Continental Philosophy

Slavoj Zizek
Beckett with Lacan – part 1
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=78

The achievement of Joyce simultaneously signals his limit, the limit which pushed Beckett to break with him. If there ever was a kenotic writer, the writer of the utter self-emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference, it is Beckett. We touch the Lacanian Real when we subtract from a symbolic field all the wealth of its differences, reducing it to a minimum of antagonism.

Beckett with Lacan – part 2
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=102

The basic constellation is thus the dialogue between the subject and the big Other, where the couple is reduced to its barest minimum: the Other is a silent impotent witness which fails in its effort to serve as the medium of the Truth of what is said, and the speaking subject itself is deprived of its dignified status of “person” and reduced to a partial object. And, consequently, since meaning is generated only by means of the detour of the speaker’s word through a consistent big Other, the speech itself ultimately functions at a pre-semantic level, as a series of explosions of libidinal intensities.

Alain Badiou
Figures of Subjective Destiny: Samuel Beckett
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=21

Why there is a close relationship between poetry and philosophy, or more generally between literature and philosophy? It’s because philosophy finds in literature some examples of completely new forms of the destiny of the human subject. And precisely new forms of the concrete becoming of the human subject when this subject is confronted to its proper truth.

On Communism – Libération 01/26.08
http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=125

My position, reinforced by a recent trip to Palestine, is that today it is absolutely imperative to separate politics from religion, just like it should be separated, for example, from racial or identity questions. Religions can and must coexist in the same country, but only if politics and the State are separate.

Link

A review by Brian Leiter:

Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism (hereafter NPS) is a serious, learned, and novel contribution to the literature on Nietzsche’s relevance to political theory. Against the two dominant strands in the secondary literature — one attributing to Nietzsche a kind of flat-footed commitment to aristocratic forms of social ordering, the other denying that Nietzsche has any political philosophy at all — Shaw stakes out a new and surprising position: namely, that Nietzsche was very much concerned with the familiar question of the moral or normative legitimacy of state power, but was skeptical that with the demise of religion, it would be possible to achieve a practically effective normative consensus about such legitimacy that was untainted by the exercise of state power itself. Although, as I will argue below, there are reasons to be quite skeptical that Nietzsche was interested in anything like these questions, Shaw has laid down a clear and invigorating challenge to existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s politics, and it is one worth meeting.

Shaw’s project is animated by interest in the following issue about political authority in the modern era: namely, how can states in practice have legitimate normative or moral authority when religion is no longer available to secure a consensus on the ‘correct’ or ‘true’ normative criteria? The problem is compounded by the fact that states need to be perceived as legitimate, and thus will use their considerable powers to produce a perception of legitimacy. Against the power of the state to produce the appearance of legitimacy, the rational insight of philosophers into the genuine moral foundations of legitimacy is no match. That, I take it, is the structure of the problem that animates Shaw’s reading of Nietzsche. But is Nietzsche really worried about these issues?

Continue reading the review

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is pleased to announce its program for the 2009 Summer School.
Location: 1888 Building, University of Melbourne.
Enrol at http://www.mscp.org.au

Week 1 January 26 – 30
11am – 1pm: Foucault and Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life (Ashley Woodward)
2pm – 4pm: History of Philosophy IV: Medieval Philosophy, Part 2 (Late Medieval Era) (Ian Weeks)

Week 2 February 2 – 6
11am – 1pm: Environmental Political Theory from Spinoza to Negri (Kate Noble)
2pm – 4pm: History of Philosophy V: Rationalism (Jon Roffe)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

Week 3 February 9 – 13
11am – 1pm: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction (James Williams)
2pm – 4pm: Heidegger’s Being and Time (James Garrett)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

Week 4 February 16 – 20
11am – 1pm: On Slavoj Zizek’s Political Theory, or: Would You Like A Politics With That? (Matthew Sharpe)
2pm – 4pm: Dialectics of Enlightenment (Bryan Cooke)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

For further information and enrollment please visit our website: http://www.mscp.org.au

Link

‘You cannot make a living just being a theoretician’: An Interview with Jean-Michel Rabaté
With Jeroen Lauwers & Thomas Van Parys

Michel Foucault, Philosopher? A Note on Genealogy and Archaeology
Rudi Visker

Beyond Resistance: a response to Žižek’s critique of Foucault’s subject of freedom
Aurelia Armstrong

Alain Badiou: Problematics and the Different Senses of Being in Being and Event
Sean Bowden

