Realist Film and Television After Alan Clarke: One-Day Symposium

University of York · 11 June 2014

Alan Clarke

'It's a Dishonest Con!': 
Realist Film and Television After Alan Clarke: A One-Day Symposium
Speakers: Dr. David Rolinson (Stirling), Dr. David Tucker (Chester)

The films of Alan Clarke remain among the most controversial and important examples of British ‘cinematic realism’. Those for which he remains best known, such as Scum (1979), Made in Britain (1982) and The Firm (1988), depict a complex vision of the working classes under Conservative rule in the 1980s. Portraying borstals, neo-Nazism and football hooliganism, the films would come to be at once maligned and censored by the same kind of moral authorities represented in many of Clarke’s works as violent and ineffective power structures.

This year will mark a quarter century since Clarke’s landmark Elephant (1989), a depiction of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland that speaks across the borders of testimony, journalism and political narrative. Clarke’s uncompromising concern with social violence, however, has led to a neglect of his cinema. This neglect has played out primarily in assessments of his importance to British cinema, which have mostly delimited the director’s work firmly within the boundaries of social realism. His work demands to be reconsidered beyond this easy narrative.

Notably, Clarke proved the most significant populariser of the dramatist Bertolt Brecht on British television, adapting Brecht’s play Baal (1982), in which he would cast David Bowie in the lead role. Clarke’s work more generally formed close ties with the theatre, as well as with the BBC. Throughout the 1960s, he was responsible for directing both stage and television adaptations of classical and avant-garde theatrical productions, often at odds with the emerging taste for cinematic realism he remains associated with, epitomised by works such as Ken Loach’s BBC television play Cathy Come Home (1966) and feature film Kes (1969), as well as Alan Bleasdale’s BBC television series Boys from the Blackstuff (1980-1982).

Furthermore, many of today’s most important and popular film-makers have acknowledged their debt to Clarke, from Danny Boyle and Paul Greengrass to Gus van Sandt. How, we should ask, does this violent, politicised body of work produce such diverse responses? Would a reassessment of Clarke’s place within British and American film move him from the margins to the centre, or does the value of his film lie in its marginal, resistant status?

We would welcome proposals for papers related, but not limited, to the following:

• The growth and the role of drama at the BBC.
• The role of journalism and testimony in dramatic productions.
• Clarke’s importance to socially-conscious filmmaking.
• Clarke’s film as an intersection between avant-garde and realist forms.
• Observations of affinities with, and re-readings of, Brechtian and Marxist theatre.
• Technological innovations (eg. the use of a steady-cam).
• The response of British media to the Northern Irish troubles.
• The penal code, law and power as articulated in Clarke’s films.
• Assertions of institutional power against Clarke’s film, in particular through censorship.
• The legacy of Clarke’s film in contemporary British cinema and beyond.
• Responses to Thatcherism.
• What does “realism” mean in the wake of Clarke’s challenge to the acceptability and range of the medium?

Proposals should be no more than 300 words in length, for presentations of up to 30 minutes. We encourage papers that will make use of audiovisual material, and presentations from practice-based as well as academic viewpoints. The deadline for submissions is Friday, 7 March 2014. Please submit to clarkeconference2014@gmail.com.

Conference organisers: Tim Lawrence, Jay James May and Andy Munzer.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Modernism Now! International Conference 2014
• Roland Barthes at 100: An International Centenary Conference
• Samuel Beckett Summer School 2014
• Samuel Beckett and the Archive: Rewriting the Beckett Canon
• Reading Brian O'Nolan's Libraries

Homes of German Philosophers

An online gallery of photographs by Patrick Lakey

Friedrich Schiller's workspace

Ludwig Wittgenstein's study in Cambridge

Ludwig Wittgenstein's desk in Cambridge

Arthur Schopenhaer's book collection

Martin Heidegger's rural hut

Los Angeles home of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer

A selection of images from Patrick Lakey's German Photographs Collection, chronicling German philosophers' homes throughout the world. [See More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Nietzsche's Daily Habits
• A Day in the Life of Arthur Schopenhauer
• Wittgenstein Day-to-Day
• Simon Critchley on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time
• Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto

The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

An NYRB Classics Original, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven

We Have Only This Life to Live: 
The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

From NYRB:

Jean-Paul Sartre was a man of staggering gifts, whose accomplishments as philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, and activist still command attention and inspire debate. Sartre’s restless intelligence may have found its most characteristic outlet in the open-ended form of the essay. For Sartre the essay was an essentially dramatic form, the record of an encounter, the framing of a choice. Whether writing about literature, art, politics, or his own life, he seizes our attention and drives us to grapple with the living issues that are at stake.

