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

Tag Archives: critical theory


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BOOK DISCUSSION — Resisting Erasure: Capital, imperialism, and race in Palestine — with authors Adam Hanieh and Rafeef Ziadah (11 Dec, in person)


The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths cordially invites you to

Resisting Erasure: Capital, imperialism, and race in Palestine (Verso 2025) 


A book discussion with authors Adam Hanieh and Rafeef Ziadah in conversation with Luca di Mambro

Thursday, 11 December 2025
3:00-5:30pm GMT 
Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre, Goldsmiths 

[Please book here to give us an idea of numbers: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/resisting-erasure-in-palestine-tickets-1972565174537?aff=oddtdtcreator&lang=en-gb&locale=en_GB&status=30&view=listing]

Why has Palestine become a defining fault line of contemporary politics? Challenging mainstream narratives that reduce Palestine to ancient hatreds, humanitarian tragedy, or legal abstractions, Resisting Erasure places Israeli settler-colonialism within the broader historical arc of imperialism, race, and fossil capitalism in the Middle East. Resisting Erasure is a succinct and far-reaching critique of the socio-economic and political forces that sustain the Israeli settler-colonial project. An essential introduction for anyone looking to understand what Palestine reveals about the world – and what it demands of us today.

Join us for this book launch with authors Adam Hanieh (Exeter) and Rafeef Ziadah (King’s College London) in conversation with Luca di Mambro (student organiser and former Goldsmiths Students’ Union President). 

Chair: Sara Farris (Sociology / CPCT)

The event is organised in collaboration with members of the Sociology Department and the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths University of London.

Free and open to the public; all welcome. 

Contact: s.farris [at] gold.ac.uk 
 


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Arun Saldanha (U Minnesota; CPCT Visiting Professor): Sexuation and the ontology of race: notes towards a Darwin after Fanon (21 November 2025 @5pm; hybrid)


The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought (CPCT), Goldsmiths, cordially invites you to


Arun Saldanha (U Minnesota; CPCT Visiting Professor)

Sexuation and the ontology of race: notes towards a Darwin after Fanon

Friday, 21 November 2025 from 5-7 pm GMT
RHB 137a and online

[Click here for the Zoom registration]

Psychoanalytical theory has done systematic work to ontologize sex as the irrepressibly insistent question spurring human existence. But is there only one such question? While for obvious ethico-political reasons Lacanian theorists of race relegate it entirely to the symbolic register and to modernity, perhaps the fact bodies become objects of such strongly racialized desires indexes a second profound ontological compulsion. Perhaps, as Darwin speculates with his theory of sexual selection, the aesthetic and psychic economies of sex itself necessitate a sensitivity to phenotype. Both sexuality and kinship remain riddled by lack and misinterpretation. It is important to stress that as subset of phenotypical variation “race” is entirely contingent on European colonization and capital. The talk will end by addressing the implications of the immanent critique of evolutionary theory for a renewed politics of universality. 

About the speaker

Arun Saldanha is Professor in the School of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) as well as Visiting Professor at CPCT in Autumn 2025. The author of Space after Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (U of Minnesota Press, 2007) as well as co-editor of books on sexual difference, Deleuze studies, and food geographies, he is currently working on a new book tentatively titled Phenotypically: A Materialist Theory of Race, which seeks a critical “return to” Darwin after Fanon in light of a resurgence of far-right fantasies around human biology.

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