Marco Grosoli will be at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, on August 20-22, for the conference Frankfurt 2025: Borders / DIALECTICS / Civility. Frankfurt 2025's keynote speakers include Catherine Malabou, Geoffrey Bennington and Carolin Amlinger.
Here is the abstract of his presentation, titled "Bordering Death. The Dialectics of Origin in Mysteries of Lisbon":
"Can the vicious circle be broken between the neoliberal excesses of borderless globalization and the over-attachment to borders reacting to those excesses? Can the interrelated concepts of border and origin help this breaking?” My paper will single out an implicit answer to these questions in Raul Ruiz’s miniseries Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). In adapting for the screen Camilo Castelo Branco’s eponymous 600-pages, 1853-1854 feuilleton, prolific (100+ films made) stateless (Chilean-born, then exiled) storyteller Ruiz disseminates several cues that he is, in fact, drawing a self-portrait through his protagonist, a Portuguese orphan on his deathbed inventing stories culminating in an imaginary flight to South America. My object will thus be less literature than an operation, performed on a piece of literature, going beyond mere adaptation. My main analytical lens will be death, a key theme in both versions. By rewriting the work by Branco (an author customarily regarded as symptomatizing the decay of Portugal’s imperialist aspirations) as a Borgesian labyrinth, and by imaginarily locating his own biography therein, Ruiz, shortly before dying (2011), reinstated finitude in the potentially infinite Borgesian network of stories he has been filming in many countries for decades, thereby hinting at important implications regarding the way borderlessness can relate to either imperialism and its antidote. Originlessness is itself posited as origin through the dying, boundlessly imaginative orphan dreaming of moving to his native South America, i.e. through a Hegelian Setzung des Voraussetzungen (positing of the presuppositions, informing Malabou’s Hegel-derived stances on plasticity and epigenesis as well as Ruiz’s Poetics of Cinema book explicitly drawing from Engels’s Dialectics of Nature). Mysteries of Lisbon offers a model for thinking borders and origins as both grounded in their own groundlessness, as opposed to either interchangeably fake or rigidly actual: a false alternative that, Ruiz seems to imply, can be overcome.
The full program of Frankfurt 2025 is available here.
