2010

____________________________

December 2010

____________________________

 

 

We have published the next volume in the Hermeneia series. We invite you to become familiar with this publication! 

Niewspółmierność
Perspektywy nowoczesnej komparatystyki. Antologia
[Incommensurability. Perspectives on Modern Comparative Literature] 

Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2010, anthology, pp 640. 

The anthology is the first author-selected collection of articles devoted to the development of comparative literary research from the 1990s to the present to be published in Poland. The selected texts are published in Polish for the first time or appear in a new Polish translation. They represent diverse ways of thinking about the tradition, present shape, and future of comparative studies. 

The book may be purchased in bookstores nation-wide as well as on the publisher’s website

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November 2010

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November 26, Friday, 17:00

Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities & Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies (supported by the Erste Foundation) 

invite you to a lecture by Katarzyna Bojarska (Polish Academy of sciences) .
History, Representation, Trauma: Is Polish Art Possible and Visible 

 

Venue: Grodzka 64 St. , room 302 (III floor)
 

 

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November 19, Friday, 16.30

Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities & Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies (supported by the Erste Foundation) 

nvite you to a lecture by

Profesor Catherine Gallagher 

Why We Tell It Like It Wasn't: Alternate History Narratives

Venue: Aula, ul. Grodzka 64 St.

 

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November 19, Friday, 18.00

November 20, Saturday, 10.00
 

Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities & Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies (supported by the Erste Foundation) 

nvite you to a lecture by

Profesor Martin Jay 

Photography and the Event

Venue: Aula, ul. Grodzka 64 St.

The Virtues of Mendacity. On Lying in Politics

Venue: Aula, ul. Grodzka 64 St.

 

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2nd Joseph Conrad International Literature Festival

Krakow
November 2-7, 2010

Other worlds, other languages

The world is neither one, nor does it speak one language. Various voices sound around us and it depends on us whether their strangeness will remain forever outside our range, or if it becomes a part of our own existence.

The second edition of the International Joseph Conrad Literature Festival has grown from the conviction on the inexhaustible richness of languages and worlds other than our own. Although we do not dedicate our festival to Conrad, then it cannot go unnoticed that our patron was one of the most diligent explorers of otherness in the modern culture of the West. In spending his life under foreign flags, venturing to territories untouched by western civilisation (and conquered by this civilisation), he experienced strangeness and otherness like almost no other European writers and wrote about this amazing experience like no other. Today, when we try to understand foreign cultures, master their heritage, translate their thoughts and words, whether we want it or not, we follow in Conrad's footsteps, writing further chapters to his masterpiece.
(Source: Festival materials)

Wednesday, November 3, 18:00

Multiculturalism Today
Lecture: Walter Benn Michaels

Thursday, November 4

16:00
Exterminate All The Brutes
Lecture: Sven Lindqvist
Introduction: Grzegorz Jankowicz

18:00
Hopscotch. Politics, society, culture
Meeting with Walter Benn Michaels
Led by: Jan Sowa

19:00
Soul Force. Polish Poetry in India
Lecture: Ashok Vajpeyi

Saturday, November 6, 18:00

Sun – Possibility – Joy
Meeting on the occasion of Michał Paweł Markowski's book release. Led by: Grzegorz Jankowicz

Sunday, November 7, 14:00

What cannot be talked about, must be discussed
Participants: Przemysław Czapliński, Marcin Koszałka, Maciej Zaremba
Led by: Ewa Majewska

Venue: CASH, 64 Grodzka St., The Assembly Hall (ground floor)
Free entry! 

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October 2010

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Professor Michał Paweł Markowski has been named the Stefan and Lucy Hejna Family Chair in Departament of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at University of Illinois at Chicago. 

 

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May 2010

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May 14 (Friday), 16.00

 

INTERNATIONAL PANEL DISCUSSION
HELD WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE "INTERZONES" PhD PROGRAM
FUNDED BY THE EUROPEAN UNION
IN THE YEARS 2010-2018

OPEN LECTURE
Crossing Borders, Interdisciplinarity, and Other Dangerous Games To Avoid
by Professor Michał Paweł Markowski

Friday, May 14 2010, 16:00
Mirror Room, Kanonicza 14 St.

PANEL PARTICIPANTS:

Professor Didier Girard (University of Haute-Alsace)
Professor Franca Franchi (University of Bergamo)
Professor Ingrid Hotz-Davies (Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen)
Professor Laura Borràs (University of Barcelona)
Professor Jonathan Pollock (Via Domitia University of Perpignan)
Professor Marc Porée (Paris 3 Sorbonne)
Professor Daniel Müller Nielaba (University of Zürich)
Professor Maria Cristina Franco-Ferraz (Federal Fluminense University)
Professor Schamma Schahadat (Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen)
Professor Kapitolina Fedorova (European University of St. Petersburg)
Professor Alessandro Marigniani (University of Provence Aix-Marseille 1)
Professor Francisco Gómez Mont Avalos (The Iberoamerican University)

 

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April 2010

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April 28, Wednesday, 16:00

 

Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities invites you to a panel discussion on contemporary museums and their programmes. Participants: Piotr Krajewski, Dorota Monkiewicz, Joanna Mytkowska, Piotr Piotrowski, Anda Rottenberg, Jarosława Suchan, Mareka Świca oraz Maria Anna Potocka.

Organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, MOCAK.

Venu: 64 Grodzka St., Aula

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March 2010

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Kraków, March 2010

 

Faculty of Polish Studies

Department of International Polish Studies

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LITERARY BORDERLANDS

(EVENT IN POLISH)

PROGRAMME:

Czwartek, 11 marca, Aula Collegium Novum UJ, ul. Gołębia 24

 

10.00-10.30 – otwarcie seminarium przez Jego Magnificencję Rektora UJ, prof. Karola Musioła oraz Dziekana Wydziału Polonistyki UJ, prof. Jacka Popiela;

10.30-11.30, prowadzenie: prof. Jacek Popiel
- prof. Stanisław Uliasz, URz Rzeszów – O pograniczu kultur raz jeszcze;
- prof. Ewa Wiegandt, UAM Poznań – „Pogranicze” jako kategoria interpretacyjna literatury małych ojczyzn;
- dyskusja;

11.30-12.00 – przerwa na kawę;

12.00-13.30, prowadzenie: prof. Władysław Miodunka
- prof. Ewa Domańska, UAM Poznań, SU Palo Alto – Epistemologie granic;
- prof. Ryszard Nycz, UJ Kraków – Możliwa historia literatury;
- prof. Michał Paweł Markowski, UJ Kraków – Na granicy (między literaturoznawstwem a filozofią);
- dyskusja;

