Alain Badiou’s play, The Incident at Antioch
Alain Badiou’s play, The Incident at Antioch, is now available in a French-English edition from Columbia University Press. You can receive a 30% discount if you go to the CUP website, and use this promo code: INCBAD
MATMOS in LA
Matmos
in The Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever
With Horse Lords
Monday, February 25th, 2013
Doors 8pm – Show 9pm
Tickets are $25 – hollywoodforever.ticketfly.com
PARKING IS FREE ON SITE
Badiou's Plato's Republic
Alain Badiou’s “hyper-translation” of Plato’s Republic is now available from Columbia University Press. If you purchase it through the web link here and enter the promo code “PLABAD” you will receive a 30% discount.
The Neighbor Three Inquiries in Political Theology, with a new Preface
University of Chicago Press
Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard
216 pages | 6 line drawings | 6 × 9 | © 2006, 2013
TRIOS
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one’s neighbor as oneself. “Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it,” he proposed, “as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment.” After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, and Stalinism, Leviticus 19:18 seems even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined.
In The Neighbor, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today’s central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt’s political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In “Miracles Happen,” Eric L. Santner extends the book’s exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek’s “Neighbors and Other Monsters” reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought.
A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, The Neighbor has proven to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. This new edition contains a new preface by the authors.
Introduction
Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor
Kenneth Reinhard
Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor
Eric L. Santner
Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence
Slavoj Zizek
http://www.amazon.com/The-Neighbor-Inquiries-Political-Theology/dp/022604520X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1354229301&sr=8-3&keywords=reinhard+neighbor
Call for Applications
Theory and Theater
The UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory is now accepting applications for its Winter and Spring 2013 core seminar, which will be on “Theory and Theater.” Please send your application by November 15 to the ECT Program, c/o Michelle Anderson, Student Affairs Officer, Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA manderson@humnet.ucla.edu. Please include your name, email address, the Ph.D. or MFA program you are enrolled in, your year in the program and expected date of degree, and the name of your thesis or graduate advisor. Please describe your background and interests in critical theory (no more than one page).
According to Plato, “there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Republic, 607b5–6) – a quarrel above all between philosophy and what Plato considers to be the most essentially mimetic form of poetry, theater (from the Greek θεᾶσθαι, meaning to behold or see). Plato argues that, as the imitative art par excellence, theater is ontologically, epistemologically, and ethically inferior to philosophy, which strives to penetrate the shadows of representation in order to attain the reality of ideas. But if there is a fundamental conflict (or even, as Plato suggests, a power struggle) between philosophy and theater, philosophy is associated with theory [θεωρία] which comes from the same root as theater, θεα. So philosophy-theory and poetry-theater are not only antagonists vying for political and social influence, but also rival siblings, each claiming to be the legitimate expression of a certain mode of visuality. Indeed, for Aristotle poetry (and above all theater) is closely allied with philosophy, as a parallel route on the way to universal truths. What then do theory and theater have in common, and what can they learn from each other? What kind of thinking is specific to the textual and performative conditions of theater? How does theater constitute a laboratory for aesthetic, conceptual, and political experimentation? And how does theoretical philosophy depend on models of knowledge and action that derive from theater? In what sense is theorizing not simply an act of description or abstraction, but performative and even theatrical? And how have philosophy and theater converged in their unfoldings after Plato, producing new hybrid forms in modernity and the contemporary world?
The seminar will begin in the winter by considering the Greek origins of both theater and philosophy in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle, in relation to commentaries by modern thinkers such as Hegel, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Wagner, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, Lacan, Adorno, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou, Butler, Žižek, and Zupančič. Theatrical topics will include tragedy, comedy, opera, and marionette theater. The seminar will include talks and sessions lead by visiting scholars, and will be held in conjunction with a series of lectures by Maestro James Conlon (Music Director of LA Opera, and Regents’ Lecturer at UCLA during Winter 2013) and a visit to LA Opera’s production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. In the spring, the seminar will concentrate on modern and recent theory and theater, including Shakespeare, Brecht, Artaud, Beckett, and Badiou, as well as Noh plays and Chinese Opera. Again the seminar will involve several guest speakers, and will include two weeks of sessions lead by Alain Badiou, who will be Regents’ Lecturer at UCLA during Spring 2013. Other experimental theatrical events are also planned for spring quarter.
