We’re pleased to announce the commencement of our Research Seminar this year, which is devoted to the topic ‘Music and Philosophy.’ We’re holding this in a hybrid format so you can join us either in RHB 139 or online via Zoom. Please visit https://cpct.uk/2025-26/ for more details, including a detailed seminar plan, links to the readings, and the Zoom registration link. Free and open to the public as per usual.
CPCT Research Seminar 2024-25
Time: Wednesday, 30 April 2025, 4:00-6:00 pm UK time.
Venue: RHB 138 and online
Zoom registration: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/m-qsXjg-SrG5HmiIdhzcNA
Readings
René Haby, “Pour une modernisation du système éducatif” (esp. pp.1-10) [PDF]; Jacques Derrida, “Divided Bodies: Responses to La Nouvelle Critique” [PDF]; Jacques Derrida, “The Age of Hegel” [PDF]; Jacques Derrida, Jacques Bouveresse, Catherine Malabou, et al., “Report of the Committee on Philosophy and Epistemology (1990)” [PDF]
About the session
In the 1970s and 1980s, Derrida was heavily involved in debates on the place of philosophy in education in France. In this seminar we will read a selection of texts related to two of Derrida’s interventions in this period, with an eye to how they might speak to challenges we now face, several decades later and in different national contexts. The first intervention was precipitated by proposals made in 1974 by the French Minister of Education, René Haby, who sought to “modernize” the curriculum in the lycée. Among Haby’s proposals were calls for more emphasis on the sciences and social sciences over the humanities, greater interdisciplinarity, and the need to better train future workers in the face of rapidly changing technology and systems of communication. In response, Derrida and others sought to rethink the role that philosophy should play in a student’s education, and made various counter-proposals for reform of their own. The second intervention dates to 1989, when Derrida was asked by Pierre Bourdieu and François Gros, themselves charged by the Minister of Education at that time, to co-chair with Jacques Bouveresse a Committee on Philosophy and Epistemology as a part of a larger project aiming to reform French education as a whole. The resulting report develops further the ideas first raised in the 1970s, and constitutes Derrida’s most detailed vision for transforming the teaching of philosophy in France.
About the session leader
Samir Haddad is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He specializes in 20th century and contemporary continental philosophy, particularly French philosophy and deconstruction, and in the philosophy of education. He is the author of Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Indiana, 2013) and is currently working on two research projects, one focused on Derrida’s work on education, and the other on the roles that translation and multilingualism might play in philosophical pedagogy.
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About the seminar
CPCT’s annual research seminar meets on a regular basis and is open to centre members, graduate affiliates, and other interested staff and students at Goldsmiths and beyond. It aims to serve as a forum for philosophical work and critical conversation at Goldsmiths.
Taking its inspiration from the title of the famous essay by Friedrich Nietzsche, our research seminar this year poses the following question: what is the contemporary university for? By definition “extramoral” in the sense that it is premised on the pursuit of knowledge without the interference of power and authority—the classical loci of which were Church and State—the modern university nevertheless exists in a world driven by profit, riddled with war, and beset with an ever-unfolding polycrisis of environmental, racial, economic, technological, and geopolitical dimensions. What, then, is the role of the university vis-à-vis its extramorality or, indeed, its moral purpose? We wish in particular to interrogate the university’s role in truth-telling and truth-making, inter alia in relation to the era of post-truth, alt-facts, and now AI technologies that seem to have deeply unsettled classical definitions of knowing, certainty, and consciousness, and to questions of whose truth, when and where truth is that emergent pluricentric views of the world have opened up. “Extramoral” is, of course, also a play on the word “extramural,” and we wish to recall the 2010 student-led debates on the university’s purpose when tuition fees were first introduced.
Convened by Julia Ng (j.ng[at]gold.ac.uk), Svenja Bromberg (s.bromberg[at]gold.ac.uk), and Sultan Doughan (s.doughan[at]gold.ac.uk).
This year’s sessions will be hybrid; to participate online, please register at the links below each session on the detailed session plan, where you will also find links to the readings. Free and open to the public.
We’re pleased to announce the commencement of our Research Seminar this year, which is devoted to the topic ‘On Truth and Lies in the Extramoral University.’ Moreover, we’re holding this in a hybrid format this year so you can join us either in RHB 138 or online via Zoom. Please visit https://cpct.uk/2024-2025/ for more details, including a detailed seminar plan, links to the readings, and the Zoom registration link. Free and open to the public as per usual.
REGISTER HERE for 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
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.
About the speaker
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).
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)’.
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.
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.
A conversation with Rebecca E. Karl and Lydia H. Liu
24 February 2023
5:30-7:00pm GMT
Zoom Link: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/97681381396
He-Yin Zhen (1886-1920?) was a theorist who figured centrally in the birth of Chinese feminism. Unlike her contemporaries, she was concerned less with China’s fate as a nation and more with the relationship among patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and gender subjugation as global historical problems. The Birth of Chinese Feminism (ed. & transl. Lydia Liu, Dorothy Ko, Rebecca Karl; Columbia UP 2013) is the first translation and study of He-Yin’s work in English. It critically reconstructs early twentieth-century feminist thought in a transnational context by juxtaposing He-Yin Zhen’s writing against works by two better-known male interlocutors of her time. He-Yin Zhen complicates conventional accounts of feminism and China’s history, offering original perspectives on sex, gender, labor and power that remain relevant today. The seminar will take the form of a dialogue with Rebecca Karl and Lydia Liu on He-Yin Zhen’s theoretical work, its intellectual and historical context, and the challenges of translation.
Rebecca E. Karl teaches History at New York University. Her most recent book is China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso 2020). She is co-founder of the Critical China Scholars collective and founding co-editor of the website, positionspolitics.org.
Lydia H. Liu is Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of The Freudian Robot (2010), The Clash of Empires (2004), and Translingual Practice (1995). Her new book Global Language Justice (co-edited) will be published by Columbia University Press in Fall 2023.
Wednesday, January 18– 5:30-7 pm GMT
Hicham Safieddine and Angela Giordani – Reflections on Translating Arab Marxism
Arab Marxist Mahdi Amel (1936-1987) applied class analysis during the era of national liberation to themes like sectarianism, political Islam, orientalism, culture and revolution, and the relationship of cultural heritage to modernity. His anti-colonial framing of capitalism in a colonial context sought to produce a new Marxist methodology. His work, which has been translated to English for the first time, challenges contemporary readings of leftist histories that are postmodern, liberal or Eurocentric. In this session we will discuss the volume Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel with its editor and translator and explore the relation of Amel’s thinking and writing to broader trends in Arab Marxism and critical theory.
Hicham Safieddine is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the political economy of finance and the intellectual history of modern Arab and Islamic thought. He is author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2019) and editor of Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel ; Trans. Angela Giordani (Brill, 2021).
Angela Giordani is a historian of the modern Arab world with diverse interests in Islamic and global intellectual history. She holds a PhD in History (Columbia 2021) and is completing a book manuscript titled Scions of Ibn Sina: Arab Humanists and Islamic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century . Currently, she is teaching modern Middle Eastern history at Smith College.
Zoom URL:
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/.
The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths University of London 