14.00–15.00 – przerwa obiadowa

Pałac Wielopolskich, Plac Wszystkich Świętych 3/4

15.30–15.45 – powitanie gości przez Prezydenta Miasta Krakowa, prof. Jacka Majchrowskiego;

15.45-17.15, prowadzenie: prof. Tadeusz Bujnicki
- dyr. Stanisław Dziedzic, UM Krakowa – Prezydent Józef Dietl – krakowianin z pogranicza;
- prof. Alois Woldan, UW Wiedeń – Tekst huculski jako czynnik transgresji między literaturami narodowymi;
- prof. Władysław Miodunka, UJ Kraków – Polski nie całkiem obcy. Poza granicami polszczyzny;
- dyskusja;

17.15-17.30 – przerwa na kawę;

17.30–18.15, prowadzenie: prof. Tadeusz Bujnicki
- prof. Jerzy Axer, UW Warszawa – Recepcja kultury antycznej w Europie Środkowowschodniej – subkultury pogranicza;
- prof. Jan Kieniewicz, UW Warszawa – Kolonializm jako próba interpretacji pogranicza;
- dyskusja;

20.00 – przejazd autokarem do Przegorzał.

 

Piątek, 12 marca, Dom Gościnny UJ Przegorzały, ul. Jodłowa 13

 

9.00–10.00, Aula, prowadzenie: dr hab. Krzysztof Zajas
- prof. Rita Felski, UV Charlottesville – Suspicious Minds (referat w języku angielskim);
- dyskusja;
- prof. Benjamin Paloff, UoM Ann Arbor – Niewidzialni. Dyskursy mniejszościowe w literaturze polskiej;

10.00–10.30 – przerwa na kawę;

10.30–12.00, Aula, prowadzenie: dr hab. Krzysztof Zajas
- prof. Robert Traba, CBH PAN Berlin – „Bilateralność” jako uniwersalne laboratorium badań pogranicza. Przykład polsko-niemiecki;
- prof. Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, JLU-Gießen – Europa Środkowowschodnia widziana z wschodniopruskich pałaców. Dzienniki hr. Lehndorffa (1727-1811);
- Basil Kerski, DIALOG Berlin – Jerzego Stempowskiego powojenne dzienniki z podróży do Niemiec;
- dyskusja;

12.00–12.30 – przerwa na kawę;

12.30–14.00, Aula, prowadzenie: prof. Andrzej Romanowski
- prof. Leonard Neuger, SU Sztokholm – W Bałtyku po kolana;
- prof. Leszek Szaruga, UW Warszawa – Blaski i cienie koncepcji Międzymorza;
- prof. Jerzy Jarzębski, UJ Kraków – Współczesne pogranicze polsko-izraelskie;
- dyskusja;

14.00–15.00 – przerwa obiadowa,

15.00–16.30

 

SEKCJA A Okolice litewskie, Aula, prowadzenie: dr Paweł Bukowiec

- prof. Theodore R. Weeks, SIU Carbondale – Warszawa i Wilno w XIX wieku – miasta polskie i niepolskie;
- dr Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, ILLiF Wilno – Miasto bez imienia: konstruowanie pogranicza w wileńskiej prozie XIX w.;
- prof. Tadeusz Bujnicki, UJ Kraków – Regionalizm i pogranicze – przypadek wileński;
- dyskusja;

 

SEKCJA B Okolice łotewskie, sala H, prowadzenie: dr Jarosław Fazan

- prof. Ēriks Jēkabsons, RU Ryga – Kultura polska w historii Łotwy – perspektywa współczesna;
- dr hab. Dorota Samborska-Kukuć, UŁ Łódź – Kazimierza Bujnickiego strategie wykluczania;
- mgr Magdalena Wulczyńska, UJ Kraków – Pisarze litewsko-ruscy w młodopolskim Krakowie;
- dyskusja;

16.30–16.45 – przerwa na kawę;

16.45–18.15

 

SEKCJA A Okolice litewskie, Aula, prowadzenie: dr hab. Marta Ruszczyńska

- dr Andrzej Pukszto, VDU Kowno – Pogranicza widziane z Litwy: problem dwuszczeblowej tożsamości narodowej;
- prof. Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn, UAM Poznań – O „Żywilli” Mickiewicza i Daukantasa;
- dr Paweł Bukowiec, UJ Kraków – Zagadnienie tożsamości w poemacie Dionizego Poški „Mužikas Žemaičių ir Lietuvos”;
- dyskusja;

 

SEKCJA B Okolice galicyjsko-ukraińskie, sala H, prowadzenie: dr Jarosław Fazan

- dr Jan A. Choroszy, UWr Wrocław – Pogranicze w pisarskiej praktyce Władysława Łozińskiego;
- dr Olga Ciwkacz, UWS Iwano-Frankiwsk – Ignacy Nikorowicz i poezja ormiańska w Stanisławowie;
- dr Tamara Tkaczuk, UWS Iwano-Frankiwsk – Modernistyczne tendencje Stanisława Przybyszewskiego w twórczej recepcji Olgi Kobylańskiej;
- dyskusja;

 

Sobota, 13 marca, Dom Gościnny UJ Przegorzały, ul. Jodłowa 13

 

9.00–10.30, Aula, prowadzenie: dr hab. Włodzimierz Próchnicki

- prof. Andrzej Romanowski, UJ Kraków – Ruskie płuco literatury polskiej;
- dr Helena Krasowska, PAN Warszawa – Różne oblicza tożsamości kulturowej na pograniczach;
- dr hab. Krzysztof Zajas, UJ Kraków – Polska literatura nieobecna;
- dyskusja;

10.30–11.00 – przerwa na kawę;

11.00–13.00, Aula, prowadzenie: dr hab. Włodzimierz Próchnicki

- prof. Nina Taylor-Terlecka, OU Londyn – Między Ojczyzną Małą a Wielką;
- prof. Aleksander Fiut, UJ Kraków – Pusta tożsamość?
- prof. Rostysław Radyszewskij, UTS Kijów – Dwujęzyczna twórczość Eugeniusza Węglińskiego;
- dr Lech Aleksy Suchomłynow, UTS Kijów – Wielokulturowość a binarna dychotomia Orient – Okcydent w prozie Orhana Pamuka;
- dyskusja;

14.00-15.00 – przerwa obiadowa, obiad w Baszcie Szyszko-Bohusza;

15.00–16.30

 

SEKCJA A Okolice rosyjskie, Aula, prowadzenie: prof. Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn

- prof. Agnieszka Czajkowska, AJD Częstochowa – Inni - podobni. Ludy zabajkalskie i mongolskie w zapiskach Józefa Kowalewskiego;
- prof. Michał Okłot, BU Providence – Taras Bulba. Rosyjska Iliada;
- Alisa Ballard (MA), PU Princeton – Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Phantom As-if (w języku angielskim);
- dyskusja;