The Philosopher Watches the Eclipse
Alain Badiou in Southern California: May 2012
The UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory is proud to welcome
Alain Badiou on the occasion of the 10th year of his visits to Southern California.On Wednesday, May 23rd at 4:00 Badiou will present a lecture, “Towards a Contemporary Conception of the Absolute,” in the Popper Theatre in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA.
On Saturday, May 19th, Alain Badiou will present a lecture and participate in a symposium entitled “Changing the World: Between History and Politics” at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (at the Graduate Art Program location: 950 S. Raymond Ave. Pasadena, CA)
Schedule
2:00 pm – 4:30 pm: talks
Nathan Brown (UC-Davis): “Rational Kernel, Real Movement: Alain Badiou and Théorie Communiste in the Age of Riots”
Kenneth Reinhard (UCLA): “The Use of Forcing”
Jason E. Smith (ACCD): “From Riot to Insurrection: History and Politics in Badiou”
4:30 – 5:00 pm: Break
5:00 – 6:00 pm: Keynote Lecture by Alain Badiou
6:00 – 6:30 pm: Roundtable
For more information, please contact Jason Smith at Jason.Smith@artcenter.edu
Art Center College of Design
Graduate Art Program
950 S. Raymond Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91105
ECT Seminar Spring 2012 Alain Badiou: Worlds, Events, Truths
ECT Seminar Spring 2012
Alain Badiou: Worlds, Events, Truths
Tues. April 3 ECT Symposium: Stathis Gourgouris
5:00 CL seminar room
“Archē and Infinity of a Political Cosmos”
1. April 5 Introduction
Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy
Tues. April 10 ECT Symposium: Michael Saman
5:00 CL seminar room
“Goethe, Lévi-Strauss, and the Science of the Concrete”
2. April 12 Neighborhoods
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, “Everything that belongs to a whole,” “Action, manor of the subject,” “Algebra and Topology,” “Neighborhoods”); “The Neighborhood,” “Toward a Philosophy of the Open” (pdf and video)
Wed. April 18 ECT Symposium: Deborah Achtenberg
noon, Faculty Center
“Derrida Between Moses and Elijah”
3. April 19 Situations
Badiou, Being and Event, “Introduction,” selections from Parts I-III (the ontology of situations)
Tues. April 24 ECT Symposium: Frédéric Worms
5:00 CL seminar room
“Critical Vitalism: a thread through French twentieth century philosophy and today’s new philosophical problems”
4. April 26 Badiou, Being and Event, selections from Parts IV and V (events)
Wed. May 2 ECT Symposium: Simone Pinet
5:00 CL Seminar Room
“World Maps, Local Languages”
5. May 3 Bruno Bosteels
Badiou, Being and Event, selections from Parts VII and VIII
(truth and the subject: the generic and forcing)
Bruno Bosteels, “World and Event”
6. May 10 Worlds
Jason Smith and Ken Reinhard
Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Book I
Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy
7. May 17 Seminar with Alain Badiou
1. Analytic study: the transcendental
Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Book II, Greater Logic 1: The Transcendental
Sat. May 19 Art Center (Pasadena) conference:
“Changing the World”
Alain Badiou, Jason Smith, Nathan Brown, Ken Reinhard
Mon. May 21 Lecture by Emily Apter 4:00, Humanities 193
“Translation at the Checkpoint: On States, Borders, and the Limits of Sovereignty in Translation Theory”
8. Tues. May 22, 5:00 Seminar with Alain Badiou
2. Dialectic study: modification, fact, weak change, event
Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Book V: The Four Forms of Change
Wed. May 23, 4:00 ECT Symposium: Alain Badiou
“Towards a Contemporary Conception of the Absolute”
Popper Theatre in Schoenberg Hall
9. May 31 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Book VI: Theory of Points
10. June 7 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Book VII: What is a Body?
ECT Symposium
Please join us on Tuesday April 3 at 5:00 in the Comparative Literature Seminar Room (Humanities 348) for an ECT Symposium with
Stathis Gourgouris
Professor of Comparative Literature, UCLA
entitled
“Archē and Infinity of a Political Cosmos”
Stathis Gourgouris was born in Hollywood and grew up in Athens, Greece. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA in 1990. He has taught Comparative Literature at Princeton and Columbia, and has been Visiting Professor at Yale (European Studies), the University of Michigan (Comparative Literature and the International Institute), and the National Polytechnic in Athens (Graduate Program of Epistemology). He was a National Endowment of the Humanities recipient in 2003 (as a Senior Fellow in the American School of Classical Studies in Athens), as well as Senior Fellow at the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University (2000). He serves currently on the Board of Supervisors of the English Institute, Harvard University, and has recently been elected President of the Modern Greek Studies Association.
