16.4.15
10.3.15
What Homer Can Tell Us About Modern War
Charlotte Higgins on the continuing relevance of a 3,000-year-old poem.
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Many wishing to make sense of wars in their own time have reached for The Iliad. Alexander the Great, perhaps the most flamboyantly successful soldier in history, slept beside a copy annotated by his tutor, Aristotle. "He esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge," according to Plutarch's biography. Simone Weil's essay, "L'Iliade ou le poème de la force", published in 1940, holds that "the true hero, the true subject at the centre of The Iliad is force", which she defines as "that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing".
Her contemporary Rachel Bespaloff, a Geneva-raised philosopher who wound up in the United States, also turned to Homer's poem as a "method of facing" the second world war. For her, it tells a profound, human story – "Suffering and loss have stripped Hector bare," her essay "On The Iliad" begins.
We are still turning to The Iliad, amid our own wars: the Australian writer David Malouf's recent novel, Ransom (Chatto & Windus), is about the encounter between Priam and Achilles in The Iliad's final book, while Caroline Alexander's new study of the poem, The War that Killed Achilles (Faber), sees it as a meditation on the catastrophic effects of conflict. While she does not indulge in crass equivalences, it is hard not to be alerted by her reading to the devastation caused by the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
[...]
The Trojan war – a more or less mythical event – was a 10-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greeks, its purpose to restore Helen to her Spartan husband, Menelaus. The Iliad charts not the famous causes of the conflict (the Trojan prince Paris's abduction of Helen) nor its spectacularly bloody end (the Greeks' ruse of the wooden horse and the brutal sacking of the city). Instead, the subject of the poem is menis, fury – specifically, the wrath of the Greeks' best warrior, Achilles.
That wrath is provoked by his commander-in-chief Agamemnon's misguided decision to seize Briseis, Achilles's captive woman, as compensation for his own bit of living loot, Chriseis, whom he has been obliged to restore to her Trojan father. Achilles, his pride and honour outraged, withdraws from the fighting and persuades his mother, the goddess Thetis, to ask Zeus to turn the tide of war against the Greeks, knowing that they will suffer appalling losses. He stubbornly resists all appeals to return to battle, but eventually agrees to send his beloved comrade, Patroclus, into the fray.
When Patroclus is killed by the Trojans' best fighter, Hector, Achilles whirls into a frenzy of redoubled, redirected rage. He joins the fighting, and begins a lengthy and pitiless slaughtering spree. Finally, he kills Hector in single combat and attaches the corpse to his chariot, dragging it triumphantly around the walls of the city. (In 2004, the bodies of American contractors were attached to the backs of cars and dragged through the streets of Fallujah.) At the end of the poem Hector's frail and eldery father, Priam, enters the Greeks' camp and persuades Achilles to restore to him his son's body.
[...]
[...] The Iliad still has much to say about war, even as it is fought today. It tells us that war is both the bringer of renown to its young fighters and the destroyer of their lives. It tells us about post-conflict destruction and chaos; about war as the great reverser of fortunes. It tells us about the age-old dilemmas of fighters compelled to serve under incompetent superiors. It tells us about war as an attempt to protect and preserve a treasured way of life. It tells us, too, about the profound gulf between civilian existence and life on the front line; about atrocities and indiscriminate slaughter; about war's peculiar mercilessness to women and children; about friendships and sympathies across the battle lines. It tells us of the love between soldiers who fight together. Most of all, it tells us about the frightful losses of war: of a soldier losing his closest companion, of a father losing his son. [Read More]
16.12.14
Michael Stipe on Douglas Coupland and 9/11
Former REM frontman reflects on the images that haunt America
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With a small, powerful set of images, Douglas Coupland actually manages to playfully (how did he pull that off?) remind us of our collective 9/11 moment – the act that unzippered the 21st century in most of the world, and changed my notion of home and safety forever. Coupland’s at first seemingly Op Art paintings are just black dots – abstract, weirdly familiar. But then you look at them on your iPhone (because you’re going to take a pic and post it … this is 2014, after all) and you have the ahhhhhhh moment when a chill runs down your spine and you realise that it’s them: the jumpers. It’s him: the boogeyman. Doug offers us the choice to either see or not see these deeply internalised images. Having that choice is what enables us to survive from day to day without going nuts.
