The recordings for the British Academy symposium “Chinese Modernity in German Jewish Thought” (May 3, 2024) are now available on our YouTube channel here:
Category Archives: Events
BRITISH ACADEMY SYMPOSIUM: Chinese Modernity in German Jewish Thought (May 3, 2024; Senate House London)
Chinese Modernity in German Jewish Thought
A British Academy symposium on the circulation of images of China in German Jewish letters of the early 20th century.
Venue: Stewart House 2/3, Senate House London
Date: May 3, 2024 from 3:30-6:40 pm
Too often, critical discussions around antisemitism and anticolonialism seem completely at odds with one another. This workshop asks whether a consideration of the images of ‘China’ that circulated amongst German Jewish thinkers might help complicate or resolve this impasse by suggesting a different orientation to both the Christian-colonial project and the racialisation of work. How were these images of China used to imagine different ways of organising social, political, and economic life in a context of intensifying antisemitism, capital-critical sentiment, and ambivalence towards the European legacies of imperialism and colonialism in the ‘Orient’?
Free and open to the public, though registration is required.
To register, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/chinese-modernity-in-german-jewish-thought-tickets-805024077687
For more information, please visit https://daoismandcapitalism.wordpress.com/.
This event is the second of three associated with Dr. Julia Ng’s British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship project Daoism and Capitalism: Early Critical Theory and the Global South (MCFSS23\230039). Thanks also go to Goldsmiths’ Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought and Royal Holloway’s Centre for Continental Philosophy for their generous support.
Programme
3:30-3:45 pm
Welcome and Introduction: Daoism, Capitalism, and German Jewish Thought
Dr. Julia Ng (Goldsmiths)
Ideas circulated from a modernizing China in the 1910s and 1920s amongst major German Jewish thinkers as they grappled with their own modernity and contemporaneity. How useful or limited is “Orientalism” as an interpretive framework for grasping the career of these ideas, and might competing “Orientalisms”—that of Buber, for instance, referring to quite a different “Orient” altogether, or Marx, which points towards China as a historical entity—complicate the picture in illuminating ways?
3:45-4:25 pm
Rosenzweig, Hegel, and ‘Oriental Messianism’
Dr. Daniel Weiss (Cambridge)
Hegel famously portrayed Jewish messianism as characterized by an ‘Oriental’ orientation that fails to produce effective agency in history. By contrast, Franz Rosenzweig reaffirmed key elements of Jewish messianism criticized by Hegel, including elements that could outwardly appear linked to passivity or non-action. However, Rosenzweig treats the Jewish orientation not as weak or ineffective, but as a committed stance that will lead the world to messianic redemption and to the overthrow of ‘illusory’ power-claims. We will see that, although Rosenzweig himself criticizes various aspects of Daoism, his account of Judaism shares elements in common with various nineteenth and early-twentieth German portrayals of Daoism. As such, we can understand him as calling into question dominant Christian portrayals of both Judaism and Daoism, and seeking to reclaim the supposedly ‘Oriental’ characteristics criticized by others. Rosenzweig’s development of a modern, challenging account of Judaism can thus be understood parallelling the ways in which European writers contended with ways in which China’s modernizing developments likewise presented a challenge to dominant Western preconceptions.
4:30-5:10 pm
Ex Oriente Lux: Martin Buber’s Dao-Hasidic Mysticism of the Worldly
Professor Agata Bielik-Robson (Nottingham)
Martin Buber’s interest in Chinese Daoism begins very early in his intellectual career and coincides – not at all accidentally – with his interest in Hasidism: both are treated by him as the cases of “spiritually rich” Orientalism which he opposes to the disenchanted West. Between 1906-1909, he writes The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, The Legend of the Baal Shem, and the Hasidism inspired Ecstatic Confessions, but he also, under the influence of Wang Qingdao, the visiting lecturer at the Berlin Seminar for Oriental Languages, publishes Talks and Parables of Zhuangzi (1910) and Chinese Ghost and Love Stories (1911) which offer a partial translation of Liaozhai Zhiyu, an early eighteenth century compilation of folktales done by Pu Songling. From this time on, Daoism – interpreted in close comparative relation to Hasidism – will never leave Buber, although he will modify his attitude towards its main concept, the Dao, over time. While in Buber’s early phase, Dao is most of all a notion of a “mystical unity” connecting the sage with the essential oneness of the world, in the later dialogic phase (beginning with his 1923 I and Thou), Dao emerges rather as the Path: the dynamic way into and through the world appreciated in its concreteness and multiplicity. Thus, in his Ascona lecture on Daoism, delivered in 1924, Buber repudiates his earlier “escapist” mysticism of the One, which now transforms into a “intraworldly” mysticism of the Two, strongly focused on the ultimate realness of the particulars, never again to be considered as an ontological “illusion.” Just as before Dao represented for him a transcendental oneness underlying all, closely corresponding with the Hasidic understanding of God as the ehad, the One pervading all creation – now it represents for him a Path into the World, where creation is to be conceived as “individuation of all things,” this time corresponding with the other meaning of ehad: not simply one, but strictly singular and unique. In my paper, I will present this trajectory in close parallel with Buber’s changing views on Hassidism, but will also juxtapose Buber’s use of the Chinese motifs with Martin Heidegger’s turn towards Daoism as instrumental for his post-war Kehre which redefined the relation between Being and beings in favour of the latter. In both thinkers, the Dao conceived as a Path into (and of) the World plays an important role in their turn towards the worldly.
