Utopias Today!, a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought, forthcoming in July 2010
Guest-edited by Patricia Vieira and Michael Marder

“Utopia” has always been a codeword for the transcendence of the actual in an effort to move beyond the confines of ‘what is’. Whether religious, political, or philosophical, utopias tend to follow two general paths. One stand of utopian thinking emphasizes what could be called a “trans-historical transcendence”, whereby an ideal can never be concretized in the temporality of human existence and must remain in the realm of what is not and could not be. As opposed to this, one might envision “intra-historical transcendence”, a utopian movement beyond history within historical becoming, that implies the opening up of the possible within the actual. In the context of the latter configuration, transcendence arises as a fold in immanence itself, rupturing the continuum that extends from potentiality to its realization.

Utopias Today! invites a multi-disciplinary reflection on the relevance (if not the urgency) of the term “utopia” in the contemporary theoretical discourse and the present historical situation. Further, we wish to stimulate a discussion on the possibility of “intra-historical transcendence” shaping a transformative political theory and praxis.
We encourage the submission of papers on topics such as: transcendence and escapism; utopia and the end of history; messianism; normative ideality; utopia and ideology (reactionary or revolutionary?); utopia and critical thinking; utopia and the state of exception; utopian thinking and modernity / post-modernity; colonialism and utopianism; utopia and (the end of) work; etc.

Deadline: February 1, 2010
Maximum length of papers: 8,500 words (including footnotes)
Submissions should be emailed to mmarder@stmcollege.ca or piv2@georgetown.edu“

Hosted by English and Philosophy Programmes.

Keynote Speaker: Andrew Benjamin (Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics, Monash University), “Justice, Law and Place: Derrida and the Unconditional”

8 October 2009 marks the fifth anniversary of the death of French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. Given Derrida’s concern with dates and contexts, but also with notions of trying to mourn for lost friends and the responsibilities of the living towards the dead and their legacies, it seems a more than appropriate time – perhaps a day late, because we hesitate, trying to postpone the inevitable – to bring together some friends and scholars of Derrida, not to mourn a man so concerned with the impossibility of mourning, but to begin to celebrate the enduring influence of deconstruction, to survey the state of play across the disciplines, in Derrida’s wake.

And then, how does this unique context – not only 9 October 2009, but also La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia – influence what is taking place? What is the relationship of Derrida and deconstruction to this context, to this time and these places? More generally, how are Derrida and the particularly European and North American phenomenon of deconstruction placed in the Antipodes? How does deconstruction take place in the Antipodes? And what can we make of the Antipodes after Derrida?

The aim of the symposium is threefold. Firstly, it is to pay our respects to Derrida not through mourning or memorialising, but through critically engaging with acts of deconstruction, and so acting responsibly towards Derrida’s legacy. Secondly, our aim is to showcase current critical and theoretical applications of Derrida and deconstruction, from across as many disciplines as possible – literature, philosophy, linguistics, life-writing, cinema, media, music, performance, gender studies, the visual arts, architecture, design, law, politics, sociology, and others. Thirdly, our hope is to begin to build a network of interested Derrida scholars across Melbourne and Australia, and across the disciplines, with the aim of promoting and advancing the study of Derrida and deconstruction, with or without a uniquely Antipodean inflection, and the possibility of organizing future events. Publication opportunities are being sought, with the aim of publishing longer versions of the conference papers as either a special journal edition or a stand-alone publication.

This call goes out as widely as possible. Papers, of roughly 20 minutes in length, can address any aspect of Derrida’s life, works, or thought, and can show deconstruction in operation across any area of scholarship. The deadline for proposals is 1 August 2009. Abstracts of up to 500 words should be sent to Derrida2009@latrobe.edu.au and should be accompanied by a brief biographical note.

Further information is obtainable from: Stephen Abblitts abblitt@latrobe.edu.au.

About Nietzsche Source: Nietzsche Source is a web site devoted to the publication of scholarly content on the work and life of Friedrich Nietzsche. The contents of the site and its internet addresses are stable and can be freely consulted
and used for scholarly purposes. Two editions are currently being published in Nietzsche Source: the digital version of the standard critical edition
[http://www.nietzschesource.org/documentation/en/eKGWB.html] and the facsimile edition of the entire Nietzsche estate [http://www.nietzschesource.org/documentation/en/DFGA.html].