He has published two books: Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford UP, 1996) – translated in Serbo-Croatian (Belgrade Circle, 2005); Greek translation forthcoming (Kritiki, 2006) – and Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford UP, 2003) – Greek translation published by Nefeli (2005). In addition to literary writings, he has written articles on politics, psychoanalysis, music, and film studies, published in boundary 2, South Atlantic Quarterly, Thesis Eleven, New Literary History, Performing Arts Journal, Qui Parle, Cardozo Law Review, Strategies, Diaspora, Social Text, as well as in journals in Greece, France, Italy, Serbia, Turkey, and Egypt.
He is a poet, with three books of poetry in Greek, and many poems published in English in anthologies and journals such as Harvard Review, Jacaranda Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Compages, LA Weekly. He has translated various Greek poets in English, notably Yiannis Patilis’ Camel of Darkness (Selected Poems 1970-1990) in the Quarterly Review of Literature Book Series (1997), as well as the poetry of Heiner Müller and Carolyn Forché into Greek.
CALL FOR PAPERS
“What Can a Body Do? Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Symptom”
The Psychoanalysis Reading Group at Cornell University invites submissions for its upcoming annual conference
Featuring Keynote Speaker Tim Dean, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo (SUNY); author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009), Beyond Sexuality (2000), and Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhabiting the Ground (1991); co-editor of A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy (2008) and Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (2001).
April 20-21, 2012
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
What does the symptom know about the body, and how much of that knowledge can it tell? Psychoanalysis operates under the hypothesis of a body de-natured from the organism. According to Jacques Lacan, this is why we think: as he notes, the subject “thinks as a consequence of the fact that a structure, that of language … carves up his body, a structure that has nothing to do with anatomy. Witness the hysteric.” De-natured from its status as organism, the body emerges as parceled and the symptom as “truth taking shape” (Lacan). The symptom “holds” the body: we do not want to let the symptom go, for the jouissance tied to its eruption props up our very being. In analysis, then, language works on the symptom: the analyst maneuvers to fragment the chain of meaning that has sustained the subject’s individual body at the expense of its carved one, inviting the subject to encounter the truth of the structure, desire borne of language’s effects on the body. Encountering such effects, however, threatens the stability of both the subject’s “self” as well as its link to the social.
The symptom also speaks to the specificity of psychoanalysis as a clinical praxis; to the limits of its relevance for interpreting social or cultural phenomena beyond the clinic; and to the possibilities for interpretation implied by Lacan’s late reformulation, following the literary example of James Joyce, of the symptom as sinthome, “a signifier that would have no sense at all, just like the Real.” If the clinic of the neurotic symptom is the place where psychoanalysis thinks itself, what kind of knowledge can the analysand articulate about psychoanalysis as a practice in light of the sinthome’s resistance to analysis? To what extent does the sinthome’s relationship to knowledge and truth invite us to historicize the many ways—clinical, scientific, mathematical, political and aesthetic—the symptom both enables and limits the production of its perverse truth?
If psychoanalysis provides a support for the work of the symptom as a singular structure through which the body exerts itself in excess of both the ego’s place within the social link and discursive taming of the body, how might we theorize this work’s ability to extend into other terrains? From Freud’s social and theological investigations (Moses and Monotheism or Totem and Taboo) to Lacan’s claim that woman is the symptom of man to Octave Mannoni’s anthropologies (Prospero and Caliban) to the Marxism of Louis Althusser (“symptomatic reading”) or Slavoj Žižek (“How Marx Invented the Symptom”) to, most recently, Tim Dean’s work on different social organizations of sexual practice, psychoanalysis moves beyond the clinic to consider the logic of bodies within and against the limits of the social world. How does psychoanalytic thought, in its labor to enter into such practices, stay loyal to Lacan’s insistence that it is the unconscious, not the analyst, that engages in the work of interpretation? Inversely, how might the internal logic of psychoanalytic thought depend on psychoanalysis’s ability to articulate itself to this manifold of social activities, from literature to law, aesthetics to anthropology?
