Antonia Pont – Guest Lecture – Amsterdam University

Faculty member Antonia Pont recently gave a guest lecture at Amsterdam University College, the Netherlands. Entitled ‘Time’s Habits and Practising Relaxation’, her paper presented the notion of practising as a mode that gives access to registers of temporality beyond the dominant mode of the present:

‘Habit maroons us in a time that is preoccupied with a useful, predictable future. It precludes the wholly new. As noted by Henri Bergson, and extended by Gilles Deleuze, our inhabiting of the present involves the modes of habitual response, recognition and representation (where representation means “the delimitation and framing of objects” rather than “an idea in the mind or brain”) (Al-Saji, 2004: 219-220). Our representational world, then, is a smaller, narrower one, where we tend to exclude polyphony and unfamiliar affective registers, based on what would seem immediately useful to the present, utilitarian body.’