The UWS Philosophy Research Initiative (www.uws.edu.au/philosophy) presents:
Stathis Gourgouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism, Thinking Out Loud 2012
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.
“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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