1. Colloquium: Dr Mick Bowles (Greenwich) — ‘Understanding: Kant, Spinoza, Deleuze’

Thurs 7th June 2007 — Greenwich University
Room KW003, King William Court, Old Royal Naval College
7-9pm Entrance is free but please e-mail volcaniclines@hotmail.com if you plan to attend.

For directions to the venue see www.deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com

2. ‘The Strange Encounter of Kant and Deleuze’ Conference

Saturday July 7th, Greenwich University, Maritime Campus, Old Royal Naval College, London: 10am - 5pm

This conference aims to explore and dramatise the conceptual relations that exist between Gilles Deleuze and Immanuel Kant. Deleuze offers us a ‘transcendental empiricism’ in direct contrast to Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’ and the combination of their common ground and their stark oppositions makes this a particularly fertile realm of thought. There has been a growing recognition of the importance of the connections between
Deleuze and Kant and this conference aims for the first time to place these relations centre stage. We are strongly encouraging both Deleuzian and Kantian scholars to come together in a constructive encounter that has critical importance for the wider philosophical community.

Keynote Session

Dr Paul Davies (Sussex University) and Dr Daniel W. Smith (Purdue University)

Registration: There is no registration fee for the conference. To register simply e-mail volcaniclines@hotmail.com in order to give us an idea of the numbers.

Volcanic Lines Deleuzian Research Group - an initiative of the Greenwich University Philosophy Department.

Thanks to Edward Willatt for the announcements

Here is the link.

Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 18, No. 3, 313-334 (2006)

Rehearsals of The Sovereign : States of Exception and Threat Governmentality
Ben Chappell — Bridgewater College, Virginia, USA

The attacks of 9/11 have been generally viewed as a traumatic, historical rupture, ushering in the ‘war on terror’ as well as a warfare/security state in the US. Yet close attention to police practices on urban streets suggests that the actions of the state in this context are not without precedent. This article links apparently divergent situations in order to track the persistence of a rationality of government, which I call ‘threat governmentality’. Concerned with security and the management of risk, and fixating on racialized bodies, threat governmentality comprises repressive violence on the part of police and civilians, and public discourse after the fact of such violence, in which the relative criminality of the victims—and hence the relative value of their lives—is debated. Rather than a post–9/11 invention, I argue that this rationality represents what Agamben called the ‘nomos of the political space’ in which we live.

Link

Russ Ford reviews Len Lawler’s Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question

This is not merely a good book, it is a necessary one, for the following reasons. First, it provides a detailed and persuasive account of the connection between the French philosophy of the 1960s and the phenomenological tradition that begins with Husserl and continues in the work of Merleau-Ponty. Second, in making this connection clear Lawlor is able to argue that rather than constituting a confusion or abandonment of the philosophical tradition, the philosophies of Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault, when read against the backdrop of Merleau-Ponty, constitute new trajectories for what appears as the decisive problem of twentieth-century philosophy: the question of the transcendental reduction. Third, the identification of the reduction as a question fosters a recognition of the necessity of the change in style that so strongly characterizes postwar French philosophy. This is a change demanded by the transformation of the question of a proper description of the phenomenological reduction into a questioning of the very philosophical program that generates such a question. Thus, Lawlor’s book argues pointedly for the necessity of an engagement with the work of the French philosophers of the sixties insofar as they constitute not an exception to but a furthering of the philosophical project of classical phenomenology.

The crux of Lawlor’s argument is the centrality of the phenomenological reduction for the direction of philosophical inquiry in the twentieth century. As formulated by Husserl in Ideas I, the phenomenological reduction, or epoche, is a methodological step that exposes transcendental subjectivity in the midst of the immanent world that it grounds. Heidegger’s ontology, insofar as it can be read as a development and enrichment of Husserl’s phenomenology, implicitly challenges the latter insofar as it presents the interrelationship of subjectivity and the world as a question. The subtitle of Lawlor’s book indicates the importance that Heidegger’s questioning ontology has for the French philosophers of the sixties, as well as the peculiar “refraction” that occurs through the work of Eugen Fink and Merleau-Ponty. Fink’s 1939 essay on Husserl—a pivotal essay for Lawlor, both in this book and in his Derrida and Husserl—contests the purity of the transcendental subjectivity exposed by the reduction and simultaneously emphasizes the impossibility of merely asserting an unproblematic correspondence between this subjectivity and the world (and even its worldly self, as Lawlor emphasizes in his discussion of the conception of the unconscious and its impact on classical phenomenology in the second of the essays in his book, “The Chiasm and the Fold”). Along with the work of Heidegger and Fink, Merleau-Ponty’s later ontological work is read by Lawlor as the persistence of the phenomenological breakthrough that followed the formulation of the reduction as the pervading question of twentieth-century philosophy. “The Being of the Question” that provides the subtitle for Lawlor’s book is the reduction conceived as a problematic dissimilarity between pure subjectivity and the world, and it is this dissimilarity, “figured” in Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, that provides what Lawlor calls the “point of diffraction” for the philosophies of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault.

The rest

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This is an essay by Foucault, published in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume II, where he directly addresses Derrida’s critique of Descartes.

Link to “My Body, This Paper, This Fire”.

PS: John Protevi rightly points out that Foucault’s “essay addresses D’s reading (in “Cogito and the History of Madness”) of F’s reading of Desartes (in History of Madness)” - a more apt description.

A new entry from Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Habermas:

Jürgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology. Moreover, he has figured prominently in Germany as a public intellectual, commenting on controversial issues of the day in German newspapers such as Die Zeit.

However, if one looks back over his corpus of work, one can discern two broad lines of enduring interest, one having to do with the political domain, the other with issues of rationality, communication, and knowledge. (In what follows, unnamed citations refer to works by Habermas; quotations are from the English editions, where available.)

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TOC

Before the abyss: Agamben on Heidegger and the living — Tracy Colony

The exemplarities of artworks: Heidegger, Shoes, and Pixar — Julie Kuhlken

Public Space — James Mensch

Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw — Deborah Cook

Nietzsche and l’élan technique: Technics, life, and the production of time — Rafael Winkler

A review of Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations

Cosmopolitanism, notes Seyla Benhabib, is a frequently invoked concept in modern political philosophy; it is a shame, therefore, that we so rarely define this term with the specificity it demands. In this volume, derived from her Tanner Lectures of 2004, Benhabib gives a specific gloss on one particular variant of cosmopolitanism, identifying and defending a specifically political version of cosmopolitan politics. It is an admirable vision, although not one without significant difficulties — as discussed by her commentators, whose contributions are included here.

Benhabib begins with a tension within the world of liberal democratic cosmopolitanism — a tension she believes can be mediated, but never completely overcome. We are committed, on the one hand, to cosmopolitan norms of human rights, which seek to articulate a concept of legal rights that are universal and unconditional. We are also, however, committed to a bounded notion of democracy, in which democratic authority is derived from the self-imposed nature of legal norms. This tension, argues Benhabib, is of crucial importance for our political future; the tension between the universal and the particular, the cosmopolitan and the local, requires more serious analysis the more unified and integrated our shared global network of institutions becomes.

The rest of the review