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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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Event Date 8 – 9 May 2013

Room 22/26
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

Presents:

‘Romantic Transdisciplinarity: Art and the New’ Conference

2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

This conference is dedicated to discussion of the transdisciplinary legacies of early German Romanticism in contemporary theory and practice in the arts and humanities, with particular reference to the construction of the concepts ‘art’ and ‘the new’. Themes to be discussed include: Romanticism and disciplinarity; aesthetics as a transdisciplinary field; transdisciplinary constructions of art, nature and the new; medium, media and transmedia as transdisciplinary concepts.

The conference is in collaboration with the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Programme:

Wednesday 8 May 2013

Introduction to the day by Peter Osborne (CRMEP, Kingston University)

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Howard Caygill (CRMEP, Kingston University) – The Fate of the “Beautiful Sciences”

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Olivier Schefer (Aesthetics, Sorbonne, University of Paris 1) – Incompleteness, Reversibility and Fragmentary Montage: On Contemporary Romanticism

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Gertrud Koch (Film Studies, Free University Berlin) - The Oldest System Programme of German Idealism and the Newest Film Theories

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Hito Steyerl (artist, Berlin) – A Presentation of the Film, Adorno’s Grey

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Thursday 9 May 2013

Introduction to the day by Éric Alliez (CRMEP, Kingston University)

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Boris Groys (Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University) – Searching for the True Self

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Claude Imbert (Philosophy, ENS, Paris) – Romanticism Abroad and French Modernism

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David Cunningham (English, University of Westminister) – Genre without Genre: Romanticism, the Novel and the New

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Peter Weibel (ZKM, Karlsruhe) – In the Name of the New: Romanticism – The Artist as Monarch

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Event Date: 2 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 Catherine Malabou (Kingston) – Whither Materialism? Althusser/Darwin

I propose here to interpret the important shift in materialism announced by Althusser in his late writings. He affirms the necessity of moving from a teleological dialectical materialism (Hegel and Marx) to a “materialism of the encounter” (Epicurus, Spinoza). According to the latter, chance, “void,” absence of intention, and purpose are essential ontological conditions of possibility for a self-differentiating real. Darwin’s concept of natural selection will be analysed here as a possible example of such a movement. The question will then be: how can we transfer what works at the level of nature to the political? What is the difference between natural and social selection? Where is the “encounter” when norms, criteria, values and inequalities seem to be the only reality? Is it possible to build a new materialism which would inscribe the logic of nature in that of the community? In other terms, is social selection compatible with materialism?

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Event Date 23 April 2013
Flett Lecture Theatre
Natural History Museum
Cromwell Road (Exhibition Rd Entrance)
London SW7 5BD

The London Graduate School and the Centre for Arts and Humanities Research at the Natural History Museum London present:

Unruly Creatures 3

This is the third in a series of one-day conferences that analyse and discuss the various ways in which animals have been used in the humanities and contemporary arts, the political and theoretical implications of this use, and the manner in which animals have resisted this appropriation such that they might enter into political discourse. With examples taken from philosophy, history, and the arts, it will also examine whether there is an animal political identity, and even new ways of thinking about revolution that might be called ‘animal’.

                                                     

Event Date: 18 April 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 Peter Osborne (CRMEP) – The Postconceptual Condition: A Report on Art

It is nearly 35 years since Jean-François Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition, that ‘seemingly neutral review of a vast body of material on contemporary science and problems of knowledge or information’ that proved to be (in Fredric Jameson’s phrase) ‘a kind of crossroads’. Those, like Jameson, who took the road to postmodernism have long since had to retrace their steps or accustom themselves to life in a historical cul de sac. Yet the revival and deepening of discourses of the modern alone is insufficient to grasp the most distinctive features of the historical present. How best, then, to characterise our intellectual condition today?

This lecture offers a double displacement of Lyotard’s standpoint: from the postmodern to the contemporary and from ‘knowledge’ to ‘art’. Critically viewed, it is argued, contemporary art is postconceptual art. As such, it reflects and reflects upon a broader postconceptual condition of historical experience.

Introduction by Dr Lucy Steeds (CSM).