 

SEKCJA B Okolice pograniczy, sala H, prowadzenie: prof. Aleksander Fiut

- prof. Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, UJ Kraków – Problematyka pogranicza we współczesnych studiach żydowskich;
- dr Aleksandra Kijak, UJ Kraków – Ossendowski na granicy;
- mgr Michał Zając, UJ Kraków – Włodzimierz Odojewski i kres Kresów;
- dyskusja;

16.30–17.00 przerwa na kawę;

17.00–18.30

 

SEKCJA A Okolice wielokulturowe, Aula, prowadzenie: prof. Tadeusz Bujnicki

- dr hab. Marta Ruszczyńska, UZ Zielona Góra – Słowiańska przestrzeń wolności w twórczości poetów kręgu Ziewonii;
- dr hab. Włodzimierz Próchnicki, UJ Kraków – Pogranicza bez granic;
- dr Zuzanna Grębecka, UW Warszawa – Klątwa Gorbaczowa, czyli nowe podziały na starych pograniczach;
- dr Joanna Szydłowska, UWM Olsztyn - Pogranicze: garb czy skarb pojałtańskiej rzeczywistości? Przykład byłych Prus Wschodnich;
- dyskusja;

 

SEKCJA B Okolice wielokulturowe, sala H, prowadzenie: dr Helena Krasowska

- dr hab. Andrzej Hejmej, UJ Kraków – W wielokulturowym świecie R. Kapuścińskiego;
- dr Jarosław Fazan, UJ Kraków – Trzy pogranicza Tkaczyszyna-Dyckiego;
- mgr Alan Weiss, UWr Wrocław – Tereny pisania Jerzego Harasymowicza;
- dyskusja i zakończenie konferencji.

 

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March 20, 2010

 

The Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University

invites you to an interdisciplinary conference co-organised with the Krakow NLS.

Venue: 64 Grodzka St., Aula

Event in Polish:

 

UNIKALNOŚĆ PACJENTA A STANDARDY POSTĘPOWANIA W TERAPII. CO O TYM MÓWIĄ PSYCHOTERAPIA I PSYCHOANALIZA?
Konferencja psychoanalityczno-psychoterapeutyczna

PROGRAM:

8.15-9.00 Rejestracja uczestników

9.00-9.30 Powitanie:

Alina Henzel-Korzeniowska – Krakowskie Koło Psychoanalizy NLS, 
prof. Michał Paweł Markowski – Dyrektor Centrum Studiów Humanistycznych, Wydział Polonistyki UJ
Pascal Vagogne – Konsul Generalny Republiki Francji
Prezesi stowarzyszeń psychoanalitycznych i psychoterapeutycznych – organizatorzy Konferencji:
Barbara Kowalów – Koło Warszawskie Europejskiej Szkoły Psychoanalizy,
Milena Karlińska-Nehrebecka – Polskie Towarzystwo Psychoterapii Integratywnej,
Ewa Canert-Łąka – Polskie Towarzystwo Psychoterapii Gestalt,
Benedykt Peczko – Polskie Stowarzyszenie NLPt

9.30-10.00

Wprowadzenie: Dominique Wintrebert
Psychoanalityk lacanowski i psychiatra, ordynator w szpitalu psychiatrycznym w Paryżu.

10.00-14.00

Sesja Poranna: "Relacja: pacjent – terapeuta"
Prezentacja stanowisk zgodnie z teoretycznymi założeniami danego Stowarzyszenia. Po każdej prezentacji komentarze pozostałych stowarzyszeń i dyskusja.

14.00-15.00 lunch na miejscu, skromnie i smacznie

15.00-19.00

Sesja Popołudniowa: "Jakie wyleczenie?"
Struktura taka sama, jak w Sesji Porannej.

19.00-19.30 Konkluzja

Aleksander Filtz, Pierre-Gilles Gueguen

www.psychoanaliza.com.pl

 

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February 2010

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February 16, Tuesday, 19:00

Department of International Polish Studies i The Women's Space Foundation

invite you to a lecture by Piotr Oczko, PhD

"Nie ma jasnych sukien… Jest książka". Gizela Reicher-Thonowa - A Forgotten Mother of Polish Comparative Literary Studies

Venue: Cheder Cafe, 36 Józefa St 

 

2009

 

 

We have published the next volume in the Hermeneia series. We invite you to become familiar with this publication! 

Friedrich Schlegel
Fragmenty

translated by Carmen Bartl
introduction: Michał Paweł Markowski
Jagiellonian University Press
Kraków 2009

 

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We have published the next volume in the Hermeneia series. We invite you to become familiar with this publication! 

Samuel Weber
Teatralność jako medium

translated by Jan Burzyński
Jagiellonian University Press
Kraków 2009

 

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Wednesday, November 4, 18:00

Życie na miarę literatury. Meeting on the occasion of Michał Paweł Markowski's book release
Led by: Justyna Sobolewska 

Venue: CASH, 64 Grodzka St., The Assembly Hall (ground floor)

 

 

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November 2009

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1st Joseph Conrad International Literature Festival

Krakow
November 2-7, 2009

 

A World Literature Feast in Krakow!

The Joseph Conrad International Literature Festival is designed as aworld scale event. That means that the festival guests come from various countries, write in different languages, represent diverse cultures and worldviews. Among the guests Krakow will play host to this year are such distinguished authors as Pascal Quignard, Per Olov Enquist, Etgar Keret and Agneta Pleijel.

The organizers want to create in Krakow a multi-colour artistic mosaic, which will reflect the riches of world literature, exposing the Polish reader to little known ways of thinking and sensitivities. The prevailing idea is to create an event which would have the widest range and one which is widely recognised throughout the world. The prevailing idea is to create an event which would have the widest range and one which is widely recognised throughout the world.
(Source: Festival materials)

 

Tuesday, November 3, 16:00

Ashes and Diamonds
A great review of 20th century Polish literature: a critical debate
Participants: Inga Iwasiów, Anna Nasiłowska, Piotr Śliwiński
Led by: Michał Paweł Markowski

Venue: CASH, 64 Grodzka St., The Assembly Hall (ground floor)

 

Wednesday, November 4, 16:00

The province of the imagination, the backwater of intellect: a debate
Participants: Stefan Chwin, Zbigniew Kruszyński, Henryk Waniek, Olga Tokarczuk
Led by: Andrzej Franaszek

Venue: CASH, 64 Grodzka St., The Assembly Hall (ground floor)

 

Wednesday, November 4, 18:00

Życie na miarę literatury. Meeting on the occasion of Michał Paweł Markowski's book release
Led by: Justyna Sobolewska

Venue: CASH, 64 Grodzka St., The Assembly Hall (ground floor)

 

Saturday, November 7, 14:00

Academic publications abroad:
discussion amongst publishers

Participants: Lindsay Waters (Harvard University Press), Hugues Jallon (Éditions La Découverte), Eva Gilmer (Suhrkamp)
Led by: Grzegorz Gauden

Presentation of Lindsay Waters' book: Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (Homini Publishing House)

Venue: Book Fair in Krakow, 41A Centralna St., Seminar Room 4

 

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October 2009

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Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme

 

Interzones is a programme selected and funded by the EU for its innovative and challenging approach to the Humanities: it is designed to nurture and promote PhD/doctoral dissertations in a dynamic, multi-centre and cosmopolitan academic environment. We seek to prepare gifted doctoral students to become the "global academics" which top universities seek out in the fields of European comparative literatures and cultural studies, or highly-valued consultants in private business sectors interested in global cultural phenomena. For this reason, our PhD/doctoral candidates will be required to pursue their studies in several research/graduate centres or doctoral schools situated in four different countries.

