Wagner and Anti-Semitism
I will be hosting a symposium on “Wagner and Anti-Semitism” at the Hammer Museum on Tuesday, Feb. 9th at 7:00 PM, with my guests Leon Botstein (President of Bard College), David J. Levin (University of Chicago), and Marc A. Weiner (Indiana University). Given the speakers and the heat the topic has generated lately, it should be a lively evening!
Here is a link to the Hammer site, with more information
And here is a link to Stewart Spencer’s translation of Wagner’s essay, Judaism in Music
Special thanks to Stewart Spencer for permission. This translation is difficult to find, and much better than the early 20th century Ellis translation.
Badiou Reading Seminar
The UCLA ECT seminar is sponsoring a reading seminar on Alain Badiou’s Being and Event Winter Quarter 2010 on most Tuesdays winter quarter from 6-8 in Humanities 348. The reading seminar is open to everyone, but RSVPs are required: Reinhard@humnet.ucla.edu.
Jan. 12, Introduction and Part I (esp. Meditations 1, 4, 5).
Jan. 19: Part II (esp. Meditations 7, 8)
Jan. 26: Part III (esp. Meditations 11, 13, 15)
Feb. 16: Part IV (esp. Meditations 16, 17)
March 2: Part V (esp. Meditations 20, 23)
March 9: Part VI (esp. Meditations 27, 28)
March 16: Part VII (esp. Meditations 31, 34)
ECT Seminar 2010 begins
The topic of the UCLA seminar on Experimental Critical Theory this year is “the Subject”; winter quarter will focus on Hegel and Badiou, and spring quarter will examine Freud and Lacan.
The seminar will be lead by Kenneth Reinhard, and guest seminar leaders will include
Winter: Étienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels and ECT Committee members John McCumber, Eleanor Kaufman, and Jason Smith.
Spring: Slavoj Zizek, Mladen Dolar, Graham Hammill, Catherine Malabou, Jean Wyatt, Eric Santner, and Alain Badiou.
In the winter, the following public lectures, linked to the seminar, will be offered:
Feb. 23: Bruno Bosteels, “Badiou and Hegel” (5:00 Humanities 348) [RESCHEDULED TO FEB. 25]
Feb. 24: Bruno Bosteels, “Marx and Marti: Logics of the Disencounter”
4:30, Lydeen Library (Rolfe 4302)
Feb. 25: Bruno Bosteels, “Badiou and Hegel” (3:00 Humanities 348)
In the spring, the following conferences, lectures, and debates linked to the seminar will be offered:
April 7 & 8: “Recovered Voices” conference (featuring Slavoj Zizek, Mladen Dolar, and others)
May 28: Badiou/Zizek debate: “Saving Wagner – A Communist Perspective” (2:00, Schoenberg Hall)
June 1 & 2: Conference on “Wagner in LA: The Opera of the 21st Century?” (featuring Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Fredric Jameson, and others)
A supplementary reading group on Badiou’s Being and Event will take place on (most) Tuesdays, 5-7, at UCLA (room tba).
CALL FOR PAPERS
WAITING FOR THE POLITICAL MOMENT
Utrecht & Rotterdam, June 17-19, 2010
Convened by Frans-Willem Korten and Bram Ieven
Sponsored by Stichting Letteren en Samenleving Rotterdam, Erasmus Trust Fund Rotterdam, the Centre for the Humanities and the OGC at Utrecht University, The Faculty of History and Art of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the City of Rotterdam.
‘Hamm: What’s happening?
Clov: Something is taking its course.’
Beckett, Endgame
Over the last decades, several political and cultural theorists have argued that the domain of politics, and even the very idea of the political, has been hollowed out. Politics today appears to have lost its proper status or has been submerged in the more powerful and encompassing infrastructures of late capitalism. Instead of frantically affirming or denying the emptying-out of the political, this conference traces the appropriation of the political by apparatuses of state, church, capitalism and media in modernity to look for ways to reinvigorate it. To do so, the conference focuses on a key concept: the political moment – the moment in which political agency becomes possible, as well as the formative role of the moment in politics. To get to grips with the political moment we not only need to understand our current moment; we need to have an idea of how it developed over time. Not considering the political moment from an exclusively contemporary point of view, this conference also calls for proposals that focus on the formation of the political in relation to its emptying-out from the late Middle Ages to the present.