5:15-5:55 pm
Kafka’s Dao and the Reverse of Possession
Dr. Julia Ng (Goldsmiths)
Reading, inter alia, Kafka’s Zürauer Aphorisms and the fragment “Workforce without Possession” alongside works of Daoism and on contemporaneous China that were consulted by Kafka, this paper explores how Kafka’s treatment of figures of ancestrality, nonhuman animation, and reversion opens up questions of ‘race,’ community, and political-economic organisation.
6:00-6:30 pm
Roundtable
6:30-6:40 pm
Q&A
About the speakers
Agata Bielik-Robson is Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has published widely on all areas of Jewish philosophy with special emphasis paid on modern Jewish thought, from Spinoza to Derrida. She is the author of Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (Bloomsbury 2019), Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (Routledge 2014), and co-editor of Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influences (Routledge 2014) and Tsimtsum and Modernity (2021).
Daniel H. Weiss is is Polonsky-Coexist Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. He is author of Paradox and the Prophets: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication of Religion (2012) and Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence (2023), among other publications, and co-editor of multiple books, including Scripture and Violence (2020) and Tsimtsum and Modernity (2021). Actively involved in the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, he is a recent recipient of a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.
Julia Ng is Reader in Critical Theory and founding Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. She specialises in philosophical approaches to literature, modern German-Jewish thought, early 20th-century Germanophone literatures in their transnational contexts, and history of critical theory. Recent publications include her translation and critical edition of Walter Benjamin’s “Toward the Critique of Violence” (with P. Fenves; Stanford UP, 2021) and articles in Theory Culture & Society, Paragraph, CR: New Centennial Review, Modern Language Notes, diacritics, and Critical Times. Funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, she is currently completing a book on Daoism and Capitalism, which has also received support from the Leverhulme Trust, the Center for Jewish History (NYC), and the British Society for the History of Philosophy.
Goldsmiths Annual Philosophy Lectures 2024: Linda Martín Alcoff (CUNY), 7-8 May in person
The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London cordially invites you to the 5th Goldsmiths Annual Philosophy Lectures 2024
Professor Linda Martín Alcoff (Hunter College, CUNY)
Lecture 1: “Extractivism as a Model for Modern Epistemology”
Respondent: Professor Sumi Madhok (LSE)
Tuesday, 7 May 2024
4-7pm
Sir Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theatre G06, Roberts Building, UCL
(https://www.accessable.co.uk/venues/roberts-building-sir-ambrose-fleming-lecture-theatre-g06)
REGISTER FOR FREE: https://bit.ly/49uxCgB
Extractivist epistemologies work analogously to extractivist capitalism by extracting something of value, transferring it to another location, and then making use of its value. Sometimes, the item being extracted is knowledge, or an object that is thought to contain knowledge. Thus, in this case extractivists seek an epistemic resource of some sort—such as a piece of pharmacological knowledge held by an indigenous community or a rural healer concerning the medicinal potential of a given plant, or an artifact from an indigenous funeral site that can help them understand the nature of that particular culture. I argue that extractivist epistemologies developed in the modern era in a way that was marked by this practice and its implicit assumptions about how value (epistemic or otherwise) can be identified, can be made portable, and can be made use of. The extractivist epistemic approach treats this epistemic resource as separable from its origin, and then renders it into a knowledge commodity with exchange value over which exclusive rights can be contractually defined, protected and enforced. But to do this involves a whole series of metaphysical and epistemological assumptions about the nature of knowing as well as the norms of good knowing. This paper will also offer corrective epistemic norms to address the problems I have identified in extractivist epistemologies.