Sofia Philosophical Review is an international peer-reviewed journal publishing articles in Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, and Philosophy of Medicine. It provides a forum both for established scholars and beginning researchers. The submission deadline for No. 2, Vol. III is October 15, 2009. The journal web site is http://portal.uni-sofia.bg/docs/philos-journal/philos-journal.html

Berlusconi in Tehran
Slavoj �i�ek

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the streetfighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now?

The rest

Cfp: “Phenomenology and Sport.” Special Issue of SPORT, ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY (2011)

A Special Issue of the journal Sport, Ethics and Philosophy (http://www.informaworld.com/rsep) will be produced for 2011, edited by Irena Martinkova and Jim Parry, will be devoted to the traditions of Continental Philosophy, and especially to Phenomenological approaches to Sport, Sports-related practices and to Sports Ethics.

Whilst happy to consider contributions of any philosophical kind, we see this Issue as a special opportunity to bring phenomenological work to a wider audience, and to stimulate future work in this field. In aiming to contribute to the wider dissemination and discussion of phenomenological methods and traditions, we will view favourably contributions on any issue in relation to Philosophy of Sport, which provided one or more of the following in application to sports (broadly conceived):
• exegesis of and critical commentary on central thinkers, texts or traditions
• clear introduction and discussion of central concepts in phenomenology
• explicit reference to methodological issues

Papers must be prepared in English. Mindful of the difficulties faced by colleagues in preparing a text in a second or third language, the Editors are very keen to encourage contributors to submit early versions of papers for comment and for advice on language issues. So we are happy to receive abstracts and full paper submissions any time from now.

Please also note that the First International Conference of the European Association of Philosophy of Sport (http://www.philosophyofsport.eu/) in conjunction with the British Philosophy of Sport Association (http://www.philosophyofsport.org.uk/) will take place at Charles University in Prague in Spring 2011 (exact date yet to be finalised), organised by Irena Martinkova and Jim Parry. In due course, a call will be issued for conference abstracts in the usual way and with the usual time-frame.

Papers prepared for the Conference may also be considered for inclusion in this Issue – but given the lead time for the Journal, papers to be submitted for the Special Issue must follow a separate timetable from Conference submissions (see above). Also, we wish to emphasise from the outset that, because of the very tight production timetable for journal issues, there is no room for negotiation over submission dates. Papers not entirely finalized by the 15th December 2010 cannot be included.

Guidelines for Abstracts and Contributions:
• Abstract of paper (200-300 words) final submission date December 15th 2009
• Accepted authors will receive notification by January 30th 2009
• The submission deadline (absolute) for accepted papers December 15th 2010
• Final papers should be between 5000-7000 words
• Preferred format is MS Word.

Abstracts/papers should be submitted electronically to phenomenology@seznam.cz;
Enquiries should be directed to: Dr Irena Martinkova martinkova@ftvs.cuni.cz or Dr Jim Parry s.j.parry@leeds.ac.uk.

Theory & Event
Volume 12, Issue 2, 2009

Table of Contents

Essays
Grizzly Man: Werner Herzog’s Anthropological Machine
Dominic Pettman

Breathless Subjects
Elizabeth Mazzolini

Real Sports
Cindy Patton

The End of New Beginnings: Nature and the American Dream in The Sopranos, Weeds, and Lost
Teena Gabrielson

Exopedagogies and the Utopian Imagination: A Case Study in Faery Subcultures
Tyson Lewis, Richard Kahn

Symposium

Eating and the Imagination of Politics: Introduction
Chad Lavin

There Is No Alternative
Melissa A. Orlie

Mastering the Art of the Sensible: Julia Child, Nationalist
Kennan Ferguson

Food as Fuel and an Ethics of Appearances
Davide Panagia

Dreams in Exile: Rediscovering Science and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Social Theory

Description: Examines the influence of Aristotle and Kant on the nineteenth-century social theory of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.

