"Untimeliness, Emergency, Emergence"

Tuesday January 27, 2026 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm, Phelps 6206C

Lunch: Please RSVP here by Monday 1/26 - 12:00 pm

Carlos Colmenares Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. He is currently working on a book project that investigates how poetic works from Brazil and Venezuela, subvert and transform our views of human subjectivity.

Nietzsche grounds his critique of the “consuming fever of history” upon the "untimely" character of Classical philology. The “untimely,” says Nietzsche, is what acts “counter to our time” and “on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” In Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), Martin Heidegger describes “the lack of a sense of emergency [Notlosigkeit] as the greatest emergency," pointing not to a call for immediate action, but instead, to a certain slowness of thinking. I will examine the life and afterlife of these two concepts and the friction that the socio-political present exerts upon them by putting them in dialogue with the work of the Venezuelan poet Igor Barreto (b. 1952). Barreto’s oeuvre interrogates, expands, and theorizes these concepts by exploring how environmental, non-human, and political agents localize our reflections on untimeliness and emergencia (emergency/emergence) within Venezuelan territory.