The deadline for submission of abstracts is February 1, 2012. Abstracts should not exceed 250 words; presenters will have 25 minutes each for their presentations with ample time for discussion afterward. Please send abstracts to the Psychoanalysis Reading Group at pargconference@gmail.edu. Notices of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2012.
ANDY HAMILTON
ANDY HAMILTON
“The Aesthetics of Imperfection and the Art of Recording”
SEPTEMBER 27, 2011
4:00 PM
HUMANITIES 193 UCLA
Andy Hamilton teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham. His areas of research include Philosophy of Mind, History of 19th and 20th Century Philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Aesthetics with a special emphasis on music. He is also a jazz pianist and writes for “The Wire” and other contemporary music magazines on contemporary composition and improvised music. Among his numerous publications is the book Aesthetics and Music (2007). For further information on his articles on philosophy and music please visit: www.andyhamilton.org.uk
CO-SPONSORED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND THE DEPARTMENT OF MUSICOLOGY
Eric Santner: The New Idolatry: Religious Thinking in the Un-Commonwealth of America
Eric Santner on the UC Press blog on the new idolatry
Badiou the Demon
Here is a link to a youtube video of Alain Badiou and Joe Litvak in a scene from Badiou’s play, Ahmed the Philosopher. The scene was part of a conference and performance on Badiou’s Drama at the HAU 1 theater in Berlin on July 2, 2011, sponsored by the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung. Speakers at the conference including Alain Badiou, Joe Litvak, Lee Edelman, Eric Santner, Ward Blanton, Martin Treml, and Ken Reinhard. A performance composed of scenes from Ahmed the Philosopher and Incident at Antioch was arranged by Sommer Ulrickson and performed by her and other actors.
Call for Papers: Jacques Derrida Today Conference
Call for Papers: Jacques Derrida Today Conference
11-13 July 2012
University of California, Irvine, USA.
Hosted by Professor Stephen Barker (UCI)
Keynotes
Due Date for Abstracts and Panel Proposals: 21 November 2011.
Submissions
Individual Abstracts & Panel Proposals should be sent as an attachment to: derridatodayconference@gmail.com
All enquiries about the conference only, to this email address.
LA Times essay on "Can Art and Politics Be Thought?"
Mark Swed’s review of the conference
Can Art and Politics Be Thought?
The UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory and the Hammer Museum present a conference/performance
on June 4 & 5, 2011 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles:
Can Art and Politics Be Thought? Practices, Possibilities, Pitfalls
Curated by Kenneth Reinhard and Drew Daniel
Part 1: Saturday June 4, 1:00-6:00
(in the Billy Wilder Theater)
Joshua Clover, “Between Centuries: Distance and the Epic”
(intro by Jason Smith)
Steve Goodman, The Martial Arts of Sonic Hauntology”
(intro Robert Fink)
Lauren Berlant, “On the Desire for the Political”
(intro by Sianne Ngai)
Matthew Barney
Interview with Drew Daniel
Part 2: Saturday June 4, 8:00-11:00
Ultra-Red (in Hammer gallery)
Jay Lesser (in Hammer atrium)
Kode9 (in Hammer Billy Wilder Theater)
Matmos (and guests) (in Hammer Billy Wilder Theater)
Part 3: Sunday June 5, 1:00-6:00
(in the Billy Wilder Theater)
Drew Daniel, “All Sound is Queer”
(intro by Julia Lupton)
Joan Copjec, “The Fate of the Image in Church History and the Modern State”
(intro by Eleanor Kaufman)
Allan Sekula, “The Forgotten Space”
(intro by Mary Kelly)
Alain Badiou, “Negation and Formalization”
(intro by Ken Reinhard)
Part 4: Sunday, June 5, 8:00-10:00
(in the Billy Wilder Theater)
Reading of scenes from Alain Badiou’s plays Incident at Antioch and Ahmed the Philosopher
directed by Stephen Barker
introduction by Ken Reinhard
Followed by a discussion with Alain Badiou
Cal Arts Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series
Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series
The 2010-2011 lecture series are hosted by Arne De Boever (Fall) and Chandra Khan (Spring). All lectures are open to the public. For a pdf of the lecture series postcard, please contact the organizing faculty member [1].
