Stathis Gourgouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism, Thinking Out Loud 2012

The UWS Philosophy Research Initiative (www.uws.edu.au/philosophy) presents:








Stathis Gourgouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism, Thinking Out Loud 2012

Lecture 1: Monday, 21 May, “Secular Criticism as Poetics and Politics”

Lecture 2: Wednesday, 23 May, “Why I Am Not A Post-Secularist"

Lecture 3: Friday, 25 May, “The Prohibitive Politics of Political Theology”

Times: 5.30 pm (for 6 pm) to 8 pm

Place: State Library of New South Wales, Metcalfe Auditorium

Registering is essential for each lecture. You can register on the State Library’s website.

Click to register for Lecture 1, Lecture 2, Lecture 3. 

“Secular criticism” is a term invented by Edward Said to combat the desire of much of modern thinking to reach for the transcendental, the very space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of modernity. Stathis Gourgouris reinvokes the term “secular criticism” as a compass for addressing the necessity to reconceptualise the political space against religious tendencies of all kinds.

Gourgouris will focus specifically on those parameters needed for societies to create new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and action, which alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics but the very self-conceptualisation of what it means to be human. The most important dimension of the secular imagination is not the battle against religion per se, but the creation of radical conditions of social autonomy. Gourgouris will address these issues with the following series of lectures.

The respondent to the lectures will be Professor Nikolas Kompridis (University of Western Sydney)

Stathis Gourgouris is Professor in the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996) and Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003), and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham, 2010).  

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The Writing & Society Research Centre and the Philosophy Research Initiative at UWS presents following seminar on Wednesday May 16:

                                 

SPEAKER: Robyn Ferrell

School of Humanities and Communication Arts

University of Western Sydney

TITLE: Sacred Exchanges

TIME: May 16, 2-4pm

PLACE: UWS Bankstown Campus, 3.G.55

ABSTRACT: As the international art market globalizes the indigenous image, it changes its identity, status, value, and purpose in local and larger contexts. Focusing on a school of Australian Aboriginal painting that has become popular in the contemporary art world,  Sacred Exchanges traces the influence of cultural exchanges on art, the self, and attitudes toward the other.

The photo-essay I present in this session is a companion piece to the book, tracing a line of associations that I used as part of the method of writing. It highlights ficto-critical material that was treated more academically in the book. It explores, through my own photos taken as research aids, some of the affects and effects of images that directed my discussion on the relation between art, culture, gender and law.

BIO: Assoc. Prof. Robyn Ferrell is is a research fellow in the Gender and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Sydney and has taught at the University of Melbourne, Macquarie University, and the University of Tasmania. She has also held visiting research positions at the London School of Economics and the University of Western Sydney and is the author of Copula: Sexual Technologies, Reproductive Powers, Genres of Philosophy and Passion in Theory: Conceptions of Freud and Lacan. 

Encountering the Author: Paul Patton on "Deleuzian Concepts"

Paul Patton, University of New South Wales, discusses his new book "Deleuzian Concepts"- details below!


Encountering the Author: Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts
Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts (Stanford University Press, 2010).


Participants:

Paul Muldoon (Monash)
Simon Duffy (University of Sydney)
Anthony Uhlmann (University of Western Sydney)
Sabrina Achilles (University of Western Sydney)

Respondent:
Paul Patton (University of New South Wales)

Date: Tuesday, 1 May 2012
Time: 1.30 to 4.30, followed by nibbles and drinks
Place: University of Western Sydney, Bankstown Campus
2 Bullecourt Avenue, Milperra
Building 3, Room G.55

Patton’s Deleuzian Concepts is a series of essays that provide important interpretations and analyse critical developments of the political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. They situate his thought in the contemporary intellectual landscape by comparing him with contemporaries such as Derrida, Rorty, and Rawls and show how elements of his philosophy may be usefully applied to key contemporary issues including colonization and decolonization, the nature of liberal democracy, and the concepts and critical utopian aspirations of political philosophy. Patton discusses Deleuze’s notion of philosophy as the creation of concepts and shows how this may be helpful in understanding the nature of political concepts such as rights, justice, and democracy. Rather than merely commenting on or explaining Deleuze’s thought, Patton offers a series of attempts to think with Deleuzian concepts in relation to other philosophers and other problems.

The series “Encountering the Author” is organized by The Philosophy Research Initiative @ UWS. This series presents papers on a recently published book on philosophy. The author is invited to be present in order to respond. The series aims to draw attention to high quality scholarship and to provoke discussions and the exchange of ideas. For more information about this series, please visit http://www.uws.edu.au/philosophy/philosophy@uws/events/encountering_the_author

RSVP by April 25 to n.lam-saw@uws.edu.au is essential for catering purposes

“‘How Can It Not Know What It Is?’ Self and Other in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner”

The UWS Democracy and Human Rights Research Initiative presents:

“‘How Can It Not Know What It Is?’ Self and Other in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner”


Date: 1st of March, 2012, 2 – 4 pm, Location: UWS, Bankstown Campus, Building 3, Room 3.G. 55

Abstract:

In this essay I provide a reading of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner that focuses upon the question of the kind of creatures the Replicants are depicted as being, and the meaning that depiction should have for us. I draw upon Stanley Cavell’s account of the problem of other minds to argue that the film’s empathy test is in fact presented as a mode of resisting the acknowledgment of others. And I draw upon Martin Heidegger’s account of authenticity and mortality to argue that this acknowledgment is crucial if one would become human. The film does not so much suggest that Replicants are, as such, human, but rather that humanity is won through the encounter with the inauthentic.

