A discussion and launch of Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin (Princeton University Press, 2014), with:
Barbara Cassin
Étienne Balibar (Kingston)
Lucie Campos (Institut Français)
Jacques Lezra (NYU, co-editor of the English translation)
Organised by Filippo Del Lucchese (Brunel) & Alberto Toscano (Co-Director, CPCT).
Co-Chair: Julia Ng (Co-Director, CPCT)
A Workshop on Harry Harootunian’s Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism
In the author’s own words, Harootunian’s new book presents us with “a Marx who was able to expand his own angle of vision from the 1860s on and widen his perspective to envisage a global arena marked by the formation of the world market.
We can perceive in this epochal shift that Marx had moved toward envisioning the multiple possibilities for radical transformation among the world’s societies that no longer depended on their capacity to replicate a singular model offered by a European nation-state or bypass the colonial experience, and which, as his views on Russia showed, could utilize the residues of a prior modes of production to create either a new register of formal subsumption or bypass capital altogether”.
This workshop will explore the challenge that Marx After Marx poses to Western Marxisms and postcolonial theories alike, in its critical recovery of Marx’s notion of formal subsumption and its attention to the temporal unevenness that has marked capitalism from its origins, as well as to the non-Western Marxist theorists – from José Carlos Mariátegui to Uno Kozo – who forged the tools to think the capital-labour relation beyond Eurocentric and stageist imaginaries.
With Harry Harootunian, Svenja Bromberg, Michael Dutton and Alberto Toscano
Chaired by Rajyashree Pandey
The world figures within any political theology. What has altered and thus what has to be drawn into any thinking of a political theology is a shift in the world’s presence. A transformation of the world remains the project of a political theology. And yet, this claim has become complicated. It is equally true, now, that world itself is in a process of change; a process that is an opening to the world’s destruction. However, this destruction is not the one that figures within the conventions of a political theology. On the contrary, it is form of destruction that is inextricably tied to the presence of catastrophic climate change as a genuine possibility. Hence the question that has to emerge – given the centrality of the world within any thinking of a political theology – concerns the impact of this modality of destruction on political theology as a mode of thought.
Andrew Benjamin is a thinker and writer of international standing with a vast body of work on painting, architecture, philosophy and aesthetics. During his career, Andrew has held high-profile posts at Warwick University in the UK, and Monash University, Australia. His recent publications include: Of Jews and Animals, Commonality Place and Judgement: Continental Philosophy and the Ancient Greeks and Architectural Projections.
Click here for full schedule and further information.
ABSTRACTS
The preposition “on” in On Nietzsche translates the word sur, meaning on but also over or above. It’s a word that serves as a prefix, in French, to both surrealism and surhomme – Nietzsche’s overman or superman. In those cases, the word carries connotations of a step beyond. In this paper, I propose a reading of On Nietzsche as Beyond Nietzsche. Precisely how does Bataille see himself as beyond Nietzsche? And is he correct to do so?
[tba]
This paper has two parts. First, it co-reads Bataille’s atheistic phenomenology of whole being (Preface + Parts 1 and 2) with aspects of Schelling’s Freedom essay that articulates the self-partitioning of God, arguing that one might read Bataille as a German Idealist, alongside Schelling as a phenomenological mystic. Second, it shows the contribution that Bataille’s writing on division, uselessness and subordination makes to contemporary anti-work political theory—and as a contrary position to the work ethic, and to the subordination under means, etc. This will also situate the text in relation to his later Accursed Share writing on a similar topic.
Bataille writes that his ‘life in Nietzsche’s company is a community’. He also writes that communication, which one assumes is integral to the sharing of a community, involves the participation in crime, in suicide, and in living outside of oneself. This paper will explore the kind of community that Bataille shares with Nietzsche through an analysis of the notions of communication and friendship in The Gay Science and On Nietzsche.
