16.4.15
6.9.11
Friedrich Nietzsche: A Perspectivist Thinker
David Maier weighs in on current trends
In an article for 3 Quarks Daily, Dave Maier asks how German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is currently being interpreted:Nietzsche is often described as a "perspectivist" about knowledge and truth. His remarks on the matter, however, render the issue far from straightforward. He clearly means to reject some form of absolutism, but which? And what does he leave in its place? One's answer to this question depends quite a bit on whether or not one wishes to see Nietzsche as an ally in contemporary disputes. Postmodern relativists, for example, see Nietzsche as a champion of their cause, breaking the chains of "objectivity" and liberating us from the logocentric hegemony of Western rationality or some damn thing. Defenders of metaphysical realism (or of Christianity, NIetzsche's explicit target) are generally happy to agree, allowing them to dismiss him along with his postmodern disciples as wild-eyed lunatics.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
However, a recent trend in Nietzsche studies has been to claim him as an exponent of scientific rationality rather than as a critic (as in the work of Brian Leiter and Maudemarie Clark). On these latter readings, Nietzsche's "perspectivism" must then be understood as not at all relativistic, and indeed compatible with, as Leiter puts it, seeing a naturalistic or scientific perspective as "the true or correct" one. [Read More]
4.9.11
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:
27.8.11
Mark M. Freed, Robert Musil and the NonModern
Free preview available online
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| Robert M. Freed, Robert Musil and the NonModern |
Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities is widely recognized as a monument of modernist literature alongside Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses. But while Musil is a major scholarly industry in the German-speaking world, critical attention from English-speaking scholars remains disproportionately small. Moreover, there has been little engagement with Musil’s contribution to cultural theory from those working outside literary studies.
Freed brings Musil into dialogue with such critics of the modern as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Lyotard and argues that Musil’s theory and literary performance of essayism constitutes a strategy of nonmodernity: that is, an engagement with the problems of modernity that does not re-inscribe the distinctions on which modernism grounded itself. [Read More]
25.8.11
Anthony Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov
What can literature tell us about the thinking process?
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| Anthony Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov |
In this ambitious contribution to literary theory, Anthony Uhlmann shows how a work of literature can be said to think, and thus in what sense literature helps us to understand the world. On the way he provides exemplary analyses of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov at work, as well as useful unfoldings of difficult material from Spinoza and Leibniz.
J. M. Coetzee
Anthony Uhlmann offers an impressively original and compelling series of interpretations that will substantially alter accepted ideas not only of Joyce, Woolf and Nabokov, but also of the epistemology and aesthetics of modernism. Uhlmann‟s Deleuzian approach—post-expressionist and postrepresentationalist— seeks to move beyond the traditional conception of modernism as an “inward turn” centered in subjectivity and interiority. Thinking in Literature accomplishes its highly innovative readings with subtlety, intelligence and insight.Thinking in Literature examines how the Modernist novel might be understood as a machine for thinking, and how it offers means of coming to terms with what it means to think. It begins with a theoretical analysis, via Deleuze, Spinoza and Leibniz, of the concept of thinking in literature, and sets out three principle elements which continually announce themselves as crucial to the process of developing an aesthetic expression: relation; sensation; and composition. Uhlmann then examines the aesthetic practice of three major Modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. Each can be understood as working with relation, sensation and composition, yet each emphasize the interrelations between them in differing ways in expressing the potentials for thinking in literature.
Richard Begam, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Anthony Uhlmann is Professor of English in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and coeditor of The Ethics of Arnold Geulincx (Brill, 2006). He is chief editor of The Journal of Beckett Studies.
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
28.4.11
Things Unspeakable: Theatre after 1945
An international, interdisciplinary conference on theatre and human rights
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| Things Unspeakable: Theatre after 1945 |
7-9 October 2011
Registration is now open for ‘Things Unspeakable: Theatre after 1945’, an international, interdisciplinary conference on theatre and human rights at the University of York (7-9 October 2011).
What have theatre and performance brought to our understanding of the unspeakable? To what degree has the realm of the unspeakable gained new currency within established and emerging trends in theatre? What is the relation between enshrined understandings of the unspeakable and the resurgence of plays and performances about torture, war and genocide?
This three-day conference gathers artistic practitioners and academic researchers engaged in the creation of new approaches to theatre, performance and human rights. The conference features 11 keynote speakers, a platform conversation between Albie Sachs and David Edgar on The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, a performance of Asylum Monologues by theatre company Ice and Fire, and presentations on theatre and torture; theatre and censorship; discourses of the unspeakable; theatres of the body and silence; theatre, law and the unspeakable; theatres of witness, war and genocide; contemporary political theatre; theatre after 9/11.
Participants and speakers include:
- Ice and Fire Theatre Company
- Professor Cathy Caruth, Emory University
- Professor Catherine Cole, Berkeley
- David Edgar, playwright
- Professor Erik Ehn, Brown
- Dr Mark Fleishman, University of Cape Town
- Dr Carol Martin, New York University Professor
- Professor Gay McAuley, University of Sydney
- Nighat Rizvi, actress and activist, Pakistan
- Rt Hon. Albie Sachs, South Africa
- Professor Carole-Anne Upton, editor of Performing Ethos, University of Ulster
- Katharine Viner, Deputy Editor, Guardian
Conference Directors
- Professor Mary Luckhurst, Department of Theatre, Film and Television, University of York, UK
- Dr Emilie Morin, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, UK
Registration
To register, and for further information, please go to http://www.york.ac.uk/tftv/news-events/events/2011/theatre-and-human-rights-conferenceLocation: Department of Theatre, Film and Television, University of York
Email: thingsunspeakable@gmail.com
About the Conference
This conference addresses the terrain of the unspeakable in relation to theatre and performance. It invites reflection upon the idea of the unspeakable as it has been represented in the theatre, both in European and non-European contexts.In his 1947 memoir, L’Espèce Humaine (The Human Race), Robert Antelme pinpoints the ‘unimaginable’: the moment of confrontation between the concentration camp detainee and the liberator, the American soldier. In the wake of accounts from survivors of the concentration camps, the term ‘unspeakable’ has taken precedence in our collective imaginary when describing moments of unfathomable suffering. It has also informed renewed philosophical debate about history, representation and ethics. Philosophers such as Theodor Adorno and Sarah Kofman have reflected upon the singular tension, evoked by Antelme, between the unspeakable and systems of representation, and upon the horror that demands to be represented but cannot be.
Debating points might be:
- What particular issues of form and performance arise in relation to representations of the unspeakable in the theatre?
- What is the relation between enshrined understandings of the unspeakable and the resurgence of plays and performances about torture, war and genocide?
- To what degree has the realm of the unspeakable gained new currency within established and emerging trends in political theatre?
- To what degree have playwrights and other artistic practitioners drawn upon the vocabulary deployed in accounts of the Nazis’ Final Solution when reflecting upon war, genocide and the repetition of catastrophe?
- theatres of witness, war, and genocide
- theatre and censorship
- theatre, law, and the unspeakable
- theatres of the body and silence
- theatre and philosophical discourses of the unspeakable
- verbatim theatre
- theatre companies working in human rights contexts
- theatre and 9/11
- theatre and torture
- theatre and apophasis in religious and philosophical history
- the unspeakable and contemporary political theatres
Jacques Derrida on Photography
An interview with the late deconstructionist thinker
(Link via Shrink at Large.)
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