Fall 2010
TIMOTHY MORTON, “Hyperobjects”
October 7th, Thursday. 7:30pm, CAFÉ A at CALARTS.
Timothy Morton [2] is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of California, Davis. His interests include ecotheory, philosophy, biology, physical sciences, literary theory, food studies, sound and music, materialism, poetics, Romanticism, Buddhism, and the eighteenth century. He has published nine books, the most recent of which are Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought.
CATHERINE MALABOU, “Plasticity: Looking For New Political Modes of Being”
November 9th, Tuesday. 7:30pm, Ahmanson Auditorium at MOCA Grand Avenue.
For directions, please consult moca.org [3].
Catherine Malabou teaches philosophy at the University of Paris X-Nanterre and is Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Her work articulates the notion of plasticity at the crossroads of philosophy and neuroscience. Her publications in English include The Future of Hegel, Counterpath (with Jacques Derrida), What Should We Do With Our Brain?, and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. This event will be preceded by an afternoon conference on biology, technology, and the arts [4].
BONNIE HONIG, “Antigone, Interrupted: Greek Tragedy and the Future of Humanism”
December 2nd, Thursday. 7:30pm, CAFÉ A at CALARTS.
Bonnie Honig is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is also Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation and appointed (courtesy) at Northwestern Law School. She is the author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Democracy and the Foreigner, and Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Her current project is about Sophocles’ Antigone.
Call for Papers: THE NEIGHBOR
Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference, University of California, Berkeley
March 11-13, 2011
Keynote Speaker:
Kenneth Reinhard
Departments of English and Comparative Literature,
Director, Program in Experimental Critical Theory
UCLA
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: JANUARY 3, 2011
The image of “the neighbor” evokes both nearness and distance, familiarity and foreignness, belonging and isolation. Pregnant with implications for kinship, community, and affiliation particular to the German-speaking world, the concept of “the neighbor” has engendered numerous meditations on hospitality and love by thinkers from Luther and Kant to Freud, Schmitt, and Rosenzweig. At the same time, the presence of neighbors has often served as the basis for ostracism and exclusion, as an incitement to war, or as fuel for fantasies about local and global neighborhoods. How do we identify a “neighbor” or “neighborhood” in our current age of increased migration and mobility? How might an examination of these themes enrich our understanding of not only genocide and violence but also exchange, aid, and co-operation?
For the conference, we are encouraging a comparative approach by seeking perspectives on “neighbors” and “neighborhoods” from scholars working in literature, history, linguistics, film, media studies, anthropology, and the social sciences. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• The Notion of Neighbors Inside and Outside the European Union
• Reactions in Theology, Philosophy, or Ethics to the Imperative “Love Your Neighbor”
• The Role of the Neighbor in Identity Formation and Identity Politics
• The Status of Friends, Enemies, and Neighbors in Geographical and Territorial Disputes
• Rivalries and Diplomacy between Neighbors on a Local, Regional, or National Scale
• The Construction of Dialects vis-à-vis Neighbors
• Linguistic Interaction between Neighboring Regions
• Community, Isolation, or Gentrification in Urban Neighborhoods
• The Kiez in Berlin, Grätzl in Vienna, or Veedel in Cologne
• Images of Neighborhoods in Suburban and Rural Settings
• The Subjection of Neighbors to Suspicion and Surveillance
• Cohabitation, Intimacy and Proximity in Collective Memory
• The Status of the Neighbor Before and After die Wende
• Media and Neighbors in the Global Village
Please send a 250-word abstract in English or German with a separate cover sheet indicating the proposed title, author’s name, affiliation, and e-mail address to neighbor@berkeley.edu
UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory
The UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory now has its own website: http://ect.humnet.ucla.edu
Please check the new website for information on the 2010-2011 seminar on “Philosophy, Art, Politics” and the graduate certificate program.
Wagner in LA: The Music of the 21st Century?
