INSTITUTE FOR DOCTORAL STUDIES
IN THE VISUAL ARTS
by Hazel Antaramian Hofman, PhD 2024
In October 2024, I had the delight to interview Dr. Elina Staikou, who, in 2021, presented "Thinking the Nitrogen Anthropocene” as the third lecture of the year-long IDSVA virtual symposium, On the Anthropocene: Either/Or, addressing the role of art and philosophy in relation to ecology, climate change, co-existence, and sustainability as an existential urgency of our times. Staikou is a member of the editorial board of Derrida Today and has participated in numerous international conferences on migration, hospitality, the ethics of eating, and the Nitrogen Anthropocene.
Hazel Antaramian Hofman: If I may speak on behalf of all the students at IDSVA, congratulations on your recent appointment.
Elina Staikou: Thank you, Hazel, for the warm welcome and, especially, for taking the time to do this interview. Thank you also for allowing me to express my gratitude to all members of the IDSVA community for the amazing reception and support they’ve given me.
HAH: I first encountered your research during the Athens residency in 2018, which deepened my appreciation for your long-standing academic involvement with IDSVA.
ES: I have been involved with IDSVA for several years as director of Independent Studies and Dissertations and with contributions to Residencies and Symposia. I always felt very attached to and grateful for it. To have been trusted with the position of Dean of Students and Chair of Independent Studies and Dissertation Committees is an incredible honor and an exciting challenge. I am one of the many people whose encounter with George Smith put their lives on a different course. Simonetta, Amy, Silvia, Dejan, Molly, and Erin are wonderful to work with and so generous with their guidance and support.
HAH: Earlier this year (2024), in an interview with Christopher Andrew, IDSVA President Emeritus George Smith responded to a question about the founding of the school as an emergence toward a necessity to exceed the traditions of Western metaphysics and its continual founding ‘every day’ by faculty and students. Would you elaborate on what it means to you with respect to IDSVA’s ‘continual founding’?
ES: My position as Dean and Chair of Independent Studies and Dissertations affords me the great privilege of witnessing what George called the ‘continual founding’ of IDSVA by its students and faculty. I have a strong sense of that in my interactions with students, faculty, and directors; it is different and singular each time. I see it in how students and their directors develop ways of working closely together, in the thought, care, and sensitivity that goes into every step of the way in the research and writing of dissertations. These are, for me, events of invention as well as foundations that are creating and consolidating new ways of seeing, thinking, and questioning. In this sense, the ‘continual foundation’ of IDSVA is what counters and exceeds Western metaphysics as a reductionist discourse, an ideology and reasoning of foundations. It is an example of an institute instituting itself through counter-institutive acts.
Early Years
HAH: To those readers unfamiliar with your work, would you introduce yourself and provide a background of your creative and research interests?
ES: I was born and grew up in Athens, where I studied English Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University. I moved to the UK for my postgraduate studies in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. After completing my PhD, I became a Research Fellow and tutor at Goldsmiths, University of London. My research interests and background gradually took on a transdisciplinary character, from literature and literary theory to cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy and the history of ideas, the life sciences, geology, and the visual arts.
HAH: What a wonderful cross-disciplinary background. How much do you attribute your interests to your upbringing? Please share a little about your parents and where you grew up.
ES: I would be happy to. My mother was an extraordinary woman. She worked as an archaeologist at various sites in Greece, including the Acropolis Museum. She was a lecturer of Aesthetics at the School of Philosophy in Athens. Creatively, she was a visual artist and wrote poetry. Later in her life, she became a photographer. For me, this created an ambiance and a milieu that was both artistic and academic, naturally drawing me towards these preoccupations. I think it was more precision in her use of language, combining technical knowledge and clairvoyance with a poetic sensibility in her description of figure, architecture, and sculpture that set me on my course. My father was a medical doctor who described himself as a lover of medicine (and mathematics) and a servant to his patients. For a while, I flirted with the idea of studying biology and the mystery of life. They were both deeply political beings who had experienced as children the harsh realities of a Greece devastated by WWII, the Civil War, and extreme poverty, my mother in a more rebellious and imaginative way, and my father, who had studied the history of the period well, in every day (and night!) diligence and practice of care, his ethos of work, dignity, and fairness. I was born in the years of the Colonels’s junta. I was raised in an intense political culture marked by the big demonstrations in the center of Athens, heated debates everywhere, and the political songs of Mikis Theodorakis, who later collaborated with my mother. I remember as a young child experiencing a sharp moment of political awakening at one of the big, electrifying Theodorakis concerts a few years after the fall of the junta when I listened to Pablo Neruda’s ‘Canto General’ for the first time.