In this paper I shall discuss some of the distinctive features of Bataille’s On Nietzsche and suggest some possible lines of critical exchange between Nietzsche’s and Bataille’s respective ‘projects’ as these arise in the text. The terms used in my title – ‘immanence’ and the ‘sacred’ – indicate what I take to be the idiosyncratic basis of Bataille’s response to Nietzsche in On Nietzsche and the importance of such an interpretative stance towards Nietzsche’s thought will be underlined.
Free and open to the public.
Written during the final months of the Nazi occupation of France, Georges Bataille’s Sur Nietzsche is a record of life during wartime. It is, in the words of the translator of the new English edition, Stuart Kendall, also a work “of ethical and political philosophy, or rather, more pointedly, […] an antifascist work written under conditions of enemy occupation, which is to say as a book written as a covert act of war.” Aimed at cleansing Nietzsche from the “stain” of his Nazi interpreters, Bataille’s Nietzsche puts thought to the test of experience and pushes experience to its limits. In this third volume of his Summa Atheologica Bataille recognises that “existence cannot be at once autonomous and viable,” yearning instead for community out of the depths of isolation and transforming Nietzsche’s will to power into a will to chance.
CPCT is pleased to host a two-day workshop of lectures and seminar discussions around the new translation of Bataille’s On Nietzsche (SUNY Press, 2015), led by Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick) and Stuart Kendall (California College of the Arts). Please see below for links to the text excerpts under discussion.
Click here for abstracts.
10 Nov (RHB 256)
4:00 pm – Stuart Kendall (CCA), ‘Bataille beyond Nietzsche: The “On” of On Nietzsche’
5:00 pm – Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick), ‘Nietzsche as an Anti-Political Thinker?’
6:00-6:30 pm – General discussion
Drinks at New Cross House
11 Nov (DTH 109)
10:00 am – William Stronge (Chichester/Brighton), ‘The Creaturely Condition’
10:45 am – Willow Verkerk (CRMEP Kingston), ‘On Communication: Bataille’s Friendship with Nietzsche’
Coffee 11:30
12:00 pm – Jim Urpeth (Greenwich), “Immanence and the Sacred in Bataille’s ‘On Nietzsche'”
Lunch 12:45 to 2:00 pm
2:00 pm – Seminar 1, “The Position of Chance” (pp83-120), led by Chris Law (Goldsmiths) [PDF]
3:00 pm – Seminar 2, “Philosophical Epilogue” (pp308-318), led by Stuart Kendall (CCA) [PDF]
4:00 pm – Concluding roundtable
***
Keith Ansell-Pearson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is one of the foremost experts on Nietzsche in the English-speaking world, and is the author of Nietzsche contra Rousseau (CUP 1991), An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (CUP 1994), Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (Routledge 1997), How to Read Nietzsche (Granta 2005), A Companion to Nietzsche (Blackwell 2006), and Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2017).
Stuart Kendall is a writer, editor and translator working at the intersections of modern and contemporary design, visual culture, poetics and ecology. He is the author of the critical biography Georges Bataille, as well as the translator of Guilty and Inner Experience by Bataille, also published by SUNY Press.
We’re pleased to announce that CPCT has launched a new website. We will be continually adding new text and audio content to its pages, as well as regular updates on upcoming events and news on our other activities.
A Workshop on Harry Harootunian’s Marx After Marx:In the author’s own words, Harootunian’s new book presents us with “a Marx who was able to expand his own angle of vision from the 1860s on and widen his perspective to envisage a global arena marked by the formation of the world market.
We can perceive in this epochal shift that Marx had moved toward envisioning the multiple possibilities for radical transformation among the world’s societies that no longer depended on their capacity to replicate a singular model offered by a European nation-state or bypass the colonial experience, and which, as his views on Russia showed, could utilize the residues of a prior modes of production to create either a new register of formal subsumption or bypass capital altogether”.