Eugen Fink and the Question of the World
Stuart Elden

Between Rupture and Repetition: Intervention and Evental Recurrence in the Thought of Alain Badiou
Hollis Phelps

Resistances: Technologies and Relationalities

The 19th Annual Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture (PIC) Conference

April 17-18, 2009

Binghamton University – Binghamton, NY

This conference seeks to explore the interconnectedness of technology, relationality and practices of resistance. We conceptualize technology broadly, as referring to systems, methods of organization, visual/imaging techniques, and political strategies and tactics, as well as to specific material objects and systems of objects – tools, commodities, bodies. We seek papers which explore the polyvalent deployments of technologies in both reproducing extant systems of power relations and their attendant practices of subjectification, as well as their role in fashioning resistant subjects, practices, and communities. We understand these processes and poïetic productions as thoroughly embedded, in terms of both historical contingency and geopolitical location.

Relationality is the cloth of subjectification processes. It is real and imagined, and inextricably linked to the production of subjects and technologies in both oppressive and resistant logics across different geopolitical locales. This conference also aims at igniting discussion and debate on the contrasting logics of resistance as they are enacted from disparate geopolitical positionalities.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary emphasis of Binghamton University’s Program in Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture, we seek work that flourishes in the conjunction of multiple frames of epistemological inquiry, from fields including, but not limited to: postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, queer and gender studies, ethnic studies, media and visual culture studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, critical theory, continental philosophy, and historiography. Workers/writers/thinkers of all different disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and non-disciplinary stripes welcome, whether academically affiliated or not. Submissions may be textual, performative, visual.

Submission Guidelines

Submission deadline: January 31, 2009.

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract along with a cover letter that includes your name, academic affiliation, contact numbers, complete mailing address, and e-mail address, as well as information regarding any technological equipment you may need for your presentation. Papers will be considered for a 20 minute presentation, followed by discussion, so please limit the length of paper to 10-12 pages.

Email address for inquiries and electronic submission of abstracts: pic.conference.2009@gmail.com

New entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Jodi Dean has been summarizing and reading Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics.

Link to her posts

Heidegger is not interested in works of art as expressions of the vision of a creator, nor is he interested in them as the source of aesthetic experiences in a viewer. He holds that “Modern subjectivism … immediately misinterprets creation, taking it as the self-sovereign subject’s performance of genius” and he also insists that “aesthetic experience is the element in which art dies.” Rather, for Heidegger, an artwork is a thing that, when it works, performs at least one of three ontological functions. It either manifests, articulates or reconfigures the style of a culture from within the world of that culture. It follows that, for Heidegger, most of what hangs in museums, what is admired as great works of architecture, and what is published by poets, were never works of art, a few were once artworks but are no longer working, and none are working now. To understand this counter-intuitive account of art, we have to begin by reviewing what Heidegger means by world and being. . . .

Download the paper here: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/189_f08/pdf/Heidegger%20OWA%20sept13_08.pdf.

Via Philosophy’s Other

TOC

Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception — Bonnie Honig

Competition in the Best of Cities: Agonism and Aristotle’s Politics — Steven C. Skultety

Publius and Political Imagination — Jason Frank

The Concept of Private Property and the Limits of the Environmental Imagination — John M. Meyer

Schumpeter’s Leadership Democracy — Gerry Mackie

Why Value Pluralism Does Not Support the State’s Enforcement of Liberal Autonomy: A Response to Crowder — David Thunder

Thunder versus Enlightenment: A response to Thunder — George Crowde

David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality

Reviewed by Peter Poellner, University of Warwick

The last decade has seen a flurry of publications on Nietzsche’s ethics and specifically on his critique of “morality” put forward in On the Genealogy of Morality. In addition to a host of journal articles and essay collections, there have been book-length studies of the subject by, among others, Aaron Ridley (Nietzsche’s Conscience, 1998), Simon May (Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on “Morality”, 1999), Brian Leiter (Nietzsche on Morality, 2002), and Chris Janaway (Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 2007). David Owen’s book is the latest addition to this growing literature. It is plausible to think that this surge of interest reflects a growing acknowledgement among philosophers in the English-speaking world that Nietzsche’s ideas on ethics and morality are of continuing relevance for contemporary thought. But while there has been increasing willingness to engage with Nietzsche among philosophers trained in the analytic tradition, there continues to be fierce disagreement on the merits and precise significance of his contribution, and indeed on its content. Much effort has been expended in recent years on clarifying or reconstructing Nietzsche’s challenge, and on excavating the argumentative structures beneath his polemics, while also making sense of the rhetorical idiosyncrasies of his distinctive philosophical style. As a result, we now have a much clearer and more detailed picture of the various interpretive options and are in a correspondingly better position than a few decades ago to assess the merits of the philosophical positions to which Nietzsche may plausibly be thought to be committed.

