You are warmly invited to a public lecture on Being Towards Love, Loss, and Care: On the Fragility of Relations with Dr. Janae Sholtz.
Topic: Being Towards Love, Loss, and Care: On the Fragility of Relations
This paper begins by contemplating the distinctive focus on the lived reality and fragility of human relationships found in feminist care ethics. The focus on relationality is central to this paradigm, yet the nature of relation itself is somewhat opaque. What does it mean to be in relation, how does one maintain a true and intimate relation, what makes a relation ethical and profound, and can the cessation of authentic relation be the opening of an ethical beginning? Drawing on phenomenology and thinkers like Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze, I develop a concept of the being of relation by exploring love as a profound “in-between” relational space that shapes and transforms those involved. I suggest that relationships have their own fragile existence, including the possibility of death or dissolution, and that confronting this fragility can deepen our capacity for authentic care and relational understanding. Rather than emphasizing individual authenticity, I want to propose a more relational form of being grounded in vulnerability, interconnectedness, and sensitivity to the meaning of human connection.
Speaker:
Dr. Janae Sholtz is Professor of Philosophy, Director of General Education, and Coordinator of WGS at Alvernia University. She is a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg and Extraordinary Professor in the Centre for Identity and Diversity at North-West University, and the author of The Invention of a People, Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political (Edinburgh 2015) and Incorporeal Matters: Between Deleuze and New Materialism (forthcoming, Edinburgh); she is an editor of Deleuze and Cosmology: Between Philosophy, Art and the Sciences (Edinburgh 2026), French and Italian Stoicisms: From Sartre to Agamben (Bloomsbury 2020), and Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism (Bloomsbury 2019). Her current project is focused on ethical considerations of love, death, and the nature of relation.
For more information, kindly contact Lindokuhle Gama.