Taunting the Useful

A talk by Emile Fromet de Rosnay
Wednesday, November 20, 2024 | 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM | FREE
Room 7000 – SFU Harbour Centre, 555 W.Hastings St., Vancouver

In an epoch driven by hyper-consumption and marvelously destructive futility, and in the context of a hegemonic utilitarianism where one goes to university to work rather than to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” the concept of the useful is perhaps one most in need of interrogation. Taunting the Useful (Punctum, 2024) seeks to unsettle notions of usefulness and uselessness, not merely by deconstructing these terms, but by sidetracking them. It doesn’t reverse things by saying that what is useless is useful. Rather, taunting is teasing, heckling, tickling, scratching the useful. By elaborating a notion of the “virtual useless,” Taunting the Useful seeks to tease the dimensions of wonder, use, and play, through modalities, contingencies, and potentialities of the useless-useful. An experimental book, it (un)does what it tells, and is as much an object taunting and taunted as it is a description of taunting the useful.

Biography

Emile Fromet de Rosnay teaches literature, film and culture in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at University of Victoria, and a former director of its program in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought. He has published work on poet Stéphane Mallarmé (Mallarmésis, 2011), postcolonial Mauritian fiction, Critical Digital Humanities, the theory of the useless, on the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and on the linguist Émile Benveniste. His new book, Taunting the Useful (Punctum, 2024), develops a theory of the “virtual useless.” He is developing another research-creation project on “Seaweed Discourses” (“Le discours des algues”) that seeks to understand language and discourse in the context of posthumanism. His research-creation name is Loumille Métros, which is his passport name with missing syllables.

Presented by the IdleLab.