Recorded Lecture: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Feeling Stone"

"Stone hurts," Jeffrey Jerome Cohen begins his opening address entitled "Feeling Stone" for the Hearts and Stones collaboratory hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne, Australia in July 2011. His keynote ruminates with anecdotal openness on the possibilities of the radical readjustment to our entrenched anthropomorphicism which may occur in the encounter between stone and flesh.

Cohen describes the relation he seeks as a collaboratory of "experimenting, working and living together" between the agency of stone and the excitation of humans, in which the meeting with rock can destabilise a human-centric narrative of existence and give way to different, creative rethinking of ecologies, landscapes, texts and art. In the process of this reconceptualisation, he subtly weaves together the actor network theory of Bruno Latour with Graham Harman and Tim Morton's work on object oriented ontology and echoes of Jane Bennett's vibrant materialism (the last of which he engages with directly in the final section of his lecture) along with a liberal dose of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

The recording of his lecture is available online, along with an image capture file of Cohen's accompanying slideshow.

"Stone as monument is stone in movement, and by 'movement', I mean 'motion' that brings about connection that is desire, affect. But the question arises, where does that motion originate – from the human hands that perhaps fashion the monument, or from the stone itself?"