Contributions in the form of a 4000 words positioning paper distributed in advance and to be discussed in a seminar setting could address (but are not limited to) the following issues: what is a political moment? What does the emptying-out of the political imply? How has the appropriation of the political by state, religion or media shaped the conditions of possibility of the political? What is the role of the moment in politics?
Confirmed speakers include: Mieke Bal, Bruno Bosteels, Rosi Braidotti, Simon Critchley, Martin van Gelderen, Olivier Marchart, Patchen Markell, Benjamin Noys, and Alberto Toscano.
If you are interested in participating, please send in a 300-words paper proposal and a short résumé of your current research by January 15 2010 to Frans-Willem Korsten, Professor of Literature and Society, Erasmus University Rotterdam, email: korsten@fhk.eur.nl; and/or to Bram Ieven, lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University, email: b.k.ieven@uu.nl.
For more information see: www.waitingforthepoliticalmoment.org
ECT 2010 Applications Due Oct. 15!
The Seminar on Experimental Critical Theory, Winter-Spring 2010: The Subject
Thursdays, 3-6
This seminar is the core course of the new Program in Experimental Critical Theory administered by the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. Students enrolled in any participating Ph.D., M.A. or M.F.A. program at UCLA are eligible to join the program, and upon fulfillment of its requirements will be awarded the Certificate in Experimental Critical Theory. The topic of the seminar this year is The Subject, with winter quarter focusing on Hegel and Badiou and spring quarter on Freud and Lacan. The formalization of the notion of the subject is often located in Descartes’ cogito and the German philosophical response to the challenge of British empiricism in the 18th century; the proclamation of the “death of the subject” is often associated with such late 20th century thinkers as Althusser, Foucault, and Lyotard. But the idea of the subject is both older than the Enlightenment (dating at least to Aristotle) and continues to persist, in one form or another – assumed, interrogated, or reinvented – in contemporary politics, aesthetics, and critical and cultural theory. Philosophy and psychoanalysis have articulated some of the most important questions concerning the idea of the subject in modernity. If Hegel represents both a culmination and a turning point in philosophical thinking on the subject, Freud marks a reinvention of the concept, a new “Copernican turn” in the idea of subjectivity that itself has had enormous implications for the philosophical and political concepts of the subject. Indeed, Jacques Lacan’s development of Freud’s ideas in relation to Descartes, Hegel, and other thinkers has lead to a new notion of the subject, one which in turn has been powerfully reconceived by the contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou. Hence Winter Quarter of the seminar will be anchored by readings of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Badiou’s Being and Event, and Spring Quarter will focus on sections from Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology and The Ego and the Id, as well as Lacan’s Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, and his essays “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire” and “Science and Truth” from Écrits.
The seminar will be lead by Professor Reinhard, with some sessions co-taught by other members of the project (including Professors John McCumber, Eleanor Kaufman and Jason Smith). Some sessions of the seminar will be lead by visitors including Etienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Slavoj Zizek, Mladen Dolar, Graham Hammill, Jean Wyatt, Eric Santner, and Alain Badiou.
Admission to the seminar and the program is by application. Students interested in enrolling in the seminar should write a letter of application describing their interests and experience in critical theory. The letter should include your name, email address, and the UCLA department or program in which you are enrolled. Please send applications by October 15, 2009 to:
The PECT Steering Committee
c/o Michael Lambert
mlambert@english.ucla.edu
Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory, 2008-2009
NOWCASTING conference at UCLA Oct 16 & 17, 2009
NOWCASTING IS THE FIRST CONFERENCE TO APPLY CONTEMPORARY DESIGN THEORY TO EMERGING ISSUES IN THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES. SHOWCASING DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECTS AT EVERY LEVEL FROM GOOGLE MAPPING TO SUPERCOMPUTING VISUALIZATION, THE NOWCASTING SEMINAR PROPOSES THAT LEARNING FROM COMMUNICATION DESIGN, INTERACTION DESIGN, AND INDUSTRIAL DESIGN WILL BE VITAL TO 21ST CENTURY HUMANISTIC INQUIRY.