HAH: When did you know that philosophy and art would be a significant part of your professional and creative life as a writer and scholar?
ES: I remember, as an adolescent, spending a lot of time reading dictionaries, looking for words and new meanings, believing that expanding and defining my language would make everything translucent to me. It was in literature and poetry and, not yet philosophy, in the deeply equivocal rather than the task of univocally where I would seek that out. Philosophy was also present in the figures of Plato, whom I liked more than Aristotle, and French existentialism. However, during my postgraduate studies, I contracted the philosophical fever. And this came again by way of literature and the reading of philosophy as literature in the writings of Jacques Derrida. Later on, teaching the history of ideas at Goldsmiths with its vibrant visual arts culture and the programme on the history and philosophy of medicine run by Howard Caygill, my thinking and research began to spread out towards other directions, and my interest in biology, now from the perspective of philosophy, was rekindled.
HAH: I wish I had approached Derrida in terms of literature—what an advantage it may have been toward understanding him. Where has this philosophical path taken you regarding your present-day research interests?
ES: My current research and book project, Deconstruction to Decomposition: Earth Mother, brings many of these elements together and, for sure, reflects and is inspired in major ways by my work at IDSVA and the things I discover in conversation with its amazing students. As the title suggests, it marks for me a movement in my intellectual trajectory from deconstruction to decomposition, more specifically, from bio-deconstruction and the critique of white biopolitics and biocentrism to thinking with soils and the world-making multispecies collaborations and partnerships in ecologies from which the Western mindset, for the most part, has pulled the human out. Maria Puig de la Bellaca, a wonderful thinker of care and human-soil relationships has called for a reinsertion of our understanding of the human into the concept of the soil and its wondrous synergies, which, although we absolutely depend on, we allow to be poisoned and depleted every day through the cascading effects of chemical agribusiness and monoculture. My work on the ‘Nitrogen Anthropocene,’ which you mentioned earlier, was largely about that. In the book I’m writing, I’m interested in the transfigurations and renewed powers of symbolization of the micro-biophysical and the elemental and the ways they become visible and thinkable by means of technoscience, alternative paradigms of knowledge, and the visual arts. There has been tremendous work done in these areas by the scholars and researchers of IDSVA, and I’m very inspired by and indebted to them.
Alongside my research for my book, my latest venture is to look after our compost heap and the rewilding in our garden amid the lush growth of the English countryside and when I am in Greece, especially on the island of Syros, in the bareness and salinity of scarce and rocky soil. Of course, compost heaps like to be left alone, but I like to think that I nourish them and then watch in fascination the growth, decay, and transformation that is slowly happening there.
HAH: Do you still live in both the United Kingdom and Greece? If so, do these two geographic settings affect your philosophical and creative thinking differently?
ES: For many years, I lived between the UK and Greece, and now, mainly in the UK. I still spend time in Greece every year, especially in the summer. Thank you for asking this question, Hazel, as I reflect on it a lot. The UK and Greece have, of course, no unity of place, time, or age for me, and my senses of self vary, multiply, and merge in and between the different geographies. The UK for me is the intense years of studying and writing my dissertation while living in the Midlands and then in London, the long hours in the British Library and the Senate House, the bustling years at Goldsmiths, and the New Forest where I raised my twins, Tommy and Theo. Greece is the place of my childhood mythology, adolescent secrets, closest friendships, the place where my children were born, and where my parents lived and died. The constant transition between these two countries and different senses and feelings of self and time have mostly affected my thinking and writing. I don’t know what my intellectual trajectory would have been if I had not constantly moved between these geographies and structures of feeling. For many years, going back to each place was accompanied by feelings of uncanny familiarity and sometimes apprehension. Now I have a more playful and Proustian relationship with it, and each time, I await the flavours, sounds, images, and sensations which will re-energize their dedicated neuronal pathways!
HAH: For this next point of inquiry, I wanted to pull particular questions from your published work; however, I decided to ask you a general question regarding your dissertation. Please tell us more about its trajectory.
ES: My dissertation, which was later published as a book, was on the topic of travel and the deconstruction of the ‘at home’, on what it means to dwell and to leave, on the hermeneutics of proximity and distance, the ethics of hospitality and difference, the figuration of the familial and the encounter with the other. All these still very much preoccupy my work on decomposition as a geo-biocultural process and configuration, the ecology of human-soil relationships in relation to natality, and questions of environmental, racial, gender, and reproductive justice. I wasn’t necessarily aware of this continuity in my research and thinking, which I thought was ramifying in diverse directions. I came to some things quite accidentally as part of the University courses I was asked to teach. Only when I began to concentrate on the book did I realize that they were all part of a trajectory.