The Doctorate's scientific agenda focuses on thinking in a non-identitarian way about the complexities, overlaps, divisions but also similarities which structure cultural, literary and artistic environments across nations, social classes, genders, ideological commitments, or historical periods. Social and cultural entities such as "Europe," for example, currently tend to be conceptualized only in terms of their limits and contours. As a consequence, the tools (such as identity, otherness, difference, colonization, entropy, etc.) with which artistic and literary productions are analyzed have tended to reproduce, or even to produce, a pre-existing idea of what it might mean to have (or not have) a nation, an ethnicity, a personality, a culture. We want to move beyond such often automatized identifications. Therefore we think of these entities -modes of being as areas of interaction- as zones: mental conditions, spaces, polysystemic meeting-places (and sometimes battlegrounds), sites not only of contestation or compliance but of invention and creativity. We take our inspiration from places like Kalin's, a tavern where a yellow line is painted on the floor to delineate the frontier between Slovenia and Croatia, itself part of a bigger venue, full of life, both a cultural space and an interzone. We understand cultural studies as a vital and elegant means not only of thinking of communication beyond the automatisms of common conceptualizations, but also as a means to ask how communication within and beyond various entities such as personality, ethnicity, and nation can be renewed and reinvented. It is under these premises that we want to ask: how do the inhabitants of interzonal spaces and conditions exist?

We explicitly invite innovative, project proposals which are prepared to strike out into new territories. Within the programme, we can provide expert supervision and academic accompaniment in a wide variety of fields and their interconnections: European literatures in most modern languages, and, also in their postcolonial extensions, empirical cultural studies, media studies, philosophy and art history.

The languages of tuition are French and English. Besides these two, a good knowledge of a third modern European language (among the following: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Russian, Polish, or Catalan) is required from the candidates in order to make them truly competitive in the field of comparative literature and visual culture.

A wide variety of facilities (such as language centres to learn or improve a fourth or fifth foreign language, sports and cultural activities, pastoral care to facilitate accommodation and visa procedures...) are offered everywhere in the consortium at no extra cost.

Candidates are also invited to join the worldwide competition starting in October 2010 for an Erasmus Mundus Fellowship which amounts to a maximum annual salary of 24000 Euros (net before tax) as all fellowships holders benefit from an employment contract with the Interzones consortium.

 

Institutions inolved:

• THE UNIVERSITY OF BERGAMO, Italy
• THE JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY, India
• THE UNIVERSITY OF PERPIGNAN, France
• THE FLUMINENSE FEDERAL UNIVERSITY, Brazil
• THE EBERHARD KARL UNIVERSITY OF TÜBINGEN, Germany
• THE UNIVERSITY OF PROVENCE AIX-MARSEILLE 1, France
• THE HERMENEIA GROUP – UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA, Spain
• THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BROWN UNIVERSITY, U.S.A.
• THE ENTRE RIOS NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, Argentina
• THE JAGIELLONIAN UNIVERSITY IN CRACOW, Poland
• THE IBEROAMERICAN UNIVERSITY, Mexico
• THE NEW SORBONNE UNIVERSITY – PARIS 3, France
• THE WESTERN UNIVERSITY – PARIS 10, France
• THE EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY OF PETERSBURG, Russia
• THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY, Australia
• THE UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH, Switzerland

More information: www.mundusphd-interzones.eu

 

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Czerwiec 2009

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Living On: New Prospects for the Humanities
Międzynarodowa Konferencja o Dekonstrukcji
Centrum Studiów Humanistycznych
Uniwersytet Jagielloński
4-6 czerwca 2009

 

Konferencja Living On: New Prospects for the Humanities zamyka 3-letni projekt badawczy pt. Humanistyka po dekonstrukcji, realizowany w Centrum Studiów Humanistycznych UJ dzięki funduszom Fundacji na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, pod kierunkiem prof. dra hab. Michała Pawła Markowskiego, z udziałem wielu gości krajowych i zagranicznych. W konferencji udział wezmą najwybitniejsi na świecie znawcy i tłumacze twórczości Jacques'a Derridy. Celem konferencji jest znalezienie odpowiedzi na pytanie, w jakim stopniu Derrida wpłynął na współczesną myśl humanistyczną, dlaczego nauki humanistyczne powinny uwzględnić refleksję filozoficzną jednego z najważniejszych filozofów XX wieku i dlaczego dekonstrukcja jest nadal inspirująca w myśleniu o ludzkiej egzystencji.
 

Day 1: Thursday, June 4

Place: Bunkier Sztuki, Plac Szczepański 3a
10.00
In Plural
Welcoming Address: Michał Paweł Markowski,
CASH, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

10.15-11.15
Peggy Kamuf
University of Southern California, USA
Competent Fictions: On Belief in the Humanities

11.15-11.30: Discussion

Session 1: Alterities
11.30-12.00
Tadeusz Sławek, Silesia University, Katowice, Poland
“Quelle effrayante responsabilité, pour nous”. Reading and Living „after” Deconstruction”

12.00-12.30
Krzysztof Ziarek, SUNY Buffalo, USA
Which Other? Whose Alterity?: The Human After Humanism

12.30-13.00: Discussion

13.00-14.00: Lunch Break

Session 2: Lives
14.15-14.45
Derek Attridge, York University, England
Deconstructive Living

14.45-15.15
Michał Paweł Markowski, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
On Living: Living On

15.15-15.45: Discussion

15.45-16.45: Coffee Break in Collegium Maius, ul. Jagiellońska 15

Session 3: Heritages
17.00-17.30
Michael Naas, DePaul University, Chicago, USA
From Abraham's Secret to the Satellites of CNN: Jacques Derrida's Religion of the Media

17.30-18.00
Adam Lipszyc, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
Messianic? Justice? Of Deconstruction?

18.00-18.30: Discussion

20.00: Dinner for participants

 

Day 2: Friday, June 5
Place: Bunkier Sztuki, Plac Szczepański 3a

Session 4: Communities
10.00-10.30
Christopher Fynsk, University of Aberdeen, Scotland
An Essential Forgetting

10.30-11.00
Paweł Mościcki, School for Social Research, Warsaw, Poland
Deconstruction and Politics: Futurity, Inoperativeness, Communism

11.00-11.30: Discussion

Session 5: Authorities
11.30-12.00
Irina Sandomirskaja, Södertörn Högskola, Sweden
Agent Derrida on the Theatre of Epistemological Cold Warfare: The Conflict of the Faculties, Calculability of Culture, and Soft Power

12.00-12.30
Grzegorz Jankowicz, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Mystical Foundation of Authority... after Deconstruction.
Agamben vs. Derrida

12.30-13.00: Discussion

13.00-14.00: Lunch Break

Session 6: Potentialities
14.15-14.45
Ewa Płonowska-Ziarek, SUNY at Buffalo, USA
On Feminine Potentiality: Rereading Agamben

14.45-15.15
Sarah Wood, Kent University, England
What happens to rigour after deconstruction?

15.15-15.45: Discussion

16.00: Photo Exhibition: „Witkacy Psychoholism”, Place: Bunkier Sztuki

18.00: Screening of “Examined Life” by Astra Taylor (2008), Polish Premiere. Place: Bunkier Sztuki

 

Day 3: Saturday, June 6
Place: CASH, ul. Grodzka 64, Main Aula

Session 7: Projects
10. 00-10.30
Jacek Gutorow,University of Opole, Poland
Youth: One Word from Shakespeare

10.30-11.00
Agata Bielik-Robson, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland
Life and Death in Deconstruction: Derrida with Bloom

11.00-11.30
Henry Sussman, SUNY at Buffalo, USA
The Phenomenology of Jet-Lag

11.30-12.00: Discussion

12.00: Farewell Address

List of Participants (alphabetical order)

Derek Attridge, York University, England
Agata Bielik-Robson, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland
Christopher Fynsk, University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Jacek Gutorow, University of Opole, Poland
Grzegorz Jankowicz, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California, USA
Adam Lipszyc, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
Michał Paweł Markowski, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Paweł Mościcki, School for Social Research, Warsaw, Poland
Michael Naas, DePaul University, Chicago, USA
Ewa Płonowska-Ziarek, SUNY at Buffalo, USA
Irina Sandomirskaja, Södertörn Hogskola, Sweden
Tadeusz Sławek, Silesia University, Katowice, Poland
Henry Sussman, SUNY at Buffalo, USA
Sarah Wood, Kent University, England
Krzysztof Ziarek, SUNY Buffalo, USA

 

Derek Attridge is Professor of English and Related Literature in the University of York, U. K. He was educated in South Africa and England, and has taught in England, Scotland, France, Italy, and the U.S.A. He is the author of  Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974),  The Rhythms of English Poetry (Longman, 1982),  Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Cornell and Methuen, 1988; reissued by Routledge, 2004),  Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1995), and Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge, 2000),  How to Read Joyce (Granta, 2007), and the co-author of  Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (Routledge, 2003). He is also the editor or co-editor of  Post-structuralist Joyce (Cambridge, 1984),  Post-structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987),  The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature (Manchester and Routledge, 1987),  The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge, 1990; second edition, 2004),  Acts of Literature by Jacques Derrida (Routledge, 1992),  Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970-1995 (Cambridge, 1998), and Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge, 2000). Publications appearing in 2004 included The Singularity of Literature (Routledge), which won the 2006 ESSE book award for literary criticism and theory, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago and Natal), and, as editor, James Joyce's 'Ulysses': A Casebook (Oxford). Reading and Responsibility is forthcoming from Edinburgh. He is currently co-editing The Cambridge History of South African Literature and  Theory after 'Theory' (Routledge).  

 

Agata Bielik-Robson, born in 1966, received her PhD in philosophy in 1995. She works at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences and the American Studies Center at the Warsaw University. She wrote articles in Polish, English and German on philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis, romantic subjectivity, and philosophy of religion (especially Judaism and its crossings with modern philosophical thought). Her publications include books: The Saving Lie. Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (in English: forthcoming at the Northwestern University Press in 2010), In the Wilderness. Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity (Cracow 2008), The Spirit of the Surface. Romantic Revision and Philosophy (Cracow 2004) Another Modernity (Cracow 2000) and On the Other Side of Nihilism (Warsaw 1997).

 

Christopher Fynsk, Head of the School of Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen and Director of the Centre for Modern Thought. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Romance Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1981, following a Diplôme d'Etudes Approfondies in Philosophy from the University of Strasbourg. Fynsk's interest covers the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Lévinas, and several contemporary artists, including Francis Bacon. Among his works are:

The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Language and Relation: …that there is language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1986; 2nd edn., 1993).

 

Jacek Gutorow is Assistant Professor at the University of Opole, Poland. His critical and academic interests range from British poetry to the XX-century American literature to contemporary theories. His essays, articles and reviews have been published in the most important Polish literary magazines, and include such topics as the role and status of literary criticism in the contemporary world, interdependencies between literature and philosophy, and the reception of British and American literary studies in Poland. He has also translated and commented upon such figures as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. His publications include four books of criticism: Na kresach człowieka. Sześć esejów o dekonstrukcji [The Ends of Man. Six Essays on Deconstruction, 2001], Niepodległość głosu. Szkice o poezji polskiej po 1968 roku [Independence of Voice. Notes on Polish Poetry after 1968, 2003], Urwany ślad [The Lost Track, 2007] and Luminous Traversing. Wallace Stevens and the American Sublime [2007]; four books of poems; and numerous translations from British and American literature (including Wallace Stevens, Ron Padgett, John Ashbery and Simon Armitage).

 

Grzegorz Jankowicz (b. 1978), critic, philosopher of literature and translator. Editor of Ha!art Publishing House. His areas of interest include 20th century literature, critical theories, popular culture, contemporary Polish poetry and the relationship of literature and visual arts. Presenter of television programmes "Czytelnia" and "Poezjem" on TVP Kultura. Member of the SILESIUS Poetry Prize jury.

 

Peggy Kamuf is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She writes on literary theory and contemporary French thought. Her books include Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise, Signature Pieces: On the Institutions of Authorship, The Division of Literature, or the University in Deconstruction, and Book of Addresses. She has translated into English numerous texts by Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and others and edited several works by Derrida, most recently the two volumes of Psyche: Inventions of the Other (with Elizabeth Rottenberg). She is also part of the team of international scholars editing Derrida’s unpublished seminars and, along with Geoffrey Bennington, is General Editor for the English translation of this series, the first volume of which will appear in 2009.