A conference sponsored by the UCLA Department of Comparative Literature, the Program in Experimental Critical Theory, The Hammer Museum, and LA Opera
With generous support from the UC Humanities Research Institute, the UCLA Dean of Humanities, the German DAAD Foundation, the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies, UCLA R.U. Nelson Fund in Music, the UCLA Department of Musicology, the UCLA Department of Germanic Languages, and the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance
June 1st
1:00 Juliet Koss, Chair, Department of Art History, Scripps College
“Spectral Gesamtkunstwerk”
2:30 Clemens Risi, Professor of Theater, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Berlin
“Re-Inventing Bayreuth for the 21st Century:
The 2007 Meistersinger as a Self-Reflection of Performance History”
4:00 David Levin, Professor of German and Theater and Performance, University of Chicago
“The Ring in Pieces: Götterdämmerung (Stuttgart Opera, Peter Konwitschny, 2002-2003)
5:30 Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
“Wagner as a Christian Jew: The Alternate Endings of The Twilight of the Gods”
7:00 RECEPTION (at the Hammer café)
June 2nd
1:00 John Deathridge, Chair, Department of Music, King’s College, London
“Reality and Image: Wagner in Film”
2:30 Mary Ann Smart, Professor of Musicology, UC Berkeley
“The Performative Wagnerite: from Patrice Chéreau to Achim Freyer”
4:00 Fredric Jameson, Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies, Duke University
“Freedom and Envy: Wagner as Dramatist”
5:30 Alain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris
“Wagner, a Musician for the Future”
(Photo: Arnold Bezuyen as Loge in LA Opera’s production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold / courtesy of Monika Rittershaus/LA Opera)
Lee Edelman and Joe Litvak
Please join us for two events in Irvine on Wednesday, April 21:
Joseph Litvak,
Professor of English at Tufts University:
“Badiou the Comedian: Ahmed the Philosopher”
12:00-2:00 pm
Humanities Gateway 1030, UC Irvine
The lecture by Joseph Litvak will be preceded by a short dramatic reading from Alain Badiou’s play, Ahmed the Philosopher, translation in progress by Professor Litvak. This talk is presented by the Critical Theory Emphasis at UCI.
Lee Edelman,
Fletcher Professor of English at Tufts University:
“Against Survival: Queerness and the Zero”
Professor Edelman’s talk is the third of a three part seminar entitled “Against Survival.” This session will assume familiarity with Alain Badiou’s book Ethics and Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games. The full schedule of Professor Edelman’s seminar is below.
4:00-6:00 pm,
Humanities Gateway 1030, UC Irvine
—————-
The UC Irvine Critical Theory Emphasis Presents
Lee Edelman
“AGAINST SURVIVAL”
Part 1: “Queerness and the Archive,” April 19, 4:00 p.m.
Part 2: “Queerness and the Zero,” April 20, 4:00 p.m.
Part 3: “Queerness and Radical Evil,” April 21, 4:00 p.m.
All seminars will be held in 1030 Humanities Gateway and are open to the
public. Light refreshments will be served.
Professor Edelman recommends the following as background for the seminars: for Part 1, familiarity with Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression and with Hamlet; for Part 2, D. A. Miller’s essay “Anal Rope” and Pedro Almodovar’s film Bad Education; for part 3, familiarity
with Alain Badiou’s Ethics and Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games.
Matmos at UCLA! Drew Daniel on Melancholia and Deleuze!
Drew Daniel, 1/2 of Matmos and Assistant Professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University speaks on “How to De-Materialize Melancholy” on Monday April 12 at 4:00 in Royce 314.
The experimental music group Matmos performs and talks at UCLA on April 13, 2010, 6:00 pm at the Experimental Digital Arts Space at the Broad Art Center.
more info
Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, aided and abetted by many others. In their recordings and live performances over the last nine years, Matmos have used the sounds of: amplified crayfish nerve tissue, the pages of bibles turning, a bowed five string banjo, slowed down whistles and kisses, water hitting copper plates, the runout groove of a vinyl record, a $5.00 electric guitar, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, violins, rat cages, tanks of helium, violas, human skulls, cellos, peck horns, tubas, cards shuffling, field recordings of conversations in hot tubs, frequency response tests for defective hearing aids, a steel guitar recorded in a sewer, electrical interference generated by laser eye surgery, whoopee cushions and balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones on a dinner plate, Polish trains, insects, ukelele, aspirin tablets hitting a drum kit from across the room, dogs barking, people reading aloud, life support systems and inflatable blankets, records chosen by the roll of dice, an acupuncture point detector conducting electrical current through human skin, rock salt crunching underfoot, solid gold coins spinning on bars of solid silver, the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun, a five gallon bucket of oatmeal.
