The Department of Philosophy at George Mason University proudly presents, Vulnerable Bodies:
a symposium in honor of the retirement of Professor Debra Bergoffen

This symposium examines the vulnerabilities of aging, disabled, intersexed, harmed, and raped bodies. In turning to these specific vulnerabilities, the symposium participants alert us to the dignity of the body and create paradigms of embodiment where the dignity of the vulnerable body informs the ways in which we formulate medical practice and social justice policies.

Thursday April 16, 2009
1:30 pm – 7 pm
George Mason University, Fairfax campus, Research 1, Room 163, Reception to follow

Speakers Include:
Professor Debra Bergoffen
Professor Ellen Feder
Professor Robin May Schott
Professor Gail Weiss
Guest Panel:
Professor Lynn. M. Constantine
Sara Regina Micho
Laina H. Saul

Earlier this month, as many readers know, Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Gianni Vattimo, Slavoj Zizek all participated at the conference “On the Idea of Communism.” For those of us who sadly missed it, Monthly Review has a good recap of links. If you know of more, please post them in the comments! (See also the lacan.com article)

New French Philosophy and Media Theory

A conversation with Bernard Stiegler

April 2nd, 7:00 pm, La Maison Française, NYU, 16 Washington Mews, NYC

http://cultureandcommunication.org/newfrenchphilosophy/

Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher and Director of the Department of Cultural Development at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris. Founder of Ars
Industrialis (a group dedicated to the “industrial politics of spirit”). His writings have been broadly influential on the study of time, labor,
capitalism, media theory, and psychopower. They include: La technique et le temps (3 vols. 1994-2001; trans. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus [Stanford UP, 1998]); De la misère symbolique (2004); Mécréance et Discrédit (2006); Economie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir (2008); and Prendre soin: De la jeunesse et des générations (2008).

Respondents

Avital Ronell, Professor of German, English and Comparative Literature, NYU. Author of The Test Drive (2005); Stupidity (2003); The Telephone
Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989)

Alexander Galloway, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU. Author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT,
2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006).

Moderator

Emily Apter, Professor of French, English and Comparative Literature, NYU. Author of The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006)

Organizers

Emily Apter, Department of French, English and Comparative Literature, Denis Hollier, Department of French, Alexander Galloway, Department of
Media, Culture and Communication, and Ben Kafka, Department of Media, Culture and Communication.

212.998.8750 maison.francaise@nyu.edu

The Experience of Freedom http://www.mediafire.com/?5cym1ntnoce

Hegel, The Restlessness of the Negative http://www.mediafire.com/?mxi2mgwpjjb

via ren yellam

A review of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age(link to the review)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

And a Zizek interview, which is quite funny. Just an excerp:

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

To Germany in the early 19th century, to follow a university course by Hegel.

How do you relax?

Listening again and again to Wagner.

How often do you have sex?

It depends what one means by sex. If it’s the usual masturbation with a living partner, I try not to have it at all.

“Emancipation is not an all or nothing affair”

Interview with Nancy Fraser

In Honor of Iris Marion Young: Theorist and Practitioner of Justice

Reading Habermas in Tehran

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Katherine Lydon. “Exscription.” Yale French Studies.78 (1990): 47-65. http://www.mediafire.com/?bjtykysjjyy

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Michael Syrotinski. “Les Iris.” Yale French Studies.81 (1992): 46-63. http://www.mediafire.com/?m0vjhrzyzbu

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Paula Moddel. “Menstruum Universale (Literary Dissolution).” SubStance 6.21 (1978): 21-35. http://www.mediafire.com/?nxhgzyh01ch

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Mundus Est Fabula.” MLN 93.4 (1978): 635-53. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?djnby2azpj0

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Tracy B. Strong. “La Comparution /the Compearance: From the Existence Of “Communism” To the Community Of “Existence”.” Political Theory 20.3 (1992): 371-98. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?jhwl3nvyena

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Thomas C. Platt. “The Two Secrets of the Fetish.” Diacritics 31.2 (2001): 3-8. http://www.mediafire.com/?xzxcoyyjzjz

