Friendship as a Way of Life
Workshop with R Morris Levine and Yongyu Chen
Graphic by Gabriel Sommer.
About this workshop
This workshop will take place online on Zoom.
Dates: Tuesdays, April 11–May 9
Time: 6:30pm–8pm EST (1.5 hours)
Capacity: 25 participants
Cost: $80-240 (Sliding scale $20-60/session)
Friendship as a Way of Life departs from Michel Foucault’s April 1981 interview of the same name. Speaking about queer intimacies, the historian called for a new political ethics born of friendship’s potential to reinvent relation, to formulate “new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force” that disrupt the “readymade” intimacies of the couple, family, corporation, and army. “We must think,” impels Foucault, “that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces.”
Resisting the impulse to typologize friendship—an urge betrayed by nursery rhymes (“Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other is gold.”), DJ Khaled (“No new friends, no new friends, no, no new.”), the friendzone, BFF, and frenemy alike—we will study some of friendship’s possibilities as enacted, in writing, meticulously, unmeticulously, between artists across the twentieth century, from Foucault to Hervé Guibert and Sophie Calle, to Paula Becker, Clara Westhoff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fleur Jaeggy, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Félix González-Torres, Ross Laycock, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Roland Barthes.
About the instructors
Yongyu Chen is a writer and PhD student in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard. Their work appears in Chicago Review, Cleveland Review of Books, Lana Turner, and Poetry.
R Morris Levine is mostly a writer. He is the editor of Zolo, a publisher of books by artists like B. Wurtz, Beatriz Gonzaléz, Gabriel Orozco, Hadi Fallahpisheh, Julia Rommel, Marie Hazard, Otis Houston Jr., and Sven Lukin, among others.
The two are friends.