This workshop will explore the challenge that Marx After Marx poses to Western Marxisms and postcolonial theories alike, in its critical recovery of Marx’s notion of formal subsumption and its attention to the temporal unevenness that has marked capitalism from its origins, as well as to the non-Western Marxist theorists – from José Carlos Mariátegui to Uno Kozo – who forged the tools to think the capital-labour relation beyond Eurocentric and stageist imaginaries.
With Harry Harootunian, Svenja Bromberg, Michael Dutton and Alberto Toscano
Chaired by Rajyashree Pandey
All welcome.
The animal of the molecular revolution will be neither mole nor snake, but a drone-animal-thing that is solid, liquid, and a gas.
—from Dividuum
As the philosophical, religious, and historical systems that have produced the “individual” (and its counterparts, society and community) over the years continue to break down, the age of “dividuality” is now upon us. Gerald Raunig charts a genealogy of the concept and develops a philosophy of dividuality as a way of addressing contemporary modes of production and forms of life. Through its components of dispersion, subsistence, and similarity, dividuality becomes a hidden principle of obedience and conformity, but it also brings with it the potential to realize disobedience and noncompliant con/dividualities.
Organised by the Department of Visual Cultures and the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought
The event is free and no booking is required. All welcome!
10 Jun 2016
4:00pm – 6:00pm
137a, Richard Hoggart Building
In the third Conflict of the Faculties, virtually the last text published within his own lifetime, Kant runs through a catalogue of (his own) hypochondriac afflictions and offers a panoply of philosophical prescriptions for alleviating these — the “power of the mind to master its sickly feelings by sheer resolution.” Some readers seize on this scenario as an unwitting parody of Kant’s own transcendental project: the comedy seems to stage an empirical dress rehearsal of the systematic opposition between the empirical and the transcendental and suggests the structural contamination of the very ideal of purity by the pathology it wants to master. A well-trodden dialectical approach, from Hegel and Nietzsche through Freud and Adorno, discerns in this tizzy of stage-management the perfect case history of the dialectic of enlightenment, ascetic ideology, or the return of the repressed: the very success of the will would be the measure of its failure, the obsession with pathology the ultimate pathology — the return of mythic nature in the most strenuous efforts to control it. This dialectical approach is compelling but it underplays both the perversity of the scenario and its strange theatricality. It also overlooks the startling practical implications — at once biopolitical, ideological, economic, institutional, and aesthetic — of Kant’s peculiar experiment. A strange note on which to end a treatise dedicated to the pedagogical imperatives of the Prussian state.
Rebecca Comay is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford 2011), editor of Lost in the Archives (2002) and co-editor of Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger (with John McCumber, 1999), as well as the author of numerous articles on 19th century German philosophy, Marx, Benjamin and Adorno, psychoanalysis, contemporary French philosophy, and contemporary art and art criticism.
Today we tend to regard political slogans as virtually indistinguishable from the buzzwords of the advertising world. It may therefore come as something of a surprise to realize that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mottos and catchphrases were routinely deemed crucial to radical praxis. In this talk, I argue that the vexed pedigree of the modern slogan—alternately hailed as the richest and the most vacuous of speech acts—is one facet of a longstanding philosophical concern with according “one-liners” too much authority. If slogans hold out the promise of a discourse no longer governed by traditional figures of predication and negation, they also threaten to undermine the very possibility of legitimating one’s cause by saying something about it. The revolutionary—be it Luxemburg, Lukács, or Lenin—thus finds herself in the uncomfortable position of not knowing how to share the insight that the truly radical utterance may not share anything at all.
Jan Mieszkowski is Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College, USA. His first book, Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser (Fordham University Press, 2006), explores the doctrine of human productivity that emerges at the intersection of the traditions inaugurated by Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. His second book, Watching War (Stanford University Press, 2012), offers a new theory of battlefield spectatorship since the Napoleonic era. He is currently completing a new book called Crises of the Sentence.
The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths University of London 