Andrew Norris is the editor of The Claim to Community (Stanford University Press, 2006), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's "Homo Sacer" (Duke University Press, 2005), and with Jeremy Elkins, the co-editor of Truth and Democracy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). His essays have appeared in Cities: Philosophie, Politique, Histoire; Constellations; Critical Horizons, Diacritics; Film-philosophy; Journal of Law & Society, Law, Culture & the Humanities; Metaphilosophy; Philosophy and Social Criticism; Political Theory; Polity; Radical Philosophy; Telos; Theory and Event; Social Science Encyclopedia; International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences; and Encyclopedia of Political Thought. He is currently completing a book entitled Publicity and Partiality: Political Reflection in the Work of Stanley Cavell.

Philosophy @ UWS Presents: Kafka and Philosophy

Philosophy @ UWS website: http://www.uws.edu.au/philosophy/philosophy@uws 

Seminar 17: Kafka and Philosophy

Seminar 17: Kafka and Philosophy

Download seminar flyer

Thursday, February 9, 2012

1.25 – 5.00 pm

University of Western Sydney

Bankstown Campus, Building 20, Room G.06

Cost: Admission Free

Please RSVP to philosophy@uws.edu.au

Franz Kafka is perhaps the most often discussed modernist author by philosophers. From Benjamin and Adorno to Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze, to mention just some of the most prominent philosophers, Kafka has been the subject of many essays and books. What has been so alluring about Kafka so that philosophers have a compulsion to return to his writings? The “Sydney Seminar” Kafka and Philosophy provides a series of possible answers to the above question.

The “Sydney Seminar” Kafka and Philosophy provides a series of possible answers to the above question. Paul Alberts takes up the issue of legal positivism in The Trial by staging a “confrontation” between Kafka and Hans Kelsen. Dimitris Vardoulakis compares the conception of the law in The Trial to Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise in order to show how it is possible to salvage a sense of freedom in Kafka’s worlds. According to Chris Conti, Kafka’s Trial is important because it signals the search of a new genre, the metaphysical crime novel. Henry Sussman argues that there is a virtual element to Kafka’s compelling and memorable literary scenes because they absorb and enmesh us within their parameters with the insistence of virtual reality, comprising free-standing self-referential worlds, to which all readers have access.

Programme

1:25pm           Welcome: Prof. Peter Hutchings 

(Dean, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney)

1:30–3:00pm  Chair: Sigi Jöttkandt

Paul Alberts (University of Western Sydney)

Knowing Life Before the Law

Dimitris Vardoulakis (University of Western Sydney)

Kafka’s Empty Law: Laughter and Freedom in The Trial

3:00–3.30pm   Coffee Break

3:30–5:00pm   Chair: Gail Jones

Chris Conti (University of Western Sydney)

Kafka’s The Trial: In Search of the Metaphysical Crime Novel

Henry Sussman (Yale University)

The Calculable, the Incalculable, and the Rest: Kafka’s Virtual Environment

Paul Alberts teaches in philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, and is working on ways of making continental philosophy applicable to understanding nature and environment.

Dimitris Vardoulakis (University of Western Sydney) is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (2010), the editor of Spinoza Now (2011) and co-editor of Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages (2011).

Henry Sussman (Yale University) is the author of numerous books, including Around the Book: Systems and Literacy – Kafka, Benjamin, Derrida (2011), The Trial: Kafka’s Unholy Trinity (1993), and Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor(1979).

Chris Conti teaches at the University of Western Sydney and is the author of Proofs: 104 Short Stories (2011) and the co-editor of Landscape, Place and Culture (2011).

The Seminar is supported by the Australian Modernist Studies Network (www.amsn.org.au).

Philosophy @ UWS

"Philosophy@UWS gathers and publicly disseminates the work and activities of scholars in the University of Western Sydney working in various sub-disciplines of philosophy, or in other disciplines in conversation with philosophy. The cross-disciplinary conversations cut across philosophy, literature, political theory, music, history, and the visual arts.

In order to foster the growth of a philosophically rich and lively intellectual community, Philosophy@UWS stages a wide range of philosophical events, such as the Thinking Out Loud lecture series, the Encountering the Author seminars, The Sydney Seminar for the Arts and Philosophy and supports specialised workshops and conferences. 

The cross-disciplinary orientation of scholars affiliated with Philosophy@UWS is anchored in, and amplified by, their institutional location in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and Writing and Society Research Centre."


http://www.uws.edu.au/philosophy/philosophy@uws 


For more information about upcoming events please visit


http://www.uws.edu.au/philosophy/philosophy@uws/events