Speakers include
ANNE BURDICK
TREVOR PAGLEN
JEFFREY SCHNAPP
JOHANNA DRUCKER
JAN-CHRISTOPHER HORAK
ERKKI HUHTAMO
WARREN SACK
LEV MANOVICH
JULIA REINHARD LUPTON
BENJAMIN H. BRATTON
TODD PRESNER
PETER LUNENFELD
LORRAINE WILD
OUTRAGE!
See Kirby Dick’s new film Outrage on HBO now!
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/outrage/index.html
Joseph Litvak: The Broadway Musical in the Age of the Hollywood Blacklist
Please join us for a talk by
Joseph Litvak
(Professor of English, Tufts University)
Bringing Down the House:
The Broadway Musical in the Age of the Hollywood Blacklist
4 pm • Thursday, October 8, 2009 • 306 ROYCE HALL UCLA
Sponsored by the UCLA Department of English
Cosponsored by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and
the UCLA/Mellon Program on the Holocaust in American & World Culture
Professor Litvak is the author of
The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (2008, Duke University Press)
Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (1997, Duke University Press)
Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (1992, University of California Press)
UCLA Comparative Literature Lecture Series "Crisis and Critique"
The Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory, 2009-2010
The Seminar on Experimental Critical Theory, Winter-Spring 2010: The Subject
Thursdays, 3-6
This seminar is the core course of the new Program in Experimental Critical Theory administered by the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. Students enrolled in any participating Ph.D., M.A. or M.F.A. program at UCLA are eligible to join the program, and upon fulfillment of its requirements will be awarded the Certificate in Experimental Critical Theory. The topic of the seminar this year is The Subject, with winter quarter focusing on Hegel and Badiou and spring quarter on Freud and Lacan. The formalization of the notion of the subject is often located in Descartes’ cogito and the German philosophical response to the challenge of British empiricism in the 18th century; the proclamation of the “death of the subject” is often associated with such late 20th century thinkers as Althusser, Foucault, and Lyotard. But the idea of the subject is both older than the Enlightenment (dating at least to Aristotle) and continues to persist, in one form or another – assumed, interrogated, or reinvented – in contemporary politics, aesthetics, and critical and cultural theory. Philosophy and psychoanalysis have articulated some of the most important questions concerning the idea of the subject in modernity. If Hegel represents both a culmination and a turning point in philosophical thinking on the subject, Freud marks a reinvention of the concept, a new “Copernican turn” in the idea of subjectivity that itself has had enormous implications for the philosophical and political concepts of the subject. Indeed, Jacques Lacan’s development of Freud’s ideas in relation to Descartes, Hegel, and other thinkers has lead to a new notion of the subject, one which in turn has been powerfully reconceived by the contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou. Hence Winter Quarter of the seminar will be anchored by readings of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Badiou’s Being and Event, and Spring Quarter will focus on sections from Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology and Interpretation of Dreams, as well as Lacan’s Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, and his essays “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire” and “Science and Truth” from Écrits.
The seminar will be lead by Professor Reinhard, with some sessions co-taught by other members of the project (including Professors Eleanor Kaufman and Jason Smith). Some sessions of the seminar will be lead by visitors including Etienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Slavoj Zizek, Mladen Dolar, Graham Hammill, Jean Wyatt, and Alain Badiou.
Admission to the seminar and the program is by application. Students interested in enrolling in the seminar should write a letter of application describing their interests and experience in critical theory. The letter should include your name, email address, and the UCLA department or program in which you are enrolled. Please send applications by October 15, 2009 to:
The PECT Steering Committee
c/o Michael Lambert
mlambert@english.ucla.edu
Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory, 2008-2009
Tote Bags For Food! Against Hunger!
Our daughter Hannah is selling tote bags to raise money for a local food bank, as part of her bat mitzvah project. Totes are $5; they are available hand colorized by Hannah, or in b&w only (you can color it yourself!). All money goes to charity (her parents donated the totes and printing costs). We’ll mail it out, just about anywhere! We hope you’ll support a young artist with a worthy cause….
