A Thought of/from the Outside: Foucault’s Uses of Blanchot

Date: 21 February 2013, 6:00pm to  9:00pm

Location: Lecture Theatre E002, Granary Building, Central Saint Martins, London  N1C 4AA

Fee: Free

Lecture by Étienne Balibar CRMEP.

A well-known essay published by Foucault in 1966 on the work of Maurice Blanchot, La pensée du dehors, was translated into English in two different ways: ‘The thought of the outside’, and ‘The thought from outside’. This indicates a deep ambiguity concerning its possible interpretations. Together with the earlier essay on Bataille ‘Preface to Transgression’, the essay forms the metaphysical counterpart to the early ‘archeological’ work, beginning with History of Madness and ending with The Order of Things, centered on the ‘anti-humanist’ doctrine of the elimination of the subject. It is widely supposed that, in his later work, when studying apparatuses of power-knowledge, and when outlining a history of regimes of subjectivation and truth, Foucault had entirely reversed this orientation. The lecture will discuss the enigmatic notion of the ‘outside’ and its relationship to transcendental philosophy, assess the importance of a dialogue with Blanchot in the formation of Foucault’s philosophy, and argue that, contrary to established wisdom, it never ceased to frame the critique of subjectivity in Foucault’s work.
via A Thought of/from the Outside: Foucault’s Uses of Blanchot – Activities – Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences – Kingston University London.

A seminar with Simon Critchley | July 20-27, 2013

Levinas’s work has become a topic of intense intellectual fascination and factional disagreement in recent years. From the relative obscurity in which his work languished until the 1980s, Levinas’s conception on ethics has become a hugely influential and highly familiar position. But perhaps it has become too familiar, reduced to a series of platitudes about ‘the face of the other’, ‘alterity’ and ‘ethics as first philosophy’. The task of this year’s Tilburg Philsophy Summer School is to begin a process of creative defamiliarization of Levinas’s thought through nothing more complex than a reading of his work, that is to say, the major philosophical writings, but also the recently published opus posthumous. Levinas extraordinarily rich and powerful writing wildly exceeds any reductive caricature.

We welcome students with a general interest in Levinas’s thought. Although we will offer an introduction to his philosophy, the focus will be  on two significant problems, or what one might call blind spots, in Levinas’s work:

i     The passage from ethics to politics, in particular the relation of what Levinas sees as the ‘anarchy’ of the relation to the other to forms of  political collectivity, in particular the state;

ii    The relation between the purported nonviolence of the ethical relation to the other and the fact of violence, both political violence and violence in the broadest sense.

In addition to Levinas’s work, we will explore its relation to a number of thinkers who influenced him Plato, Plotinus, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl or Heidegger or who he decisively influenced Blanchot, Derrida, Irigaray, Butler.

via Levinas – Ethics, Politics and the Problem of Violence.

via SHAKESPEARE AND PHILOSOPHY.

James Corby (University of Malta) interviews Simon Critchley (New School) by video link during the Style in Theory / Styling Theory conference in Malta in November 2009 (http://www.um.edu.mt/events/styleintheory2009).

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main Street, not Wall Street”, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

via Occupy first. Demands come later | Slavoj Žižek | Comment is free | The Guardian.

1989 marked not only the defeat of the Communist State-Socialism, but also the defeat of the Western Social Democracy.

Nowhere is the misery of today’s Left more palpable than in its “principled” defence of the Social-Democratic Welfare State: the idea is that, in the absence of a feasible radical Leftist project, all that the Left can do is to bombard the state with demands for the expansion of the Welfare State, knowing well that the State will not be able to deliver.

This necessary disappointment serves as a reminder of the basic impotence of the social-democratic Left and thus push the people towards a new radical revolutionary Left.

Needless to say, such a politics of cynical “pedagogy” is destined to fail, since it fights a lost battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the inability of the Welfare State to deliver will be Rightist populism. In order to avoid this reaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the Social-Democratic Welfare State.

via Only Communism can save liberal democracy – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

The conversation continues from where it left off last time. To recap, Simon Critchley quoted Francis Bacon on violence:

When talking about the violence of paint, it’s nothing to do with the violence of war. It’s to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality. We nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that I have been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.

To which Simon himself added:

Existence seems to me ever-more screened and distanced, a shallow shadow world whose ideological patina is an empty empathy. None of us is free of this. Maybe art, in its essential violence, can tear away one or two of these screens. Maybe then we’d begin to see. Because the whole problem turns around what is seen and not seen. We think we see what happens ‘there’ and make pronouncements about ‘them’. But we do not see as we are seen because we are wrapped in a screen. There are tyrants here too. Art might unwrap us a little through its violence.

via Mute magazine PRINT / ONLINE / SUBSCRIBE | Between Baudrillard and the Cave: Alfredo Jaar and Simon Critchley in Conversation.

Part 2

Read an English translation of Alain Badiou’s recent article for Le Monde. Translation kindly provided by Cristiana Petru-Stefanescu.

The Eastern wind is getting the better of the Western one. How much longer will the poor and dark West, the “international community” of those who still think of themselves as masters of the world, continue to give lessons of good management and behaviour to the whole planet? Isn’t it laughable to see certain intellectuals on duty, disconcerted soldiers of the capital-parliamentarism that stands as a shabby paradise for us, offering themselves to the magnificent Tunisian and Egyptian peoples in order to teach these savage populations the basics of “democracy”? What a distressing persistence of colonial arrogance! Given the miserable political situation that we are experiencing, isn’t it obvious that it is us who have everything to learn from the current popular uprisings? Shouldn’t we, in all urgency, closely study what has made possible the overthrow through collective action of governments that are oligarchic, corrupt and—possibly, above all—humiliatingly the vassals of Western states?

via VersoBooks.com.