 

Adam Lipszyc works at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has published The Inter-people. The vision of subjectivity in the writings of Harold Bloom (2005, in Polish), The Trace of Judaism in the 20th century philosophy (2008, in Polish) and edited and co-translated into Polish a selection of essays by Gershom Scholem (2006). He is also the editor of the volumes: Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy, Theology, Politics (2006, in Polish, English and French) and Abraham Joshua Heschel: Philosophy, Theology, and Interreligious Dialogue (with Stanisław Krajewski; 2009, in English, forthcoming). His book The Revision of the Process of Josephine K. on various 20th century writers, from Kafka to Sebald, is to be published soon in Polish. Currently he is working on a book on the problem of language and justice in Walter Benjamin.

 

Michał Paweł Markowski, Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Chairman of the Department of the International Polish Studies at Jagiellonian University. Visiting Professor at Harvard, Northwestern and Brown. Author of several books on philosophy and literature, including The Inscription Effect: Jacques Derrida and Literature (1997; new edition 2003), Nietzsche: Philosophy of Interpretation (1997), Identity and Interpretation (2003); Black Waters: Gombrowicz, World, Literature (2004), Literary Theories of the 20th Century (2006), Polish Modern Literature: Leśmian, Schulz, Witkacy (2007). He also published four collections of essays (Anatomy of Curiosity [1999]; Excess: Essays on Writing and Reading [2000]; Desire and Idolatry [2004]; The Unforeseeable [2007]). Editor of the Hermeneia series at Jagiellonian University and Artistic Director of the Joseph Conrad International Literary Festival.

 

Paweł Mościcki (born 1981) – philosopher, essaist, translator; Ph.D. candidate at Graduate School for Social Research in Warsaw (Polish Academy of Science). His main interests are: contemporary philosophy, theater, literature and critical political thought. He is a member of the editorial board in polish quarterly „Political Critique”. He has translated (and co-translated) books by Alain Badiou, Derek Attridge, Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Rancière. He is the editor of the book Maurice Blanchot. The Extreme Literature (Warsaw 2007) and the author of Politics of Theater. Essays on Engaging Art (Warsaw 2008). Currently he is working on his disseration on the concept of potentiality in the work of Giorgio Agamben.

 

Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author of Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy (Humanities Press, 1995), Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford University Press, 2003), and Derrida From Now On (Fordham University Press, 2008). He is also the co-editor of Jacques Derrida's The Work of Mourning (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and co-translator, with Pascale-Anne Brault, of several works by Derrida, including The Other Heading (Indiana University Press, 1992), Memoirs of the Blind (University of Chicago Press, 1993), Adieu—to Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford University Press, 1999), Rogues (Stanford University Press, 2005), and Learning to Live Finally (Melville House, 2007). He is also co-editor of The Oxford Literary Review. 

 

Tadeusz Sławek, b.1946, professor of comparative literature at the University of Silesia, rector of this university between 1996-2002. Most important publications include books on Robinson Jeffers, William Blake, Jacques Derrida, seventeenth and eighteenth century literature and culture, concrete poetry. With a bass player Bogdan Mizerski performs “essays for words and a double bass” (four CD recordings).

 

 

Abstracts

Peggy Kamuf
Competent Fictions:  On Belief in the Humanities

 

The title borrows its formulation from Charles Péguy's 1913 Dialogue de l'histoire et de l'âme païenne but, unlike its source, it only marginally touches upon the relationship between high and low culture shifting its emphasis towards two problems: one is a reflection upon what it means to work and teach at the university (after Derrida's work on the university sans conditions) in the world profoundly divided and torn by various more or less aggressive conflicts (we shall bear upon the reception of Derrida in Algeria), the other, a question of living in a society and culture in which the term „crisis”, which now reverberates mainly with economic echoes, is deeply implicated in spiritual/religious consequences. We will attempt to demonstrate that the temporality of deconstruction from which stems the Derridean pensée méditante elicits a specific meaning of „after” which twists its apocalyptic thread with a resurrectionist theology of metamorphosis.

 

Krzysztof Ziarek
Which Other? Whose Alterity?: The Human After Humanism

 

Alterity and difference have been for a while now the central issues in philosophical, cultural, and political discussions, which have increasingly taken on an ethical tenor. The intensifying process of globalization, with the global operations of capital and the world market, the advances in communications and genetics, and the problem of difference and multicultural societies, has only added urgency to the question of rethinking the place of the human in contemporary world and the ethics that could follow from such a reconceptualization. What complicates the situation further is the precisely question of what kind of ethics the 21st century needs: one based on the centrality of the human, one that would also include animals, or perhaps a more capacious environmental ethics, with the global environment at stake. Many philosophical discussions of these issues have been informed by Levinas’s notion of radical or absolute alterity, the idea which underlies his strenuous polemic with phenomenology and Heidegger’s thought in particular. My aim here is not to resuscitate this by now quite old polemic but to explore instead the stakes of the often neglected or unremarked difference between l’être and Seyn, and the implications this difference has for what can be seen as the differently ethical tenor of Levinas and Heidegger. Keeping this difference between l’être and Seyn in mind, I want to point to two crucial points of proximity between Levinas and Heidegger, so far mostly ignored in the critical discussions of their work: the dignity of the human and the problematic of power. If in Levinas the dignity of the human is owed to the alterity of the other human, in Heidegger, that dignity comes from the capacity of the human to be Da-sein, specifically to be-there as the site for being to give there to be (beings) in a way which would remain free from power. In this paper, I question the commonly held idea that Levinas’s thought has to be opposed to Heidegger’s, because, as Levinas himself claims, the thought of being is inimical to ethics. To that effect, I show how Heidegger’s approach to being is differently ethical from Levinas’s thought, since Heidegger’s is non-anthropocentric world-wide ethics, emphatically displacing the human from its position of reference/centrality.

 

Derek Attridge
Deconstructive Living

 

One of the issues we are still working through with regard to deconstruction is whether it has any ethical consequences for living our lives. Martin Hägglund's powerful reading of Derrida, Radical Atheism, argues against the notion that Derrida's thought implies an ethics of hospitality to the other. "Whatever we do, we have already said 'yes'", he writes. I would like to explore the tension between description and prescription in deconstructive writing by and after Derrida, and relate it to the central place of desire in any account of ethical relations.

 

Michał Paweł Markowski
On Living: Living On

 

In my paper I will ask a question picked up many times by Derrida: what does it mean to a person, or to a text, to live on, à survivre? What are the necessary conditions for survival, when does it fail, and what are the consequences of this possible, and sometimes unavoidable failure? What is this “sur” in survival, and how are death and life intermingled in this desire to live on? And finally: can one really live on, or is this only an illusion cherished on the verge of death? Is not the whole notion of tradition an illusionary attempt to save what is doomed to vanish?

