thinking the event

 

 

context

 

This seminar is primarily focused on contemporary philosophical thought structured around the concept of ‘the Event’ as articulated in a number of currents in contintental philosophy. This concept was deemed to be significant and germane to a number of researchers enquiries and projects but also because of the impact it has had on contemporary cultural theory, criticism and practice.

It has been running since Spring 2008 and continues throught this next semester with a set of texts already identified. See below for a comprehensive list of these along with a number of supplementary texts that participants have identified as pertinent and illuminative for the issues thrown up throughout the seminar.

 

schedule

 

These seminars are taking place every second Wednesday @ 9.30 - 11.30 in Johns Street starting on the 10th of September. In concert with all of the School activities, attendance and committment to the seminar are expected to be consistent, rigorous and maintained throughout the semester.

 

format

 

All participants are required to read the text for each seminar. All participants are also encouraged to read around these and where possible supplement their scholarship with parallel texts and materials and to offer them to the seminar. These can be posted with full bibliographic details at least three days prior to the seminar itself to allow others to consult and read them.

Each seminar will have one researcher who has been nominated from the previous session to lead the seminar. This should be a formal presentation of around thirty minutes where the text is summarised and where significant points, contradictions, etc are highlighted and analysed. This will then lead to a discussion amongst all participants.

On the completion of a text, all participants are required to undertake to write a short paper (1000 words) on a topic or theme emerging in the text as a way to consolidate understanding and identify continuities and differences across the texts. Similarly, the School is keen to see this seminar as generating concrete productive outcomes in a number of possible forms as determinedby the group.

 

some key volumes

 

Agamben, Giorgio (2005) The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Stanford
Badiou, Alain (2003) Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford
Deleuze, Gilles (2006) Nietzsche and Philosophy, London: Continuum
Rancière, Jacques (1998) Disagreement: Politics And Philosophy, Minnesota UP
Zupančič, Alenka (2003) The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two, Cambridge: MIT

see also; http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/agamben.htm

 

spring semester 2009

 

  • 7 January 2009 9:30-12:00
    Peer-review assessment

  • 14 January 2009 9:30-12:00
    Deleuze, NP, §3 ‘Critique’
    Supplementary reading: Deleuze, ‘Preface’ from Kant’s Critical Philosophy: the doctrine of faculties, 1984;

  • 19 January 2009 9:30-12:00
    Critchley and Badiou: Screening

  • 28 January 2009 9:30-11:30
    Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, ‘Introduction: The possibility of commitment’, ‘1. Demanding Approval – a theory of ethical experience’, ‘2. Dividualism – how to build an ethical subject’
    Supplementary reading: Peter Gratton, ‘Just Demanding, An Encounter with: Simon Critchley. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance’, PhaenEx 2, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2007
  • 11 February 2009 9:30-11:30
    Critchley, ID, ‘3. The Problem of Sublimation’, ‘4. Anarchic Metapolitics – political subjectivity’
    Supplementary reading: Nietzsche, ‘Preface’, ‘First Essay: Good and Evil, Good and Bad’, On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887

  • 25 February 2009 9:30-11:30
    Preparation for Critchley talk, we shall look in more detail at the final chapter and appendix of Infinitely Demanding. However, as Critchley's paper will be derived in particular from his more recent essay in Naked Punch, which continues the debate between him and Zizek concerning political violence, it will help to look also at Zizek's short essay in LRB http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/zize01_.html; an interview http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/web/zizek.php; and a more extensive essay here http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance.htm

    Simon Critchley on Ethics: Politics of Resistance in the Contemporary World

    Organised by the "Rethinking 'The Event'" Research Seminar Group

    Thursday 26/2/2009 14.30 - 18.00

    This afternoon of talks, presentations and critical responses seeks to open up a debate on Simon Critchley's important recent contributions to the international dialogue on democracy and resistance.

    Participants include: Simon Critchley (Keynote); Sinead Hogan; Aislinn O'Donnell; Shane Cullen; and Declan Clarke. For more information go here...


  • 11 March 2009 9:30-11:30
    Deleuze, NP, §4 ‘From Ressentiment to the Bad Conscience’
    Supplementary reading: Nietzsche, ‘Second Essay: ‘Guilt’, ‘bad conscience’, and related matters’, in On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887; Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’ to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, 1972

  • 25 March 2009 9:30-11:30
    Deleuze, NP, §5 ‘The Overman: Against the Dialectic’
    Supplementary reading: Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life...’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, 1998; Mark Warren, ‘The Politics of Nietzsche’s Philosophy’, Political Studies, XXXIII, 1985; Nietzsche, LXIX ‘The Shadow’, LXX ‘Noon-Tide’, LXIII ‘The Higher Man’, in Thus Spake Zarathustra: a Book for All and None, 1883

  • 8 April 2009 9:30-11:30
    Group debate: to be arranged.

  • We may schedule some more seminars during Easter break dependingon the group's availability.

  • 29 April 2009 9:30-11:30
    tba

  • 13 May 2009 9:30-11:30
    tba

 

 

autumn semester 2008

 

A seminar series investigating the recent currency of the "event" within the nexus of philosophical and critical writing. The seminar addresses aspects of Badiou, Ranciere, Agamben and Deleuze in the first instance. See last semester's readings.

