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

Category Archives: Seminar


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CPCT Spring 2022-23 research seminar “Translating Global Critical Theory” –  Reflections on Translating Arab Marxism (18 Jan)

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:

https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/92987594062


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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/.


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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/.


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CPCT Research Seminar 2020-21: Critiques of Violence

Paul Klee (From the Song of Songs) Version II ((Aus dem hohen Lied) (II. Fassung))

CPCT Research Seminar 2020-21:
Critiques of Violence

We’re pleased to announce the programme for this year’s Research Seminar, which is convened by Andrea Mura and Julia Ng. A detailed session plan including further readings and links to PDFs is available at https://cpct.uk/2020-21/.

Wednesdays from 4:00-6:00pm UK time on Zoom

=> Register here: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gLOwwDQFTX2WYR4MmZ40Cg

Description:
2021 is the 100th anniversary of the publication of two texts that were seminal for the development of the modern critique of the state: Walter Benjamin’s “Toward the Critique of Violence” and Sigmund Freud’s Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The years around 1921 were not only the immediate aftermath of a number of revolutionary events in the environs of “Europe” (Russia, Germany), however; they were also coincident with the abolition of the world’s last widely recognized caliphate, the reshaping of the Arab Middle East, and the creation of the first Islamic mass movement of the twentieth-century: the Muslim Brotherhood. Taking this triple anniversary as its point of departure, this seminar will investigate what it means to “critique violence” and what being a “state” stands for during the long decade around and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, both for contemporaries of the time and for us today who are the heirs to some of the most influential writings in political and legal thought resulting from this period. Alternating between close systematic readings of the texts in question and a genealogical approach to their historical and intertextual contexts, the seminar will seek to return the conceptual and practical stakes of a critique of violence to their full complexity, reconsidering them as articulations of implicit and explicit debates on anti-imperialism, nationalisms old and new, the value of constitutionalism, and the ambiguous role of religion in the modern world.