His images also remind me that nobody really knows how to look downtown any more without feeling, in some way, conflicted. Every time I see the Freedom Tower, I think of “freedom fries” – the term coined when the US wanted to invade Iraq, and France objected. Anything attached to the word “French” in the US was then relabelled with the word “freedom”: freedom toast, freedom fries, freedom kiss, for fuck’s sake. French wine was banned, French people were spat upon, their heads in photographs replaced with heads of weasels. Forget the Statue of Liberty and where it came from. It was a disastrous response—a horrid turn on the formerly leftist act of boycotting as protest. I’ve never been more embarrassed by my country, (except when we re-elected George W Bush and Dick Cheney). I largely blame the media for this egregious abuse of power and influence.
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| Michael Stipe |
The Freedom Tower was meant to inspire patriotism and instead embodies the darker sides of nationalism. The 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s response, buoyed by the media, and our shock at having finally been direct victims of terrorism, paved the way for a whole new take on “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” There was no longer any need to explain or publicly debate militaristic power, or the police state mindset. To do so was to be the opposite of a patriot. [Read More]
25.6.14
Nat Hentoff Documentary: The Pleasures of Being Out of Step
Larry Rohter reviews David L. Lewis’s new documentary
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| Nat Hentoff |
Early in “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,” a documentary about the writer, critic and record producer Nat Hentoff that opens on Wednesday, Mr. Hentoff declares that “the Constitution and jazz are my main reasons for being.” That may seem an odd pairing to anyone unfamiliar with the man or his work, but Mr. Hentoff has nurtured those twin passions since the 1940s.
“Duke Ellington used to tell me that ‘we gave the world the freest expression ever in the arts,’ so I always thought there was a natural tie there,” Mr. Hentoff said in an interview last week at his Greenwich Village apartment. “The whole idea of the Bill of Rights and jazz,” he added, is “freedom of expression that nobody, not even the government, can squelch.”
Mr. Hentoff, who turned 89 this month, is the author of books like “Living the Bill of Rights: How to Be an Authentic American” and “The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America.” Initially, though, he built a reputation in the jazz world, interviewing artists like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and turning the writing of liner notes for albums into something approaching an art form. [Read More]
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Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: The World and the Politics of Peace
A new publication from Bloomsbury
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| Bonnie Roos, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: The World and the Politics of Peace |
Ranging over depression-era politics, the failures of the League of Nations, popular journalism and the Modernist culture exemplified by such writers as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, this is a comprehensive exploration of the historical contexts of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood.
In Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: 'The World' and the Politics of Peace, Bonnie Roos reads Barnes's novel against the backdrop of Herbert Bayard Swope's popular New York newspaper The World to demonstrate the ways in which the novel wrestles with such contemporaneous issues as the Great Depression and its political fallout, the failures of the League of Nations and the collapse of peace between the two World Wars. Roos argues that Nightwood allegorizes the role of liberal newspapers - epitomised by the sensationalism of The World - in driving a US policy that hastened the arrival of war. [Read More]
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7.4.14
Staging Beckett at the Margins
University of Chester, 11-12 September 2014
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| Samuel Beckett. Photograph: Reg Lancaster/Getty Images |
Staging Beckett is a three year collaborative research project undertaken by the universities of Chester, Reading, and the Victoria & Albert Museum which started in September 2012, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project explores Beckett’s impact on British and Irish theatre practice and cultures while also looking at how Beckett has been staged internationally, and it is compiling a database of professional productions of Beckett’s plays in the UK and Ireland.
Our second conference, to be held at the University of Chester, 11-12 September 2014, will focus on perceived notions of Beckett at the margins, on productions staged outside London and other major theatrical centres. What has the impact of Beckett’s drama been upon regional, small national, touring and marginal theatrical practices and cultures? What is at stake when staging Beckett in marginal cultures or lesser-known geographical areas? How does Beckett’s work move from a country’s capital city to its regions? Does Beckett’s work speak to national, or local, cultural contexts? How does it fit within established theatrical, cultural and economic infrastructures?