HAH: As IDSVA students conduct their independent studies, as such research may carry their ideas toward their dissertation preparation, how would you advance your observations and suggestions to them regarding the critique of established notions in art and philosophy from academic or scholarly circles?
ES: In my work and the kind of work that is produced by students and directors at IDSVA, which in my new position I have the chance to hear more about, there is a recognition of and openness to different paradigms of knowledge and modes of cognition, which are often tacitly excluded by traditional philosophical programs. I think this work is necessary and does not lack philosophical rigour or vigour. It mobilizes critical resources adding and shifting perspectives from areas usually neglected or ignored by philosophy per se. We need this kind of work to detect, criticize, and exceed ideological-metaphysical structures and symptoms, even or especially in their clandestinity. These perspectives and lenses through which philosophical programs and grammars are rewritten and reinvented, or to evoke Sylvia Wynter, through which new ceremonies are found, whether these are the cultivation of ‘mourning-arts’ for and with the nonhuman and of ‘attentiveness’ to the spacing and interludes of the relationality with others, the ‘Black Sublime,’ the redrawing of an ‘ontology of tattooed bodies,’ thinking ‘the hospitality of the blue note,’ art as a gesture of freedom in the public space, or inoculating philosophy with Indigenous wisdom and ceremony (and my dissertation students will know I am thinking of them), they renew and form questions to and for philosophy. I don't think these perspectives simply graft exogenous metaphors onto philosophy properly. Across these fields and within philosophy itself, this cross-pollination effectuates a general reinterpretation that involves, to quote Derrida, ‘one metaphorical-conceptual system actively interpreting another.’
In our long late-night conversations with my student Novel Sholars, who graduated last Spring, we worried about Audre Lorde’s famous saying, ‘For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.’ It is important to know the positionality and historicity of one’s intervention while repurposing tools and retooling one’s critical kits with new conceptualism and sensibilities. This may not bring down the master’s house in its entirety, but it is something that we cannot afford not to endeavour.
What I would advise students as they make their way from their Independent Studies to their dissertation, building on previous work or arriving at it sometimes from unexpected passageways, is to remain true to their artistic and intellectual visions and passions as these are moulded, redefined and reconfigured through their study of philosophy and in conversation with their directors and peers. As their director, I ask my students to be my guides to their work and thinking throughout their projects so that they have a strong sense of direction. This is, of course, something that often emerges along the way, and I’m there to prompt and remind them not to skip any steps, take shortcuts, or lose sight of the thing that drives their original question and insight.
HAH: I’d like to ask you one last question. First, for your general comment, I will provide a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley in his ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821). Shelley writes: “Poets are the mirrors / Of the gigantic shadows / Which the future casts upon the present. / Poets are the unacknowledged / Legislators of the world” (stanza 48).
Where and how do you see the new role of the artist-philosopher as ‘legislator of the world’?
ES: To go back to what I’ve just said about the dismantling of the master’s house, in other words, the struggle for justice and emancipation in its multiple, singular, situated, and global forms and urgencies, there are different paths and kinds of work to pursue this amid which the role of the artist-philosopher is indispensable for seeing other possibilities of cohabitation and change in the world. For this, we need effective ways with which art captures our attention and, as Walter Benjamin said, re-organizes our perception. Benjamin’s epistemo-critical program also proposed what he called ‘immanent critique,’ in which the work of art itself generates and dictates the conceptual tools for critique and understanding. To bring into this the beautiful poem by Shelley that you shared with me and the role of the artist-philosopher as ‘legislator of the world,’ what artist-philosophers can uniquely do is generate new transcendental aesthetics, reformulating and exceeding Kant’s idea of the philosopher as the legislator of human reason towards new sensibilities, structures of understanding and conceptualities. This is what cultivates and brings about the ethico-aesthetic turn and the urgent shift in planetary consciousness, in which IDSVA is participating with important work.
HAH: Thank you for your generous time and the wonderful directions that guided this interview for the benefit of us all at IDSVA.
ES: It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you again, Hazel, for such thoughtful and engaging questions.
Works Cited
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. ‘A Defence of Poetry’. English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. Stanza 48.
Staikou, Elina. E-mail correspondence with the author. 24 October 2024.