 

Michael Naas
From Abraham's Secret to the Satellites of CNN:
Jacques Derrida's Religion of the Media

 

I would like to consider the relationship between tele-technologies, the media, and religion in Derrida's work--a subject that Derrida takes up most explicitly, interestingly, just after his own trip to Poland in 1997. This is, I believe, an important subject for any consideration of the future of deconstruction

 

Adam Lipszyc
Messianic? Justice? Of Deconstruction?

 

In his later writings Jacques Derrida tried to present his deconstructive project as Messianic and ethical, by reorganizing it around a vision of Messianic justice. Now, there are at least two clusters of questions such an identification provokes. First, whereas the idea of linking the concept of the Messianic to the concept of justice is a commonplace of the dispersed but identifiable tradition of Jewish philosophy – also in the 20th century, from Scholem through Benjamin to Lévinas – it is not at all clear what notion of justice is meant here and, more importantly, how just the Messianic justice really is. What is certain is that the Messianic justice, dissatisfied with all forms of immanent, general order, concentrates on saving the particular, both when applied to socio-political life and when applied to the practice of critical reading in the humanities. Yet, the fundamental tension that tears apart the Messianic idea of justice is the question if it is really saving the particular from the immanent bonds of the general or rather violently destroying it in the name of the Messianic Kingdom. Is the Messianic justice the only hope for the particular or is it its worst enemy? Second, once the possibilities of solving the dilemma offered by earlier thinkers are sketched, one may turn to another cluster of questions, this time concerning deconstruction proper. Does deconstruction, with its sensitivity to the particular and mistrust towards any positive vision of the Kingdom, offer an attractive solution of the problem, keeping the best part of Messianism and eliminating its unpleasant consequences? Or, perhaps, doesn’t this very mistrust in its radical form turn deconstruction into a form of anti-Messianism and hence make its claims to justice empty? Or, perhaps, only by becoming anti-Messianic, can it be truly just and can really do justice to the particular? Thus: if we are concerned with doing justice to the particular, both while living and while reading, should we stick to deconstruction-as-a-form-of-Messianism or to deconstruction-as-a-form-of-anti-Messianism – or, finally, forget it?

 

Paweł Mościcki
Deconstruction and Politics. Futurity, Inoperativeness, Communism

 

Derrida, especially in his later works, has invented numerous concepts that could be read in the perspective of political issues: hospitality, politics of friendship, sovereignty, etc. Effectiveness of these ideas is limited due to the fact that he simultaneously put into question the stability of the field of politics as such. All the reflections of the French philosopher are located on the quasi-transcendental level that has no direct connection with historical and social problems of actual politics. Is this position politically useful and philosophically justifiable? Can this constant reframing of the political serve in the process of its refreshment? To answer these questions I would like to examine three concepts. First two are present in the texts of Derrida and Nancy: “democracy to come” and “inoperative community”. The third one is – as I would argue – the inevitable horizon of their thought: the concept of “transcendental communism”.

 

Irina Sandomirskaja
Agent Derrida on the Theatre of Epistemological Cold Warfare:
The Conflict of the Faculties, Calculability of Culture, and Soft Power

 

In my presentation, I propose to analyze Derrida’s epistemological and pedagogical agenda as it is discussed in several essays collected in The Eyes of the University; Right to Philosophy 2. My purpose is to further articulate Derrida’s view on knowledge and the university as these are formatted by the Cold War – a category not very often applied in the analysis of Derrida’s legacy but relevant in the present-day post-Cold War situation in the humanities and the arts. Its relevance is especially evident in the light of the doctrine of soft power that has been operated in the politics since the fall of the USSR.

Soft power is rhetoric of seduction which comes to substitute the hard power of military coercion, containment, and deterrence.

Power is the ability to produce the outcomes you want. When someone does something he would otherwise not do but for force or inducement, that's hard power-the use of sticks and carrots. Soft power is the ability to secure those outcomes through attraction rather than coercion. It is the ability to shape what others want. (…) Soft power can rest on the attractiveness of one's culture, political ideals, and policies, or on one's ability to manipulate other countries' political agendas. (Joseph S. Nye Jr. “The Velvet Hegemon”, Foreign Policy, No. 136 (May - Jun., 2003), pp. 74-75

Soft power thus re-assesses the criteria of utility of knowledge that belongs to Kant’s “lower faculties”, the humanities that pride themselves on their critical potential, or at least a decency of abstaining from the generation of utility value for the system. However, already the ideological warfare of the Cold War period creates utility in the knowledge produced by the “lower faculties” which turn over to scientific methods and reinvent the object of the humanities as a calculable and manipulable body of information.

At the service of war, of national and international security, research programs have to encompass the entire field of information, the stockpiling of knowledge, the workings and thus the essence of language and of all semiotic systems, translation, coding and decoding, the play of presence and absence, hermeneutics, semantics, structural and generative linguistics, pragmatics (…) literature, poetry, art, and fiction in general: the theory that has these disciplines as its object can be just as useful in ideological warfare(…) What is produced in their fields can always be used (..including) apparently useless research (philosophy of the humanities). (Kant’s) principle of reason is a principle of integral calculability (…)” (Derrida, “The Principle of Reason”, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2004; 143-145).

With the proclaimed end of the Cold War, the principle of “integral calculability” becomes ever more pervasive as it is disseminated through the strategies of soft power. The Cold War is thus not over, it has instead proliferated and radically revised its methods. How does this affect the humanities and is it possible to resist the epistemological Cold War? This are the questions I posing in my reading of Derrida

 

Grzegorz Jankowicz
Mystical Foundation of Authority... after deconstruction. Agamben vs. Derrida

 

The purpose of my speech is to analyze two different interpretations of Walter Benjamin’s Zur Kritik der Gewalt. In 1990 Jacques Derrida presented his reading at the opening of Saul Friedlander’s colloquim Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’: Probing the Limits of Representation. His point was to deconstruct a highly complicated connection between law and violence. He made references to Benjamin, Pascal and Montaigne, but there was another hardly concealed figure in his text – Carl Schmitt. Thirteen years later Giorgio Agamben in his book State of exception challenged Derrida’s interpretation. Agamben’s reading of Benjamin and Schmitt was aimed at going beyond the deconstructive aporias to find a conceptual, ethical and political way out of the metaphysical bond (presumably sustained by deconstruction) that puts together law and violence.