Lecture 2: “Imperial Museums”
Respondent: Professor Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (Birkbeck)
Wednesday, 8 May 2024
3-6pm
A V Hill Lecture Theatre, Medical Sciences, UCL
(https://www.accessable.co.uk/ucl/access-guides/medical-sciences-a-v-hill-lecture-theatre-131)
REGISTER FOR FREE: https://bit.ly/49uxCgB
My focus here will be primarily on archaeological museums that house cultural artifacts from many cultures: these are what I call “imperial museums”. I will focus on the knowledge claims made by such museums, which are used to justify their retention of their collections. The primary way museums legitimate their right of ownership and of display is on the basis of protecting a universal cultural knowledge which has unlimited reach into the future. I will explore and analyze the debates over this claim, looking especially at the issue of human remains of indigenous peoples in the Americas and the effort to repatriate these remains. I will also look at some current options for transforming such museums as developed by Dan Hicks, Ariella Azoulay and Philip Deloria. The principal issue this paper is concerned with is not the right to retain objects but the ideological effect of such museums in the legitimation of Imperialism, both past and present.
About the speakers
Linda Martín Alcoff is professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and Co-Director of the Mellon Public Humanities and Social Justice Program. Her work bridges political and philosophical topics, on epistemology, Latin American philosophy, feminism, critical race theory and continental philosophy. As well as writing numerous academic and public facing pieces in philosophy, her books include Rape and Resistance (Polity 2018), The Future of Whiteness (Polity 2015), and Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford 2006), which won the Frantz Fanon Award. She has also edited eleven books and published over 100 articles and book chapters. She is past president of the American Philosophical Association, and is originally from Panama.
Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies and Head of the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. Her work combines critical theory and ethnographic approaches with a focus on South Asia and is interested in social sciences focused on epistemic interventions from the Global South. Her latest book is Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggle for Justice (Cambridge, 2021), winner of the 2022 Susan Strange book award.
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is Professor of Human Rights and Political Philosophy at Birkbeck Law School. His work covers decolonial and anti-colonial approaches to philosophy, law, art practice, and education, with a focus on the Americas and Atlanticism, emphasising decolonial and visual methodologies, political economy, and racial justice. His What If Latin America Ruled the World? (Bloomsbury, 2010) won the Frantz Fanon Award.
Co-sponsored by the Department of English, UCL.
Free and open to all; register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/goldsmiths-annual-philosophy-lectures-2024-linda-martin-alcoff-cuny-tickets-815560662897.
Contact: j.ng [at] gold.ac.uk or s.bromberg [at] gold.ac.uk
Recordings of British Academy Symposium “Translating China in the Changing Political Economy, 1920s-2020s” (March 25, 2024)
The recordings for the British Academy symposium “Translating China in the Changing Political Economy, 1920s-2020s” (March 25, 2024) are now available on our YouTube channel here:
SYMPOSIUM: Translating China in the Changing Political Economy, 1920s-2020s (March 25, 2024, Senate House London)
Translating China in the Changing Political Economy, 1920s-2020s
A British Academy symposium on 100 years of China’s place in Europe’s linguistic, political, and philosophical formation.
Venue: Stewart House 2/3, Senate House London
Date: March 25, 2024 from 3:30-6:40 pm
We often hear about China in the news in connection to changes in the global political economy—concerning, for instance, the new infrastructural world order (Belt and Road Initiative), supply chains and their dependencies, and rebalances in the relation of law and traditional culture (tianxia or ‘Chinese’ universalism; ‘civilisational’ harmony). Yet much less consideration has been given to the direct impact that cultural translations broadly conceived and moving in multiple directions have on the fashioning of ‘China’ as a new global political and economic actor. Drawing examples from the British-German-Chinese 1920s for the 2020s, this public symposium and roundtable will explore the links between: (i) the teaching of modern non-European languages and the setting up of institutions to facilitate this teaching (e.g., SOAS) in support of British and German trade interests abroad; (ii) the specific role that philosophical and literary translations play in constructing the image of China as a political and economic counterpart during times of shifting geopolitical relations; (iii) the contribution of public intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell and Richard Wilhelm; and (iv) reinventions of Confucian and Daoist traditions by public intellectuals seeking to legitimise or criticise policy in China. How might a consideration of these moments in the translative process help us more deeply understand and critically analyze the pictures of political economy given to us in times of seemingly unprecedented change?