We Have Only This Life to Live is the first gathering of Sartre’s essays in English to draw on all ten volumes of Situations, the title under which Sartre collected his essays during his life, while also featuring previously uncollected work, including the reports Sartre filed during his 1945 trip to America. Here Sartre writes about Faulkner, Bataille, Giacometti, Fanon, the liberation of France, torture in Algeria, existentialism and Marxism, friends lost and found, and much else. We Have Only This Life to Live provides an indispensable, panoramic view of the world of Jean-Paul Sartre. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York
• Jacques Derrida on Jean-Paul Sartre
• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• On Albert Camus

Bloomsbury Revelations: Reissue Series

A series of major works from the fields of philosophy, politics, religion and critical theory

Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

Karl Barth, On Religion

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Martin Buber, I and Thou

Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?

Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image

Jacques Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics

Mohandas K. Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers

Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, Discourse on Free Will

Roland Barthes, Language of Fashion

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Movement-Image

Alain Badiou, Being and Event

Erich Fromm & Karl Marx, Marx's Concept of Man
including 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts'

Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real

Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth

Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil
Or The Lucidity Pact

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution

Bernhard Crick, In Defence of Politics

Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness

For more information on the Bloomsbury Revelations series, visit their official website. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher King on Book Cover Design
• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• The Book Cover Club
• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Book Cover Archive
• Judging a book...
• The Great Gatsby: Re-Covered
• Peter Mendelsund in Design Bureau

The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 2012

Volume 20, Issue 1 is freely available online

The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory is a companion volume to The Year’s Work in English Studies. It provides a narrative bibliography of published work, recording significant debates and issues of interest across a broad range of research in the humanities and social sciences. As the fields of critical and cultural studies shift, so the range and scope of the journal alters, and current volumes include chapters on Digital Media, Science and Medicine, and Popular Culture. The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory functions as a bibliographical tool of practical use to scholars and students alike, as well as a lively collaboration with contemporary debates.

Contents

Preface
Nerys Williams, Poetics
Susan Currell, Modernisms
David Marriott, Black Cultural Studies
Caroline Bassett, Digital Media
Stephen Shapiro, Marxism and Cultural Materialism
Jeremy Munday, Translation Studies
Nicholas Chare, Trauma and Testimony
Lisabeth During and Deborah Levitt, Film Theory
Seb Franklin, Popular Culture
Graeme Pedlingham, Psychoanalysis
Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism
David Tucker and Daniël Ploeger, Drama and Performance Studies
James Procter and Stephen Morton, Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory
Marios Constantinou and Maria Margaroni, Continental Philosophy
Andrew Mangham, Science and Medicine
Adriana Bontea, Narratives
Shamira A. Meghani, Queer Theory and Sexualities

The entire first issue of Volume 20 is freely available to read and download online [Read More]

Outside Literature: Lars Iyer on Exodus

Tim Smyth talks to Iyer about his latest novel

Lars Iyer, Exodus

From The Quarterly Conversation:

Since the appearance of his novel, Spurious, in 2011, Lars Iyer has made a challenging and vigorous contribution to our sense of the importance of literature and thought in our vexed cultural moment. The intellectual anguish and inventive bickering of his two UK philosophy professors sees him steer a middle course between Mercier and Camier and Withnail and I. His combination of almost-total bleakness and bracing humour enables him to dip perilously close to despair, only to escape at the last minute.

With the sequel to Spurious, Dogma, Iyer confirmed his importance as part of an “enclave outside literature,” whose work extends the territory outside the contemporary canon to new and challenging distances. This novel extended W.’s and Lars’s itinerary across America, with little more than Plymouth Gin and the word omoi for company. As the humour deepens, so too does the despair, recalling both the Thomas Bernhard of Frost and Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show.

