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

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Donald Rutherford – Perfectionism in Spinoza and Nietzsche

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

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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

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Round Table Discussion:

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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.

Talk:

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Event Date: 13 May 2013
Room 22/26
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society presents:

Professor Gary Watson (University of Southern California) – Psychopathy and Prudential Deficits

Gary Watson’s area of specialization is moral,  political philosophy and legal philosophy, with a special concentration on the theory of agency and responsibility. More recently, his research investigates the question of whether criminal law has a coherent normative underpinning.

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Event Date: 10 – 12 May 2013

Room B01

Clore Management Centre

Birkbeck, University of London

Torrington Square

London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:

The Actuality of the Absolute: Hegel, Our Untimely Contemporary

Hegel is the ultimate bête noire of the last two centuries of philosophy:proponents of Lebensphilosophie, existentialists from Kierkegaard onwards, materialists, historicists, analytic philosophers and empiricists, Marxists, traditional liberals, religious moralists, deconstructionists and Deleuzians, they alldefine themselves through different modalities of rejecting Hegel. But when enemies start to speak the same language, it is a reliable sign that something is eluding them all. So what if something happens in Hegel, a break-through into a unique dimension of thought which was obliterated, rendered invisible, by the so-called post-metaphysical thought? What if the ridiculous image of Hegel as the absurd “absolute idealist” who “pretended to know everything” is an exemplary case of what Freud called Deck-Erinnerung (screen-memory), a fantasy-formation destined to cover up a traumatic truth? The task of the symposium will be to unearth aspects of this traumatic truth.

Programme:

Friday 10th May

Welcome and Introduction to the conference – by Slavoj Zizek.

Session 1 Chair – Slavoj Zizek

Andrew Cutrofello – Hegel and his problems

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Costas Douzinas -  Is there a right to a revolution?

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Saturday 11th May

Introduction to day 2 – by Slavoj Zizek.

Session 2 Chair – Catherine Malabou

Rebecca Comay – The Dash (I): Vicissitudes of Absolute Knowing

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Frank Ruda – The Dash (II): Working Through Absolute Knowing

AUDIO HERE

Discussion of the two above papers

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Session 3 Chair – Slavoj Zizek

Catherine Malabou – Hegel on synthetic a priori judgments

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Alenka Zupancic – Between Aufhebung and Verneinung

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Sunday 12th May

Introduction to day 2 – by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek.

Session 4 Chair – Costas Douzinas

Slavoj Zizek – The absolute recoil

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Department of Philosophy

Professor Ken Gemes (Birkbeck) – Nietzsche on the Value of Truth

Nietzsche claims that the with the rejection of religious underpinning of the value of truth (the truth as God’s word) we can now raise the question of why and to what extent we should value truth.  He argues that our need for meaning conflicts with our will to truth since that will tends to destroy all mythologies including the mythology of value – our will to truth reveals that values are not in the world but are merely our projections onto the world.  This knowledge eviscerates the world of meaning.  This does not mean that Nietzsche rejects the value of truth but that he rejects the notion, inherited from the Judeo-Christian world view, that truth is an unconditional value. Such a notion of truth, destructive of all myth and meaning, is unliveable. The very claim that the truth is valuable, even if not unconditionally valuable, is itself one of those myths that help give life meaning.

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Department of Philosophy

Professor Ken Gemes (Birkbeck) – Nietzsche on Nihilism and the Death of God

This lecture introduces Nietzsche as the philosopher of the death of god. Nietzsche claims that we have not yet fully understood the ramifications of the modern rejection of belief in God.  Giving up on belief in God undermines all our values, though many cling to those values, for instance the value of compassion and the value of truth, in the absence of God or of any other justificatory basis for those values.  When we truly appreciate the meaning of the death of God we will, says Nietzsche, lapse into nihilism; the inability to find any values in the world. This Nietzsche presciently predicts as the future of Europe for the next two hundred years. Nietzsche does not endorse nihilism but seeks to move beyond it to a new affirmation of this, the one and only, world.

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Event Date: 9 May 2013
Room B34
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

The Department of Psychosocial Studies presents:

Professor  Slavoj Zizek – The Event: Politics, Art, Ontology

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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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