Keynote 2:
Prof. John Kim (University of California, Riverside):
"Subjunctive Sovereignty: Yoko Tawada, Stephanie Syjuco, Byron Kim and the Limits of the jus publicum Europaeum"
Saturday, April 11, 12:45 pm
1501 UH
Abstract:
Though the Westphalian order is said to be everywhere waning, its schematic force persists within
discourses of transnationalism and multilingualism through the political trope of the “person.” Rereading
this trope in Carl Schmitt’s writings on sovereignty and political theology, this paper examines the
persistence and ironic undoing of “the person” in the work of the literary author Yoko Tawada as well as
in that of the visual artists Stephanie Syjuco and Byron Kim. This paper seeks to articulate the ways in
which their work reminds us through their creative engagement with the crisis of representation that
Westphalian sovereignty has been waning since its inception.
John Kim is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese and German at the University of
California, Riverside. His research focuses on issues of translation, both cultural and linguistic, and he has
published widely on authors and thinkers including Paul de Man, Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault,
Friedrich Hölderlin, Yoko Tawada and Naoko Sakai, among others. He writes about issues such as
cosmopolitanism, universalism and imperialism. He has translated works from French, German and
Japanese into English.