The final instalment of Iyer’s trilogy, Exodus, is the funniest, most hopeful, most despairing, and most gin-soaked episode of the three. Despite the impossibility of true endings, it is a final instalment—and a satisfying one at that. I talked to Lars, via email, over the course of nearly two months, during which we talked about hot tubs, the Bible, endings, and the collapsing borders of literature. [Read the Interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Thomas Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics

3:AM Magazine publishes an essay by Martin Paul Eve

From Martin Paul Eve (3:AM Magazine):

Thomas Pynchon ranks among the most critically acclaimed American authors of the past fifty years; certainly so when viewed in terms of academic scholarship. He has two academic journals devoted solely to his work and influence (Pynchon Notes and Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon), over twenty monographs exploring his writing and, since 1978, there have been 23 doctorates awarded in the United Kingdom alone on, or in major part concerning, his fiction. This trend shows no sign of stopping; with apologies to the well-known formulation of James Joyce, almost a century ago, it seems as though Thomas Pynchon will continue to keep the professors busy.

The reasons for this critical proliferation are not hard to fathom. Pynchon is a man of mystery, refusing to be photographed or interviewed, who has published some of the finest works of post-war literature, particularly V., Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon. His novels have most frequently been type-cast as exemplary of the postmodern – saturated as they are with paranoia, indeterminacy and failed quest-narratives – but this seriously underplays the scale of Pynchon’s writing. Consider that Pynchon is also a writer of enormous historical scope. V. spans the defining moments of crisis in the twentieth century, Gravity’s Rainbow re-casts the sixties in terms of World War II and the history of Calvinism (including a flashback to a Mauritian Dodo hunt) while Mason & Dixon explores the interrelation of its eponymous protagonists with the Age of Reason and slavery in America. If this weren’t enough, his novels are interdisciplinary, incorporating metaphors from science and technology, cartography, popular culture, cartoons, aural puns, mathematical in-jokes, outrageous character names (and sexual practices) and sublime prose poetry.

More important than any of these preceding aspects, though, is the fact that Pynchon is a politically engaged, ethical writer. Gravity’s Rainbow is not just a dense, postmodern sprawl, but instead makes one of its central observations on the fact that the evil of mankind, parallel to nature, “does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation”, a spatio-temporal transposition to a new setting, persisting Beyond the Zero of any Pavlovian deconditioning, and always collecting around centres of power, embodied by the novel’s final, America-bound, transatlantic V-2/ICBM. Through this impossible moment, Pynchon highlights that behind twentieth-century America’s technological and economic supremacy lies the dark negotiations of Operation Paperclip and a re-embodiment of the right-wing politics supposedly vanquished in the Second World War. How many of us notice, inscribed upon our antibiotics, the second label, permanently hidden beneath the surface-level, reading “sulfonamide” and “I.G. Farben”? How many of us see, when we watch satellite television, the German technician crying: “Vergeltungswaffe”? [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Thomas Pynchon: Signed Books
• A new Thomas Pynchon novel?
• International Pynchon Week 2013
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality

Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch

A new play published by Columbia University Press

Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts

Columbia University Press:
The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts, a new play by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with an introduction by Kenneth Reinhard.

The Incident at Antioch is a key play marking Alain Badiou’s transition from classical Marxism to a “politics of subtraction” far removed from party and state. Written with striking eloquence and extraordinary poetic richness, and shifting from highly serious emotional and intellectual drama to surreal comic interlude, the work features statesmen, workers, and revolutionaries struggling to reconcile the nature and practice of politics.

This bilingual edition presents L’Incident d’Antioche in its original French and, on facing pages, an expertly executed English translation. Badiou adds a special preface, and an introduction by the scholar Kenneth Reinhard connects the play to Paul Claudel’s The City, Saint Paul and the early history of the Church, and the innovative mathematical thinking of Paul Cohen. The translation includes Susan Spitzer’s extensive notes clarifying allusions and quotations and hinting at Badiou’s intentions. An interview with Badiou encompasses the play’s settings, themes, and events, as well as his ongoing literary and conceptual experimentation on stage and off. [Read More]

Praise for the book

Badiou resembles Sartre in the versatility, creativity, and energy that make them major literary authors as well as philosophers. It is a measure of Spitzer's talent as a translator that she manages to preserve the literariness of Badiou's language—its difficulty, strangeness, and beauty—while making it vivid and fluid and consistent with the syntactical and grammatical demands of English.

