What is Global Critical Theory? Part 3
All seminars will take place on Zoom. Links to be found underneath each session description.
– Spring Term –
Jan 17 – 4pm GMT
Speaker: Matthieu Renault, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (France)
Topic: Rewriting the “Decline of the West” in the Black Atlantic
Contact: s.bromberg[@] gold.ac.uk
About the talk
What happens, from both theoretical and political viewpoints, when intra-Western notions and laments on the “decline of the West” – pessimistic, conservative, and sometimes openly fascist – are taken up, translated and transformed from a non-Western perspective – with emancipatory or even revolutionary aims? My talk will begin to explore this question by examining Caribbean and African-American rewritings of this theme as it found its inaugural formula in Oswald Spengler’s (in)famous The Decline of the West (1918-1922).
After briefly tracing back the massive transatlantic circulations of Spengler’s philosophy in the interwar period, I will focus on the writings of key figures in twentieth-century black radical thought: W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, George Schuyler, and Malcolm X.
Matthieu Renault is Professor in “Critical history of philosophy” at the Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (France), and a member of the Research Team on Philosophical Rationalities and Knowledge (ERRaPhiS). His research focuses on the relationships between philosophy and non-European societies, the (post)imperial history of knowledge and its minority rewritings (class-gender-race). He is the author of: Frantz Fanon. De l’anticolonialisme à la critique postcoloniale (Éditions Amsterdam, 2011) ; L’Amérique de John Locke. L’expansion coloniale de la philosophie européenne (Éditions Amsterdam, 2014) ; C.L.R. James. La vie révolutionnaire d’un « Platon noir » (La Découverte, 2016) ; L’empire de la révolution. Lénine et les musulmans de Russie (Syllepse, 2017) ; W.E.B. Du Bois. Double conscience et condition raciale, with Magali Bessone (Éditions Amsterdam, 2021,) ; and, forthcoming, Maîtres et esclaves. Archives du Laboratoire d’analyse des Mythologiques de la modernité (Les Presses du réel, 2024) Kollontaï. Défaire la famille, refaire l’amour (La Fabrique, 2024), with Olga Bronnikova.
Feb 21 – 4pm GMT
Speaker: Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University
Topic: Marx’s Critique of Capitalist Slavery
REGISTER HERE for the zoom link
About the talk
The historicist debate on capitalism and slavery since Eric Williams has largely either ignored Marx entirely while denying the need to define its object (capitalism), or tended to cherry pick random passages from his ouevre that mention slavery. In this talk I will argue in contrast that Marx’s critique of political economy offers the only adequate means to theorise capitalist slavery as a social form, and furthermore, that the construction of this concept (capitalist slavery) must proceed not at random, but in systematic relation to the many relevant concepts in Marx’s critique: profit vs. surplus value, labor vs. labor power, constant vs. variable capital, etc.
Nick Nesbitt is Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (French) with a Minor in Brazilian Portuguese from Harvard University. He has previously taught at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and at Miami University (Ohio), and in 2003-4 he was a Mellon Fellow at the Cornell University Society for the Humanities. He is the author of Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Liverpool 2013); Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Virginia 2008); and Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Virginia 2003). He is also the editor of The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today (Duke 2017), Toussaint Louverture: The Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2008); co-editor of Revolutions for the Future: May ’68 and the Prague Spring (Suture 2020); and co-editor (with Brian Hulse) of Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Music (Ashgate 2010). His most recent book is entitled The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (Virginia, 2022).
March 27 – 4pm GMT
Speaker: Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier, University of Fribourg
Topic: Frantz Fanon and the Critical History of Philosophy
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About the talk
Within a critical history of philosophy, Frantz Fanon is a paradoxical figure. Though he has become a symbol of a fundamental epistemological turn and a paramount figure in new narratives of the history of philosophy, Fanon didn’t subject his own use of the Modern European canon to much questioning. How are we to interpret the disjunction between these two facets of his writing? How is Fanon’s thought connected to the contemporary project of a critical history of philosophy?
To answer this question, I will discuss Fanon’s philosophical practice and the specific ways in which he took up the task of « critique ». I will also draw on a number of contemporary readings of Fanon in order to contrast the philosophical meaning each of them gives to Fanon’s epistemological rupture. This interpretation, I will claim, depends on how we think of the relationship between the critical philosophy of race on the one hand, and the critical history of philosophy on the other – i.e. it depends on the divergent, and somewhat contradictory, meanings imparted to critique at this historical juncture.
About the speaker
Lucie K. Mercier is Senior Researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She was previously Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, London, as well as Visiting Fellow at the University of Paris 8 and at the Program in Critical Theory of UC Berkeley. She recently published ‘The Translatability of Experience: On Fanon’s Language Puzzle’ (Critical Times 6(1), 2023) and ‘Warding Off the Ghosts in the Historiography of Philosophy’, (Critical Philosophy of Race 10(1), 2022).She is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective and is currently working on a book-length project on Fanon’s philosophy.