We are keen to hear from academics and practitioners interested in how Beckett has been, or might be, staged in areas beyond the major theatrical centres of London, Dublin, Paris, New York, Sydney, Tokyo, etc. Issues to consider might be, but are not limited to, the following:
- Theatre and local politics
- Cultural marginalisation
- Small-scale productions
- Amateur productions
- Planned productions that failed to be realised
- Festivals
- Beckett in Scotland
- Beckett in Wales
- Beckett on tour, nationally and internationally
- Beckett as a marginal author
- Beckett and subaltern cultures
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19.2.14
Washington University Special Collections: Travel Grant
The annual travel grant competition is now open to applicants
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| Design: Rhys Tranter |
Travel reimbursement grants of up to $1000 are available to faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and independent scholars who would like to use our collections for research. Funds may be used for transportation, food, lodging, and photocopying. Applicants must reside at least 50 miles from St. Louis.
The Department of Special Collections is a multi-faceted research institution that contains materials related to a wide variety of academic disciplines. Below is a listing of some of our major collections:
Film and Media Archive: The Film and Media Archive is committed to the preservation of documentary film and other media which chronicle America's great political and social movements, with a particular emphasis on the African-American experience. The collections of prominent filmmakers Henry Hampton (Eyes on the Prize) and William Miles (I Remember Harlem) include hundreds of hours of high quality programming and feature a comprehensive and diverse array of primary interviews, photos, archival footage, and written documents gathered and generated during the film production process. For more information, contact Nadia Ghasedi atnghasedi@wustl.edu or (314) 935-6154, or visit our on-line catalog at http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/filmandmedia/.
Manuscripts: Collections of literary papers, press archives, and magazine archives. The bulk of the collection consists of the papers of major 20th-century literary figures including James Merrill, Samuel Beckett, Howard Nemerov, Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Mona Van Duyn, and many others. For more information, contact Joel Minor at joelminor@wustl.edu or (314) 935-5413, or visit http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/manuscripts/.
Modern Graphic History Library: Dedicated to acquiring and preserving distinguished works of modern illustration and pictorial graphic culture. Focusing on artists’ working materials and sketches as well as finished artworks, the range of the collection extends from book, magazine, and advertising illustration to graphic novels, comics, poster design, pictorial information design, and animation. In addition, the collection also contains the archives of fine artists like Ernest Trova that have a relationship with popular culture and mass media. For more information, contact Skye Lacerte at slacerte@wustl.edu or (314) 935-7741, or visit http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/MGHL/.
Rare Books: Collection strengths include the history of books and printing, especially the English Arts & Crafts movement; the book arts; semeiology and the history of non-verbal communication; a collection of Little Black Sambo books and related objects; and 19th- and 20th-century British and American literature complementing the modern literary archives housed in the manuscript unit. For more information, contact Joel Minor at joelminor@wustl.edu or (314) 935-5413, or visit http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/rarebooks/.
University Archives: The Washington University Archives is comprised of more than 300 unique collections. Most collections chronicle the history of Washington University from 1853 to the present day. These diverse collections range from the writings of University co-founder William G. Eliot, to student produced publications, and professional and personal papers of faculty members such as Arthur Holly Compton. Other collections relate to 20th-century St. Louis history, with a focus on business, transportation, politics, social welfare, urban planning, and architecture. For more information, contact Sonya Rooney at srooney@wustl.edu or (314) 935-9730, or visit http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/archives/.
An application form is available at http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/tg/TravelGrantApplicationForm2014.pdf.
