A talk by Niklaus Largier of the University of California, Berkeley.

Niklaus Largier is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published on medieval mysticism, the history of ascetic practices, prayer, and aesthetic experience. His books include an edition of the works of Meister Eckhart (Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993); In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (Zone Books, 2007), and Die Kunst des Begehrens: Dekadenz, Askese und Sinnlichkeit (C. H. Beck, 2007). In a number of recent essays he discusses medieval practices of contemplation, the stimulation of sensation and affect, and the emergence of aesthetic experience. He is currently working on a book on figuration, tentatively entitled Figures of Possibility.