To order, email here: reinhard@humnet.ucla.edu
Ring Festival LA
A conference to be held at UCLA June 1 & 2, 2010, as part of Ring Festival LA
Why have a conference on Richard Wagner’s operas?
Why have a festival in LA centered on Wagner’s Ring?
The conference will be part of the city-wide Ring Festival LA that will surround the first complete cycles of Los Angeles Opera’s new production of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, directed by Achim Freyer and conducted by James Conlon. The conference will examine various aspects of Wagner’s music, including its legacy in Southern California, as a major influence on the history of film music and exile culture; and its continuing importance in contemporary music, art, and philosophy. The conference will also examine Wagner’s anti-semitism, and the issues that it raises in both of those cultural contexts … READ MORE
New Book: Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba
Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play
by Carl Schmitt
Translated by David Pan and Jennifer R. Rust
Introduction by Jennifer R. Rust and Julia Reinhard Lupton
Preface and Afterword by David Pan
Available October 1, 2009
Though Carl Schmitt is best known for his legal and political theory, his 1956 Hamlet or Hecuba provides an innovative and insightful analysis of Shakespeare’s tragedy in terms of the historical situation of its creation. Arguing that the construction of the figure of Hamlet was shaped by the politics of James I’s succession to the throne, Schmitt uses this interpretation to develop a theory of myth and politics that serves as a cultural foundation for his concept of political representation. More than literary criticism or historical analysis, Schmitt’s book lays out a comprehensive theory of the relationship between aesthetics and politics that responds to alternative ideas developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. Jennifer R. Rust and Julia Reinhard Lupton’s introduction places Schmitt’s work in the context of contemporary Renaissance studies, and David Pan’s afterword analyzes the links to Schmitt’s political theory. Presented in its entirety in an authorized translation, Hamlet or Hecuba is essential reading for scholars of Shakespeare and Schmitt alike.
“Beyond ancient tragedy and the Atreides, through the themes of vengeance, of the brother and of election, this essay also questions the political destiny of the ‘European spirit.’”
—Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship
“The intrusion into Shakespeare’s Hamlet by the highly controversial German legal and political theorist and constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt will raise eyebrows in the English-speaking world. The able English translation and introductions will engender a plethora of studies by Shakespeare scholars, and by political scientists and historians who will analyze subtexts in order to decipher Schmitt the man from Schmitt the thinker.”
—George Schwab, President, National Committee on American Foreign Policy
“In his remarkable essay on Hamlet, Schmitt argues that the playwright’s audience shared with him not only a horizon of cultural and historical knowledge; they were also, he claims, profoundly attuned to the symptomatic gaps and displacements, to the dream-like traces of a political unconscious, at work in the play. Here, Schmitt claims to have definitively deciphered what might be called the ‘latent dream thoughts’ of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy. It is, however, only by way of the inner tensions of Schmitt’s own essay, made vibrantly legible in the brilliant introduction by this volume’s editors, that the reader can fully grasp the ways in which the traumatic entry of historical time into the realm of aesthetic play generates Hamlet’s persistent force as the paradigmatic tragedy of modern European theater.”
—Eric Santner, Professor of Germanic Studies, The University of Chicago
“Like Hamlet’s Mousetrap, Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba is an incendiary provocation, one that still has the power to catch the conscience of Shakespeare critics half a century later. Schmitt’s deep reflections on the nature of tragedy, the relations between the real and the aesthetic, and the barbarity of Elizabethan theater, will engage and sometimes irk Shakespeareans of every stripe. His critical practice—poised somewhere between a Kantian contest of faculties and an Anschluss—grates productively against the more pacific versions of interdisciplinarity that reign today. And Rust and Lupton’s fine introduction lays bare the religious, political, and philosophical stakes of Schmitt’s Shakespearean encounter.”
