Event Date: 12 December 2013
Lecture Theatre E002,
Granary Building
Central Saint Martin’s
University of the Arts London
London N1 4AA

The London Graduate School and  Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University  present:

Ernst Bloch London Symposium

The work of Ernst Bloch posits a utopian impulse that Fredric Jameson has described as ‘governing and encompassing everything, from games to patent medicines, from myths to mass entertainment, from iconography to technology, from architecture to Eros, from tourism to jokes and the unconscious’.

This one-day event, organized by the Kingston London Graduate School, with the support of CRMEP, revisits Bloch’s work in four themed panels on materialism, atheism, time & aesthetics, and political economy of hope.

Programme:

Welcome by  Simon Morgan Wortham (LGS, Kingston):

Panel 1:  Bloch Today – Contemporary Theory, Arts and Politics

Chair: Christopher Kul-Want (Central St Martin’s)

Johan Siebers (Central Lancashire/Middlesex) – Full Frontal Philosophy:

Richard Noble (Goldsmiths) – The Political Interpretation of Utopia:

Silvia Mazzini (Humboldt University, Berlin) – Bloch’s Objective Fantasy:

Panel 1 Audience Questions:

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Panel 2: Materialism/Atheism

Chair: Christopher Kul-Want (Central St Martin’s)

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (Bath) – Living in Blochian Times: The Importance of the ‘not-yet’ for Prefigurative Politics:

Catherine Moir (Cambridge) – Bloch’s Speculative Materialism:

Hager Weslati (Kingston) – Bloch-Kojève: Divine Non-existence:

Panel 2 Audience Questions:

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Panel 3: Time/Aesthetics

Chair: Hager Weslati (Kingston)

Arno Münster (Amiens) – Concrete Utopia: Consciousness of Anticipation and Praxis:

Peter Osborne (Kingston) – The Problem of a Multilayered Temporal Dialectic:

Response by Frederic Schwartz (UCL):

Panel 3 Audience Questions:

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Panel 4: Political Economy of Hope

Chair: Stella Sandford (Kingston)

Caitroina Ni Dhuill (Durham) – The Concentric Promiscuities of Utopia:

Agata Bielik Robson (Nottingham)  – The Ontology of Hope:

Peter Thompson (Sheffield) – The Future of Hope and the Metaphysics of Contingency:

Panel 4 Audience Questions and Close: