The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths University of London

‘Giving the Foreigners Citizenship’, or, Machiavelli for Brexiteers

Gabriele Pedullà

16 May

5-7

Professor Stuart Hall Building

Room LG01

A long and authoritative philosophical tradition, starting with Aristotle, asserted that cities have to be especially careful with foreigners, granting them citizenship only in exceptional cases, because the afflux of newcomers risks resulting in a threat to political concord and harmony. Against this opinion, in his Discourses on Livy Machiavelli offered a completely different reasoning: modern states should follow the model of Rome instead, where subjected populations and immigrants from abroad were constantly incorporated into the civic body, making the republic stronger, even if this process inevitably fuelled social conflicts. A lesson that is still valid today?

Gabriele Pedullà is associate professor of Italian Literature at the University of Roma Tre and has been visiting professor at Stanford, UCLA, the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Lyon), and Harvard. He is the author of In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema, Machiavelli in Tumult, and the novel Lame [Blades].

10am-1pm

25 May 2019

Room RHB 144

Richard Hoggart Building

In The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (MIT Press, 2018), Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda present a reading of Hegel’s most reviled concept, absolute knowing. Their book sets out from a counterintuitive premise: the “mystical shell” of Hegel’s system proves to be its most “rational kernel.” Hegel’s radicalism is located precisely at the point where his thought seems to regress most. Most current readings try to update Hegel’s thought by pruning back his grandiose claims to “absolute knowing.” Comay and Ruda invert this deflationary gesture by inflating what seems to be most trivial: the truth of the absolute is grasped only in the minutiae of its most mundane appearances. What if everything turns out to hinge on the most inconspicuous and trivial detail—a punctuation mark?

Rebecca Comay is a Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto

Frank Ruda is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee

Places are limited to so please register ahead of time with a.toscano@gold.ac.uk

Marxism and Psychoanalysis: Alliance or Conflict? 

From Soviet Psychology to the Present

Samo Tomsic and Keti Chukhrov

31 May 2019

4-7pm

Professor Stuart Hall Building Room PSH 305

The critique of psychoanalysis in Soviet Marxist philosophy and psychology was predicated on the secondary role of the unconscious and hence of ‘psychics’, in the construction of the social subject. Key studies such as Voloshinov’s Freudianism (1976) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) and Leontiev’s Activity and Consciousness (1977), insisted that what functions as lack and alienation in psychoanalysis are in fact socio-economic categories and hence prone to dissolution under communism, having no stable ontology of their own. Consequently, the unconscious is simply that part of consciousness, which has not yet acquired awareness; indeed consciousness is nothing but an assemblage of socio-cognitive activity and labour, and therefore precisely an extension of social production. This classical mode of Marxist argumentation was subject to severe critique in the 1970s such as Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974), Guattari’s Machinic Unconscious (1979) and Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975). In these texts desire and the unconscious were claimed as the irretrievable force of capitalism’s libidinal and phantasmatic nature. Meanwhile Lacan’s critique of philosophy’s reliance on consciousness in the 1960s was even stricter, calling the transparently rational subject a fatal error of philosophy. What, therefore, is left of the Soviet Marxist critique of psychoanalysis? This symposium will explore this question, specifically through a discussion of subjectivity and the social function of language, from these two drastically opposed standpoints. Continue reading →

Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity: Derrida’s Geschlecht III

A Conference on a Newly Re-discovered Text

April 8-9, 2019

Richard Hoggart Building 137a, Goldsmiths, University of London

With Geoffrey Bennington — Katie Chenoweth — Josh Cohen — Paul Davies — Simon Glendinning — Tobias Keiling — Simon Morgan Wortham — Adam Rosenthal — Mauro Senatore — Elina Staikou — Rodrigo Therezo — Lynn Turner — Naomi Waltham-Smith — Sarah Wood

This two-day conference focuses on a recently discovered text by the late Franco-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida.  Geschlecht III, rediscovered in the Derrida archive and newly published in French (forthcoming in English), is the “missing” installment in Derrida’s four-part series on Martin Heidegger and the German word Geschlecht (meaning, among other things, “sex,” “race,” and “species”).  Geschlecht III presents us with one of Derrida’s most sustained engagements with Heidegger, a meticulous reading of what he will call Heidegger’s “national-humanism”: the nationalistic undercurrent in Heidegger’s thought that posits German and Germany as the privileged media through which to think the essence of the human and its relationship to the fate of the West. 

Click here for the programme and abstracts.

Free and open to all.

Contact: j.ng [at] gold.ac.uk

Geology of Race: Anthropos, Capital, and Universality under Pressure of Extinction

Ben Pimlott Building Lecture Theatre

5-7pm

Encouraged by a couple of references to Marxism in The Human Planet, a short mass-market book published this year by two physical geographers, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, this talk will start by explaining why a critical conversation between geology and the humanities is likely to be defining of the twenty-first century episteme. In claiming that the cumulative and accelerating destruction by capitalism of species, climate stability, and social formations will be legible forever in Earth’s crust, and in finding objective reasons to doubt the viability of the human species in the coming centuries, the Anthropocene might be the most consequential concept ever invented. Of course, it is not “man” so much as industrial capitalism precipitated by primitive accumulation that has brought about a new detectable phase in the history of the earth. Anthropos is not a totality over and against “nature”, but itself an ecology fissured in essence by vectors we call sex, class, race, religion, and nation. Focusing on the Anthropocene’s racial dimensions I will rehearse the key historical trajectories which converged into the structural racism and slow violence (which could also be called differential extinguishability) of modern globalization: slavery, monopoly, genocide, underdevelopment, carbon emissions, toxicity, refugees. Extinction is both an ever-thickening possibility on the horizon for the human species and what has already threatened some social formations in order for today’s wealth to materialize. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, a geology of race understands there are substrata to biopolitical discrimination running deeper than those of capital and prejudice. Stratigraphers millennia into the future will be able to read racism in the rocks, provided they are radical.

The talk ends by turning to the simple but momentously pressing question: what politics is capable of deflecting racial capitalism’s path towards extinction. While Badiou is understandably skeptical about environmentalism, I will argue there has never been a better justification for revolutionary universality than the Anthropocene. Geocommunism is the name for the hypothesis of a mode of production without private property and border, in which the few do not wreak havoc on the many to enrich themselves, but collectivities share the earth as an immense and perishable commons.

Arun Saldanha is Associate Professor of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Space After Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (Minnesota, 2007), and he is coeditor of Deleuze and Race (Edinburgh, 2013), Sexual Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism (Routledge, 2013), Geographies of Race and Food: Fields Markets Bodies (Ashgate, 2013), and the Deleuze Studies special issue “Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene” (2016).