Owen’s valuable book offers a sustained, clear, crisply argued reconstruction of Nietzsche’s central arguments in On the Genealogy of Morality as well as some thoughtful explanatory ideas on Nietzsche’s incendiary style in this text, situating both in the context of the development of his thought on morality following his break with his early ethics of heroic love and self-sacrifice (inspired partly by Schopenhauer and Wagner) in Human, All-Too-Human. In Owen’s account of this development, Nietzsche’s point of departure since Daybreak is the “death of God”, the loss of belief in the Christian God among the cultured classes dramatized as the urbane atheism of the people in the marketplace in §125 of The Gay Science. The people in the marketplace consider the loss of authority of the metaphysical beliefs associated with Christianity to be a process that need have no implications for their practical orientation in life, an orientation that remains structured by a certain conception of morality continuous with “Christian” morality. For Nietzsche, by contrast, morality thus understood is rationally dependent on the truth of those now widely abandoned metaphysical beliefs: “When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality” (TI, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man”, §5). Nietzsche’s task, as he conceives of it from The Gay Science onwards, is therefore threefold: he needs to provide a broadly naturalistic explanation of the hold that “morality” continues to have — irrationally, by his lights — even on unbelievers; he needs to come up with an adequate evaluative framework permitting him to determine the “value of morality” as a self-standing practice deprived of its metaphysical trappings; and he needs to tell us something about the criteria for assessing evaluative commitments. The last requirement is particularly challenging for him as he is committed to “perspectivism”, a view which Owen interprets as the epistemological claim that justification is necessarily relative to practical perspectives constituted by specific, contingent interests and purposes — and that the idea of a practical justification valid for all rational beings merely qua rational beings is incoherent.

Rest of the review

We are pleased to announce the 2nd Annual LSU Philosophy Conference:
Louisiana State University

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

April 18-19th, 2009

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Todd May, Clemson University

This conference is open to all undergraduates and graduates. However, we will be looking for graduate-level work and only the best papers will be selected for presentation. This conference is open to any topic, but creativity will be rewarded.

Please submit papers intended for 30 minutes of presentation/questions (do not exceed 15 pages). Send papers as an attachment in Word, but remove your name to facilitate blind review. Include name, paper title, university affiliation, level of education and contact information (phone and email) in your email. Please email papers to ajoh147@lsu.edu by February, 20th.

This conference was funded by PSIF and the LSU Philosophy Department. It is organized by the graduate students in the Philosophy Department, at LSU.
Please contact the Graduate Advisory Committee with any questions: Andrew Johnson ajoh147@lsu.edu; Clayton Alsup calsup1@lsu.edu; Bill Schulz wshul1@lsu.edu.

Zizek responds to The New Republic review (mentioned previously here).

Link

Some important Lacan texts

Delving into the nuances and gradations of conceptual constructions while also recalling the far horizons of philosophical reflections — from Aristotle to Derrida and friends — Derrida on Time moves between intricate detailed readings and expansive historical overview. The text invokes the mutual readings that Hodge also identifies as the friendship of ‘Blanchot, Levinas, [and] Derrida and their continuing points of reference: Aristotle, Augustine, Nietzsche; Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger’ (92) not to mention Kant, Freud, Nancy, Marion, among many others. While explicating the transformations articulated across and between these various textual engagements, Hodge traces these theorists’ reflections on temporality and time. This book demands an oscillating reading that returns back and forth between chapters, paragraphs, concepts, and phrases creating a disrupted and repeated engagement. There is a clearly discernable trajectory but there is also a looping return such that later insights recall, re-signify and rearticulate earlier observations. This returning is not a restating but a retrospective materializing of that which had already emerged: what the reader might have overlooked earlier attains a new significance in the context of later explications. This encourages or demands a non-linear reading so that later sections invite, even require, a revisiting of the earlier.