Recovered Voices Conference: Staging Suppressed Opera of the Early 20th Century
For more information, please follow this link to the Orel Foundation web site.
A Conference Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and the OREL Foundation
Additional funding by: The “1939” Club and The Natalie Limonick Endowment in Jewish Civilization
Registration is required. Please click here to register.
The Nazi regime was not only responsible for the destruction of millions of lives, but also for the suppression of countless works of art, literature, and music. These works, grotesquely termed “degenerate art” by the Nazis, were banned, and the artists, Jewish and non-Jewish, were branded enemies of the state. Thousands were murdered, some went into hiding, and some escaped, but even many of the “fortunate” ones were ruined by the trauma. Although by now this is a well-known story, it continues to unfold in its tragic details, and we are only beginning to truly understand the enormity of the loss.
The work of the historian is not only to document this loss; we can also make some small contribution to undoing this terrible story: forgotten artists and composers can be brought back to public attention, lost masterpieces can be retrieved. And great music can be heard again and enter into its rightful place as part of the repertory. This conference, co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies the OREL Foundation is inspired by James Conlon and the Los Angeles Opera’s “Recovered Voices” project, an ongoing commitment to stage masterpieces of 20th-century European opera that were suppressed by the Third Reich. LA Opera’s project has richly demonstrated that an enormous amount of this music—much of it by composers little known or unknown in America—is not only worthy of retrieval from the abyss of historical circumstances, but by any standard is great and capable of speaking to us urgently and eloquently today.
The OREL Foundation is dedicated to helping restore these works to the stage, concert halls and chamber music venues, whether formal or informal. The Foundation encourages musicians, scholars and music lovers to become better acquainted with these composers and their works, many of which would certainly be better known today, but for the catastrophe of their history. James Conlon, whose work inspired the creation of the OREL Foundation, has been a tireless champion of this music, performing it frequently, making important recordings of many previously under-performed composers, and encouraging musicians all over the world to consider and perform these composers whenever possible.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
UCLA Faculty Center, California Room
Speakers include Albrecht Dümling, Martin Goldsmith, Harvey Sachs, Michael Beckerman, Adrian Daub, David Levin, and Sigrid Weigel.
8:00 PM • Schoenberg Hall
FREE performance by: Jeffrey Kahane, Daniel Hope and members of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in an all Schulhoff program.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
UCLA Faculty Center, Sequoia Room
Speakers include Michael Haas, Bret Werb, Ryan Minor, Brigid Cohen, Peter Franklin, Christopher Hailey, Ian Judge, Michael Hackett, and Ken Reinhard.
7:30 PM • Keynote Address
James Conlon (Richard Seaver Music Director, LA Opera)
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
Bruno Bosteels at UCLA
Please join us for two talks by
Bruno Bosteels (Cornell University) at UCLA this week:
The UCLA Departments of Spanish and Portuguese
And Comparative Literature present
“Marx and Martí:
Logics of the Disencounter”
Wed. Feb. 24, 2010 at 4:30 in Rolfe 4302
The UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory
and the Department of Comparative Literature present
“Badiou and Hegel”
Thursday, February 25 at 3:00 in Humanities 348.
Bruno Bosteels is the author of Badiou o el recomienzo del materialismo dialéctico (2007), Badiou and Politics (2010) and Marx and Freud in Latin America (expected 2010). He is currently preparing a manuscript entitled, After Borges: Literature and Antiphilosophy. He is also the translator of several books by Alain Badiou: Theory of the Subject (Continuum, 2009), Can Politics Be Thought? followed by An Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of State, and What Is Antiphilosophy? Essays on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Lacan (both for Duke University Press). He is the author of dozens of articles on modern Latin American literature and culture, and on contemporary European philosophy and political theory. His research interests further include the crossovers between art, literature, theory, and cartography; the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s; decadence, dandyism, and anarchy at the turn between the 19th and 20th centuries; the communist hypothesis; cultural studies and critical theory; and the reception of Marx and Freud in Latin America. He currently serves as the general editor of diacritics.
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).
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
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)
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