Jan Mieszkowski (Reed) discusses the political promise held–and betrayed–by the radical utterance par excellence: the slogan.

9 Jun 2016
5:00pm – 7:00pm
137, Richard Hoggart Building

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.

A seminar with Prof. Samir Haddad (Fordham) on what it means — intellectually, institutionally, politically — to “do philosophy” in the classroom after May 1968 and today.

7 Jun 2016
3:00pm – 6:00pm
Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building

A CPCT special seminar with Samir Haddad (Fordham), in conversation with Andrew Parker (Rutgers).

The decade following May 68 saw a series of reforms and counter-reforms made to the French education system, together with a flurry of philosophical writing on matters of education. In this seminar we will examine three engagements with the idea of a professor, by Bourdieu and Passeron, Derrida, and Lyotard, with the aim of both better understanding the French system at the time and provoking philosophical reflection on the chances and risks, the conditions and the demands we invariably meet with as students and teachers in the philosophy seminar room.

Discussion will be based around three texts that provide both traditional and alternative accounts of the teaching of philosophy: Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction (1970), Derrida’s “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How it Ends” (1976) and Lyotard’s “Endurance and the Profession” (1978).

For copies of the texts please contact j.ng@gold.ac.uk or visit the link below.

Click here for copies of the texts under discussion.

A two-day Symposium with Isabelle Stengers and Goldsmiths academics

19 May 2016
2:00pm – 6:00pm
PSH 314, Professor Stuart Hall Building

These two symposia will explore the development of Isabelle Stengers’ most recent work, and will engage with her and the audience in conversations about many of her influential concepts and propositions. The two days will consist of brief interventions by Goldsmiths staff members that will focus around a selection of her most recent essays. These will be followed by conversations with Stengers as well as with members of the audience.
The second day will explore her call for ‘(re)learning the art of paying attention’, in connection to questions of ontological politics, capitalism, and political ecology.

Discussants: Vikki Bell (Sociology), Monica Greco (Sociology) and Marsha Rosengarten (Sociology)

Register Here

A two-day Symposium with Isabelle Stengers and Goldsmiths academics

18 May 2016
2:00pm – 6:00pm
PSH 314, Professor Stuart Hall Building

These two events will explore the development of Isabelle Stengers’ work, and will engage with her in conversations about many of her influential concepts and propositions. The two days will consist of brief interventions by Goldsmiths staff members that will focus around a selection of her most recent essays. These will be followed by conversations with Stengers as well as with members of the audience.

Each day of discussions will explore specific aspects of Stengers’ work. The first day will centre around Stengers’ development of a speculative philosophy concerned with a risky and situated experimentation with possibles, as well as her plea for slow science.

Discussants: Luciana Parisi (Cultural Studies), Martin Savransky (Sociology), and Alberto Toscano (Sociology)

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What is the link between desire and exploitation, and what does it mean for political thought?

14 Mar 2016
6:00pm – 7:30pm
137a, Richard Hoggart Building

One of the earliest discoveries of psychoanalysis concerned the intimate relation of the social structures and the unconscious mechanisms. Jacques Lacan later reframed this connection by speaking of homology between political and libidinal economy. In this way, he indicated that psychoanalysis significantly widened the space, in which critical thought and emancipatory politics should intervene in order to intensify the possibilities of a social change. The talk will begin by discussing two concepts, which demonstrate a wide-reaching link between Marx and Freud’s critical projects, before passing on to more general examination of the link between libidinal bonds and mechanisms of exploitation.

Samo Tomšic is the author of The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, and is currently research assistant in the interdisciplinary cluster “Image Knowledge Gestaltung” at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

All welcome. No need to book.