David Wills : The Poetics of Inanimate Life - Mallarmé, Cixous, Celan.

POIESIS : symposium at MaMa, Zagreb [June 11-16, 2015] http://poiesis.mi2.hr/ ----------------- David Wills specializes in modernist literature as well as film theory and comparative literature. His major ideas are developed in Prosthesis (Stanford, 1995), Dorsality (Minnesota, 2008), and the forthcoming Inanimation (Minnesota, 2015), where he argues that the animal, or specifically human body, should be understood as a prosthetic articulation of “natural” and “artificial”; and that our conception of the human as an intact natural entity that subsequently comes into contact with inanimate forms of technology does not account for the prosthetic relations that govern the ways we in fact operate in the world. Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life expands those ideas via interpretations of the “artificial life” that function in cases such as autobiography and poetic writing, as well as music, love and war. His current projects include an analysis of the temporal technology of the death penalty (Killing Times, Fordham University Press, forthcoming), and a series of essays on sound. Wills is also a translator (The Gift of Death, Right of Inspection, Counterpath, and The Animal That Therefore I Am) and interpreter (Matchbook, Stanford, 2005) of the work of Jacques Derrida. He is a member of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project and an International Fellow of the London Graduate School.