— Joseph Litvak, Tufts University

Badiou is one of very few writers for the theater to reflect explicitly on the contemporary possibilities and limits of political theater.

— Peter Hallward, Kingston University

Between three Pauls, the apostle, Claudel, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Badiou revives the tradition of political theater. In language of unprecedented beauty, he portrays a city--both archaic and ultra-contemporary--whose prince is, or will be, a woman.

— Catherine Malabou, University of Kingston

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou on Krapp's Last Tape
• Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
• Nina Power on Protest and Alain Badiou
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek

Advertising and Consumer Culture: Postgraduate Symposium

University of York · 31 May 2013

Advertising and Consumer Culture
Third Annual Postgraduate Symposium
University of York
Centre for Modern Studies
Bowland Auditorium
Humanities Research Centre
Friday 31 May 2013

About the Symposium

Commercial speech – advertising – makes up most of what we share as a culture . . . As the language of commercialism has become louder, the language of high culture has become quieter.

– James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads that Shook the World

Throughout the modern period, advertising and consumer culture have dominated everyday life; moreover, the trappings of commercialism permeate much of supposed ‘high culture’. Commodities clutter the pages of novels from Dickens and Zola to Bret Easton Ellis; works by Joyce and DeLillo are enlivened by advertising jingles and slogans; brands and trademarks pervade the practice of artists from Picasso to Warhol and the visualisation of consumer desire is appropriated and challenged in the work of Richard Hamilton and Martha Rosler.

Whether celebrating or critiquing advertising and consumer culture, art reflects our enduring fascination with them, despite research into the psychological effects of advertising, concerns over the evils of consumerism, and the often sinister nature of market research. The recent television show Mad Men, for instance, has revivified interest and scholarly debate surrounding the power of advertising and the consumer, as well as restaging debates around sexism, truth and the heteronormative ideal. Meanwhile, sociology in the wake of Erving Goffman continues to explore advertising’s uses and abuses of gender, identity and desire. Countervailing against consumerism and advertising’s many critics, theorists such as Michel de Certeau and the critical movement Thing Theory have endeavoured to examine advertising and consumer culture from a standpoint that goes beyond the model of the ‘passive consumer’ or Marx’s account of commodity fetishism.

We invite abstracts for 20 minute papers from postgraduate students and early-career researchers working in the modern period (1850-present day) across the humanities and social sciences. This conference aims to provoke interdisciplinary discussion about advertising and consumer culture. We therefore welcome papers that address these topics from historical, sociological, political or anthropological perspectives, as well as papers that analyse advertisements themselves and the representation of advertising and modern consumer culture in literature, film, television, theatre, and visual art.

Topics for Discussion

Topics for discussion may include but are by no means limited to:

• The ways in which advertising and consumer culture intersect with issues of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity
• Psychological/psychoanalytic perspectives on advertising and consumer behaviour; how identity is created and reflected through participation in consumer culture; the legacy of Freud and Bernays
• How artists have appropriated the techniques of advertising, or have been co-opted by advertising and commodity culture (Koons, Rosler, Murakami, Kusama and Hirst) -Theorists who have engaged with advertising and consumer culture (Adorno, Barthes, Baudrillard, Certeau, Fukuyama, Goffman, Klein, Marx, McLuhan)
• The use of music in advertisements
• The formal innovations literature has adopted to create a poetics of advertising/consumer culture
• Shopping, the rise of the department store, brand names, and their representation in culture
• Histories of advertising agencies or ‘ad-men’
• How the importance of advertising in art may challenge the boundaries between high and low culture and/or modernism and postmodernism
• Anti-consumerist movements (the Situationist International, Adbusters) and strategies (détournement, culture jamming)
• The recent transformations advertising has undergone as a result of social media -The advert as spectacle or ‘event’ (celebrity endorsements, Christmas advertising, product placement, Pawel Althamer’s Real Time Movie)
• Figures who have worked in advertising, either before or during their artistic careers (Fitzgerald, Rushdie, DeLillo, Warhol, Lynch)
• Political advertising and the roles of politics in advertising

