The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths University of London

Research Centre run jointly between the Departments of Sociology and English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths University, London

Author Archives: CPCT Admin


by Leave a comment

CFP: The Critique of Violence from the 1920s to the 2020s, Northwestern U [deadline: 10 April 2022]

Call for Papers
 
The Critique of Violence from the 1920s to the 2020s


The Department of German, the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, and the Critical Theory Program at Northwestern University invite graduate students and early career researchers to participate in a colloquium in response to the publication of the new translation and critical edition of Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (Toward the Critique of Violence) recently published by Stanford University Press.  The colloquium welcomes explorations on any topic related to Benjamin’s essay or the additional writings gathered in the volume—those by Benjamin and as well as those by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, Georges Sorel, and Emil Lederer.  In addition to giving brief accounts of how the new edition of “Toward the Critique of Violence” changes our understanding of Benjamin’s contribution to political theory, the two editors of the volume, Peter Fenves and Julia Ng, will respond to the presentations. 

The colloquium will take place on May 23, 2022 at Northwestern University.  Those interested in participating should send an abstract (approx. 250 words) for a 15-minute presentation to Jörg Kreienbrock (j-kreienbrock@northwestern.edu) by April 10th. All participants will receive a copy of Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition in preparation for their presentation and a modest honorarium. Participants will be responsible for their own accommodation and travel expenses. As noted above, the range of topics is entirely open; but it is expected that some of the presentations will be concerned with the political, cultural, and philosophical conditions of the 1920s in and beyond the European circumstances that come under discussion in Benjamin’s essay, while other presentations will be more concerned with present situations; still others may be directed far afield from both the 1920s and the 2020s as well as the European focus through which Benjamin explicitly frames his analysis and implicitly punctures as well.  The texts collected into Toward the Critique of Violence intersect with a wide variety of humanistic and social-scientific disciplines, and the colloquium welcomes proposals that reflect the breadth of Benjamin’s essay and its associated writings.  

We will aim to notify participants of their acceptance by April 15th.

Send your submissions to: j-kreienbrock@northwestern.edu

For further information, please contact: p-fenves@northwestern.edu
 


by Leave a comment

CFP: Experiencing Visual Images – Interdisciplinary Approaches (AHRC LAHP and UCL, 11 Nov 2022 [deadline: 8 Apr 2022])

© 2022 James Turrell Studio Files
Title: Breathing Light (2013)

CPCT graduate affiliate Federica Murè would like to invite submissions to “Experiencing Visual Images – Interdisciplinary Approaches,” a conference supported by the AHRC LAHP consortium and open to PGR students and early career researchers. Submission deadline: 8 April 2022. For more information please contact experiencing.images@gmail.com.

Experiencing Visual Images: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Call for Papers

University College London, 11 November 2022 (provisional)

It is now widely recognised that the relentless (re)production of visuality, a distinct feature of our digital age, has increasingly problematised the status of the image and the gaze. This has prompted a growing need for research across the academy into the complex question of how we see and experience so much visual information and the impact this has on our ability to think with and through images. 

In the field of neuroscience, the underlying neural mechanisms of visual perception are known to be complex and remain incompletely understood.  From a philosophical point of view, scholarship in image studies has asked compelling questions on the demarcation between mere images and art images, demonstrating how the progressive reduction of the world to image has compromised our ability to conceptualise this point of difference. Meanwhile, historians of art, science and literature (to name only three historical sub-fields) stress the cultural specificity of visual perception, exploring how the gaze and the experience of seeing visual images was configured in past societies. Finally, contemporary visual artists have pioneered the creation of visual art through historically marginalised gazes. This sustained and wide-ranging interest in the visual, all of which points towards its profound richness and complexity, indicates the need for critical engagement and collaboration across disciplines, in order to develop new approaches to the image and to deepen our understanding of its shifting ontological status and the consequences this yields on the configurations of our gaze.

Contributions are therefore invited to a one-day conference that seeks to explore the possible intersections between scientific, philosophical, historical and artistic approaches to understanding the gaze and the image. We hope to foster constructive communication across traditionally drawn disciplinary boundaries in order to enrich our understanding of how the complex processes of experiencing visual images can be interpreted in a wide range of historical and cultural contexts. 