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Richard Livingston. “The Unsacrificeable.” Yale French Studies.79 (1991): 20-38. http://www.mediafire.com/?d3djujmvwdo

Hall, Mirko M., and Jean-Luc Nancy. “The War of Monotheism: On the Inability of Civilization to Expand: The West Battles against Itself.” Cultural Critique.57 (2004): 104-07. http://www.mediafire.com/?mojc1tukim3

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Wild Laughter in the Throat of Death.” MLN 102.4 (1987): 719-36. http://www.mediafire.com/?uvdnxzpy11k

h/t Serenity

Articles are available here

Frederic Will — Can We Get Inside the Aesthetic Sensibility of the Archaic Past?
Maryvonne Saison — “The People Are Missing”
Thomas Leddy — The Aesthetics of Junkyards and Roadside Clutter
Emmanouil Aretoulakis — Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11
Dan Disney — Toward a Poeticognosis: Re-reading Plato’s The Republic via Wallace Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
Jonathan Davis — Questioning “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: A Stroll around the Louvre after Reading Benjamin
Grant Tavinor — Definition of Videogames
SYMPOSIUM: Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Twenty-Five Years Later
Ivan Gaskell — The Riddle of a Riddle
Thomas E. Wartenberg — Not Just Mere Things
Cynthia Freeland — Danto and Art Criticism
Arthur C. Danto — Ontology, Criticism, and the Riddle of Art Versus Non-Art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

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”.

TOC

Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization — Ihab Hassan

The Dramatic Sources of Philosophy — Amelie Oksenberg Rorty

Art and Evolution: Spiegelman’s The Narrative Corpse — Brian Boyd

Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will? — Don Levi

The Worst Case of Knowing the Other?: Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida — David Hillman

Literature, Politics, and Character — Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

Plot Taxonomies and Intentionality — Jon Adams

How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have? — Amihud Gilead

“A little throat cutting in the meantime”: Seneca’s Violent Imagery — Amy Olberding

Of Literary Universals: Ninety-Five Theses — Patrick Colm Hogan

And more

JBSP: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Finitude: History & Politics

ANTONIO CALCAGNO: Michel Henry’s Non-Intentionality Thesis and Husserlian Phenomenology

FABIO PRESUTTI: Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and the ‘Idea of Language’ in the Synthesis of ‘Being’

BETH LORD: The Virtual and the Ether: Transcendental Empiricism in Kant’s Opus Postumum

JAMES N. McGUIRK: Aletheia and Heidegger’s Transitional Readings of Plato’s Cave Allegory

TRACY COLONY: The Wholly Other: Being and the Last God in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy

FARHANG ERFANI: Fixing Marx with Machiavelli: Claude Lefort’s Democratic Turn

Part 2

Foro Social Mundial México 2008

(h/t: Azadeh Erfani)

Penn State Press is publishing Sally Scholz’s latest book, entitled Political Solidarity:

From the publisher’s description:

Experiences of solidarity have figured prominently in the politics of the modern era, from the rallying cry of liberation theology for solidarity with the poor and oppressed through feminist calls for sisterhood to such political movements as Solidarno?? in Poland. Yet very little academic writing has focused on solidarity in conceptual rather than empirical terms.

Sally Scholz takes on this critical task here. She lays the groundwork for a theory of political solidarity, asking what solidarity means and how it differs fundamentally from other social and political concepts like camaraderie, association, or community. Scholz distinguishes a variety of types and levels of solidarity by their social ontologies, moral relations, and corresponding obligations. Political solidarity, in contrast to social solidarity and civic solidarity, aims to bring about social change by uniting individuals in their response to particular situations of injustice, oppression, or tyranny.

The book explores the moral relation of political solidarity in detail, with chapters on the nature of the solidary group, obligations within solidarity, the “paradox of the privileged,” the goals of solidarity movements, and the prospects for global solidarity.

More from the publisher, including the Table of Contents

Interview with Axel Honneth, in Le Monde, obviously in French.

Link

Link

Obits: NYT, Le Monde, IHT

A video where Cesaire speaks of his childhood (in French):