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Event Date: 23 May 2013

Lecture Theatre E002, Granary Building,

Central Saint Martins,

London N1C 4AA

The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and the London Graduate School in collaboration with Art and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins present:

Professor Scott Wilson (Kingston) – Lars von Trier and the Fear of Philosophy

‘Let us recognise the subject’s efficacy in the gnomon he erects, a gnomon that constantly indicates truth’s site to him.’ Lacan, Ecrits.

This is a paper about the creativity of fear in film and philosophy, focussing on Lars von Trier and Gilles Deleuze. The former is a film maker who has a long history of psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment for phobic anxiety which he has used both critically and creatively as material for his films. The latter, we discover from his biographer Francoise Dosse, had a phobia for both milk products and schizophrenics. In this paper, the understanding of phobia developed in the cinema of von Trier will be deployed in order to disclose the link between a fear of milk and the figure of the schizophrenic and offer a different way of understanding the dynamic genesis of Deleuze’s philosophy, particularly his logic of sense. Neither exactly a structure nor a symptom, phobia is a problematic category in psychoanalysis. Here, psychoanalytic, schizoanalytic and neuroscientific accounts of phobia are discussed by way of elaborating a ‘gnomonology’ that articulates a critical and clinical understanding of cultural production, particularly in its engagements with scientific discourse.

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Event Date: 23 May 2013
The Peltz Room
43 Gordon Sq
Birkbeck, University of London
London WC1H 0PD

Birkbeck School of Arts presents:

Birkbeck Arts Week 2013

Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures:  A book and some afterthoughts

    Professor Leonard Barkan (University of Princeton) will discuss his recent work on the relationship between words and pictures from antiquity to the Renaissance. Professor Barkan is the author of The Gods Made Flesh, Unearthing the Past and most recently Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures.

Introduction by Dr Dorigen Caldwell (Birkbeck).

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Event Date: 22 May 2013
Birkbeck Cinema
43 Gordon Sq
Birkbeck, University of London
London WC1H 0PD

Birkbeck School of Arts presents:

Birkbeck Arts Week 2013

Dr Patricia I. Vieira (Georgetown) – Messianism and social struggle: Representations of Canudos in Brazilian Cinema

The link between messianism and political resistance is revisited in many movies from the 1960s Cinema Novo movement, which sought to denounce social inequalities in Brazil. In films such as The Guns (Ruy Guerra, 1964) or Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha, 1964) religion is portrayed ambiguously: it functions both as response of the people to the precariousness of their lives and as an alienating factor that prevents them from rebelling against those who cause their suffering.

Introduction by Dr Louis Trinidade (Birkbeck).

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Event Date: 21 May 2013
Room 112
43 Gordon Sq
Birkbeck, University of London
London WC1H 0PD

Birkbeck School of Arts presents:

Birkbeck Arts Week 2013

James Shapiro interviews Colin Teevan

This event is a conversation between Colin Teeva, a playwright, and Prof James Shapiro an eminent scholar of Renaissance theatre and culture. Because of scheduling difficulties we cannot have Prof Shapiro at Colin’s Thursday event. We therefore want to have a sound recording of the interview.

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Event Date: 21 May 2013
Birkbeck Cinema
43 Gordon Sq
Birkbeck, University of London
London WC1H 0PD

Birkbeck School of Arts presents:

Birkbeck Arts Week 2013

Film maker Mark Lewis in conversation with writer David Campany

    Mark Lewis makes films and digital works. By using film as a gallery medium, he investigates the process of cinema production while also taking into consideration the wider tradition of photography and art. Recent films like Man (2012), Smoker at Spitalfields (2012) and City Road 24 March (2012) make direct reference to the pictorial exploration of the everyday, and in his piece Black Mirror at the National Gallery (2011) the interaction between the museum space, the mirror and the cinematic camera becomes a collaborative exercise for observation and composition making. In 2009 he represented Canada at the 53rd Venice Biennale.

David Campany is a writer and curator. His books include Art and Photography (Phaidon, 2003), Photography and Cinema (Reaktion, 2008), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (Afterall / MIT, 2010), and Walker Evans: the Magazine Work (Steidl, 2013). In 2010 he curated ‘Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film’, for Le Bal in Paris. Later this year he curates major shows of the work of Mark Neville (at The Photographer’s Gallery) and Victor Burgin (at Ambika P3). In collaboration with BIMI (Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image).

