Can the Public Intellectual Save the University?

26 September 2013, 10.30am - 5.00pm

What is the current state of the univerity? Has it been reduced to a bureaucratic machine that has killed thinking?

Or is it a place where true intellectual engagement still exists?

Join us for a one-day event to discuss the role of the university today and its responsibility to the public.

10:30 - 10:45 Welcome Address (Carl Cederström)
10:45 - 11:45 Martin Parker (Alternative Business)
12:00 - 13:00 Mary Evans (Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities)
14:00 - 15:00 Andy Martin (The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs. Camus)
15:15 - 16:15 Simon Critchley (The Hamlet Doctrine)
16:15 - 17:00 Panel debate

Venue

John Pryde Lecture Theatre
Sir Martin Evans Building
Museum Avenue
Cardiff CF10 3AX [See Map]

Register

This event is free of charge and open to everyone. Click here to Register. [Read more]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley's How to Read Series
• Simon Critchley/Tom McCarthy Panels
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

9 Things You Can Learn From Hamlet

Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster on Shakespeare's 'most enduring play'

Kenneth Branagh in his 1996 film adaptation of Hamlet

From The Huffington Post:

The main reason why Hamlet is Shakespeare's most enduring play is that it requires the most endurance. Contrary to centuries of Shakespeare scholarship on Hamlet's quintessential modernity, this requirement is first and foremost factual: Hamlet is the Shakespeare character with the most lines in a single play and Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, clocking in at over 4 hours onstage. Hamlet in its entirety might be thought of as Hamlet in its eternity. Hamlet is a king of infinite space.

Hamlet also requires our endurance for he is a consummate philosopher, which is why he thinks so much and at such great length and ultimately acts so little. It is difficult for us to peer through centuries of romantic fog that whirl around his character. We tend to imagine the play as lofty, overblown, the pinnacle of Western literature. But the fact is, Hamlet was a revival of an earlier play also called Hamlet- which had been a big hit- and was thus a kind of box-office sequel by London's most successful dramatist: WS. Commercially, Shakespeare never put a foot wrong. Hamlet was a blockbuster. It remained a blockbuster in the decades and centuries that followed.

Here we reach a conundrum: Hamlet is a revenge drama. Everyone loves a revenge drama, right? But the play consists of Hamlet's inability to take revenge. The audience would have thought they were going to watch a Tarantino-esque Elizabethan action movie with a few good sword fights. But instead of bloody acts, they get endless bloody thoughts. Hamlet soliloquizes on the meaning of life, dithers and feigns madness, tying himself up in the most exquisite dialectical knots, doubting everything, even the ghost who demands revenge. When he concocts the play within the play, to catch the conscience of the king, and it works- Claudius confesses his guilt- still he doesn't do it.

If Hamlet is Shakespeare's most enduring play, then the paradox is that there is something unendurable about it. The play goes on and on. Hamlet goes on and on. Spinning out words, words, words that lose the name of action. The weirdest thing is that having been a crowd pleaser from the very beginning, it seems to do so little to please the crowd. Our expectations about tight, coherent, fast-moving, well-executed plot unravel in scene after scene, spiraling down into Hamlet's infinite jest and perspicuous melancholia.

Hamlet is not a version of our best self, let alone our authentic humanity, but what is worst and most selfish in us. His failure of commitment, his radical inhibition, his suicidal melodrama, and his violent misanthropic and misogynistic cruelty, are some of the rather unappealing aspects of our selves. Shakespeare forces us to stare at that which we do not want to look; to see what Uncle Teddy Adorno felicitously called our Hamlet Syndrome.

Hamlet is a kind of camera obscura that presents us with a true picture of the world in its inverted form. What if the modern depressive Dane Lars Von Trier was right and some malevolent meteor obliterated the entirety of human civilization in a flash? If somehow after that apocalyptic devastation a single copy of Hamlet remained, a faithful record of our culture could be reconstructed on its basis. It's not a pretty picture. [For the Full List, Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Simon Critchley on Shakespeare and Theory
• Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets
• Shakespeare's Hamlet: Polonious on Conduct
• Shakespeare, Justice and Modern Law
• Toni Morrison on Joyce and Shakespeare

Talk About Nothing: Simon Critchley and Fiona Shaw

An event hosted by the Rubin Museum of Art

From the Rubin Museum of Art:

The Rubin Museum of Art presents the conversation series "Talk About Nothing." In this episode, actress Fiona Shaw and philosopher Simon Critchley discuss "nothingness" in the works of Ibsen, Beckett, and T.S. Eliot.

"Talk About Nothing" was presented in association with the exhibition "Grain of Emptiness: Buddhism-Inspired Contemporary Art" at the Rubin Museum of Art, in New York City.

For information about current exhibitions and events, please visit www.rmanyc.org. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• The Big Think Interviews Simon Critchley
• Critchley on Nature in Terrence Malick
• Simon Critchley on Contemporary Art
• Simon Critchley on Samuel Beckett

Simon Critchley on the Tragic and its Limits

An interview with The White Review

John Douglas Millar (The White Review) interviews philosopher Simon Critchley:

To Critchley, one attraction of tragedy lies in ‘its savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to philosophy, and its massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation.’ Since the beginning of his career he has been concerned with the antagonism between literature and philosophy, telling me earlier this year that ‘Literature was always my passion. It was what philosophy was meant to serve in a sense . . . Literature was served by philosophy rather than the other way around.’ His work on tragedy may be read in this light, and can also be seen as a model for reading the present state of permanent war in which we find ourselves. In the following interview we discussed the significance of tragedy for him, his use of collaboration as a working method, and how his latest obsession has lead to the new book. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Continental Philosophy
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory
• The Big Think Interviews Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

INS: The Mattering of Matter

Sternberg Press releases an archive of the International Necronautical Society

The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society

From 3:AM Magazine: 'New from the International Necronautical Society, The Mattering of Matter, a collection manifestos, declarations, reports, transcripts and broadcasts edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin, featuring key INS members Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley and Anthony Auerbach.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Tom McCarthy on the International Necronautical Society (INS)
• Tom McCarthy's Computer Desktop
• Tom McCarthy on Film, Art and Writerly Advice
• Tom McCarthy on Friedrich Kittler
• Tom McCarthy on Gerhard Richter

Simon Critchley on Contemporary Art

An article for The Brooklyn Rail

Al Held, 'The Big A' (1962)

Philosopher Simon Critchley shares his thoughts on contemporary art: '[...] despite such confusions of reference and the horrors of the contemporary art business model—or perhaps even because of it—I want to defend contemporary art, up to a point. It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural meanings—good, bad, or indifferent. I am middle-aged enough to remember when literature, especially the novel, played this role and when cultural gatekeepers were literary critics, or social critics, often from literary backgrounds. That world is gone. The novel has become a quaint, emotively life-changing, and utterly marginal phenomenon. The heroic critics of the past are no more. I watched this change happen slowly when I still lived in England in the sensation-soaked 1990s and recall, as a kind of cultural marker, the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 and immensely long lines queuing up to see a vast spider by Louise Bourgeois in the Turbine Hall. It was clear that something had shifted in the culture.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Francis Bacon: Five Decades
• Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon
• David Lynch on BBC's The Culture Show

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

Figure/Ground Communication talks to Simon Critchley

An interview with one of our leading contemporary philosophers

Simon Critchley, photographed in 2012

Andrew Hines talks to Simon Critchley (29 July 2012):

How did you decide to become a university professor? Was it a conscious choice?