The Department of Special Collections
The Visual Media Research Lab, Washington University Libraries
http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/
spec@wumail.wustl.edu
(314) 935-5495
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15.1.14
Reading Brian O'Nolan's Libraries
The International Flann O'Brien Society issues a call for papers
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| Flann O'Brien at the Palace Bar in Dublin. Photograph: Getty Images. |
Call For Papers: ‘Reading Brian O’Nolan’s Libraries’
The Parish ReviewOfficial Journal of the International Flann O’Brien Society
The expanding field of Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen) scholarship has undergone a remarkable transformation in the wake of the writer’s 2011 centenary. This renewed scholarly interest has given rise to a range of Cultural Materialist, Deconstructionist, and Genetic approaches, amongst others, that have explored the representation, and indeed the limits of, knowledge within O’Nolan’s oeuvre. His writing continues to resonate within the public sphere, as is attested by the many reissues, adaptations, and collections of his works, including the recent publication of his dramatic works and short stories by Dalkey Archive Press. As Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman) and Myles na gCopaleen (Cruiskeen Lawn, An Béal Bocht), O’Nolan is celebrated, in part, for his savage parodies of academic institutions, erudite individuals, and pedagogical methods; a reputation that appears to rest uneasily alongside this increasing scholarly attention.
The John Burns Library at Boston College acquired Brian O’Nolan’s papers and personal library in February 1997, yet a complete inventory of the latter has only just been compiled and published for the first time in the most recent issue of The Parish Review (2.1, Fall 2013), guest edited by Maebh Long. (A copy of the issue, including the full inventory, is available from the International Flann O’Brien Society by contacting the general editors at viennacis.anglistik@univie.ac.at). This is an important and exciting resource for O’Nolan scholars: the library contains over four hundred books, periodicals, and newspapers in French, German, Greek, Irish, and Latin on subjects as diverse as archaeology, philosophy, politics, psychology, science, and theology. Additionally, there are literary texts from the Classical, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, and Modern periods. Due to the complexity of this collection, its potential as a resource for scholarship is only beginning to be examined.
A forthcoming issue of The Parish Review (October 2014) will take up the question of how to assess Brian O’Nolan’s personal library, particularly in light of the representation of archives, marginalia, and scholarship across his oeuvre. We will encourage dialogue between frequently polarized critical approaches, asking which O’Nolan we might find between these shelves. Is O’Nolan’s work invigorated or exhausted by questions of influence? Does the representation of scholarship within his work mark a point of potential or resistance for archival approaches? What might be gathered from the annotations and marginalia within this wide-ranging collection of texts? Or should O’Nolan scholarship be spared from such lines of inquisition? The editors invite proposals on any aspect of O’Nolan’s writing, but are especially interested in papers that explore the holdings at the Burns Library and/or investigate the wider epistemological issues that arise within his work.
Potential topics for papers include, but are by no means limited to:
- How models of influence are sustained by and/or undermined by O’Nolan’s work
- The complexities of O’Nolan’s national and intellectual contexts
- The representation of libraries and/or scholarship within modernist and post-modernist texts
- O’Nolan’s engagement with, or response to, specific literary movements
- How emerging methodologies and technologies might inform our use and understanding of O’Nolan’s library
Essays will be limited to 5,000 words and adhere to the MLA style guide. They will be submitted for peer-review to the editors by 31 May 2014. Contributors can expect to receive feedback by 31 July 2014. [Read More]
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17.12.13
Modernism and the Moral Life: A Symposium
Manchester, 30 May 2014
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The conference is designed as an opportunity for rigorous interdisciplinary exchange between the spheres of critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy, politics, literature, sociology, history, theology, the visual arts, architecture and music. We invite proposals for papers from scholars whose work looks to analyse the connections between aesthetics, ethics and politics in any and all of these fields. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- the relation between style, form and ethics in modernist cultural production
- the extent to which ‘life’ entails or excludes the ‘moral’ in modernist thought
- theory and/as ethics
- ethics and langauge
- modernism and revolution
- utopia
- gender, ethics and critique
- modernism, vision and ethics
- violence and war
- after ‘otherness’
- the limits of liberal humanist approaches to literature and ethics
- perfectionism, authenticity, sincerity, bullshit, narcissism, hedonism, elitism, virtue, duty, commitment, loss of sensitivity, happiness, loneliness, anxiety, inequality, humanism and anti-humanism in the discourses of modernism
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21.10.13
A to Z of Theory: Walter Benjamin
Andrew Robinson introduces the cultural critic via three major topics
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| Walter Benjamin |
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19.10.13
The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema
A new title from Edinburgh University Press
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| Add caption |
This study examines the representation of gesture in modernist writing, performance and cinema. Deploying a new theoretical term, ‘the speech-gesture complex’, Anthony Paraskeva identifies a relationship between speech and gesture which is neither exclusively literary nor performative and which, he argues, is fundamental to the aesthetics and politics of modernist authors. In discussions of works by Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, Paraskeva shows how this relationship is closely informed by their attention to the performed gestures of actors in theatre and cinema.