The classical origins of nineteenth-century social theory are illuminated in this sequel to the award-winning Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece. George E. McCarthy stresses the importance of Aristotle and Kant in the creation of a new type of social science in the nineteenth century that represented a critical reaction to Enlightenment rationality and modern liberalism. The seminal social theorists Marx, Durkheim, and Weber integrated Aristotle’s theory of moral economy and practical wisdom (phronesis) with Kant’s theory of knowledge and moral autonomy. The resulting social theories, uniquely supported by a view of practical science that wove together science and ethics, proved instrumental to the development of modern sociology and anthropology.

George E. McCarthy is National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor of Sociology at Kenyon College. His books include Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece, also published by SUNY Press; Objectivity and the Silence of Reason: Weber, Habermas, and the Methodological Disputes in German Sociology; Romancing Antiquity: German Critique of the Enlightenment from Weber to Habermas; and Dialectics and Decadence: Echoes of Antiquity in Marx and Nietzsche.

To read online

Call for papers: Derrida Today

Special issue on: “Traces of Judaism in Derrida”

“For you have understood me well: when I say ‘the most jewish (la plus juive),’ I also mean ‘more than jewish (plus que juive).’ Others would perhaps say: ‘otherwise jewish (autrement juive),’ even ‘other than jewish (autre que juive).’”

- Jacques Derrida: Abraham, the Other

Faced with numerous references to themes from Jewish thought, Jewish thinkers, and biblical narratives throughout Derrida’s writings, one finds it impossible to disregard the profound influence of the Jewish tradition on his work. Although it is widely known that Derrida was born in Algeria into a Sephardic Jewish family and suffered from anti-Semitic violence during his childhood, there has yet been no satisfactory inquiry into the structural connections between this aspect of his autobiography and his philosophical work. Often pushed to the margins of the literature on Derrida, these topics need to be fully explored, elaborated and, if possible, made intelligible. This special issue of Derrida Today therefore welcomes papers that try to illuminate all aspects of Derrida’s thought from the perspective of its indebtedness to the Jewish tradition.

Deadline of submission:

30 April 2010

Submissions and queries:

Nathan Van Camp, Institute of Jewish Studies (University of Antwerp). nathan.vancamp@ua.ac.be

Preparation of Manuscripts
Authors should include an abstract of 200 words, plus 5-7 keywords with their submission. A short biographical note (up to 50 words) should appear at the end of your article.
Notes should be kept to a minimum, and should appear at the end of the text, before the References section. Details about Notes, quotations and other formatting issues can be found at: http://www.eupjournals.com/userimages/ContentEditor/1231321381530/EUPJournalsStyleGuide.pdf

The Third Annual TELOS Conference

A review of Conversations

This book is a collection of ten interviews with Irigaray by scholars and readers of her work from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Norway. The interviews span the period from 1996 to the present. Some have been published before, but in scattered places, so it is helpful to have them assembled together.

Some interviews address specific topics: architecture, building and dwelling, with Andrea Wheeler; yoga, with Michael Stone; the later Merleau-Ponty, with Helen Fielding; education, with Michael Worton; and Irigaray’s re-interpretation of the Virgin Mary, with Laine Harrington and Margaret Miles. I found this a particularly interesting interview. Irigaray interprets Mary to have been a ‘virgin’ in the sense of having achieved integrity as a woman and autonomy with respect to her mother Anne; thus, she had a kind of spiritual perfection that enabled her to generate a divine child. Irigaray firmly rejects the interviewers’ reference to Mary as a symbol, insisting on the historical reality of her virginity and of the incarnation — although, evidently, her understanding of what these realities consist in departs considerably from theological tradition (pp. 87-88, 102).

Continue reading the rest of the review

This week, we examine a division in the philosophical world, between what’s called analytic philosophy, as practised in the English-speaking world and the Nordic nations, and continental philosophy. If you’re an analytical philosopher, all that French and German stuff looks vague, verbose and romantic. If you’re sitting Paris, the analytical stuff is likely to seem abstract, dry and quite unconnected with human realities. Professor Paul Patton straddles the divide and this week he tells us whether he thinks it’s real.

