Going Transbinary: Learning from Classical Daoist Philopoetics: Kyoo Lee

Session 1  Being 虚无

October 24, 5:30pm, Room 222, RSVP

Session II  Doing 無爲 

October 30, 4:55pm, Room 229, RSVP

Session III  Knowing 不知

November 6, 4:55pm, Room 229, RSVP

The Proseminar to the Poetics and Theory Advanced Certificate Program will integrate a special three-session guest seminar series led by Kyoo Lee aka Q, Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York: Going Transbinary: Learning from Classical Daoist Philopoetics A call to think across rather than against the binary, this seminar on a philopoetics of the transbinary explores its ambient dynamics and queer-subterranean power by revisiting two classical Daoist texts, Daodejing (道德經)by Laozi (老子) and Zhuangzi (庄子), sites for some alternative ontology (being), methodology (doing) and epistemology (knowing) at play.   *Only the first session of the seminar series is a public lecture. The next two sessions are smaller sessions only open to NYU community. The space is limited and registration is first come first serve. Please register for each session that you are planning to attend separately.   “Pathways” (Dao道) in classical Daoist discourses, almost never “ready-made,” tend to renew themselves readily, all the way through; “way-making (dao) that can be put into words,” “eloquently couched” as such (信言不美 美言不信Daodejing 道德經CH 81 my trans.), “is not really way-making” (道可道非常道01 trans. by Ames and Hall), says the old sage (老子), who also says that “those who know will not say it, and those who say would not know it” (知者不言 言者不知 56 my trans.). What is he or are they saying? Dao is effable and ineffable: it is what it is and is not what it is (called), as it does what it undoes and it knows not just that it does not know but what it unknows. There, listen for nuances in negations. Nuances, not nonsense. Note that these Daoist riddles are not non-binary but rather transbinary: they transgress binary codes with ambient openness to life in motion. Through a threefold look at a Daoist philopoetics of negation—trans-Daoist ontology (being 虚无), methodology (doing 無爲) and epistemology (knowing 不知)—we will see how and where its bio-energetics (qi 氣) can be reanimated and why this attention matters, especially now. Today, such a call is being or else should be amplified. In the age of planetary collapse and transition, which GPS will take us to such a Daoist “gate of all wonders” (衆妙之門01)? What kind of thresholding, not just gatekeeping, would be possible again? Taking the auto-poetic generativity and transpecificity of such good old Daoist paradoxes and ironies as a philopoetically renewable energy, this seminar that contemporizes the Daoist idioms of trans-ambiguation (transitory ambiguation and ambulatory transition) introduces ways to reboot Laozi (老子) and Zhuangzi (庄子) translingually and transconceptually, focusing on their metamorphic—metaphorical and metaphysical—avant-gardism, their retrofutural waiting (weiding未定 Zhuangzi 04) game.   Kyoo Lee aka Q, Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, is a philosopher, writer, editor (of philoSOPHIA, SUNY Press), critic and curator, who works widely in the interwoven fields of the Arts and Humanities.