Key Features
- Provides new close readings of major and neglected work by Kafka, Joyce, James, Lewis, Nabokov and Beckett, revealing their complex relations with both theatre and cinema
- Establishes a new critical-theoretical category, and highlights an unexplored dialogue between Ibsen, Benjamin, Adorno, Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Brecht, Artaud, Lang, Meyerhold, Duse and Garbo
- Analyses central and neglected modernist texts alongside stage productions, styles of acting, film history and performance theory [Read More]
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21.8.13
Call for Papers: Alain Badiou’s Ethics
An announcement from the International Journal of Badiou Studies
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| Alain Badiou |
Badiou’s Ethics
“Rather than link the word [‘ethics’] to abstract categories, it should be referred back to particular situations. Rather than reduce it to an aspect of pity for the victims, it should become the enduring maxim of singular processes. Rather than make it merely the province of conservatism with a good conscience, it should concern the destiny of truths, in the plural”The focus of the third issue of Badiou Studies will be Badiou’s ethics. Ethics is paramount to Badiou’s political theory and his materialist dialectics, and is evident throughout his philosophy. Moreover, Badiou’s small book on ethics remains one of the most important points of entry into Badiou’s thought since it is not only widely read across disciplines but is also one of the most widely translated of all of his works.
– Alain Badiou
Badiou’s theory of ethics and his book on the subject are easily approachable. Yet, under this beguiling transparency, there lies an explosive and radical affront to popular ethics of mainstream society, media, academia and politics in the capitalist world. We welcome articles and other works that explore this complicated, confrontational and foundational aspect of Badiou’s thinking.
Prospective articles should be in the range of 5,000-8,000 words, prepared for blind review, and accompanied by an abstract of approximately 250 words. Abstracts for proposed articles should be sent by the 30th of September 2013, with full papers to be submitted by the 1st of December 2013.
We warmly invite discussions about ongoing circumstances of struggle and revolution, as well as book reviews and reports of conferences, symposia, lectures, masterclasses and other pertinent events.
Authors should follow the standard guidelines for online submission.
In line with the ethos of the Badiou Studies we will accept articles in supported world languages, although an English abstract is required for all submissions.
L’etica in Alain Badiou
Il fulcro del terzo volume di Badiou Studies sarà il problema dell’etica nel pensiero di Badiou. L’etica, infatti, rappresenta un’istanza fondamentale del pensiero politico e della dialettica materialistica dell’autore, ed è in effetti un aspetto pregnante di tutta la sua filosofia nella.Inoltre, il testo sull’etica di Badiou è una delle principali porte di accesso al pensiero del filosofo, non solo per la sua portata interdisciplinare ma anche per la sua ampia diffusione internazionale. La teoria dell’etica di Badiou appare piuttosto semplice da affrontare; tuttavia, al di sotto di questa ingannevole linearità essi rivelano, all’interno del mondo capitalistico, una radicale ed esplosiva capacità critica nei confronti dell’etica del senso comune, sia essa quella delle convenzioni sociali, dei media, delle istituzioni accademiche o della politica. Si invitano articoli ed altri lavori che indaghino questo complesso aspetto del pensiero di Badiou, il suo valore fondativo e la sua capacità di aprire discussioni e confronti con altre problematiche e posizioni teoriche.
Gli articoli proposti dovranno avere una lunghezza compresa tra le 5000 e le 8000 parole, essere preparati per il processo di blind review ed essere accompagnati da un abstract di 250 parole. Gli abstract dovranno essere inviati entro il 30 Settembre 2013, gli articoli entro il 1° Dicembre 2013.
Saranno inoltre accolti anche testi di natura differente, quali discussioni sulle proteste e rivoluzioni tutt’ora in corso nel mondo, recensioni di libri, e resoconti di conferenze, convegni, lezioni, corsi e altri eventi significativi.
