"Lingis: Life, Death, Desire", A Public Seminar by Drs Aaron Aquilina, Omar N'Shea & Niki Young

"Alphonso Lingis: Life, Death, Desire", A Public Seminar by Dr Aaron Aquilina, Dr Omar N'Shea & Dr Niki Young (Malta)

Date: 6pm, 12 May
Venue: Campus Hub, B0-418, University of Malta

Abstract:
Alphonso Lingis (1933–) is an American philosopher, essayist, and translator. His work spans genres: travel writing, formal philosophy, personal recollections, fictional narratives. His thought likewise crosses and transgresses all sorts of lines: life and death, animal and human, stone and sky, desire and inertia. This English Seminar will consist of three brief and interdisciplinary presentations of some of the main facets of Lingis’s writings. Dr Niki Young (Philosophy) will begin by fleshing out Lingis’s concept of “life” beyond deathbound thought; Dr Omar N'Shea (Foundation Studies) will close-read Lingis and excavate the pulses of desire; and Dr Aaron Aquilina (English) will outline Lingis’s focus on two particular modes of personal and collective death. Moving from life to desire to death, the presenters hope that the thoughts that shall emerge in connection with one another will be anything other than chronological or rigid.

Bionotes:
Aaron Aquilina is an academic with the Department of English at the University of Malta. His research interests explore the various intersections between literary theory and continental philosophy, with particular focus on death studies, queer theory, and poststructuralist thought more generally. He has published various articles and chapters, is a co-editor of Further and Higher Education in Malta (Kite, 2023), and his monograph The Ontology of Death was published that same year with Bloomsbury. He has also published some poetry, and is the editor-in-chief of the University of Malta’s international creative writing journal, ANTAE (www.antae.um.edu.mt).

Omar N'Shea is a cultural historian of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Malta, where he is Director of the International School for Foundation Studies. His forthcoming monograph on eunuchs in the Assyrian Empire (Spring 2026) builds on his wider body of research on gender in the ancient Middle East. He is also the author of a cultural biography of the Neolithic Maltese site Bur Mgħeż, published in Aphroconfuso, and a contributor to Antoloġija Numru 1 (2024) with essays on queer modernity in Malta and on the translation and reception of Gilgamesh. His current series Es Sidr, also in Aphroconfuso, explores Malta–Libya relations from 1969 to 1989. Omar is a member of the scientific board and organising committee of GeMANE (Gender, Methodology, and the Ancient Near East) and co-editor of the forthcoming volume GeMANE: Exploring Gender Dynamics Across the Ancient Near East.

Niki Young is a lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Malta. His philosophical interests centre around 20th and 21st Century Continental thought, with a special focus on the incorporation of 20th century ideas into contemporary fields of research such as those of Posthumanism, Animal Studies, as well as New and Speculative forms of Realism and Materialism.

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