Submissions

Abstracts for papers should be no more than 300 words in length, and submitted by Monday 25th March 2013 to cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk. We ask that applicants also include a short biography. For further information about the symposium or the CModS Postgraduate Forum, please contact us at this address, or visit http://www.york.ac.uk/modernstudies/postgraduate-forum/

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Don DeLillo on Mad Men and Writing
• Don DeLillo on Bookstores
• Don DeLillo, White Noise
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho

Pasolini Speaks

A selection of interviews with the controversial filmmaker

Pier Paulo Pasolini

From The Criterion Collection (link via Espen Terjesen): 'Pier Paolo Pasolini is without question one of the most controversial filmmakers who ever lived. He is also among the most fascinating. He brought rigorous social and artistic philosophies to every project he embarked on, and boldly voiced beliefs that provoked consternation in others. In the 2005 documentary Via Pasolini, available as a supplement in our Trilogy of Life set, we get to hear Pasolini directly; the film comprises clips from interviews done over many years. The following segment, taken from a 1971 television show, features the filmmaker answering a series of questions about faith, love, and hate, and in the process touching on his Catholicism, his Marxism, the grace of the poor and illiterate, and the corrupting influence of conventional culture.' [Watch the Interview]

Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey

A library of free online video presentations

Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Capital)

A close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital in free video lectures by David Harvey. [Link]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Karl Marx and World Literature
• Ian Fraser and Lawrence Wilde, The Marx Dictionary
• Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital
• Blanchot on Karl Marx and Communism

Simon Critchley on Religion and Philosophy

An interview with Religious Dispatches

Simon Critchley

Beatrice Marovich (Religious Dispatches) interviews Simon Critchley about his recent work, The Faith of the Faithless: 'What can an atheist do with theology? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The philosopher Simon Critchley is clear about the fact that, while he doesn’t believe in any gods, neither does he find it necessary to give up on theology.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Political Theology talks to Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley Interview: The Faith of the Faithless
• Simon Critchley discusses The Faith of the Faithless
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Political Theology talks to Simon Critchley

A conversation about Critchley's recent work, The Faith of the Faithless

From Political Theology: 'Simon Critchley discusses his new book, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, with Dave True of Political Theology. Along the way Critchley touches on an array of topics: his respect for religion, the experimental nature of free thought, what love has to do with a politics of resistance, the genius of the Occupy Movement, nonviolence and its limits, the wisdom of Antonio Gramsci, and the illusions of Marxism.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley on Religion and Philosophy
• Simon Critchley Interview: The Faith of the Faithless
• Simon Critchley discusses The Faith of the Faithless
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Nina Power on Protest and Alain Badiou

Radio Free Everybody talks to philosopher and activist Nina Power

Nina Power

Stir to Action has posted a new edition of its interview series, Radio Free Everybody (RFE). In the second episode, which includes a transcript, Matt Callahan talks to philosopher and activist Nina Power about the work of Alain Badiou, her thoughts on Defend the Right to Protest, and her book One-Dimensional Woman:

Matt Callahan: Ok, that’s sufficient. Well then, let’s go right into this, the first question that I wanted to ask you is how do you distinguish philosophy from science, art and politics?

Nina Power: Ok, well I think, well the way you pose the question is obviously very Badiouian, in the sense that these are his distinctions, although you missed out love. [Laughs]

Matt Callahan: That’s true.

