This is Zizek’s famous documentary. The full video is here! I highly doubt that it will remain on google video for long…so watch it before it’s removed.

As the end of the semester approaches, this tool may be useful to many. Ottobib is an interesting site. After you enter the ISBN of a book, the site will generate the proper bibliography in MLA, APA or Chicago style.

Link.

An essay by Ron Santoni, “Bush as the Stranger”:

As did so many others, I’m sure, I broke out in laughter when informed that George W. had included Camus’ The Stranger on his last summer’s reading list. Was this another Karl Rove production, specifically designed to impress an academic population totally disenchanted with our misguided, deceptive, and double-speaking president?

Surely, I quickly concluded, even a distressingly conniving political strategist like Rove would recognize that such a pretense would be transparent and soon become another episode of the tragic make-believe of the Bush administration. Or maybe, I continued, George the Lesser wanted to extend a small conciliatory gesture to the French, on whom—after they dared to disagree with his murderous and counterproductive incursion into Iraq—he had poured scorn and ridicule, going so far as to encourage the imposition of new freedom-loving labels on some of France’s gustatory delights (”freedom fries,” anyone?). So perhaps the inclusion of a work by Camus was intended as a “salute” to France by way of honoring one of its Noble laureates in literature? Noblesse oblige!

Here is the rest

(And the video from The Daily Show on the President and Camus)

“Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Contemporary Women’s Writing”

We invite proposals for papers for a book-length project related to topics on women’s writing produced since the late 60s/early 70s. These works may fall into the categories of modernist or postmodernist avant-garde writing by women; we are primarily interested in texts (narrative, lyric, dramatic, trans-genre) that push the boundaries of language and thought and that are written from an international or transnational perspective. Engagement with issues of language, subjectivity, and gender is necessarily complex, perhaps even more so when effected under difficult political, economic, social circumstances. Questions that might be addressed include: How is gendered experience expressed through non-conventional texts and how might diverse literary strategies express or enact cultural resistance? What are the challenges of linguistic, formal, aesthetic innovation in terms of ‘accessibility’ and charges of elitism? How does contemporary women’s writing address current conceptualizations of the body (citizen) in relation to nation or state?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: authoritarianism, commodification, defiance and noncompliance, experimentation, phenomenology, im/permeability of borders and boundaries - enclosing/ejecting, absorbing/repelling margins/borders/frontiers/peripheries/hinterlands, gender expectations, genre conventions, melancholia, memory, nostalgia, palimpsests, performance, power/resistance, systematic rape and genocide, transnationalism, trauma and terror, women and law, women and war, women in transitional economies, immunities (political immunity but also disease), women’s rights/human rights, writing the body

Please send abstracts of essays (300 words) along with a current c.v. to Stephenie Young young1s@cmich.edu or Adele Parker at Adele_Parker@brown.edu . The Deadline is September 15th, 2007

A radio interview with Maurice Merleau-Ponty (in French) from 1959. The interview lasts 23 minutes.

A new book by Dorothea Olkowski: The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy

From the publisher:

The Universal proposes a radically new philosophical system that moves from ontology to ethics. Drawing on the work of De Beauvoir, Sartre, and Le Doeuff, among others, and addressing a range of topics from the Asian sex trade to late capitalism, quantum gravity, and Merleau-Ponty’s views on cinema, Dorothea Olkowski stretches the mathematical, political, epistemological, and aesthetic limits of continental philosophy and introduces a new perspective on political structures.

Straddling a course between formalism and conventionalism, Olkowski develops the concept of an ontological unconscious that arises from our “sensible” relation to the world-the information we absorb and emit that affects our encounters with the environment and others. In this “realm of the senses,” or the field of vulnerability defined by our experience with pleasure and pain, Olkowski is able to rethink the space-time relations put forth by Irigaray’s notion of the “interval,” Bergson’s “recollection,” Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the “flesh,” and Deleuze’s “plane of immanence.”

This aesthetic sense is shared by all humankind and nonhuman entities in the organic and inorganic world. The sensible universal can be applied to categories of pure and practical reason; experiential binaries of male-female and subject-object; and issues of autonomy, moral laws, and the regulation of perception.

About the Author: Dorothea Olkowski is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her publications include Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation and, with Constantin Boundas, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy. She has also edited books on Merleau-Ponty and on French feminism.

Simply Audiobooks has a selection of free audio-books for download. Of possible interest: Kafka's Metamorphosis.

 Link

The Association for Theatre in Higher Education's Religion and Theatre Focus Group invites submissions to its online peer-reviewed  journal, The Journal of Religion and Theatre.  We welcome descriptive  and analytical articles examining the spirituality of world cultures  in all disciplines of the theatre, performance studies in sacred  rituals of all cultures, themes of transcendence in text, on stage,  in theatre history, the analysis of dramatic literature, and other  topics relating to the relationship between religion and theatre. The journal aims to facilitate the exchange of knowledge throughout  the theatrical community concerning the relationship between theatre  and religion and as an academic research resource for the benefit of  all interested scholars and artists.  The journal is indexed in MLA  International Bibliography.  The address of the journal is: http://www.rtjournal.org

Submission Guidelines:

– Submit your article in Microsoft Word format via the internet

– Include a separate title page with the title of the article, your name, address, e-mail address, and phone number, with a 70 to 100 word abstract and a 25 to 50 word biography

– Do not type your name on any page of the article

– MLA style endnotes — Appendix A.1. (Do not use parenthetical references in the body of the paper/ list of works cited.)

– E-Mail the article and title page via an attachment in Microsoft Word to Debra Bruch: dlbruch -at- mtu.edu. (Please replace the -at- with @.)

DEADLINE:  May 1, 2007
 

A review of Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation

Strauss and Levinas? What do these well known, yet hitherto unrelated thinkers have in common to warrant a monograph dedicated to their juxtaposition? Both are mid-20th century Jewish thinkers whose popularity has increased in recent years; both are somehow associated with the phenomenological movement represented by Husserl and Heidegger; both of them sided with Heidegger rather than Cassirer at Davos, although only one of them repented having done so. What drives this study is none of these trivial, or not so trivial, commonalities (and differences). Rather, what ties them together is the author's interest in establishing a path toward a novel constructive Jewish theology of Jewish revelation as law, or Jewish law as revelation.

Link 

TOC: Special Issue on Solidarity