From the blog “How to Live”, a post by Simon Critchley.

The University of Texas at San Antonio Department of Philosophy & Classics announces a workshop on the thought of Simon Critchley
who will be the Brackenridge Distinguished Visiting Professor. The workshop will take place on Monday February 22nd and Tuesday February 23rd 2010. Please click here for more details.

Critical Horizons:A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory

VOLUME 10 (2009) ISSUE 2

**SPECIAL ISSUE**
Ethics of Commitment and Politics of Resistance:
Simon Critchley’s Neo-Anarchism
Edited by Robert Sinnerbrink and Philip A. Quadrio

Contents

Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance: Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Robert Sinnerbrink and Philip A. Quadrio

On Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
Alain Badiou
 
Neo-Anarchism or Neo-Liberalism? Yes, Please! A Response to Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Robert Sinnerbrink
 
“Critchley is Zizek”: In Defence of Critical Political Philosophy
Matthew Sharpe

The Common Root of Commitment, Resistance and Power
Karin de Boer
 
Speaking to the People: Critchley, Rousseau and the Deficit in Practical Rationality
Philip A. Quadrio
 
Which Anarchism? On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Infinity for (Political) Life: A Response to Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Nina Power
 
A Plea for Prometheus
Alberto Toscano
 
Humorous Commitments and Non-Violent Politics: A Response to Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding
Fiona Jenkins
 
Mystical Anarchism
Simon Critchley

Several parts to this series, currently Part 4.

Beyond the Sea
By Simon Critchley

Thinking is thanking. So, let me begin by thanking the readers of “Happy Like God” for their thoughtful and voluminous responses. It is obviously impossible to do justice to the range of the many responses or indeed assuage the outrage that my words seemed to inspire in some. But several interconnected themes were echoed in many of the comments and I’d like to address some of them.

Link

TOC

Introduction to the special issue on continental philosophy of law — Nick Smith

The catechism of the citizen: politics, law and religion in, after, with and against Rousseau — Simon Critchley

The dedifferentiation problem — Pierre Schlag

Bodies against the law: Abu Ghraib and the war on terror — Kelly Oliver

Overblocking autonomy: the case of mandatory library filtering software — Gordon Hull

Commodification in law: ideologies, intractabilities, and hyperboles — Nick Smith

Wilde’s extraordinary panegyric to Christ culminates in what he calls Christ’s ‘dangerous idea’. This turns upon the treatment of a sinner like Wilde himself. Christ does not condemn the sinner – “Let him of you who has never sinned be the first to throw the stone” – but rather sees sin and suffering as ‘being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection’. By this, Wilde does not mean that the act of sin itself is holy, but the transfiguration of this act that follows from the experience of long repentance and suffering. To this extent, and Wilde finds this a deeply un-Hellenic thought, one can transform one’s past through a process of aesthetic transfiguration or sublimation.

Read the rest

POWER, CONFLICT, AND COMMITMENT: RETHINKING THE POLITICAL

Second Workshop in Social and Political Thought at Michigan State University

March, 28/29, Saturday: 9am-6pm, Sunday: 9:30am-12:30pm

http://www.msu.edu/~lotz/workshop2009/index.htm

Description:

During recent decades philosophers from diverse perspectives have extensively discussed the problem of the public sphere and the language, conflicts, and outcomes it can organize.  Liberal understandings of politics and public life have been challenged by feminists, critical race theorists, and radical democrats.  In view of structural change and the crisis of dominant political institutions, it has become clear that our understanding of politics needs careful reformulation.  We need to develop new conceptions of what it means to be political, how the individual and the self are politically situated in the world, and how political action and resistance (or transformations) are possible. This second workshop for social and political thought at Michigan State University will bring these perspectives together and discuss new perspectives for understanding the political sphere within our current social situation.

Speakers

Amy Allen (Dartmouth College); Feminism, Foucault, Continental Philosophy; author of The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory

Todd Hedrick (Michigan State University); Critical Theory, Habermas, Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy

Simon Critchley (New School); Poststructuralism, Continental Philosophy, author of Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, On Humor

Kristie Dotson (Michigan State University); Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Epistemology, Social and Political Philosophy, editor of  Race, Hybridity and Miscegenation

Robert Gooding-Williams (University of Chicago), Critical Race Theory, Nietzsche, Social and Political Philosophy, author of Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism, Look, a Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics

Roberto Nigro (Michigan State University); Foucault, Marx, Social and Political Philosophy; editor/translator of Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology

Organization and RSVP

Prof. Christian Lotz

Michigan State University

Dept. of Philosophy

503 South Kedzie Hall

East Lansing, MI 48824

517.353.9392 (Office)

517.355.4490 (Dept.)

http://www.msu.edu/~lotz

lotz@msu.edu

Link

(h/t: Marcus Leis Allion)

Obama’s victory marks a symbolically powerful moment in American history, defined as it is by the stain of slavery and the fact of racism. It will have hugely beneficial consequences for how the United States is seen throughout the world. His victory was also strategically brilliant and his campaign transformed those disillusioned with and disenfranchised by the Bush administration into a highly motivated and organized popular force. But I dispute that Obama’s victory is about change in any significant sense.

Continue reading

(h/t: Micah White)

Comments on Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding — ALAIN BADIOU (with an introduction by SIMON CRITCHLEY)
Emblems and Cuts: Philosophy in and against History — ALBERTO TOSCANO
“Living with an Idea”: Ethics and Politics in Badiou’s Logiques des mondes — GABRIEL RIERA
From Universality to Equality: Badiou’s Critique of Rancière — JEFF LOVE AND TODD MAY
The Consistency of Inconsistency: Alain Badiou and the Limits of Mathematical Ontology — TZUCHIEN THO
The Scintillation of the Event: On Badiou’s Phenomenology — GERT-JAN VAN DER HEIDEN
What is to be Done? Alain Badiou and the Pre-Evental — NICK SRNICEK
Paulitics — DAN MELLAMPHY AND NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY
Book Panel/Table ronde
Jay Lampert’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History — ALAIN BEAULIEU, FADI ABOU-RIHAN, EUGENE HOLLAND, JAY LAMPERT
Student Essay Prize/Prix-étudiant — The Body as Measurant of All: Dis-covering the World–FLORENTIEN VERHAGE

Or the only truly tested philosophy is that of a dead philosopher. When the philosopher dies, the philosophy is put to the test. Does is still seem valid? Or does it fade into irrelevance in the face of eternity? From the Sydney Writers’ Festival, a conversation with Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers.

Link

The Authors@Google program was pleased to welcome philosopher, professor and author Simon Critchley to Google’s NY office to discuss his new book “On Humor”.