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

– The emotional gaze: psychological effects of seeing visual images

– Diversifying the gaze: neurodivergent visual perception

– The science of seeing: cognitive and neural mechanisms of visual perception (historical, cutting-edge theories)

– Reconstructing historical gazes: past experiences of seeing

– Metaphysics of seeing: looking at, looking through visual images (philosophical, religious approaches) 

– The disordered gaze: visual perception and illness (e.g., schizophrenia, stroke)

– Decolonising the gaze: non-Western experiences of seeing

– Queering the gaze: queer experiences of seeing

– Visual sociology

– Image and neuroaesthetics 

– Image and ethics

– Moving Images

Short (10-minute) papers from PGR students and ECRs working in all disciplines (Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences) are welcomed. 

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words (as well as any enquiries) to experiencing.images@gmail.com by Friday April 8th.

Conference organisers

Genevieve Caulfield – PhD candidate, UCL Department of History

Federica Mure – PhD candidate, Goldsmiths Department of English and Creative Writing

This conference is sponsored by the London Art and Humanities Partnership (LAHP)


by Leave a comment

Friends of CPCT—”What is Global Critical Theory?” Research Seminar 2021-22, new location (#BoycottGoldsmiths)

Dear friends of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought,

In response to the ongoing efforts by senior management at Goldsmiths to push through redundancies and restructuring across academic and professional staff – a process that will have a particularly devastating effect on one of the CPCT’s host departments, English and Creative Writing, Goldsmiths UCU has called for a BOYCOTT/GREY-LISTING of Goldsmiths to put external pressure on the university administration, which has hitherto ignored or dismissed protests and alternative proposals from staff to what will be a hugely damaging process, at both a collective and individual level.

In order not to lose the intellectual community we’ve sought to build through our Research Seminar (“What is Global Critical Theory?”), we have accordingly decided to take our seminar out of Goldsmiths and run it in a purely personal capacity. Until further notice, THIS IS NOT A MEETING OF THE CPCT AT GOLDSMITHS. We will host our meetings via Alberto Toscano’s Zoom account at his other institution, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. We also hope to use some of our meetings to keep you posted about the campaign at Goldsmiths and any ongoing solidarity actions.

With best wishes,

Alberto, Julia and Vikki

New registration link: https://sfu.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Mvde2urzouGNLEosgI6CgFCB_IzlU23Egr

#BoycottGoldsmiths: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/11947/Goldsmiths-hit-with-international-boycott

Open Letter to Frances Corner, Warden of Goldsmiths: https://we-are.gold/2021/10/14/open-letter-to-frances-corner/

For a detailed session plan including further readings and links to PDFS, please visit https://cpct.uk/2021-2022/.


by Leave a comment

CPCT Research Seminar 2021-22: What is Global Critical Theory?

The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought is pleased to announce the theme of this year’s Research Seminar: “What is Global Critical Theory?”

The history of critical theory is one of migration and displacement of ideas – of travelling and exiled theory – but to date it has all too often been written as a story of the afterlife of the European Enlightenment. There is a growing research interest in the global reach of critical theory but its emphasis has often been skewed towards the applicability of ideas to local contexts, or to regional and area studies of specific social and political phenomena. This seminar seeks to begin to pose the problem of a ‘global critical theory’ by undertaking a series of soundings of conceptual debates emerging in different locales and conjunctures that foreground the non-Western genesis of crucial problems of contemporary critical theory, as well as the situated problematisation of the forms of historical difference and unevenness that mark the travels of critical theory. The seminar will touch, inter alia, on Caribbean and Latin American debates on the short-circuits, ‘misencounters’ (desencuentros) and misplacements between critical concepts in Europe and the Americas, and their aesthetic figurations in the periodisation of the Baroque and the conceptual persona that is Caliban; explore the uptake by Levantine Marxist intellectuals of Said’s Orientalism; investigate the oft-overlooked contributions of Vietnamese philosophers Trần Đức Thảo to postwar phenomenology and deconstruction, and Nguyễn Khắc Viện to global Marxism; and inquire into the critical theories of fascism originating in interwar Japan. 

Free and open to the public, as always. Convened by Alberto Toscano (a.toscano [at] gold.ac.uk) and Julia Ng (j.ng [at] gold.ac.uk)

Register here: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_t5RX4pGtQEiGxD9VthSSGg

For a detailed session plan including further readings and links to PDFS, please visit https://cpct.uk/2021-2022/.


by Leave a comment

Goldsmiths Undergraduate Philosophy Circle 2021-22

Theme ’21-’22: Thinking through Nature & the Climate Crisis with
Non-Western Philosophies

The Goldsmiths Undergraduate Philosophy Circle is open to all Goldsmiths students interested in reading and discussing philosophical texts together. 