“No” is the short answer. I went to university late. When I became a graduate student in 1985, there had been no jobs in England from 1977, and that began to stop in 1988; so from the late 70s until 1988, there were no jobs in the humanities, and certainly not in philosophy. Philosophy departments were being closed down. So, there was a little group of graduate students at the University of Essex and we all knew that there was no reason to do a Ph.D. because it would lead to nothing. We did it for that reason, just out of a sort of spite, I suppose. We would have quite liked to end up as lecturers, but you couldn’t have the ambition because there was nothing to have the ambition for. We all knew that doing a Ph.D. was a stupid idea because it would just make us less employable when we eventually did go and get proper jobs. So, I would say it was not an ambition of mine. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Continental Philosophy
• Simon Critchley's How to Read Series
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory
• Simon Critchley Interviewed on Swedish Television
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Simon Critchley discusses The Faith of the Faithless

Simon Critchley featured on PRI's Smiley/West

Verso have posted an audio recording of Simon Critchley's recent appearance on the Smiley & West radio show. Critchley discussed his new book, The Faith of the Faithless, and was joined in conversation by Cornel West and Tavis Smiley. [Listen]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley Interview: The Faith of the Faithless

Simon Critchley Interview: The Faith of the Faithless

Why a counterfactual faith is so important to modern politics

Simon Critchley, Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh of Stir (stirtoaction.com) interviews the philosopher Simon Critchley to mark the publication of his new book, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology:

It has been reasoned that the recent theological revival is because of a “theoretical deficit, not a theological need” (Alberto Toscano). Are there more reasons for this unexpected if not unusual upturn in interest in political theology than the catastrophic failure of the communist projects of the previous century?

Simon Critchley: The interest in political theology comes out of a dissatisfaction with liberalism. The notion of political theology as a category or term actually originates in Bakunin. So, it originates in Italian thought in the mid-nineteenth century and is also first used as an abusive term. And when Carl Schmitt picks it up in the 1920s he gives it a different valence but the object of attack for both Bakunin and Schmitt, on the left and on the right, is the same liberalism.

Periodising that, you have the aftermath of the collapse of the Warsaw pact and the Soviet Union, and the period in the early 90s when there is a lot of optimism about the potential within democracy for emancipatory energies that then quickly exhausts itself. Then, there is a return to the theological concerns at that moment, which isn’t so much a return to communist ideas as an attempt to find something at the level of the deep motivational structure of what it means to be a human self and what selves might be together. If you are interested in that question then the history of religious thought is really a place to look — maybe the place to look.

For me, I’ve never been a particularly secularist thinker and I’ve never had a strong faith in the ideas of secular modernity. I’ve had a huge interest, as long as I’ve been aware of such things, in religious thinkers like Paul, Pascal, Augustine and many others. It seems to me that if you start from some idea that philosophy or theory has to do without religion then you are cutting yourself off from that incredibly useful archive of possibilities. So, I think that philosophy is inconceivable without religion, or shouldn’t be done without religion as it shouldn’t be done only with religion. I am not a theist in that sense. It means using the best and most powerful ideas in that tradition for other ends. Of the people who have gone back to using religious sources to think about politics, then I would say that Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul is the most powerful.

The question for me is two-fold. Firstly, it is diagnostic: to understand the nature of political forms is to think of them as different forms of sacralisation. In my view, I have this idea that the history of political forms — fascism, liberal democracy, Stalinism — is different forms of the sacral. There is always some sacred object: the nation, the people, the race, or whatever it might be. So, rather than seeing the history of politics as the movement from the religious to the secular, I see politics as a shift in the meaning of the sacred.

For me, that is an incredibly useful diagnostic tool when you are, say, looking at political forms in a country like the one I am living in (the US), where an incredibly powerful political theology exists in terms of American civil religion which is able to exert a unusual power over citizens and using that to find out how that works. So, there is a diagnostic category that is very important, and then there is a more normative one.