—Richard Halpern, Professor of English, The Johns Hopkins University
New issue of S on Islam and Psychoanalysis
The on line journal S has a new special issue on Islam and Psychoanalysis, edited by Sigi Jöttkandt and Joan Copjec. You can get it here
Table of Contents
Editorial
Islam and Psychoanalysis
Sigi Jöttkandt, Joan Copjec
Articles
Cogito and the Subject of Arab Culture
Julien Maucade
To Believe or to Interpret
Jean-Michel Hirt
The Veil of Islam
Fethi Benslama
Jannah
Nadia Tazi
Four Discourses on Authority in Islam
Christian Jambet
The Glow
Fethi Benslama
Dialogues
Translations of Monotheisms
Fethi Benslama, Jean-Luc Nancy
The Qur’an and the Name-of-the-Father
Keith Al-Hasani
Book Reviews
Reading Backwards: Constructing God the Impossible in Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam
Benjamin Bishop
The Powers of the Negative: The Mathematic102-106
Etienne Balibar on Spinoza's Three Gods
Here is a link to a talk by Etienne Balibar on “Spinoza’s Three Gods,” delivered at Birbeck University’s Institute for the Humanities as part of the conference
“Thinking with Spinoza: Politics, Philosophy and Religion”
on 7th & 8th May, 2009.
DESIGN YOUR LIFE!
Ellen and Julia Lupton’s new book in now available; you can buy it here
Here is a link to excerpts from the book.
And here is a link to their website, the origin of the book.
(I’ll have to talk to Ellen’s husband, Abbott Miller, about writing a companion volume, “Design Your Wife” ...)
Jewish Studies at UC Irvine
Jewish Studies in the University, Community, and Global Society
Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 4:30-6:00pm
135 Humanities Instructional Building UC Irvine
This event is free and open to all. Please join us for a catered reception after the discussion.
The Panelists
Sarah Bunin Benor
Assistant Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies, Hebrew Union College
Daniel Boyarin
Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, Departments of
Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley
Susannah Heschel
Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College
Kenneth Reinhard
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
University of California, Los Angeles
Please direct questions about the event to Glenn Levine at glevine@uci.edu
OUTRAGE: a film by Kirby Dick
OPENS TODAY at the Sunset 5 in West Hollywood and in
New York, NY: Chelsea Cinema 9
Washington, DC: E Street Cinema
San Francisco, CA: Landmark Theaters Embarcadero Center
Philadelphia, PA: Ritz at the Bourse
Amy Hollywood at UCLA
The UCLA Department of English invites you to a seminar by
Amy Hollywood
“Love and the Heretic”
Monday, May 11, 2009, 4:00 p.m.
Royce Hall, Room 306
Reception to Follow
Amy Hollywood, Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School, is a historian of Christian thought specializing in mysticism, with strong interests in feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. Her first book, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995) received the International Congress of Medieval Studies’ Otto Grundler Prize for the best book in medieval studies. Her second book, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (University of Chicago Press, 2002), deals with Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray and their fascination with excessive bodily and affective forms of Christian mysticism. Professor Hollywood is currently co-editing, with Patricia Beckman, the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism and completing a book of essays to be called “Acute Melancholia.” She is also the editor of the Gender, Theory, and Religions Series for Columbia University Press.
This event is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation Grant for Transforming the Humanities at UCLA and is organized by Lowell Gallagher (English)
Two Talks By Catherine Malabou
May 5 @ UC Irvine (5:00 PM in Student Center, Moss Cove A): “How is Subjectivity Undergoing Deconstruction Today? Philosophy, Auto-Hetero-Affection, and Neurobiological Emotion”
May 6 @ UCLA (5:00 PM, Royce Hall 314), “On ‘Post-traumatic subjectivity’”
(Recommended reading: Slavoj Zizek, “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject”; download here)
Catherine Malabou teaches philosophy at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. She is the author of The Future of Hegel (Routledge 2005), Counterpath (with Jacques Derrida), (Stanford 2004), What should we do with our brain? ( Fordham, 2008), Plasticity at the Eve of Writing (Forthcoming, Columbia University Press, 2009), Le Change Heidegger, du fantastique en philosophie (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2004), Plasticité (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 1999), and Les nouveaux blesses, de Freud a la neurologie: penser les traumatismes contemporains (Bayard, 2007). Her work consists mainly in articulating the concept of plasticity at the crossing of philosophy (dialectic and deconstruction) and neuroscience.