April 24 – 4pm BST
Speaker: Fadi A. Bardawil, Princeton University
Topic: An Inventory of Traces: Palestinian Existence in Edward Said’s Early Works
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In the last pages of Orientalism, under the subheading “The Personal Dimension,” Edward Said borrows Antonio Gramsci’s words about the imperative to compile an inventory of the historical processes that have deposited in someone an infinity of traces as a starting point for a critical elaboration. Orientalism, Said then notes, is an attempt to “inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.” This talk takes as its starting point Said’s observation to investigate how his own Metropolitan Palestinian exilic experience informed his early conceptualization of the relation between knowledge and power, which will be further developed in his trilogy Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981).
Fadi A. Bardawil, is visiting research scholar in the department of Near Eastern Studies and visiting Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Princeton.
His work investigates the traditions of intellectual inquiry and modalities of political engagement of contemporary Arab thinkers at home and in the diaspora, and their friction with the different genealogies of critical theory (Frankfurt school, anti-colonial and post-colonial). In doing so, his research explores how the different relationships to cultural production (creating and thinking), political practice (acting) and generational dwelling (living) in different sites (Global North/South), can help us reckon with questions of power, emancipation and solidarity in an increasingly interconnected, yet fragmented world.
His recent Arabic and English writings have appeared in American Ethnologist, boundary 2; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; The Journal for Palestine Studies (Arabic edition); al-Jumhuriya; The Immanent Frame; Megaphone; Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online; South Atlantic Quarterly; and World Records Journal.
He is the author of Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke UP, 2020).
– Autumn Term –
Nov 23 – 12:00 – 13:30 GMT
Speaker: Yuji Nishiyama, Tokyo Metropolitan University
Topic: The Trials of Untranslatable: Derrida in Japan & The Association for Deconstruction
Zoom link: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUodOqrqDktGtOUbfKYeS1Tl0DhMcqBzl-X
My presentation on Derrida in Japan consists of two parts: Derrida’s visit in Japan and a report of our activities at the Association for Deconstruction.
Like other French thinkers, such as Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard, etc., Jacques Derrida was invited three times to Japan (1983, 1984 and 1992), and on each visit received philosophical inspiration from the “civilization developing outside of all logocentrism” (Of Grammatology). He wrote some articles in collaboration with Japanese (“Letter to a Japanese Friend,” “Faxitexture,” “Aletheia,” etc.), two books (The Language of the Other, The Translation and/or the Performance) and interviews (including a long one about Sartre) which are published only in Japanese. What was Derrida’s intellectual relationship with Japanese culture? What kind of essential inspiration did his journey on the island country give his philosophy?
In 2013, in Tokyo, the Association for Deconstruction was founded by five initiators: Satoshi Ukai, Kazuisa Fujimoto, Yusuke Miyazaki, Daisuke Kamei and myself. The association aims to allow free discussion on the thought of deconstruction in Derrida and other thinkers or writers. We organize seminars, run a site containing information on deconstruction, build a database of books and articles, and advance collaboration between Japanese and foreign researchers. I will make a report on our research activities developed by the Association for Deconstruction.
Yuji NISHIYAMA is Professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University and Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie (2010-2016). He works on modern French philosophy, focusing on Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot. He is the author of Literature as Contestation: Solitude, Friendship and Community in Maurice Blanchot (Ochanomizu-syobô 2007), The Right to Philosophy (with DVD, Keiso-syobo, 2011) and Imagining an Abandoned Land, Listening to the Departed after Fukushima (Lambert, 2016), and the editor of Philosophy and the University (Miraisya, 2009) The Humanities and the Institution (Miraisya, 2013), Never-ending Derrida (Hoseidaigaku, 2016) and To breathe through Words now: Humanities in the Age of Viruses (Keiso-syobo, 2021). He is also the Japanese translator of books and articles by Jacques Derrida (The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. I & II, The Right to Philosophy, The University without Condition, Save the Name, etc), Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas, Catherine Malabou and Michel Houellebecq, etc.
Dec 14– 12-13:30 GMT
Topic: Asia Theory Network Field Report
Speakers: Li-Chun Hsiao, Oscar V. Campomanes, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Hung-chiung Li
As part of our series, ‘What is Global Critical Theory?’, Goldsmiths Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought (CPCT) hosts a roundtable with colleagues from the Asia Theories Network (ATN) surveying their work and critical theory in Asia.
Contact: jacob.mcguinn[@] gold.ac.uk
About the talk
The series of short presentations we put together here can be considered, to a necessarily limited extent (yet one that, we hope, still warrants critical attention), a “state of the field” report on the studies of “critical theory” based in Asia, in conjunction with the studies of the epistemological, cultural, and socio-political changes and possibilities of Asia undertaken by scholars of Asia Theories Network (ATN) or those we connect with or know of through ATN. Acutely cognizant of the malleability of the umbrella term “critical theory” as well as the variety of existing schools of thought (Deleuzian, postcolonialist, etc.) and disciplines we may be associated with (or the lack of neatly fit categories), we proceed with no more than a loosely conceived (critical) “theory” as our common denominator, on the basis of which we seek to push the envelope of the productions of theoretical knowledge about and around Asia by means of connecting with, and learning from, multiple sites or nodal points of theoretical interventions. The aforementioned practices and vision(s) of theoretical inquiry can be illustrated by Critical Asia Archives: Events and Theories, which is a bi-annual online publication platform created in 2020 by ATN and co-edited by Li-Chun Hsiao and Hung-chiung Li, with members of the editorial board or guest editors outside ATN taking turns to curate special topics focused on one specific site of theoretical engagement (e.g. Taiwan, Japan, etc.). In the first presentation, Hsiao and/or Li will elaborate, in light of the Hong Kong topics, on how new horizons of critical thought not only can be precipitated by monumental events, as is usually the case, but also by the end of any prospect of such events.
