The Nineteenth-Century Forum would like to invite you to two talks followed by a Q&A with: 
Sober Postdoctoral Fellow, Ross Martin and Graduate Candidate, Srdjan Cvjeticanin

‘On Emerson’s Revolutionary Ecstasies: Cardiovascular Exuberance and Anti-Slavery Thinking’ presented by Ross Martin 

Since Richard Poirier began undoing the notion that Ralph Waldo Emerson proposes a mode of individualism that is stable and resists releasing itself into the world beyond it, some influential readers—from Stanley Cavell, to George Kateb, to Sharon Cameron, to Branka Arsić—have furthered Poirier’s account, reintroducing us to an Emerson who regards life as open and overflowing. Benefiting from the exuberant thinking of Margaret Fuller and Georges Bataille (read alongside Emerson), my talk elaborates on the Emersonian scholarship of recent decades to discuss overabundance from a cardiovascular standpoint as a surging tide that rushes through concentric expansions, and so the scientific impetus for Emerson’s anti-slavery thinking. Augmenting Emerson’s scientific abolitionism with archival evidence, I further investigate his study of Emanuel Swedenborg—the Enlightenment scientist turned mystic—whose lost hematology dissolves anatomical boundaries so that the inward intensity of individuality must release itself and transfigure. Briefly reconstructing Emerson’s Swedenborgianism, my talk uncovers a vision of ontological fecundity unfurled over his career that merges Swedenborg with an emerging strain of American radicalism exemplified by the Haitian Revolution. Finally, I turn to Toussaint Louverture who for Emerson represents the heart’s emancipatory powers, thus situating revolutionary change in an overactive heartbeat at the center of a momentous movement. With Louverture, Emerson at last identifies the dawning of a new age, an upheaval in residual experience through an utmost ecstasy.

‘A nothing tormented by a nothing’ presented by Srdjan Cvjeticanin

In "The Mast-Head," the thirty-fifth chapter of Moby Dick, Ishmael makes the following assertion: "For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the cracking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber." The ensuing chapter, "The Quarter-Deck," proves him right. With a rousing speech, Ahab seduces his entire crew into abandoning their material interests and risking their lives in order to seek revenge against a whale, a whale on whose white hump he piled "the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down." No sooner than Ahab stops to take a breath, the Pequod's decks erupt into a deafening chant of  "Death to Moby Dick." The capture is immediate. It happens so quickly and with such ease that Ahab confesses surprise. Why was it so simple, so effortless to convince the entire crew to follow a madman into madness? The second chapter of my dissertation, "A nothing tormented by a nothing," investigates the answer to this question. It does this by first conceptualizing the historico-philosophical conditions animated in Moby Dick and then constructing the theory of the subject operative in Melville's works (esp. Moby Dick, Pierre, Bartleby). After this, I turn to Moby Dick and the "Whiteness of the Whale," by way of which I establish the crucial difference between Ishmael and Ahab, and propose an answer for why Ishmael alone survives. I conclude by constructing the political theory I understand to be embedded in Melville's fictions and arguing for the political function of aesthetics. My talk covers the first part of this chapter.