H/T: Alison Nicole Crane Reiheld

I am organising a section “Political Theology as Political Theory” for the Fourth General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), September 6-8, 2007, at the University of Pisa/Italy. http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/

For this section I invite paper proposals.

Please forward this call to colleagues, students and others you may be aware of who are working on aspects of “political theology” (including, but not limited to Carl Schmitt, J.B. Metz, Latin American/African/Asian liberation theology, radical Islam, Zizek/Agamben/Badiou, etc.) and circulate it on appropriate mailing lists.

Deadline for proposals for the conference is 1 March. Please send your proposals to me well before that date: e.kofmel@sussex.ac.uk

I will accept papers that are presented in person as well as tabled papers if you can’t make it to the conference.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Erich Kofmel
Managing Director
Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS)
www.scis-calibrate.org
e.kofmel@scis-calibrate.org

SCIS
39 Tenant Lain
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton
BN1 9PR
England

A review of Augustine (Blackwell Great Minds)

This is the second book (appearing in the same year as Allen Wood's Kant) in the Blackwell Great Minds series, which has two advertised goals: to give readers a strong sense of the fundamental views of the great western philosophers, and to capture the relevance of these philosophers to the way we think and live today. Clearly, these are both laudable goals, as is Matthews' own more particular goal of contributing to a wider recognition of Augustine's importance as a philosopher (6).

The rest of the review 

Chris S as well as Roy Rivenburg of LA Times brought this to my attention:

A philosophical view of sex
Deconstructionist Jacques Derrida reportedly had tried to use his coveted archives as leverage to derail a sexual harassment case against a professor at UC Irvine.
By Roy Rivenburg, Times Staff Writer
February 25, 2007

When a vampire expert allegedly seduced a tipsy UC Irvine student four years ago, he inadvertently set off a chain of events that now jeopardizes the school’s control of a dead philosopher’s prized archives.

The story came to light after UCI announced last week that it would drop a lawsuit against the widow and sons of philosopher Jacques Derrida, the acclaimed founder of deconstruction, an influential but bewildering theory that questions the concept of absolute truth.

In 1990, Derrida signed an agreement to donate his scholarly papers to UCI, where he taught part time. But after his death in 2004, Derrida’s heirs began questioning the pact. The university tried to negotiate, then sued three months ago, a maneuver that outraged professors in California and beyond.

Buried in the news that UCI would resume negotiations with Derrida’s family was a mysterious footnote: The feud over his archives was sparked by a letter Derrida sent to UCI shortly before his death.

In it, the pipe-puffing Frenchman threatened to pull the plug on the archives because he was furious about “some things the university was doing,” said Peggy Kamuf, a USC professor and Derrida friend.

More here (or here)

As you may have noticed, I have not been very good at updating this site over the past few days. Since I created it, I tried to make sure that every single day something interesting gets posted. This past week has been a rather remarkable one in my personal life, so much so that I could not give this site its due attention. I should be getting back on track shortly. Thank you for your patience, and for visiting the site.

Part one (in French)

Part Two (in French)

THE THINKABILITY OF DESPAIR: a special issue of Postmodern Culture

Abstracts for articles by 3/1/07; accepted articles due in full by 12/15/07 for publication in 2008. Please email abstracts to Rei Terada, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697: terada@uci.edu, or to pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu.

If trauma theory is an account of how things come to be unthinkable, how should we conceive positively the possibility and uses of thinking about those things that we least want to think about? What happens when what might well have been traumatic is thought, and when things that we might assume are “unthinkable” are considered? How might political, psychological, and/or philosophical thought build itself constructively around the experience and acknowledgment of despair?

Adorno, for example, struggles with this question in Negative Dialectics: he both comments on the “unthinkability of despair” for Kant and leaves room for its thinkability in general. Kantian reason, Adorno suggests, “hope[s] against reason” to correct the wrong of death (385); by this logic, Kant fails fully to tolerate his own knowledge. Writing on his own account, Adorno opines that despair is thinkable in a self-differential or dialectical form: “grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept of different colors” (377).

Articles may consider topics from a theoretical and/or cultural studies perspective that emphasizes the impact of their arguments on postmodern culture; they may explore writers such as Adorno, Blanchot, Klein, Nietzsche, and Weil; unblinking confrontations with violence, death, or genocide; the conditions of possibility of thinkability; giving up; “nihilism”; the philosophical genealogy of despair; dynamics of hope and despair in contemporary politics; psychoanalytic theories of working through, and their intersection with political theory; hegemony and totalitarianism; visual artists and filmm/07akers (L. Freud, Warhol).

Postmodern Culture is a peer-reviewed electronic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture.

We can begin from the singularity of Alain Badiou’s contention in the current theoretical debates, and his pamphleteering radicality: his critique of contemporary nihilism, philosophical but also more generally cultural, and his critique of the morals associated with identity politics. From the startling effect this is having on Anglo-Saxon theory in particular – insofar as much of it is based on those twin supports: the deconstructionist lineage of Continental phenomenology, and the native development of cultural studies. For there is much to be gained from what his forceful readings identify as the points of conceptual concretion in these discourses, the complacencies of doxa where the poststructuralist and postmodernist incisiveness has turned to, in his own words, “non-thought”. There is a tonic in the critical insights that they produce about the relativist abdication of philosophy, as he sees it, and its compensatory reliance on aestheticized fetishes. My aim is therefore to see which questions his intervention raises, and which he further enables us to raise.

The rest (pdf)

I have been quite busy and have not had time to post much over the past few days. Chris S keeps up the good work and has this new tip:

Correction: French philosopher story
IRVINE, Calif. - In a Feb. 14 story about a lawsuit involving the writings of French philosopher Jacque Derrida, The Associated Press reported erroneously on the status of the case. The University of California, Irvine, is negotiating with the family and has not dropped the suit, according to Christine Byrd, a spokeswoman for the university. She intends to release more details if an agreement is reached.

Source

Originally published in: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York: Institute of Social Research, 1941, IX, 17-48.

“A clear judgment concerning the relation of serious music to popular music can be arrived at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization.” This thesis is the starting point of one of Adorno’s first essays on popular music, written after he fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and joined his colleagues of the Frankfurter Schule at the Princeton Radio Research Project, led by Paul Lazersfield. Below you’ll find the first part of this lengthy essay on the musical material. The next parts treat the subjects of the presentation and the impact on the listener.

Click here