Free and open to the public, though registration is required. Registered attendees will receive (via the registration confirmation email) a booklet containing a collection of ‘artefacts’ selected by the speakers for consideration ahead of the event as well as an opportunity to submit a question for possible inclusion in the roundtable discussion.
To register, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/translating-china-in-the-changing-political-economy-1920s-2020s-tickets-804851200607.
This event is the first of three associated with Dr. Julia Ng’s British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship project Daoism and Capitalism: Early Critical Theory and the Global South (MCFSS23\230039). Thanks also go to Goldsmiths’ Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought and Royal Holloway’s Centre for Continental Philosophy for their generous support.
Programme
3:30-3:45 pm
Welcome and Introduction: Translation as Political-Economic Communication?
Dr. Julia Ng (Goldsmiths)
How might translation, broadly conceived, serve as a mode of political-economic communication? In these opening remarks, I will outline a constellation of texts, institutions and ideas associated in particular with the German Sinologist and translator Richard Wilhelm, a constellation that intersects with British and Chinese counterparts to suggest an altogether distinct and crucial way of picturing multilinear political economic transformations.
3:45-4:25 pm
Laozi: The Story So Far
Professor Timothy Barrett (SOAS)
Daoist thought in Europe in the interwar period looked back on a history of translation stretching back at least a century. In 1934 Arthur Waley prefaced his own attempt at situating Laozi in his historical context by contrast with all earlier translators with an assertion that his predecessors had been ‘scriptural’, treating the Chinese text of the Daode jing as an authoritative statement of Daoism to be interpreted as it was, not viewed as a product of a certain time and place. While this may be so, the assumptions behind these earlier translations had their own times and places that are in themselves worth recapitulating. Perhaps the diversity of approaches that a quick background survey reveals may help in situating 1920s and later European responses.
4:30-5:10 pm
China’s Russell Paradox: On the Historical Significance of ‘Misunderstanding’ between Russell and China
Dr. Jan Vrhovski (Edinburgh)
Between 1920 and 1921, the British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell embarked on a significant journey to China, leaving a significant mark on the country’s intellectual landscape. Russell’s visit and lectures in China catalysed various developments within Chinese academia, intellectual circles, and socio-political discourse. However, even after more than a century, the precise impact of Russell’s philosophy on China remains somewhat enigmatic. Historiographical gaps and ideological paradigms obscure a comprehensive understanding of this encounter, exacerbated by fundamental disparities between Chinese interpretations of Russell’s ideas and his perception of China. In my presentation, I aim to shed light on the historical lineage and intellectual significance of the enduring “misunderstanding” of Russell’s philosophy in early Republican China. This misunderstanding critically shaped the boundaries of Chinese intellectual discourse on science, materialism, and modernity. Conversely, I will explore Russell’s portrayal of China in the years following his return to Europe, during the period of his life which Ray Monk (2000) somewhat provocatively titled “the ghost of madness.” Of particular interest is Russell’s anthology The Problem of China, which offers insight into his perceptions of the country and its intellectual past, present, and future. Special attention will be given to the two decades following Russell’s visit to China, providing a nuanced exploration of the complexities inherent in this paradoxical relationship.
5:15-5:55 pm
Global China, or Chinese Global Orders? 1920s-2020s
Professor Leigh Jenco (LSE)
In this paper, I will examine the idea of canons, how they are formed, and what political work they do. I will focus on the so-called “Great Books” curricula that were developing starting in the 1920s as a way to discuss what “Great Books” should be and the difficulties of incorporating the Chinese classics into this curriculum, with a comparative look at the canon-formation around the Five Classics (especially the Shangshu and Mandate of Heaven). I will then connect this with Xi Jinping’s “Global Civilization Initiative” to explore its relationship to how we think about cultural appropriation, now and in the past.
6:00-6:30 pm
Roundtable
6:30-6:40 pm
Q&A
About the speakers
Timothy Barrett is professor emeritus of East Asian History at SOAS, University of London, where he taught from 1986 to 2013, primarily covering Chinese religious history, on which he has published several books, besides some further publications on the reception of the Chinese tradition in Europe. A graduate of Cambridge with a doctorate in Religious Studies from Yale, he had earlier taught in Chinese Studies at Cambridge for over a decade.
Jan Vrhovski is a research fellow at the department of Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies, School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include intellectual history of modern China, history of analytic philosophy, mathematical logic, history and philosophy of science in China, and international history of mathematics. His current book projects include the Science and Metaphysics Debate (Brill, 2024) and Palgrave Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy in China (2025-).