Rest of the review

Abstract

This paper makes the case that discourse analytic approaches in social psychology are not adequate to the task of apprehending racism in its bodily, affective and pre-symbolic dimensions. We are hence faced with a dilemma: if discursive psychology is inadequate when it comes to theorizing pre-discursive forms of racism, then any attempts to develop an anti-racist strategy from such a basis will presumably exhibit the same limitations. Suggesting a rapprochement of discursive and psychoanalytic modes of analysis, I argue that Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides a means of understanding racism as both historically/socially constructed and as existing at powerfully embodied, visceral and subliminal dimensions of subjectivity. Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides us with an account of a pre-discursive (that is, a bodily, affective, pre-symbolic) racism, a form of racism that comes before words, and that is routed through the logics of the body and its anxieties of distinction, separation and survival. This theory enables us, moreover, to join together the expulsive reactions of a racism of the body to both the personal racism of the ego and the broader discursive racisms of the prevailing social order. Moreover, it directs our attention to the fact that discourses of racism are always locked into a relationship with pre-discursive processes which condition and augment every discursive action, which escape the codifications of discourse and which drive the urgency of its attempts at containment.

Hook, Derek (2006) ‘Pre-discursive’ racism. Journal of community & applied social psychology, 16 (3). pp. 207-232

Link

FROM RICOEUR TO ACTION: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

UK-Ireland Society for Ricoeur Studies Conference — June 23-24, 2009

This conference will be held at the University of Kent (Canterbury, UK).

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Dr. Pamela S. Anderson (Philosophy, Oxford University)

Prof. George H. Taylor (School of Law, University of Pittsburgh)

Prof. Olivier Abel (Faculté libre de théologie protestante de Paris)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Friday, April 24, 2009

There is an arrangement with Continuum to review a formal proposal for publication of a selection of the conference papers as an edited volume on Ricoeur, for their series in Continental Philosophy.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS: Papers addressing all aspects of Ricoeur’s work in relation to contemporary social, political, economic and environmental crises are welcome. Areas of particular interest include but are not limited to:

Social Praxis
Political Theory and Identity
Political Economy
Theology, Religion and Society
Hermeneutics and Law
Ethics and Nature
Literary Theory and Self-Understanding

A partial list of Ricoeur’s work and themes:

Lectures on Ideology and Utopia
The Just
The Course of Recognition
Oneself as Another
Thinking Biblically
The Symbolism of Evil
Figuring the Sacred
Memory, History, Forgetting
History and Truth
Fallible Man
L’Homme Capable

For purposes of consideration, please submit an electronic abstract only (of roughly 300-500 words) and attach a separate title page that includes the paper’s title, the author’s name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email address. Notification of acceptance will be given via email. Final papers should not exceed a length of 3000 words (or twenty minutes when read aloud). Abstracts and queries should be sent to: Dr. Todd Mei (University of Kent) at T.Mei@kent.ac.uk.

Abstract

Chantal Mouffe’s political philosophy has been influential in a variety of domains, including sociology, cultural studies, media studies, law, art, literary criticism, and journalism studies. By combining Gramsci’s focus on hegemony with post-structuralist theory she has developed – in collaboration with Ernesto Laclau – a sophisticated perspective on the political that intersects with all aspects of society, including the role and functioning of journalism. Her emphasis on the productive role of hegemony and conflict in society combined with her plea for a radical pluralist democracy, open a wide range of new perspectives for journalism studies. We present an overview of Mouffe’s work set against a recent interview with her, in which we discuss, among other things, the potential diversity of contingent journalistic identities, ranging between being complicit with hegemonic socio-political projects, and safe-guarding or even deepening democratic institutions, including itself.

Link

From this issue of the New Yorker.

14th Annual Philosophy Conference at Villanova University

“New French Thought”

Keynote Speaker: Bernard Stiegler

April 3-4, 2009

We encourage submissions that consider any theme in contemporary French philosophy, which might engage figures including (but not limited to): Badiou, Rancière, Descombes, Meillassoux, Compagnon, Laruelle, Kristeva, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Cixous, Stiegler, Deleuze, Marion, Balibar, Aron, Laplanche, Castoriadis, Latour, Ferry, Ricœur, Derrida, Virilio, Lefort, Henry, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Gauchet, Manent, Renaut, Baudrillard, Lazarus, Macherey, Rabaté, Gaillard, Brisson, Romano, Malabou, Lyotard, Milner, Serres, and others.

Submission Guidelines

We encourage submissions from faculty and graduate students of abstracts (at least 300 words) and/or papers (3,000 to 5,000 words).

Please submit in blind review format to ryan.feigenbaum@villanova.edu by February 1, 2009.