Gli autori dovranno seguire la procedura standard per la stesura e l’invio degli articoli, che è possibile trovare sul sito della rivista.
In linea con l’ethos di Badiou Studies si accettano lavori nelle principali lingue della comunità accademica, anche se è necessaria la presenza di un abstract in lingua inglese.
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11.6.13
Gary Indiana on Burroughs and Naked Lunch
An extract from Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch”
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| William S. Burroughs on the set of David Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch |
Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists, social reactionaries from libertarians. Or, to use one of Burroughs’s favorite distinctions, members of the Johnson Family from the Shits. Johnsons have a live-and-let-live, mind-their-own-business mentality. Shits have an uncontrollable need to pass judgment on and be right about everything. In today’s censorious climate, police work dominates the pages of the book reviews: this writer has the wrong attitude and must be done away with.
Burroughs has always elicited a testy response from the cultural establishment. While early support for Naked Lunch from such mandarins as Mary McCarthy and John Ciardi has been matched over the years by encomiums from many of our best writers and by a substantial body of excellent academic criticism, the overall literary world’s recognition of Burroughs has been grudging more often than not. Perhaps Burroughs’s achievement represents a threat to the well-mannered, conventionally crafted, middle-class novel. It could be as simple as that. Burroughs expanded the content of fiction, giving artistic form to extremes of contemporary abjection. Naked Lunch opened a path into the world of the addict, the homosexual, the social outlaw. From this despised and largely unmentionable territory, Burroughs extracted a presiding metaphor of control. Naked Lunch deals with the control of consciousness and behavior through addiction—to sex, power, money, drugs, even to control itself. When themes of this nature, which ultimately have to do with politics, lie at the heart of a writer’s work, appreciation is often checked by the timidity of those who prefer not to think about such issues. [Read More]
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The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975
An NYRB Classics Original, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven
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| We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975 |
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]
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10.6.13
Bloomsbury Revelations: Reissue Series
A series of major works from the fields of philosophy, politics, religion and critical theory
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| Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason |
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| Karl Barth, On Religion |
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| Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory |
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| Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis |
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| Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method |
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| Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics |
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| Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus |
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| Martin Buber, I and Thou |
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| Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? |
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| Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously |
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| Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image |
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| Jacques Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics |
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| Mohandas K. Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers |
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| Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, Discourse on Free Will |
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| Roland Barthes, Language of Fashion |
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| Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Movement-Image |
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| Alain Badiou, Being and Event |
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| Erich Fromm & Karl Marx, Marx's Concept of Man including 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts' |
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| Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real |
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| Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred |
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| Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth |
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| Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil Or The Lucidity Pact |
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| Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus |
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| Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution |
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| Bernhard Crick, In Defence of Politics |
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| Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness |
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30.5.13
In Defence of Judith Butler
Darin Barney comments on recent controversies
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| Judith Butler |
On Thursday June 30, 2013, McGill University will confer an honorary doctorate on American philosopher Judith Butler. For many of us who work and study at McGill, and for many others who look to universities such as McGill for moral leadership, this will be a tremendous day, a day when -- even if for only a brief, symbolic moment -- it will seem as if the university is what we imagine it to be in our fondest hopes: a place where thought that is fearless in its devotion to justice is not only tolerated, but honoured.
Judith Butler, Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is a tower of contemporary social and political thought. Her work -- in several books over two decades--on gender, sex, sexuality, queerness, feminism, bodies, political speech and ethics has changed the way scholars all over the world think, talk and write about identity, subjectivity, power and politics. It has also has changed the lives of countless people whose bodies, genders, sexualities and desires have made them subject to violence, exclusion and oppression, by lending recognition, dignity and power to their experience, and by illuminating the contours of an ethics in which we might begin to live well with, and because of, the differences that constitute us. That McGill will recognize her with an honorary degree gives hope to many of us whose faith in the university has been challenged in recent years.
But not everyone feels this way.