As the coordinator of ATN’s participation in this Global Critical Theory Seminar at Goldsmiths, Hsiao will introduce and reflect on the contexts in which the local groundwork of ATN was laid, and through the lends of which two iterations of our recent work can be understood: The first is the historical “moment of critical theory” in these parts of Asia that coincided with the waves of democratization movements sweeping across South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan in the 1980s. The second context didn’t emerge until after a time lapse in which critical theory evolved as a branch of institutionalized knowledge; to many of us, it is this keen awareness of and the discontent with critical theory’s status as “just another specialty” that brought us together and formed Asia Theories Network in the first place. The second presentation, by Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, will discuss the ideas around the June 2023 “Global Authoritarianism” conference he organized, in collaboration with ATN and other organizations, which explored, among other things, the specter of authoritarianism that can serve as both enabler and disabler of critical-theoretical inquiries and interventions. In the third presentation, Oscar Compomanes, who is the chief organizer of the ATN workshop on “the University,” held in Manilla on December 4-7 this year, will report and reflect on the visceral double threats of shrinking thought horizons inside the university as well as the eroded freedoms outside it, particularly in the Philippines. Finally, in the context of the intellectual endeavors by ATN outlined above, Li will introduce and discuss an edited volume of critical essays, titled Entangled Waterscapes in Asia, which, featuring contributions from a number of ATN members, is co-edited by Li and Kwai-Cheung Lo.
About the speakers
Li-Chun Hsiao (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo) is Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, specializing in postcolonial studies, literary and cultural theories, Taiwan literature and culture, and Anglophone Caribbean literatures. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Chung Wai Literary Quarterly from 2015 to 2017, and current serves as co-editor-in-chief of Critical Asia Archives. Having been a visiting scholar at Hitotsubashi University (2017-18) and UCLA (2011-12), Hsiao is the author of the monographs The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches. (Lexington Books, 2022) and The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation: Universality, Postcoloniality, and Nationalism in the Age of Globalization (ibidem, 2021). He has book chapters collected in the edited volumes Keywords of Taiwan Theory (Unitas 2019), Comparatizing Taiwan (Routledge 2015) and Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror (Purdue UP 2010), and his papers have been published by Critical Arts (2020), Chungwai Literary Quarterly (2014), Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies (2010), CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (2009), and M/MLA Journal (2008), among other journals.
Oscar V. Campomanes (PhD in American Civilization from Brown University) is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, the Department of English, and holds the Rev. James F. Donelan SJ Professorial Chair in the Humanities, the Loyola Schools, Ateneo de Manila University. He was ASEAN University Network (AUN) Distinguished Visiting Professor in American Studies at Vietnam National University-Hanoi in 2001-02, and Visiting Scholar in the Division of Cultural Studies, Department of Religious and Cultural Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2020, Term 2. Recent publications include the essay on Filipino visual arts for SANGHAYA: Philippine Culture and the Arts Yearbook 2020 (Cultural Center of the Philippines, 2021), and an extended essay on the Filipino American Marxist writer Carlos Bulosan in Mari Jo Buhle et al., Eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (Verso, 2022). The book he co-edited with the Filipinist economic historian Yoshiko Nagano and anthropologist Nobutaka Suzuki, Colonialism and Modernity: Re-Mapping Philippine Histories, has just been published by Ateneo de Naga University Press (2022).
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a professor of cultural studies and a founding director of the Center for Technology in Humanities at Kyung Hee University, Korea. He is a visiting professor at the University of Brighton and was invited as a visiting professor at the Centre for Culture Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University, India. He served as an academic adviser for Gwangju Biennale in 2017 and as a program manager for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021. He is a board member of The International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP) and Asia Theories Network (ATN). He edited the third volume of The Idea of Communism (2016) and Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (2023). He published articles in journals such as Telos, Deleuze and Guattari Studies and Philosophy Today, and chapters in The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory (2021), Thinking with Animation (2021), Back to the ’30s?: Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism and Democracy (2020) and Balibar/Wallerstein’s “Race, Nation, Class”: Rereading a Dialogue for Our Times (2018).
Hung-Chiung Li is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University, Taiwan. He is also Co-Coordinator of the Asia Theories Network, and founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of Critical Asia Archives. He has been the vice president of the Comparative Literature Association of the Republic of China (Taiwan), and the editor-in-chief of Chung Wai Literary Quarterly. His research interest includes critical theory, comparative literature, and Taiwanese and East Asian cultures and thoughts.
The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths University of London 