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.