Politics for me, to put it in a crude formula, is “association without representation”. I adapted this from Rousseau. The notion of association for me is not just, but nonetheless still, a religious idea. Religion is linked to the idea of Renegare who asks what is it that binds fast? What is it that binds fast an association? For me, that is a question that the left has been grappling with for the last couple of centuries. So, I don’t think you can just slough off the religious tradition or say it’s just nonsense. That is a philistine gesture that is counter-productive in all sorts of ways. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Modernism Then and Now

A conversation published in 3:AM Magazine

In 3:AM Magazine, David Winters and Anthony Brown discuss modernism, then and now [Read More]

Simon Critchley on Greek Tragedy

Philosopher shares his current obsession

Greek vase depicting a production of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis

In a post for The Believer, Simon Critchley shares his latest obsession for Greek tragedy (link via ReadySteadyBook): 'I have always tended to work obsessively on one topic at a time to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t consider this a virtue. For the past 6 months, that topic has been ancient tragedy: its nature, its savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to philosophy, and its massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley: Do It, England (The Hamlet Doctrine, Part I)

A free public lecture available online

On 29 November 2011, Simon Critchley presented a lecture at the London Graduate School entitled 'Do it, England (The Hamlet Doctrine, Part I)'. Thanks to Backdoor Broadcasting, you can listen to the lecture in its entirety on their website, along with an introduction by Professor Martin McQuillan (Kingston). [Listen]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley: Style in Theory

Simon Critchley on Shakespeare and Theory

Tilburg Philosophy Summer School · July 2012

Richard Burton in a production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Simon Critchley is to give a series of lectures that read Shakespeare in light of philosophy and contemporary critical theory: 'Simon Critchley will give a series of lectures on Hamlet which will deal with various ‘outsider’ interpretations of the play, notably those of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Schmitt, Benjamin and Lacan as well as providing a close textual engagement with the play itself.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley's How to Read Series
• Simon Critchley/Tom McCarthy Panels
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

David Winters on Shane Weller's Modernism and Nihilism

On Weller's contribution to Palgrave's 'Modernism and...' series

Osip Brik by Aleksandr Mikhajlovich Rodchenko © DACS 2005

David Winters reviews Shane Weller's recent study, Modernism and Nihilism for Ready Steady Book: 'To consider the concept of nihilism, Simon Critchley once remarked, is to take up the trail of ‘Ariadne’s thread’, a theoretical route through the labyrinth of history. For Critchley, the story of nihilism is the story of what it means to be modern, and to read the philology of nihilism, of the nihil, is to look through a lens at modernity’s underside. Shane Weller’s survey of the web of relations between Modernism and Nihilism proceeds from the same supposition. His book unpicks the thread where it’s at its most knotted, in the high modernist literatures of the early twentieth century. For Weller, what’s at work in the works of the modernists – from Tzara to Kafka to Cioran – is a discursive puzzle for which ‘nihilism’ would seem to be the key, the master term that could unlock and make sense of the modern. Yet the thrust of his thesis is the fact that it fails to do so; the way that whatever it touches is rendered resistant to interpretation. So, on the one hand, thought and talk about ‘nihilism’ is ubiquitous across modern culture: wherever the modernist moment is, nihilism sits alongside (or inside) it. On the other, modernism proves unable to reduce nihilism to its propaedeutic, its explanatory toolkit. Rather, nihilism is what haunts modernism, as its ghost or double, a tense co-presence forever unsettling its meanings.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism
• Travels in Nihilon: Critchley on Beckett and Adorno

Simon Critchley's How to Read Series

Monographs on philosophy, theory, politics and religion

Brain Pickings offers a summary of Simon Critchley's series, How to Read: 'Each of the books tackles one of humanity’s great texts of literature, philosophy, science and religion, from Shakespeare to Freud to Darwin to the Bible, and enlists a leading scholar in that subject to break down the classic in a way that facilitates, deepens and enriches your understanding of it.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory

Simon Critchley/Tom McCarthy Panels

University of Louisville, Literature and Culture Since 1900 · February 23-25, 2012

Call for Papers

Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy will be presenting at the University of Louisville's 40th annual Literature and Culture Since 1900 Conference. In order to make the most of their visit we are calling for papers that engage with these two contemporary thinkers either alone, in articulation with each other, or with other interlocutors. Depending on the quality and number of submissions we may be able to propose a double session of papers. Below are specific CFP prompts and contact information.