Nina Power: But yeah, in that sense I would say to Badiou when he says that philosophy in a sense is empty, and actually what distinguishes philosophy is not it’s particular subject matter or its content, but its function in the way that it sort of weaves all these other disciplines and talks about them in a certain kind of meta-way. You know, that it can hold together certain kinds of abstractions or truths that are generated by these other disciplines, but it doesn’t generate any truths of its own. So in a way, for me, philosophy is not a particular method or a particular set of questions as you might be taught as an undergraduate, you know, let’s say it’s all these different ways of thinking about ethics or politics or epistemology or metaphysics or something like that. I think it seems to be more humble or more interesting to say that philosophy has no content of its own, it generates no questions that are specific to it, but it can, nevertheless, have this sort of capturing or compossibilizing function, you know, that it can draw things out of other disciplines.

Matt Callahan: How does that relate to Marx’s famous statement that philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however it is to change it? Is Badiou’s use of the term or what you are referring to as the Badiouian view of philosophy related to that?

Nina Power: You can’t force something, you can’t say, well alright, we’ve got to stop thinking, let’s just do something, ok, without knowing what you’re doing. Obviously there’s lots of kind of wasted action, if you like, there’s no sense in wasting time either, thinking through problems that are irrelevant, but at the same time it’s also, you’ve got to know what you are doing, you’ve got to understand enough of the situation in order to be able to act. When Badiou talks about the event and there are lots of questions that follow from this but it’s about saying something happened that you may not be able to exactly describe in the political situation but what truth might be is your fidelity to whatever’s happened. So, let’s say you’re involved in a political action and something is revealed about the relationship between the state and the way in which, people figured in this state and you see something and you don’t know what to call it, you see something that seems to you true, but isn’t what the state generally tells you is true and you hold true to this so you think about the way in which immigrants are excluded from the way in which the state figures itself or a certain way of seeing the world differently in terms of how you can organise it or maybe without money or something and you hold true to that.

Matt Callahan: I was asking it more, you might say, rhetorically it seems that Badiou is responding to a number of different contradictions. One of which is the original critique of philosophy as such by in Marx’s thesis on Feurbach and on the other hand, he was referring to the fact that all through the 20th century he talks about the destitution of philosophy, referring to Heidegger’s The End of Philosophy of 1969, where he’s offering over philosophy to science on the one hand, and the poet on the other. I mean you can look as these figures as just philosophers or whatever name you want to give them, but there’s really a question of well, does philosophy really have a role at all?

Nina Power: Yeah, I mean this is why the emptiness of philosophy’s really important. So, with ontology, Badiou basically hands over ontological questions concerning multiplicity and so on to mathematics. He says, look, I mean why is philosophy still trying to answer these with this useless language, that mathematics does far better? And that’s to say, well if we can pass that over to mathematics then philosophy has more time, if you like, to think about how we combine events, how we discuss subjects, so what are the subjects of these events? So, instead of spending all of our time coming up with yet another ontology you actually try to think much more about precisely the more practical questions. So what are the truths that are generated in these other areas, in politics, in love, you know, and what philosophy do to put them together to think through different kinds of subjects: the faithful subjects, the loyal subjects, the loving subject, the scientific subject, the collective subject. So in that way, I think he’s paring down philosophy, so although there’s something rather grandiose about Badiou’s system, I think at the end of the day it’s actually really minimal in a certain sense and quite humble, oddly.

Matt Callahan: The last few years, renewed inquiry into what Badiou called the communist hypothesis and really whether or not this was just because of the financial crisis. Is this only amongst philosophers and what does it have to do with communist parties and so on and so forth?

Nina Power: Well, I guess that I think the communist hypothesis idea and the return of it was actually floated before the economic crisis so I don’t think it was really responding to that just chronologically. But, I think there is something slightly problematic about it for me because it retains this kind of idealist element. I think on the one hand it’s very brave how people want to be talking about communism again-”have we left enough time after the horrors etc.” But, I think that it’s a very interesting kind of project, let’s say there’s this idea of invariance so that certain kinds of movements and certain kinds of political situations retain or maintain a kind of similarity that you can point to across the ages. Say, this is where in the Paris commune, May ’68, there’s something similar about that kind of… [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett
• Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek

John Gray on Slavoj Žižek

Gray reviews Less Than Nothing and Living in the End Times

Žižek at his apartment in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2010. Photo: Reiner Riedler/Anzenberger/Redux

In The New York Review of Books, John Gray has published a damning and thought-provoking review of Slavoj Žižek's new book, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, and 2010's Living in the End Times:

