The Book To Come
‘The Book to Come’ Session III (Vilnius). ‘A Reading Group’ with Slavs and Tatars. Photo: CAC Vilnius.
Saturday 2 April 2016
‘Session III’ (Vilnius)
3pm / Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius / Session III (Vilnius) / CAC Reading Room.
In a Reading group Slavs and Tatars will be discussing Norman Brown’s book Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (1991).
“Brown’s book is one we return to repeatedly (we first came upon him in our research for Not Moscow Not Mecca), a rare example of seamlessly mixing the affective and the analytical. Namely, we’d like to focus on chapters 1, 5, and 6. Late in his life, Brown turned to the prophetic tradition, as a means of coming to terms with the end of communism and the viability of leftist ideologies. His turn to Islam is particularly relevant today, not only in its redemption of a progressive agency within the realm of faith but also as an assessment of modernity in crisis. As Brown draws a line between the Prophet, Karl Marx and James Joyce, we’ll elaborate upon the chain of transmission or al-isnad, to include certain anti-Afklärung figures and gnostic thinkers from Johan Georg Hamann to Henri Corbin.”—Slavs and Tatars.
Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low). The collective’s practice consists primarily of three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture performances.
The presentation of the project The Book to Come at CAC Vilnius is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.