This workshop aims to critically examine artistic, literary, philosophical, and political strategies and practices of inaction. It looks at how these practices, on one hand, work against dominant cultural and political narratives and, on the other, are absorbed by capitalism and ultimately become neoliberal adjuncts to prevailing economic and political systems. The focus of the workshop will be on artistic and aesthetic practices from the early twentieth century until today, since they offer a particularly fertile testing ground for thinking through strategies of action and inaction. One example might be found with so-called unofficial artists, writers, and intellectuals in totalitarian or post-totalitarian systems. They could not afford to protest in plain sight and thus often chose non-assuming and perhaps counter-intuitive strategies like leisure, ambivalence, and irony for staging their resistance. Also, Eastern European performance art, for example, has long demonstrated that inaction can structure the artist’s presence as much as (if not more eloquently than) action. Here, the typical action, which with its Western connotations is often imagined to lead to a romanticized version of revolution, is subverted.

At the same time, conceptualizing inaction as an agent of change — also in the sense of contemplation as basis of creativity — comes with its pitfalls. When does inaction simply become a willful act of ignorance? As Hannah Arendt has elucidated, we have been witnesses to mass atrocities that we have refused to acknowledge, which alerts us to exercise caution when it comes to doing nothing. In this light, individual positions like ‘opting out’ and departing from sociopolitical life (e.g., abstaining from voting) become highly problematic. After all, who is free to ‘opt out’ and who remains helplessly stuck?

Also of interest are cultural and artistic practices that thematize inactivity as forms of resistance, resilience, or counter-movement in the broader field of heritage discourses, conservation, and art history, as well as within the museum context. The aim is to discuss, on the one hand, whether decay is understood as a kind of inactivity that causes a revaluation of objects, sites, and practices in terms of negation or negotiation. On the other hand, the aim is to interrogate how to interpret inactivity regarding questioned monuments, events, and places without sticking to the binarity of ‘productive’ or ‘destructive’ discourses. Does decay as process — and/or doing nothing as practice in the above-mentioned fields — also become an agent of change or, referring to the Aristotelian philosophy, counter-energeia in times of political and ecological crises?

In their 2023 book Soeurs, Pour une psychanalyse féministe [Sisters, A Plea for a Feminist Psychoanalysis], psychoanalyst Silvia Lippi and philosopher Patrice Maniglier introduce a sororal psychoanalysis that aims to overcome the oppositions between the psychic and the social, the intimate and the political, the unconscious and the collective, and to contribute to imagining a world rid of the imaginaries of masculine domination. Theirs is an attempt to redefine the field after #MeToo – not to deconstruct psychoanalysis, but to reconstruct it by listening to what is being said by those who challenge its phallogocentric, homophobic, heternormative biases. To start psychoanalysis anew is ultimately to attempt to do something with the unconscious, i.e., what is meant to remain unknown and can therefore never be anticipated.

This event will focus on unconscious sisterhood, a concept Lippi and Maniglier introduce to describe a type of social link that is opposed to the phallic model of brotherhood. Unconscious sisterhood is not limited to the relations between persons already identified as women; it rather originates directly from various traumas that form what Lippi and Maniglier term a ‘shared symptom’. In elaborating these concepts, our speakers will explore a definition of womanhood that is radically political and relational — one critical of Lacan’s notorious definition of woman as mystic, which condemns women to remain silent, isolated, and apolitical.

Simone Brioni is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the literary and cinematic representation and self-representation of migrants, and the legacy and memory of Italian colonialism. On these topics, he wrote four documentaries: The Fourth Road (2009; with/about Kaha Mohamed Aden), Aulò (2009; with/about Ribka Sibhatu), Maka (2023; with/about Geneviève Makaping) and Beyond the Frame (2023). Publications in this area also include The Somali Within (2015), Scrivere di Islam (co-authored with Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, 2020), The Horn of Africa and Italy (co-edited with Shimelis Bonsa Gulema, 2018), and L’Italia, l’altrove (2022).