Leigh Jenco (PhD, Chicago) is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, specializing in Chinese and comparative political theory. She has served as editor of the American Political Science Review (2016-2020) and currently stands as member of the APSA Council. She has received numerous major grants, most recently the Chinese Global Orders global convening programme funded by the British Academy. Her publications include Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao (Cambridge UP, 2010) and Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford UP, 2015) as well as articles in American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Modern China, and T’oung Pao.
Julia Ng is Reader in Critical Theory and founding Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. She specialises in philosophical approaches to literature, modern German-Jewish thought, early 20th-century Germanophone literatures in their transnational contexts, and history of critical theory. Recent publications include her translation and critical edition of Walter Benjamin’s “Toward the Critique of Violence” (with P. Fenves; Stanford UP, 2021) and articles in Theory Culture & Society, Paragraph, CR: New Centennial Review, Modern Language Notes, diacritics, and Critical Times. Funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, she is currently completing a book on Daoism and Capitalism, which has also received support from the Leverhulme Trust, the Center for Jewish History (NYC), and the British Society for the History of Philosophy.
RECORDING of Asia Theories Network – “Field Report” (14 Dec 2023)
A recording of Asia Theory Network – ‘Field Report’ presented by Li-Chun Hsiao, Oscar V. Campomanes, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Hung-chiung Li as part of the 2023/24 CPCT research seminar on ‘What is Global Critical Theory? (Pt.3)’.
CPCT Research Seminar: Matthieu Renault, ‘Rewriting the “Decline of the West” in the Black Atlantic’ (17 Jan, 4pm, online)
Rewriting the “Decline of the West” in the Black Atlantic
Matthieu Renault, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (France)
17 January 2024
16:00 – 17:30 GMT
Online
REGISTER HERE to get the zoom link
Contact: s.bromberg[@] gold.ac.uk
This seminar is part of the 23/24 CPCT research seminar series on ‘What is Global Critical Theory? Pt.3’ [link].
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.
About the speaker
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.
CPCT Research Seminar: Asia Theories Network – “Field Report” (14 Dec, 12 noon, online seminar)
Asia Theories Network – “Field Report”
Li-Chun Hsiao, Oscar V. Campomanes, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Hung-chiung Li
14 December 2023
12-1.30pm
Online
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.
REGISTER HERE to get the zoom link!
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.
Professor Sonja Buckel: Subjectivation and Cohesion (13 Nov, 5pm, Goldsmiths, RHB 137a)
Subjectivation and Cohesion:
Towards the Reconstruction of a Materialist Theory of Law
Sonja Buckel (Kassel University)
13 Nov 2023
5-7pm
Goldsmiths, University of London
RHB Room 137a
Join Goldsmiths Unit for Global Justice and Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought for a talk by Professor Sonja Buckel (University of Kassel) on her book Subjectivation and Cohesion: Towards the Reconstruction of a Materialist Theory of Law, followed by a Q&A session.
This event is free and open to all.
You can book your place here or just come along on the day
Contact: s.bromberg[@] gold.ac.uk
About the talk
Marx initially studied law and, in his early writings in particular, he was sharply critical of the law of his time. However, he did not develop a legal theory in the strict sense. His main interest was in combining philosophy and economics to analyse capitalist societies. It was mainly the critical scholars following Marx who attempted to develop such a materialist theory of law.
In her talk, Sonja Buckel will present these different approaches and develop her own legal-theoretical approach in confrontation with them. To this end, the works of Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Evgeny Pashukanis, Oskar Negt, Isaac D. Balbus, the so-called ‘State-derivation School’, Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas and Michel Foucault are first analysed for their strengths and weaknesses, and then combined to form something new and much needed: a materialist legal theory that is fit for the present and which avoids the shortcomings of existing theories – above all their disregard for gender relations and the reductive consequences of functionalist, economistic or politicist approaches to law.
The result was published in German in 2007 and in English in 2020 (Subjectivation and Cohesion. Towards the Reconstruction of a Materialist Theory of Law, Brill, Historical Materialism Book Series).
About the speaker
Sonja Buckel, Ph.D. (1969), Kassel University, is Professor of Political Theory and member of the faculty of the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt. She is a lawyer and political scientist and has published on legal theory, European migration policy and critical social theory. Since 2021, she has also been Vice-President of the University of Kassel.
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The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths University of London 