In a stupendous feat of intellectual overproduction Žižek has created a fantasmatic critique of the present order, a critique that claims to repudiate practically everything that currently exists and in some sense actually does, but that at the same time reproduces the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism. Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic—amounts in the end to less than nothing. [Read More]

[Update: 12.08.12] You can read Žižek's response at lacan.com.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek
• Slavoj Žižek on life, happiness and Hegel

'Authenticity': Postgraduate Symposium Call for Papers

University of York · 31 May 2012

'Authenticity': Call for Papers

University of York Centre for Modern Studies Postgraduate Second Annual Symposium
Bowland Auditorium, Humanities Research Centre, Thursday 31 May 2012

The signs of authenticity pervade our everyday interactions with the world, from the authentic takeaway to the historical television re-enactment and the claimed impartiality of the commercial press. In response to the British riots in the summer of 2011, Tudor historian David Starkey made the distinction between the authentic and inauthentic citizenry. Those who partook in looting and affray were figured as outside authentic structures of legal and moral behaviour, ‘feral’ even. The insidious and barely concealed attribution of inauthenticity to what in London was a predominantly black community set off racial tension that for many years now has been thought of as behind us. Authenticity, then, had become the buzzword in the reenlivened discourses of politics, race, class and culture.

Through this interdisciplinary conference, the Centre for Modern Studies Post-Graduate Forum seeks to explore and question the associations and assumptions that have come to coalesce around the concept of the ‘authentic’. From the art historian Hal Foster’s charting of the ‘Return of the Real’, through its philosophical instantiations in Marx, Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Adorno, by way of the pop/mass culture debate in Cultural Studies, to the notion of performative ‘masquerade’ in theories of gender and sexuality - issues of authenticity thread through much recent work in the humanities and the social sciences. For example, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recent exhibition on postmodernism aims to historicise a discourse famous for its slippery employment of replication, reproduction and rearrangement into a compartment of the authentic academic canon.

We therefore invite abstracts for papers from post-graduates working in the humanities and social sciences disciplines in the modern period (1850-present). We would welcome interdisciplinary papers, and submissions from panels. Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:

• The authenticity debate in twentieth century philosophy
• Critical Counterfactualism
• Hoaxes, deceptions and counterfeiting
• Documentary film and television
• Photography
• Journalism
• Cuisine
• Digital authentication and access
• Intellectual property and copyright
• Identity: race, class, gender, sexuality
• Mimesis and verisimilitude
• Materiality / immateriality – replication, the virtual / digital (gaming)
• Fantasy / utopia / visionaries / spiritualities / sci-fi
• Costume, cross-dressing / beauty industry and cosmetics
• Geographies of authenticity – i.e. ‘native’ and ‘indigenous’ vs. ‘foreigner’ ‘alien’
• Immigration / migration

Abstracts for papers should be 300 words in length, and the deadline for submissions is Monday 26th March 2012 at 5.00pm. Please send abstracts to cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk - if you would like more information about the symposium or the CMODS Postgraduate Forum, don't hesitate to contact us at this address, or visit our website.

Katja Behling, Martha Freud: A Biography

What was it like to be Sigmund Freud's wife?

Sigmund Freud with his wife, Martha Bernays Freud (center), and her sister, Minna Bernays (left) in 1929.

Jenny Diski reviews Katja Behling's Martha Freud: A Biography (translated by R.D.V. Glasgow) in the London Review of Books:

In the membership roll of the worshipful guild of enabling wives, the name of Martha Freud ranks with the greatest: Mrs Noah, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Marx, Mrs Joyce, Mrs Nabokov, Mrs Clinton, and their honorary fellows, Mr Woolf and Mr Cookson. Wives, of either sex, are what keep the universe orderly and quiet enough for the great to think their thoughts, complete their travels, write their books and change the world. Martha Freud was a paragon among wives. There is nothing more liberating from domestic drudgery and the guilt that comes of avoiding it than having a cleaning lady who loves cleaning, a child-carer who’s content with child-care, a homebody who wants nothing more than to be at home. And Martha Freud was all those things. Quite why she was those things is something that her husband might have been the very person to investigate, but Freud was nobody’s fool and knew when to leave well alone in the murkier regions of his personal life – especially that dark continent in his mind concerning women. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• On the Couch: Freud and the New Yorker
• David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method
• Sigmund Freud: The Reluctant Philosopher
• Freud and Global Economic Collapse
• Ballard: 'Freud was a born storyteller'
• Freud and Yeats on Wikipedia
• Sigmund Freud and Cocaine
• Freud and Love
• Open Yale Courses: Theories of Literature
• Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital

Seán Sheehan, Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed

A new title from Continuum

Seán Sheehan, Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed

Another interesting new title from Continuum: 'One of the most widely-read thinkers writing today, Slavoj Žižek’s work can be both thrilling and perplexing in equal measure. Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed is the most up-to-date guide available for readers struggling to master the ideas of this hugely influential thinker. Unpacking the philosophical references that fill Žižek’s writings, the book explores his influences, including Lacan, Kant, Hegel and Marx. From there, a chapter on 'Reading Žižek' guides the reader through the ways that he applies these core theoretical concepts in key texts like Tarrying With the Negative, The Ticklish Subject and The Parrallax View and in his books about popular culture like Looking Awry and Enjoy Your Symptom! Major secondary writings and films featuring Žižek are also covered.' The Continuum website includes an online preview of the book, and endorsements from Donagh Brennan, Editor of the Irish Left Review [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Slavoj Žižek on Philosophy
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek
• Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett
• Alain Badiou on Krapp's Last Tape
• Slavoj Žižek on Ridley Scott's Alien
• Slavoj Žižek on life, happiness and Hegel
• Slavoj Žižek on Samuel Beckett

Ian Fraser and Lawrence Wilde, The Marx Dictionary

One of a new series of reference dictionaries published by Continuum

Ian Fraser and Lawrence Wilde, The Marx Dictionary

A recent publication from Continuum has just caught my eye: 'The Marx Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Karl Marx. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Marx's thought from a philosophical perspective. Students will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Marx's writings, coverage of their German origins, and detailed synopses of all his key works. The Dictionary also includes entries on Marx's major philosophical and political influences and contemporaries. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Marx's work, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Marx Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying Marx or Nineteenth-Century Political Thought more generally.' The publisher's website includes an online preview of the book, and endorsements from Professors David McLellan and Terrell Carver [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Karl Marx and World Literature
• Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers

Simon Glendinning, Derrida: A Very Short Introduction

A new guide to one of the most difficult contemporary philosophers

Jacques Derrida

In this week's Times Literary Supplement (6 January 2012), Neil Badmington reviews Derrida: A very short introduction by Simon Glendinning:

Glendinning's overview is accurate and informed, and the book covers many of the key terms: logocentrism, aporia, and grammatology, for example. I have a reservation, however, about the level at which the volume is pitched. Oxford Universty Press's "Very Short Introductions" are, the publisher explains, "for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject", and many of the titles in the series live up to this claim. (Catherine Belsey's Postructuralism and Peter Singer's Marx come to mind.) But Glendinning is often too immersed in the material to meet the needs of a newcomer. A discussion of the preface to Of Grammatology, for example, is interrupted by a reference to "Derrida's 'messianic' hope, a messianism without a determinate messianism'. Glendinning is not wrong to make the link, but the absence here of an explanation of Derrida's work on the messianic renders the allusion an obstacle. Meanwhile, a later chapter claims that "Derrida's conception of the 'text'... is not simply Heidegger's 'world'", but reveals nothing about the meaning of "world" in Heideggerean philosophy.

Glendinning's book might satisfy readers already familiar with Derrida's writings, but those seeking an accessible guide will need to turn elsewhere, perhaps to John D. Caputo's Deconstruction in a Nutshell (1997) or Nicholas Royle's Jacques Derrida (2003). Between here and there is a world of difference.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• Roland Barthes, Travels in China
• Roland Barthes translated into Txt-spk
• Roland Barthes and The Preparation of the Novel
• Alain Robbe-Grillet, Why I Love Barthes
• Badmington on Roland Barthes and Mythologies