Backdoor Broadcasting Company

 

Event Date: 27 and 28 April 2012
Room B35
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX

Birkbeck School of Law and the Serpentine Gallery present

Poetics of Anxiety and Security: the problem of speech and action in our time. Homi Bhabha on Auden and Arendt

Birkbeck School of Law and Serpentine Gallery are hosting a two-day conference exploring two key works by poet W.H. Auden and political theorist Hannah Arendt. Led by internationally-renowned Harvard academic Homi Bhabha, participants will investigate Auden’s The Age of Anxiety and Arendt’s prolific oeuvre, in particular the links between the works, the relevance of poetry and the wider issue of security. This multi-disciplinary event will include lectures, discussions, screenings, poetry readings and performances to examine essential questions about the relationship between poetry, politics and art.
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PROGRAMME

Friday 27 April

Welcome by

Julia Peyton-Jones (Serpentine Gallery)

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Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery)

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Introduction by

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (Birkbeck)

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Reading 1:
Eleanor Bron reads excerpts from W. H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety (1948)

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Lecture:
Homi K. Bhabha – Poetics of Anxiety and Security: The Problem of Speech and Action in Our Time
[AUDIO HERE]
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Reading 2
Eleanor Bron reads excerpts from W. H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety (1948)

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Open Classroom 1:

W. H. Auden – Open discussion of passages from Audenís work
with Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Maria Aristodemou, Homi Bhabha, Costas Douzinas,Eleanor Bron, William Kentridge and the audience, chaired by Susannah Gottlieb

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Screening:
Andrea Geyer – Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb

Trailer:

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Saturday 28 April

Welcome and Introduction by
Julia Peyton-Jones (Serpentine Gallery)

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Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery)

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Open Classroom 2 :

Hannah Arendt – open discussion of passages from Arendt’s work
with Maria Aristodemou, Patricia Tuitt, Homi Bhabha, chaired by Costas Douzinas

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Lecture:
Introduction by Homi Bhabha
Susannah Gottlieb – Poetry in Times of Need
Closing comments by Homi Bhabha
[AUDIO HERE]
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William Kentridge in conversation
introduced by Homi Bhabha

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Lecture:
Costas Douzinas – Unhappy Borders: History, Memory, Law
[AUDIO HERE]
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Clive Phillpot reading from Gustav Metzger’s notes ‘Headline: The Anxiety Machine’
[AUDIO HERE]
(images forthcoming)
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Final Panel:

Reading Trauma and Anxiety in Auden and Arendt with Maria Aristodemou, Andrea Geyer, the speakers and the audience, chaired by Patricia Tuitt

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Closing comments .

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Event Date: 27 June 2011
Beverage Hall Senate House
University of London
WC1E 7HU

 

The Birkbeck School of Law presents:

Inaugural Lecture

Professor Patricia Tuitt - Used up and misused: the Nation State, the European Union and the Insistent Presence of the Colonial

The question of how economic and social rights are distributed across groups and between people is foreclosed in the earliest stages of the emergence of a political community. This lecture introduces a week-long series of events on the theme of social exclusion by exploring the development of the European Union.

I shall draw together two moments that, at first sight, appear separated from each other, not least by our ideas of history. One is the contemporary ‘post-modern’ moment of the European Union in which various economically grounded rights to freedom of movement have encouraged citizens to look across the increasingly porous borders of Europe with greedy eyes. The other is the ‘Age of Discovery’ or ‘Age of Exploration’ that is conventionally dated from the early 15th century, although accounts of its end-date – suggestively – differ.

The link between these moments is not merely to be found in the energy of the peoples of Europe – their desire to discover the riches that the ‘new’ Europe can yield. Rather, examining the process of emergence of the European Union, I argue that ‘discovery’ remains the principal mode through which European sovereignty is grounded. All the certainties of the so-called Age of Discovery have been brought forward to the present fashioning of the European Union, not least the belief that a political community that has reached the limits of its economic and social efficacy – that has, as it were, exhausted its evolutionary potential – is a figuratively empty space, waiting to be filled. Thus, the old modern Europe had to be conceived of as thoroughly bankrupt before its migrating citizens could appropriate it to the resolutely post-national and post-modern aims of European integration. An abundance of opportunities has no doubt resulted from the integration of Europe but the most substantial rights and rewards are reserved for those relative few capable of engaging in an age-old process of sovereign formation.

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