Link to the audio file

Review of Heidegger’s Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality

For James Luchte, Heidegger’s early philosophy is the phenomenology of ecstatic, original temporality as it develops in the years 1924 to 1929. Basing his text on the three components of the phenomenological method — reduction, destruction, and construction — Luchte divides his study into three distinct yet overlapping parts — Heidegger would call them equiprimordial ‘parts’: the [original] Phenomenon, the Destruktion, and the Topos [= building site] of ecstatic temporality. By way of a contrast with Husserl’s phenomenology, Part 1 eventually pinpoints Heidegger’s ‘phenomenological’ reduction quite precisely in “moments of vision, truth events, radical breaks amid system, eruptions: revolution, poetry, art and events of questioning” (47, 59). These moments “breach” our everyday familiarity of being, suspend the normality of our matter-of-fact existence — what Husserl dubbed the “natural attitude” — and disclose our unique being-t/here in the full finitude of its original temporality. We thus come “to ‘know ourselves’ as an ‘event’ amid a world” into which we have been thrown (48).

Read the rest of the review

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN FOR ADORNO- 40 YEARS ON

The conference will take place 6th of August in the IDS Building on the campus of the University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RE (see map below).

The conference will be free-of-charge. However, places will be limited so please register beforehand to avoid disappointment.

Anyone wishing to attend the conference should register via email to Simon Mussell: s.p.mussell@sussex.ac.uk

Please see http://adorno2009.blogspot.com for further details.

The deadline for papers for VOl 21 of Pli – The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, on ‘Novelty, Transformation and Change’, has been extended to September 15, 2009.

Attempts to explain the genesis of novelty require and engender reappraisals of our metaphysical or ontological assumptions. The sense of novelty and the possibility of experiencing it are in turn open to debate. Further, the relation of novelty to the concepts of change or transformation stands in need of analysis. Thought which critically engages with the world engenders a pressing interest in how change or transformation can be brought about. We are then faced with the question of how we can move beyond our current existence and relation to the world from within these conditions. If we are interested in radically changing our own existence then how do we navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of losing the hope of real novelty and alienating the goal of change from human possibility? Can we convey the need for and goal of a transformation that would imply a break with our current terms of representation? Do accounts of the genesis of novelty offer the key to bring about deliberate change, or are they in tension with the concept of change? For the next edition of Pli we welcome papers that engage with or challenge these questions and the paradigms surrounding novelty, transformation and change.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

·  The event as the irruption of novelty in Badiou.

·  Difference and novelty.

·  Understanding novelty in terms of discovery or creation, and the relation between discovery and creation (epistemologically, phenomenologically, ontologically, ethically, or in terms of philosophical anthropology).

·  What role, if any, does the imagination play in the recognition or production of novelty?

·  Nietzsche’s thought of the Übermensch.

·  Bergson’s account of duration.

·  The incommensurability of the event: Deleuze’s conception of the new.

·  The relation between a given metaphysics and ontology and the possibility of deliberate change. For instance, do ontologies of becoming allow for agency?

·  Discussions of the possibility, intelligibility and theoretical consequences associated with the notion of the ‘cure’ or other psychological alterations in psychoanalytic discourse as a form of radical change.

The deadline for submissions is 15th September 2009.

Submissions, no longer than 8,000 words should be sent by email to: plijournal@googlemail.com . Alternatively submissions can be sent in the form of a single hard copy plus a copy on disk as a Word or RTF file. We only accept articles and will not review abstracts. Please refer to the “Notes for Contributors” on our website. Include an e-mail address if possible for future correspondence.

TOC

Jacques Rancière: in Disagreement
Paul Bowman; Richard Stamp

Conjunctive Times, Disjointed Time: Philosophy between Enigma and Disagreement
Sudeep Dasgupta

Politics without Politics
Jodi Dean
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I have finally set up the site in a way that it should be nicely viewed on mobile phones, such as the iphone and different browsers of smartphones. There is no new link; the site should automatically detect mobile browsers and adapt itself. I would be grateful if readers could give me some feedback. I have tested it on a few mobile browsers but not all…and not yet the iphone. So please do let me know.