To Take Root Among the Stars: Utopic Exodus in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower – A Talk by Dr Nicolas de Warren

About the Speaker:
Dr Nicolas de Warren studied in Paris, Heidelberg, and Boston. He is the author of Husserl and the Promise of Time, A Momentary Breathlessness in the Sadness of Time, Original Forgiveness, and German Philosophy and the First World War. He is currently writing a book on the phenomenology of the afterlife and a book on plastic ghosts and trash immortals.

About the Talk:
The aim of this lecture is to explore Octavia Butler’s science-fiction novel from the vantage-point of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hope. The themes of temporality, exodus, violence, and divine inexistence are addressed both internally within Butler’s novel and externally from Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. The cultural horizon of Afro-Futurism and Sun-Ra’s jazz music will also be discussed.