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Event Date: 21 March 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:

Dr Stella Sandford – A Critical Theory of Sex

The sex/gender distinction has been fundamental to Anglophone feminist theory since the 1970s, in various different ways. Many feminists, seeing a direct political advantage in a vocabulary that allowed them to distinguish between what they saw as the biological reality of sex and normative masculinity and femininity, embraced ‘gender’ as a category of analysis. What is the relation of the sex/gender distinction and its theoretical vicissitudes to the social reality of everyday gendered lives? Has the sex/gender distinction ever made waves outside of feminist theory? In this lecture I will argue that the tendency of the popular cultural uses of the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ gives a false impression. The popular concept of sex is not the biological concept but its ideological deployment and as such the social reality of the idea of ‘sex’ is more important than its biological reality. Feminist theory requires a theoretically satisfying account of sex that is adequate to this social reality in order to oppose it. This is the role of a critical theory of sex.

Introduction by Jon Cairns (Co-ordinator of Critical Studies, BA Fine Art, Central St Martin’s).

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Event Date: 14 March 2013

54 Grafton Way
Central London
London
W1T 5DL

The London Graduate School presents:

Debt

Introduction to the symposium by Simon Morgan Wortham.

Martin McQuillan – False Economy

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Samuel Weber - The Debt of the Living

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Howard Caygill – Debt and the Origins of Obedience

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Etienne Balibar – Debt Capitalism

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Event Date: 7 March 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 Simon Morgan Wortham (LGS) -  Auto-immune Narcissism

For Plato, excessive sleep offends against citizenship and the polis. Kant, meanwhile, suggests that an undue propensity to sleep may give rise to premature death. Where sleepwalking is concerned, moreover, Kant finds it impossible to propose the ‘rules of conduct’ required by pragmatic anthropology. Hegel, meanwhile, considers sleepwalking an illness; and indeed an implied menace lurks deep in the heart of sleep. For if the retreat into itself of the ‘soul’ in deepest slumber seems inescapable, at the same time such a withdrawal establishes the grounds for the disorder that is somnambulism. Hegel’s own argument suggests, then, a profound sickness rooted in the inherent imbalance of sleep. Sleep is radically double-facing in Freud’s work. It serves the conscious wish to sleep and the workings of the unconscious at once, since the ability to hold down repressed material is reduced by a certain, unavoidable relaxation of energy during sleep, while at the same time dreaming expends unused energy or ‘interest’ in a way that is innocuous in terms of the wish to sleep. The difficulty of knowing in which or in whose interests one sleeps is therefore perhaps at its strongest in Freud. In ‘A Metaphysical Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’, dreaming is not just a means of wallowing in the deep narcissism shared by the ego and the libido alike; it is also a matter of tackling those unresolved psychic residues that threaten to break into and disturb the narcissistic dream. Crucially, this threat to the narcissistic indulgence of dreaming which comes from day-time remainders isn’t just a matter of external menace, because for Freud such residues acquire significance precisely to the extent that they retain a certain degree of libidinal ‘interest’. Thus, I argue, the dream sees narcissism defending itself against what are basically its own interests. For Freud, in fact, this may be what a dream is.

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Event Date: 21 February 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 Étienne Balibar (CRMEP) – A Thought of/from the Outside: Foucault’s Uses of Blanchot

A well-known essay published by Foucault in 1966 on the work of Maurice Blanchot, La pensée du dehors, was translated into English in two different ways: ‘The thought of the outside’, and ‘The thought from outside’. This indicates a deep ambiguity concerning its possible interpretations. Together with the earlier essay on Bataille (‘Preface to Transgression’), the essay forms the metaphysical counterpart to the early ‘archeological’ work, beginning with History of Madness and ending with The Order of Things, centered on the ‘anti-humanist’ doctrine of the elimination of the subject. It is widely supposed that, in his later work, when studying apparatuses of power-knowledge, and when outlining a history of regimes of subjectivation and truth, Foucault had entirely reversed this orientation. The lecture will discuss the enigmatic notion of the ‘outside’ and its relationship to transcendental philosophy, assess the importance of a dialogue with Blanchot in the formation of Foucault’s philosophy, and argue that, contrary to established wisdom, it never ceased to frame the critique of subjectivity in Foucault’s work.

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Event Date: 7 February 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 Sam Weber (LGS) – The Singularity of Literary Cognition

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