Krzysztof Ziarek
Professor Krzysztof Ziarek joined the faculty of Comparative Literature in spring 2004. Professor Ziarek did his doctoral studies in the University at Buffalo's English Department.
Krzysztof Ziarek teaches 20th-century comparative literature, especially contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, philosophy and literature, and literary theory. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event, The Force of Art (Stanford University Press), and Language After Heidegger (Indiana University Press, 2013).
Prof. Ziarek has also published numerous essays on Coolidge, Stein, Stevens, Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Levinas, and co-edited a collection of essays, Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies. He is the author of two volume of poems in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski and Sad dostateczny. He has won NEH and ACLS fellowships.
His work has been featured in the recently published "100 Global Minds," ed. Gianluigi Ricuperati (Roads Publishing, 2015), which introduces readers to "the world's most innovative and inspiring thinkers."
Department of Comparative Literature | 638 Clemens Hall | Buffalo, NY 14260-4610
Telephone: 716.645.2066 | Fax: 716.645.5979
Address: Department of Comparative Literature
638 Clemens Hall
Buffalo, New York, United States
Krzysztof Ziarek teaches 20th-century comparative literature, especially contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, philosophy and literature, and literary theory. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event, The Force of Art (Stanford University Press), and Language After Heidegger (Indiana University Press, 2013).
Prof. Ziarek has also published numerous essays on Coolidge, Stein, Stevens, Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Levinas, and co-edited a collection of essays, Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies. He is the author of two volume of poems in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski and Sad dostateczny. He has won NEH and ACLS fellowships.
His work has been featured in the recently published "100 Global Minds," ed. Gianluigi Ricuperati (Roads Publishing, 2015), which introduces readers to "the world's most innovative and inspiring thinkers."
Department of Comparative Literature | 638 Clemens Hall | Buffalo, NY 14260-4610
Telephone: 716.645.2066 | Fax: 716.645.5979
Address: Department of Comparative Literature
638 Clemens Hall
Buffalo, New York, United States
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Books by Krzysztof Ziarek
In the aftermath of poststructuralist debates, Inflected Language proposes to rethink the ontological and ethical dimensions of language by rereading Heidegger's work, more specifically his reflection on poetry, and by engaging Levinas' ethics and contemporary poetics. Building on the readings of Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, and Celan, the author contends that, against common misinterpretations, their approach to language forces us to reexamine the very basis of relations to alterity, whether that of the world, things, or people.
According to the new view of language offered in these works, thought's job is not, first and foremost, cognition in the sense of understanding, calculations, and definition, but in securing alterity against cognitive assimilation instead. In this context, Inflected Language reshapes the current philosophico-literary debate about language by showing how the apparently neutral differential play of signification is already invested with ethical and worldly signification. In order to avoid obliterating this elusive signification in theorizing language, Ziarek proposes following a new mode of reading—a post-Heideggerian "hermeneutics of nearness," which foregrounds the poetic element in language and its ways of figuring the other.
"The book is a valuable addition both to the discussion of ethics in continental philosophy and to the employment of continental philosophy for the reading of poetry." — Robert Bernsaconi
Future Crossings uses a broad spectrum of philosophers and writers--Acker, Adorno, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Joyce, Levinas, Nancy, Wordsworth, and many others--to consider whether the future of literary studies depends on an understanding of aesthetics both as an outcome of its cultural context and the questioning of that very context.
Papers by Krzysztof Ziarek
In the aftermath of poststructuralist debates, Inflected Language proposes to rethink the ontological and ethical dimensions of language by rereading Heidegger's work, more specifically his reflection on poetry, and by engaging Levinas' ethics and contemporary poetics. Building on the readings of Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, and Celan, the author contends that, against common misinterpretations, their approach to language forces us to reexamine the very basis of relations to alterity, whether that of the world, things, or people.
According to the new view of language offered in these works, thought's job is not, first and foremost, cognition in the sense of understanding, calculations, and definition, but in securing alterity against cognitive assimilation instead. In this context, Inflected Language reshapes the current philosophico-literary debate about language by showing how the apparently neutral differential play of signification is already invested with ethical and worldly signification. In order to avoid obliterating this elusive signification in theorizing language, Ziarek proposes following a new mode of reading—a post-Heideggerian "hermeneutics of nearness," which foregrounds the poetic element in language and its ways of figuring the other.
"The book is a valuable addition both to the discussion of ethics in continental philosophy and to the employment of continental philosophy for the reading of poetry." — Robert Bernsaconi
Future Crossings uses a broad spectrum of philosophers and writers--Acker, Adorno, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Joyce, Levinas, Nancy, Wordsworth, and many others--to consider whether the future of literary studies depends on an understanding of aesthetics both as an outcome of its cultural context and the questioning of that very context.
Starting from the importance of the critique of humanism(s), the presentation will address the role and shape of the “Humanities” in the aftermath of such a critique. How can we rethink the notion of the “humans” without humanism and what would be the relevance of such revision for “humanistic” disciplines? This rethinking of “humans without humanism” will take into account the critique of technology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the need for the relational (dis)placement of the humans within the broader context of the world