Paul de Man Conference
The Paul de Man Project presents:
Property, Sovereignty, and the Theotropic: Paul de Man’s Political Archive
April 24-25, 2009
9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
The University of California, Irvine
135 Humanities Instructional Building
Free and open to the public
Speakers include:
Etienne Balibar, Stephen Barker, Walter Benn Michaels, Ellen Burt, Cynthia Chase, Tom Cohen, Steve Mailloux, Nigel Mapp, J. Hillis Miller, Kevin Newmark, Marc Redfield, Andrzej Warminksi.
FRIDAY APRIL 24 2009
135 Humanities Instructional Building
10:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
Coffee
10:30 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.
Martin McQuillan:
“Introductory Remarks”
10:45 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
Erin Obodiac:
“Remarks”
11:15 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Cynthia Chase:
“The Unfinished Portable Rousseau”
(introduced by John Hicks)
12:00 p.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Coffee Break
12:15 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Marc Redfield:
“Mistake in Paul de Man: Violence, Quotation, Reading”
(introduced by Julien Weber)
1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Lunch Break
2:30 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.
Stephen Barker:
“Rhetoric and Rausch: de Man on Nietzsche on Value and Style”
(introduced by Jaye Austin Williams)
3:15 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Tom Cohen:
“Toxic Assets: Suicidal “deconstruction,” de Man’s remains, and Hillis’ cat, Rosie”
(introduced by Brandon Granier)
4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Coffee Break
4:30 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.
Ellen Burt:
“Reading Spectacles in Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert”
(introduced by Brook Haley)
5:15 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Etienne Balibar:
“Lovence in Rousseau’s Julie où la Nouvelle Héloïse”
(introduced by Lahela Minerbi)
SATURDAY APRIL 25 2009
135 Humanities Instructional Building
10:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
Coffee
10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
Walter Benn Michaels:
“Normativity, Materiality and Inequality: The politics of the letter in Paul de Man’s manuscripts”
(introduced by Katrina Harack)
11:15 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Kevin Newmark:
“Bewildering: The Passage from Language to Politics in the Writing of Paul de Man”
(introduced by Ronald Mendoza-de Jesus)
12:00 p.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Coffee Break
12:15 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Andrzej Warminski:
“Lightstruck: ‘Hegel on the Sublime’”
(introduced by Mathew Schilleman)
1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Lunch Break
2:30 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.
Nigel Mapp:
“Politics versus Theology? The Apotropaic in Paul de Man’s Rousseau”
(introduced by Ben Bishop)
3:15 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Martin McQuillan:
“Broken ‘Promises’: Rousseau, de Man, and Watergate”
(introduced by Garrett Bruen)
4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Coffee Break
4:30 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.
Steve Mailloux:
“Theotropic Logology? Paul de Man and Kenneth Burke”
(introduced by Paul Dahlgren)
5:15 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
J. Hillis Miller:
“Paul de Man at Work: What Good Is an Archive?”
(introduced by Megan Becker-Leckrone)
Avivah Zornberg at UCLA
The UCLA Department of English, UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, and UCLA Hillel
invite you to a seminar by
Avivah Zornberg
“‘And I am a Stranger:’ Becoming Ruth”
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
4:00 p.m.
Royce Hall, Room 306
Reception to Follow
Background sources for Dr. Zornberg’s talk are posted to Lowell Gallagher’s web page, here
Slavoj Žižek at UCLA
The UCLA Mellon Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory and the Department of Comparative Literature present a lecture by
Slavoj Žižek
“From the Critique of Religion to the Critique of Political Economy”
Wednesday April 15 at 5:00 in 314 Royce Hall
Call for papers: Special Issue on Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba Special Issue Editors: David Pan and Julia Reinhard Lupton
Link to Telos CFP here
In 1956, Carl Schmitt published a short volume entitled Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel, based on a seminar he led on the topic at the Volkshochschule in Düsseldorf the year before. We seek submissions of approximately 6,000 words. Please direct inquiries to David Pan, Department of German, the University of California, Irvine, dtpan@uci.edu. and Julia Reinhard Lupton, Department of English, the University of California, Irvine jrlupton@uci.edu.
