Event Date
We begin with a mystery. Alan Cohen surfaces from a slim file in the British Library: a set of letters exchanged from 1943 to 1950 between his mother in London and British authorities in Pondicherry India, pleading to recover her son from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram there. The archival puzzle at the heart of this project, however, is not what it first appears.
The story of what happened to Alan, of his search for a state of irrevocable oneness with the Divine, and of his mother’s attempts to return her son to herself, and in turn, to himself offers a way to understand forms of profound, transformational devotion that we often associate with cults. What grips us about cults is not the scandal but the enigma of those who join and what becomes of them. This talk proposes that the figure of the devotee indexes something far broader: a structural crisis in the modern self, one organized around the simultaneous terror and longing provoked by the prospect of one’s own dissolution. At the limits of the self—its surrender, its ecstatic expenditure, its annihilation, and its reconstitution—we glimpse a new horizon of psychic and social possibility. Moving between the intimate archive of one man's longing and the vast contemporary fascination with cults as a cultural phenomenon, this talk theorizes desire for radical self-transcendence and what it might tell us about the hungers that ordinary life leaves unsatisfied—and about the selves we have built that may not, in the end, be enough.
Co-sponsored by English, Cultural Studies, French and Italian, and Comparative Literature.
Poulomi Saha is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.