Professor Butler, who is Jewish, is an outspoken critic of the state of Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people and its occupation of disputed territories, and a supporter of the international campaign to use Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions as means to pressure the Israeli government to end the occupation and extend equal rights and reparations to unlawfully displaced Palestinian citizens. This has prompted Hillel McGill and McGill Students for Israel to issue a letter of protest calling on the McGill administration to reconsider its decision to honour Professor Butler. Their position has been supported in a recent editorial by Barbara Kay in the National Post and in a post to the Open Zion blog by McGill History Professor Gil Troy. [Read More]
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7.3.13
Phenomenology's Presence Conference
University of Sussex · 13 June - 14 June 2013
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| University of Sussex |
The 4th Annual University of Sussex Graduate Conference in Phenomenology
13 June – 14 June 2013
What is presence for phenomenology? Where is phenomenology, at present? Does phenomenology privilege presence? And what of absence?
We are welcoming submissions for the 4th annual University of Sussex graduate conference in phenomenology. The themes of the last three years have progressed through phenomenology’s beginnings, ends, and methodology. This year the conference will approach the ambiguous status of phenomenology’s presence.
We invite abstracts from those working in, around, or critically engaging with phenomenology, broadly construed. We also encourage abstracts from those working outside philosophy departments. This is in keeping with the theme of the conference in that we hope to question the typical place and presence of phenomenological research.
Husserl’s famous battle cry calls thinking to return to the ‘things themselves’, that which is given, or that which presences and is present. Yet, this very challenge, the question of presence, has drawn quite different responses from those thinkers who have engaged with the inheritance of phenomenology. Now more than ever, phenomenology must contend with a scientific world view which describes the world by that which is withheld and yet underpins all that is given. Does phenomenology present an alternative? Should it? Or is the future of phenomenology more one of absence than presence?
This conference provides graduate students the opportunity to present for twenty minutes and receive questions and feedback for an additional twenty minutes each. It is a two-day conference, organized by graduate students for graduate students. It is organized as a single ‘stream’, ensuring that every speaker has the opportunity of addressing all delegates. We aim to bring together postgraduates engaging in original research on phenomenology and related branches of philosophy and to promote contemporary studies in this field.
Keynote speakers:
- Professor Béatrice Han-Pile (University of Essex, UK)
- Professor Robert Bernasconi (Pennsylvania State University, US)
- Phenomenology and temporality
- Phenomenology and truth
- The presence or absence of phenomenology in other disciplines (aesthetics, ethics, cognitive science, politics, psychoanalysis, etc)
- Phenomenology and absence (death, loss, sleep, the unconscious)
- The presence or absence of phenomenology in academic philosophy today
- The “metaphysics of presence”
- Phenomenology and ambiguity
Submissions:
Submissions should be made via the conference website (http://www.sussexphenomenology.com) no later than 7 April 2013. (Click here for submissions. Also send a copy of your (300 words) abstract to the conference mail address (info@sussexphenomeology.com) in MS Word format.Useful information:
The conference will be held at the University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom.Notifications of acceptance will be issued by 21st April.
Speakers shall be allocated 40 minutes in total: 20 minutes in which to deliver their talk and 20 minutes for Q&A. This format allows graduate students to receive ample feedback on their work.
The conference fee is £30 for each accepted speaker.
This event is open to and free for the public.
Further information concerning travel and accommodation, can be found at the conference website (http://www.sussexphenomenology.com).
For any inquiries you can connect us via conference e-mail address: info@sussexphenomenology.com
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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]
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Conor Carville, Harm's Way
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Conor Carville’s first collection of poems moves back and forth in time, and across the world, to listen to accounts of harm and the means by which it has been resisted or overcome. The poems probe how violence and abuse reverberate through history and memory, politics and psychology, be it through the voices of St Patrick’s sister Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Kandinsky, Walter Benjamin, an 18th-century mariner or a modern-day wheelie-bin.
Moving and incisive, the poems also combine memories of childhood and youth in Northern Ireland with reflections on the globalised present.
Conor Carville was born in Armagh City. Educated at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University, he is currently a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Reading. His critical work on cultural theory and Irish writing, The Ends of Ireland: Criticism, History, Subjectivity, was published by Manchester University Press in 2012. In 1997 he won the Friends Provident Irish National Poetry Prize, and in 2007 the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. He lives in London.[Read More]
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