Session 6: Hope: From Here to Modernity

Session 6: Hope: From Here to Modernity
Chair: David Feldman
Post Apocalyptic Culture
Teresa Heffernan
Department of English, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS, Canada

A year before Frank Kermode’s influential The Sense of an Ending (1967) appeared, which insisted that we must hold onto the idea of the end or risk succumbing to the “intolerable idea that we live within an order of events between which there is no relation, pattern, mutability, or intelligible progression,” Jacques Derrida suggested  abandoning the idea of the end for an understanding “which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology-in other words, through the history of all of his history-has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game.”  The source of this rupture–this apocalyptic event that shifts us from the dream of an origin and end to a dream where there is no foundation and no end to the game–is, according to Derrida, when “language invaded the universal problematic.”   What comes forth from this tear or this shift, however, is: “the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.”
Offering a reading Michel Houllebecq’s controversial novel Elementary Particles that posits a future that passes “beyond man,” this paper will explore what in 1966 Derrida could refer to only as the “yet unnameable.” What does a world that has abandoned a “sense of an ending” look like?  Is it about ruins and ghosts?  Is it about possibility and plurality?  What does it mean to be stuck in the game?   And what does it mean to violently resurrect the sense of the end as this novel does in its conclusion?

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Some people live in a land of opportunities, whereas some other people just dream of a land of possibilities. Richness, poverty, health, illness, discrimination, pain, lack of education, injustice, trauma… These are some of the issues people have to deal with in their lives. What depends on the strength which someone face unpleasant things in his/her life?
In this essay, I aboard how resilience, a powerful strength that takes the anxiety out of hard times, can be an engine of change, a clearer window in which we can see a different reality. But resilience is understood not only as an inner strength, but also as a skill that can be developed.
Related to Theatre of the Oppressed, this kind of theatre created for generating dialogue among societies and cultures that have spent their last resort, it is explained how theatrical techniques used in the process of Counseling can be beneficial for post-traumatic stress disorder, treatment of depression, multicultural counseling, development of social skills or labor or group counseling in order to generate a more resilient personality.
Based on Stanislavski’s, Brecht’s, Boal’s, and Ionesco’s works, for instance, some exercises, games and activities are explained, suggestions in which theatre is understood as a way of learning to act (in both senses: acting and taking action) not only talk, to hope and create new realities; beautiful and wonderful realities, all with the power of theatre, counseling, love and hope.

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No abstract is presently available