ECT seminar Spring 2009: Public Lectures
April 15 Slavoj Zizek (5:00, Royce 314): “From the Critique of Religion to the Critique of Political Economy”
May 6 Catherine Malabou (5:00, Royce 314), “On ‘Post-traumatic subjectivity’”
(Recommended reading: Slavoj Zizek, “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject”; download here)
Mary Kelly at the Hammer: Thurs, Feb. 26, 7:00 PM
CANCELLED
Please join us for a talk by UCLA Professor of Art, and founding member of the Project in Experimental Critical Theory, Mary Kelly.
Mary Kelly has contributed extensively to the discourse of feminism and postmodernism through her large-scale narrative installations and theoretical writings. Her recent exhibitions include the 2008 Biennale of Sydney; Documenta XII, Kassel, 2007; WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007; and the 2004 Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is the author of Post-Partum Document (1983) and Imaging Desire (1996).
Points of Departure: Political Theology on the Scenes of Early Modernity
The University of California, Irvine
Feburary 20-21, 2009
Speakers: Etienne Balibar, Victoria Kahn, Graham Hammill, Jacques Lezra, Jane O. Newman, Lowell Gallagher, David Pan, Jennifer Rust, and Adam Sitze
In literary studies, the phrase “political theology” has come to designate the common sources and affiliations shared by politics and religion, as well as their antagonisms and internal resistances. In Renaissance and early modern studies, “political theology” unites scholars who aim to develop some of the texts and impulses associated with critical theory (especially psychoanalysis, later deconstruction, and the Baroque meditations of Walter Benjamin) in a direction defined by issues of secularization, sovereignty, and biopower in the Renaissance and in contemporary life. The phrase “political theology” has its origins in medieval iconographies of sacred kingship as distributed and displayed in the political, dramatic, and artistic forms of European civilization, along with the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and others in the seventeenth century. There is thus a special relationship between political theology as a critical approach to literature, politics, and thought and early modernity as a period and area of study.
This conference brings together established and emerging scholars in early modern studies who share an interest in the role that seventeenth century literature and thought has played in modern theories of secularization, sovereignty, and forms of life. We have asked speakers to address texts or moments from the early modern period that have served as a “point of departure” for later developments of politics and theology in modernity. Our goal is to present situated introductions to major figures in modern political theology, revealed through their exegetical engagements with early modern texts. The conference aims to make the case not only for the relevance of political theology as a critical discourse in the humanities today, but for the essential role that Renaissance and Baroque literature and thought have played in its pre- and post-histories.
A conference convened by Julia Lupton and Graham Hammill and sponsored by UCI’s Department of English, the Political Theology Group, the Program in Religious Studies, the Group for the Study of Early Cultures, and the Department of German, with additional support from UCLA’s Critical Religious Studies Group and the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo.
Ronald Judy to speak at UCLA
The UCLA Project in Experimental Critical Theory invites you to a lecture by
Ronald Judy
Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies
University of Pittsburgh,
on Wednesday, February 18 at 5:00 in Royce 306
entitled, “Reading Scenes in New World Literature in the Direction of Humanität”Podcast of Badiou's lecture
Podcast of lecture by Alain Badiou at UC Irvine on Feb. 7, 2009: Can the Word Jew be a Philosophical Concept?
Alain Badiou in Southern California (Winter 2009)
Feb 3: Negation and Formalization in the Avant-gardes of the 20th Century (Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, 7:30)
The lecture will be in the LA Times Theater at the Art Center’s main campus in Pasadena. The Art Center campus is located at 1700 Lida Street, Pasadena, CA 91103. For parking, follow the driveway entrance to the end. Park anywhere in the lot and enter the building from the upper south wing, which is the closest and most convenient entrance. Signs will mark the way. The lecture is free and open to the public. Seating, however, is limited. Directions to the Art Center are available here
Feb. 4: Life and Immortality: Body-of-Truth and Incorporation (5:00, Royce 314, UCLA)
Feb. 6: Toward a New Signification of the Sartrean Idea of ‘Engaged Artist’ (Cal Arts; 6:00 pm in room F200)
Feb. 7: Can the Word ‘Jew’ be a Philosophical Concept? (3:00 135 Humanities Instructional Building, UC Irvine)