The first two terms will be devoted to exploring key readings on this year’s topic, while the third term will be reserved for participants to self-organise an event related to the theme. The format of the meetings is an open discussion for around 2 hours with a break in the middle. The discussion is usually introduced by a volunteer who speaks on the text and the author for around 5-10 minutes. Conceived as an informal gathering, everyone should feel free to contribute as much as they like.

To join the group and receive the materials in advance (shared via Google Drive), please email s.bromberg@gold.ac.uk.

Meetings: on Fridays, 4-6pm; 3 x Autumn Term; 4 x Spring Term (see dates below)

Location: TBD

Convenor: Svenja Bromberg (Lecturer in Sociology), s.bromberg [at] gold.ac.uk

For more information, please visit https://cpct.uk/ug-2021-2022/.


by Leave a comment

PUBLICATION: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition by Walter Benjamin, Edited by Peter Fenves and Julia Ng

We’re pleased to announce a new publication that might be of interest to you: 


Toward the Critique of Violence
A Critical Edition
Walter Benjamin
Edited by Peter Fenves and Julia Ng

If outside the Americas (UK/Europe/Middle East and Africa/Asia-Pacific), apply the code CSV21TTCOV to receive a 30% discount when ordering from combinedacademic.co.uk or use this link. 

* * *
“This translation places before English readers for the first time the most comprehensible version yet of Benjamin’s compelling and demanding essay.”—Kevin McLaughlin, Brown University

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin’s immensely influential essay, “Toward the Critique of Violence,” this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory.

The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin’s critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context.

With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin’s work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.
 

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German Jewish philosopher.

Peter Fenves is Joan and Serapta Harrison Professor of Literature, Northwestern University.

Julia Ng is Lecturer in Critical Theory and codirector of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London.



by Leave a comment

TRAGEDY AND PHILOSOPHY: CPCT Annual Conference 2021 (2-4 and 9-11 June, online)

TRAGEDY AND PHILOSOPHY

Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought
Annual Conference 2021
Goldsmiths, University of London

2-4 and 9-11 June, 2021
3:30-7:30pm BST, online

Keynotes: Miriam Leonard (UCL), Manfred Posani Löwenstein (Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici), Tina Chanter (Newcastle), Jeremy Glick (Hunter College, CUNY), Rebecca Comay (Toronto)

Register here for each session.

[**NB: Scroll down to see all 6 dates on the registration page.]

DESCRIPTION:

Pivotal for the history of aesthetics are the encounters between philosophy and tragedy that span from Ancient Greece to the decolonizing Caribbean. Ever since its infamous exclusion in Plato’s Republic and its theorisation in Aristotle’s Poetics, tragedy has played a number of often contrasting roles in philosophy’s own self-understanding. Tragedy has variously been conceived as an origin of philosophical (and dialectical) thought, as a limit to philosophy’s efforts at intellectual sovereignty, as well as a constant source of ethical exemplification and conceptual instruction. While conscious of the stakes of philosophy’s image of tragedy, this conference will try to expand its purview to look beyond and beneath a late-eighteenth early-nineteenth century idea of the tragic which has often come to saturate reflection on this relationship. Tragedy and Philosophy will therefore also seek to consider a variety of themes that transcend the equation between tragedy and the tragic, including: the contribution of anthropology and history to an understanding of the specificity of Greek tragedy; the place of femininity, lament and conflict in ancient Greek tragedies; the relation between music and words in tragedy, and its philosophical significance (including in tragedy’s repetition by modern opera); the early modern emergence of a poetics of tragedy irreducible to Aristotelian and Idealist or Romantic variants; tragedy as a reflection on sovereignty; tragedy as an art intimately linked to moments of crisis and transition.

This virtual conference is organised in sessions distributed over six days. Each panel will take place from 3:30-5:30pm BST and each keynote address from 6:00-7:30pm BST. Sessions will be followed by a discussion. A concluding roundtable will close the conference.

Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Donna Jones (Berkeley) — The Promise of Decline: Race and the Rhetoric of Historical Pessimism in the Interwar Years (17 May 2021, CPCT “Critiquing Violence Today” series)

The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London cordially invites you to its Lecture Series 20/21 on “Critiquing Violence Today”:

The Promise of Decline: Race and the Rhetoric of Historical Pessimism in the Interwar Years

Donna Jones (Berkeley) 

Monday, 17 May 2021

4:00-6:00pm BST, Zoom

(To register please visit https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_G5SHSXsMQgenm_PsYeYdeg) 

Donna Jones is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and the author of The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism and Modernity (Columbia UP, 2010). She is currently working on two two projects, The Ambiguous Promise of European Decline: Race and Historical Pessimism in the Era of the Great War and The Tribunal of Life: Reflections on Vitalism, Race and Biopolitics. 

Contact: centreforphilosophyandcriticalthought@gold.ac.uk


by Leave a comment

Goldsmiths Annual Philosophy Lectures 2021: Monique David-Ménard (Paris), 25 and 27 May 2021, online

The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought cordially invites you to the

Goldsmiths Annual Philosophy Lectures 2021

Monique David-Ménard (Paris)

(Register here for both events)

Part I
Tuesday, 25 May 2021
6-8pm BST, online

Objects of Desire, Objects of the Drives, and Jouissance in Transference

Respondent: Darian Leader (CFAR)

For an analyst, expounding a clinical example is no mere illustration of a pre-existing theory. Rather, the exposition serves as a laboratory for the formation of concepts and thus of the capacity for critiquing previous theories. In my presentation, I will put this claim to the test by examining the significance and function of “The Thing” (das Ding), “desire,” “the objects of the drives,” and “jouissance” in the field of transference. Lacan wrote in L’Étourdit that “formalisation is our goal, our ideal” because there is something indeterminable directly in the analytic act due to the infinite equivocity of language. But do we only have a choice between an “integral transmission” by virtue of a matheme, and non-knowledge?

Part II
Thursday, 27 May 2021
6-8pm BST, online

Animism of the Unconscious: On the Animism of Property in Modern Right

Respondent: Alain Pottage (Law, Sciences Po, Paris)

Instead of seeking the connection of the social and the sexual in the mode of how subjects of desire are involved in forms of power and in relation to rights, what if we focused our attention on the various regimes of things? As anthropologists Marilyn Strathern and Maurice Godelier have demonstrated, things in the social are objects of exchange, of production, and of transmission. Our relations to things, especially to inanimate things, are not as rational as we generally suppose: things and objects condense the unknown in social relations. How is this unknown articulated with the unconscious objects of our desires? In my presentation, I will attempt to approach this animistic layer of socio-political existence from three angles: Hegel’s philosophy of abstract right, Freud’s account of the animism of the unconscious, and the comparison, made by Marilyn Strathern, between the role of mask-statues in New Ireland and patent rights and intellectual property in modern societies. The question is this: how do political struggles in democracies put into play animistic components of social relations?

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Monique David-Ménard is professor emerita of philosophy at the University Paris-Diderot (Paris 7) where, as the Director of the Centre d’études du vivant, she established the field of research on “Gender and Sexualities.” She is also a practicing psychoanalyst and vice president of the Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne. Additionally, she is a co-founder of the ISPP (International Society for Psychoanalysis and Philosophy), an associate of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Berlin), and a member of the International Network of Women Philosophers (UNESCO). She is the author of L’hysterique entre Freud et Lacan: corps et langage en psychanalyse (1983; English as Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. by Catherine Porter, 1989); La folie dans la raison pure: Kant lecteur de Swedenborg (1990); Les constructions de l’universel: psychanalyse, philosophie (1997); Tout le plaisir est pour moi (2000); Deleuze et la psychanalyse: l’altercation (2005); Éloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle (2011); and, most recently, La Vie sociale des choses. L’animisme et les objets, Editions du Bord-de l’Eau, collection Totem et tabou (2020).

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst working in London and a founding member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR). A major contributor to the field of psychoanalysis, his books include What is Madness?, Strictly Bipolar, Hands and Why Can’t We Sleep? He also regularly contributes articles on psychoanalysis to The Guardian.

Alain Pottage is Professor of Law at the Sciences Po, Paris. His research focuses on questions in the history and theory of intellectual property, and on the question of law in the Anthropocene.

Co-sponsored by The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London.

Contact: centreforphilosophyandcriticalthought@gold.ac.uk