Part I

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Film showing:   “Outside the National Gallery” (2011)  and   “Black Mirror at the National Gallery” (2011)

Part II

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Film showing: “Beirut” (2011)

Part III

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Mark Lewis’ website can be accessed here

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Event Date: 20 May 2013
Room 414,
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

Birkbeck School of Arts presents:

Birkbeck Arts Week 2013

Science and writing symposium

Literary works have long trespassed on the terrains of scientific discourse, interrogating the linguistic and ethical limits of scientific thinking and innovation. On rare occasions, the speculation of creative writers has actually pushed the frontiers of scientific knowledge forward. This symposium brings together creative writers, scientists, science writers, academics and their students to explore some of the aesthetic and intellectual concerns that science raises as a topic for creative writing. Chaired by Birkbeck’s Richard Hamblyn, author of The Art of Science (2011), the symposium will feature readings from distinguished writers of fiction, drama and poetry, a Q&A with the audience, and a roundtable discussion between writers, scientists and academics on the intersection between science and creative writing. Participants include Dr. Laura Salisbury, RCUK Fellow in Science, Technology, and Culture, Birkbeck; Mark Maslin, Professor of Palaeoclimatology; Marek Kukula, the Public Astronomer; playwright Nick Payne, poets Simon Barraclough and Rosie Shepperd; and graphic novelist Darryl Cunningham. This event will conclude with a wine reception sponsored by the Wellcome Collection.

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Event Date: 20 May 2013
Room 22/26
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society presents:

Dr Clayton Littlejohn (KCL) – The Russellian Retreat

Clayton Littlejohn is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at King’s College London. His publications include Justification and the Truth-Connection (Cambridge University Press, 2012), This is Epistemology (Wiley, Forthcoming), and Epistemic Norms, edited with John Turri (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming). His current research concerns the relation between theoretical and practical reason.

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Event Date: 17 – 18 May 2013

Room B01
Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:

Spinoza and Nietzsche in Dialogue

A two-day conference

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1881: “I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! [T]his most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil.”

This conference brings together scholars from around the world working in differing intellectual traditions to explore the many connections between the thought of Spinoza and Nietzsche. Both are in a range of respects radical thinkers with a highly individual approach to the tradition that preceded them. This event will put Spinoza and Nietzsche in dialogue, and in so doing widen the dialogue among scholars, and in addition bring the discussion to a wide public.

Programme

Friday 17 May 2013

Introduction to the conference by Susan James (Birkbeck).

Moira Gatens and Paul Patton – The Exemplar in Spinoza and Nietzsche

AUDIO HERE

Donald Rutherford – Perfectionism in Spinoza and Nietzsche

AUDIO HERE

Hannah Grosse Wiesmann  – Spinoza’s Conatus and Nietzsche’s Will to Power: Self-Preservation vs. Increase of Power?

AUDIO HERE

Saturday 18 May 2013

Martin Saar – Another Radical Enlightenment? Spinoza and Nietzsche on Power and Knowledge

AUDIO HERE

Alexander Douglas and Christoph Schuringa – Spinoza and Nietzsche On Valuing

AUDIO HERE

Round Table Discussion:

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Event Date: 16 May 2013

German Historical Institute
17 Bloomsbury Square
Holborn,
London WC1A 2NJ

The Leo Baeck Institute London presents:

A lecture series organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London, the Jewish Museum and the Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt am Main, in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London. This season’s topic will be Jews and Muslims: British Perspectives which takes a look at British viewpoints be they political, legal or cultural, on Jews and Muslims living in the UK in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Prof. Raphael Gross (Director, Leo Baeck Institute and Jewish Museum Frankfurt) and Dr Daniel Wildmann (Deputy Director, Leo Baeck Institute) have pleasure in inviting you to our third lecture in the new series:

Dr Brian Klug – Dealing with Difference: Jews, Muslims and the British Left Today

Generally speaking, the British left has been on the side of the disadvantaged and the oppressed. For this reason, socialists, radicals and liberals have instinctively rallied to the cause of newcomers in an increasingly multicultural society. But circumstances have changed and the waters now are muddied. This lecture will explore the reasons why it is difficult for the left today, given its origins and orientations, to deal with Muslim and Jewish difference when that difference is asserted by Jews and Muslims themselves.

Brian Klug is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St Benet’s Hall,Oxford. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish and non-Jewish Relations,UniversityofSouthampton, and in summer 2012 was Visiting Scholar at the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding,UniversityofSouth Australia.

His latest two books are Being Jewish and Doing Justice (2011) and Offence: The Jewish Case (2009).

Introduction by Dr Daniel Wildmann (LBI).

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Event Date: 16 May 2013

Lecture Theatre E002, Granary Building,

Central Saint Martins,

London N1C 4AA

The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and the London Graduate School in collaboration with Art and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins present:

Professor Éric Alliez (Kingston) – Duchamp à Calcutta

Duchamp à Calcutta: No, Duchamp didn’t go to Calcutta and it is a terribly bad pun, used here to refresh the tautological inquiry into Duchamp’s ‘meta-eroticism’ (a tautology since Duchamp, readymade included, is the meta-ironic specialist in precision ass and glass works –precision oculism). But it is a productive tautology if the whole Duchampian corpus can be rearticulated – via Lacan and against Lacan’s phallogocentrism – through the passage from the principle of contradiction to the principle ‘there is no sexual relation’; and from the latter to the transexuation of Rrose Sélavy, subverting the grammaticality of painting (‘the arrhe of painting’), ‘feminine in gender’. Duchamp à Calcutta, or, Duchamp du sexe.

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