  • Weds 10/9/08
    Agamben, The Time That Remains, ‘The Sixth Day: (Eis euaggelion theou)’, and ‘Threshold or Tornada’

  • Weds 24/9/08
    Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, ‘Preface’, ‘Chapter 1: The Beginning of Politics’, ‘Chapter 2: Wrong: Politics and Police’
    Supplementary reading: Jacques Rancière and Davide Panagia (2000) ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’, Diacritics 30: 2

  • Weds 08/10/08
    Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, ‘Chapter 3: The Rationality of Disagreement’, ‘Chapter 4: From Archipolitics to Metapolitics’
    Supplementary reading: Jacques Rancière (2001) ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Theory & Event 5: 3; Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, chapters 7 & 8

  • Weds 22/10/08
    Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, ‘Chapter 5: Democracy or Consensus’, ‘Chapter 6: Politics in its Nihilistic Age’
    Supplementary reading: Jacques Rancière (2004), ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103: 2/3; Michael Dillon (2005), ‘A Passion for the (Im)possible: Jacques Rancière, Equality, Pedagogy and the Messianic’, European Journal of Political Theory 4

  • Weds 05/11/08
    Ian MacKenzie, ‘What Is A Political Event?’ Theory & Event 11: 3, 2008

  • Weds 19/11/08
    Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962, §1 ‘The Tragic’
    Supplementary reading: Vincent Pecora, ‘Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Poststructuralist Thought’, SubStance vol. 14, no. 3, issue 48, 1986; Nietzsche, ‘Section IV: From the Souls of Artists and Writers’, Human, All Too Human


  • Weds 03/12/08
    Iain Mackenzie, ‘What is a Political Event?’ Theory & Event, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2008
    Supplementary reading: Nietzsche, ‘Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks’, 1872; Rancière, ‘Misadventures of Universality’, 2008

  • Weds 17/12/08
    Deleuze, NP, §2 ‘Active and Reactive’
    Supplementary reading: Todd May, ‘The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze’, SubStance, vol. 20, no.3, issue 66, 1991; Linda Williams, ‘Will to Power in Nietzsche’s Published Works and the Nachlass’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 57, no. 3, July 1996; Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine’, in A Thousand Plateaus, 1987

 

spring semester 2008

 

A seminar series investigating the recent currency of the "event" within the nexus of philosophical and critical writing. The seminar begins with a close reading of aspects of the work of Badiou and expands on this within the contested exchanges between Badiou, Ranciere, Agamben and Deleuze.

 

  • 27/2/08
    Initial Readings:
    BOURDIEU, Pierre (2000) (orig. 1997) Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge: Polity.
    RANCIERE, Jaques (2004)(orig. 1983) The Philosopher and His Poor [Le philosophe et ses pauvres], Duke University Press.

    An opening discussion of the tensions between two disciplines - sociology and philosophy - but also of the intersection of thought and action, words and deeds, intellectual work and bodily work, production and social reproduction. Bourdieu writes about the apparent separation of the "skhole" from the place of necessity, work, and the market. Rancière writes of the "sociologist king" and challenges Bourdieu's apparent mastery in exercising an unmasking of "pure" enquiry. These texts provide an opportunity to follow through the discussions that were only very briefly raised in the first session of epistemic practices.

    See the readings that Tim Stott circulated: (i) Ross, Kristin (1991) 'Rancière and the Practice of Equality', Social Text, No. 29. pp. 57-71. (ii) Rancière, Jacques (2003) 'Politics and Aesthetics; an interview', in ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities, v.8 n.2 August. pp. 191-210. (iii) Rancière, Jacques (2003) 'Ten Theses on Politics' in Theory & Event, v.5, n.3. unp.

  • 09/04/2008
    Badiou, St Paul: the Foundation of Universalism, 2003: chapters 1-3
    Supplementary reading: Peter Hallward, ‘The Politics of Prescription’, South Atlantic Quarterly 104: 4, 2005

  • 16/04/2008
    Badiou, SP: chapters 4-6
    Supplementary reading: Alain Gignac, ‘Taubes, Badiou, Agamben: Reception of Paul by Non-Christian Philosophers Today’, 2007

  • 23/04/2008
    Badiou, SP: chapters 7 to 10
    Supplementary reading: Ashton, Bartlett and Clemens, ‘Masters & Disciples: Institution, Philosophy, Praxis’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 2:1-2, 2006

  • 30/04/2008
    Badiou, SP: general discussion: readers reviews of themes in SP: Clodagh – Subjectivity; Glen – Grace; Aislinn – Love; John – Event; Georgina – Truth; Tim – Law; Martin – Universality
    Supplementary reading: Slavoj Zizek, ‘The Politics of Truth, or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St Paul’, in The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, 1999

  • 07/05/2008
    Badiou, SP: general discussion
    Supplementary reading: Peter Osborne, ‘Neo-Classic: Alain Badiou’s Being and Event’, Radical Philosophy 142, March/April 2007

  • 14/05/2008
    Agamben, The Time that Remains, 2005, ‘The First Day: Paulos doulos christou Iēsou’ and ‘The Second Day: Klētos’
    Supplementary readings: Stefano Franchi, ‘Passive Politics’, and Catherine Mills, ‘Agamben’s Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life’, Contretemps 5, December 2004; Eleanor Kaufman, ‘The Saturday of Messianic Time (Agamben and Badiou on the Apostle Paul)’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 107:1, winter 2008

  • 21/05/2008
    Agamben, TTR, ‘The Third Day: aphōrismenos’
    Supplementary reading: Agamben, ‘The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin’, in Potentialities, 1999

  • 28/05/2008
    Agamben, TTR, ‘The Fourth Day: Apostolos’
    Supplementary reading: Brian Dillon, ‘The Carcass of Time’, Oxford Literary Review, 19, 1-2, 1997

  • 04/06/2008
    Agamben, TTR, ‘The Fifth Day: Eis euaggelion theou’
    Supplementary reading: Franz Kafka, ‘Before the Law’

 

 

 

For additional information on the collaborating institutions consult www.dit.ie, www.ncad.ie, www.iadt.ie and www.ulster.ac.uk.