Simon Critchley
Simon Critchley's writings have made a profound impact on shaping the theoretical landscape in the 21st century. In conjunction with his keynote address at the University of Louisville's "Literature and Culture Since 1900 Conference," this panel is calling for papers that engage with any and all aspects of Critchley's work. Possible topics include his work in theorizing and continuing continental thought, his work as a poetry critic, his theory on humor, or his more idiosyncratic works like The Book of Dead Philosophers or his numerous mass media publications (NY Times Column, The Guardian's Blog on Being and Time).

Tom McCarthy
In her much cited 2008 review of his novel Remainder, Zadie Smith describes Tom McCarthy as articulating a kind of 20th century novel that Smith doesn't write, but greatly admires. In conjunction with his creative keynote and symposium at the University of Louisville's "Literature and Culture Since 1900 Conference," this panel is calling for papers that engage with any and all of McCarthy's work. Critics may want to consider how his novels (Men in Space, Remainder, and C) work in conjunction with his critical, essayistic writing in Tintin and the Secret of Literature or his reports for the International Necronautical Society. Papers that situate McCarthy within current theoretical and cultural debates are encouraged, as are papers that offer insightful readings of his literary project.

Submissions

Please send your 250 word abstract to seth.a.morton@rice.edu by Monday 26 September 2011.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Calling All Agents: Tom McCarthy Symposium
• Is Tom McCarthy a Modernist Writer?
• Simon Critchley: Beckett, Literature, Philosophy
• How To Stop Living and Start Worrying
• Philosophers: Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley on Critical Theory

On the role of contemporary critical theory

Simon Critchley presents a talk on Critical Theory Today, 23 October 2009 (link via Continental Philosophy)

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley

Calling All Agents: Tom McCarthy Symposium

Birkbeck College, University of London, 22-23 July 2011

Design: Rhys Tranter. Image by Bodacea. Source.

Calling All Agents: A symposium on the work of Tom McCarthy
Birkbeck College, University of London
22-23 July 2011

About the Symposium

'Calling All Agents: A symposium on the work of Tom McCarthy' is the first academic symposium on the work of British novelist Tom McCarthy. This event will feature papers on McCarthy's three novels, Remainder (2005), Men in Space (2007) and C (2010), as well as his role as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society, and his relationship with the Tintin series. The day will conclude with a reading by and Q&A session with McCarthy.

Timetable of Events

Friday 22 July 2011

18:00–19:00: Reception: Gylphi launch of Contemporary Writers series and David Mitchell: Critical Essays (Keynes Library, Birkbeck)

19:30–21:00: Film: Double Take (Birkbeck Cinema)

Saturday 23 July 2011

09:00–09:30: Registration

09:30–11:15: Panel 1

• Holly Pester (Birkbeck)
• Henderson Downing (Birkbeck)
• Dr Jane Lewty (University of Amsterdam)

11:15–11:30: Coffee

11:30–13:15: Panel 2

• Dr Julia Jordan (Sussex)
• Dr Gill Partington (Birkbeck)
• Mark Blacklock (Birkbeck)

13:15–14:00: Lunch (own arrangements)

14:00–15:45: Panel 3

• Dr Eric Langley (UCL)
• Dr Laura Salisbury (Birkbeck)
• Prof Andrew Gibson (Royal Holloway)

15:45–16:15: Coffee

16:15–17:00: Panel 4: “In Conversation”

• Dr Daniel Lea (Oxford Brookes)
• Prof Peter Boxall (Sussex)
• Prof Simon Critchley (New School)

17:00–18:00: Tom McCarthy: Reading & Q&A

18:00–19:00: Wine

How to Register

There is no registration fee for this event, to register send an email to Dennis Duncan at d.duncan@english.bbk.ac.uk indicating whether you will be attending the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series launch and film screening (22 July) and/or the conference (23 July).

Website

• Calling All Agents: A Symposium on Tom McCarthy
• Facebook

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Is Tom McCarthy a Modernist Writer?
• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying
• Simon Critchley: Beckett, Literature, Philosophy