 

Ewa Płonowska-Ziarek
On Agamben: Biopolitics, Potentiality, Feminism

 

At the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben calls for a new modality of (non- dialectical) mediation of bare life and a political form outside the parameters of the sovereign decision: This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe...(Agamben, 188).
By displacing sovereign decision on bare life, this different form of mediation between bodies and forms of living cannot be confused either with dialectical reconciliation, social construction, and especially not with a naive celebration of prepolitical life. The key point here is the interconnection and yet nonidentity between form and life, human and inhuman, materiality and signification, which makes their separation and unification equally impossible. By preserving a fundamental relation to the excess of impotentiality over actuality, the conflicting creation of form for/from bare life might take its orientation from poesis rather than from action, too frequently associated with agency controlling materiality, or production, too frequently understood as a self-realization of the subject. In this paper I will attempt to develop a new type of mediation between bare life and a form of life by examining Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality from a feminist perspective. Such a mediation, I argue, takes us beyond the usual three alternatives that govern the discussion of the body in feminist politics: the paradigm of biopolitics, the nostalgic return to the remains of the natural body, or the equally naive social construction of a new technological body.
The interrogation of Agamben’s work from a feminist perspective raises three questions which I will examine in this project. The first question pertains to the distinction between enabling impotentiality and the destructive impossibility and futility, associated with subjugated subjectivities reduced to bare life. The second question pertains to the relation between potentiality and materiality – materiality understood in the double sense of the body of racialized, gendered subjectivities and the materiality of the work of art, for instance the materiality of the house in Agamben’s example of the architect. And finally, I will consider the relational aspect of potentiality implied in his work but never developed.

 

Sarah Wood
What happens to rigour after deconstruction?

 

The notion of rigour often comes up in philosophical and journalistic responses to or defences of Derrida. Inspired by Professor Markowski’s thoughts about the necessity of forgetting, I would like to talk about rigour in relation to what I see as vitally supple, tremulous and flexible in deconstruction. I hope to touch as I go on law, cruelty, rectitude and erection in Derrida’s work, and therefore on necessity, ethics and the masculine in philosophy.
I would like to focus on Writing and Difference. In ‘Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book’ Derrida writes the about ‘rigour and rigidity of poetic obligation’ but also affirms ‘the virtue of the lie’ and a path that lacks the ‘prescription of truth’s rigour.’ It would seem that Derrida’s notion of poetic freedom may command us to embrace lying and indirectness. ‘Genesis and Structure’ appeals to Husserl’s distinction between ‘rigour’ and ‘exactitude’: one can be rigorous and at the same time inexact. ‘La parole soufflée’ associates rigour with the Artaudian ‘cruelty’ that can liberate an ‘unknown, fabulous and obscure reality that we here in the West have completely repressed.’ How might these and other uses of the term ‘rigour’ affect the ways that those of us interested in deconstruction might choose to proceed with our work?

 

Jacek Gutorow
YOUTH: ONE WORD FROM SHAKESPEARE

 

Is it possible to write about the death of Jacques Derrida? Or perhaps we should use the plural form of the noun, following Derrida’s own manner of writing about the “deaths of Roland Barthes”, and pointing to the fact that someone else’s death is inevitably plural and touches us in more than one way or convention? Which infidelity to choose: the one telling us to keep silent or the one commanding us to pay homage to the dead?
Having posed such questions, I would like to analyze Derrida’s own manner of addressing the dead as beings (images) appearing “in” us and “for” us, and to suggest a possibility of community of mourners recognizing that Derrida can be seen only “in” and “through” us – with the proviso that “being seen” is synonymous with “seeing”, i.e. giving back one’s gaze. What kind of community would it be? What mode of mourning? How to avoid the moment of interiorization but at the same time keep the memory of the man?
One answer may be proposed via a reading of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In particular, I’d like to point to a certain ambiguity surrounding the Bard’s use of the word youth as it starts resonating in quite unexpected ways (I will make the point clearer during my presentation). My contention would be that, similarly to Shakespeare’s work of preserving the beauty of the young man, the Derridean work of mourning is informed by a paradoxical moment of discovering someone else’s gaze and voice inside of us, and locating it “as” youth, i.e. in its strange and irreducible ambiguity.

 

Agata Bielik-Robson
Life and Death in Deconstruction.
Derrida with Bloom

 

My essay offers a meditation on one of Derrida’s most mysterious passages, concerning Walter Benjamin’s concept of life. In Derrida’s “Force of Law,” where it is uttered, Benjamin is presented as a highly dialectical thinker, who criticizes naturalistic approach to life, issuing with a dubious notion of “bare life” (blosses Leben), yet not in order to reject all possible vitalism, but rather to restore a richer, more antithetical ideal of the living. Moreover, Derrida suggests that this dialectical defense of life belongs to the very core of a Judaic heritage that strongly influenced Benjamin:

“This critique of vitalism or biologism here proceeds like the awakening of a Judaic tradition. And it does so in the name of life, of the most living of life, of the value of life that is worth more than life (pure and simple, if such exist and that one could call natural and biological), but that is worth more than life because it is life itself, insofar as life prefers itself. It is life beyond life, life against life, but always in life and for life.”

This truly revealing idea never found a proper development in Derrida’s other writings and may be justifiably regarded as just a minor gloss to Benjamin’s notoriously difficult “Critique of Violence.” However, as I will try to argue, this very idea lies at the bottom of Derrida’s project of deconstruction: his meditation on the nature of language may be said to originate in his insight into the status of this strange, denaturalized life that “survives”, or “lives on” in the seemingly alienating realm of writing. Yet, this intution is often obscured in Derrida’s thought due to his allegiance to the radically opposite line of thinking about language as “the realm of the dead,” which starts with Hegel, continues via Kojeve, and matures in his French pupils: Blanchot and Lacan. Thus, in order to rescue it, I will call for a help from a thinker, usually (though wrongly) identified as Derrida’s sworn enemy, i.e. Harold Bloom and his theory of “antithetical vitalism”. I would like to take absolutely prima facie Bloom’s thesis, borrowed by him directly from Wallace Stevens, according to which a “theory of poetry” is at the same time a “theory of life,” and then show that this constant substitution of (mis)reading-as-writing for living, and vice versa, can also prove illuminating in Derrida’s case. It is my hope that with a little help from his foe Derrida will emerge as a subtle vitalistic thinker whose meditation on life indeed “proceeds like the awakening of a Judaic tradition.”

 

Henry Sussman
The Phenomenology of Jet-Lag

 

My presentation has something to do with the way which we either live constantly out of our time-zones, with its attendant life-rhythms, OR we have subjected ourselves to a global time paying little heed to local difference, a cybernetic 24/7 time-frame within which we are continuously subject to productivity, as the subject-positions we have assumed define this term. A precedent to this increasingly prevalent time-zone is the sleepless state attained by K. in Kafka's Schloss, as days grow longer & time attenuates its pace.

 

 

Examined Life, Friday, June 5, 18.00
Screening of “Examined Life. The Philosophy is in the streets.”
by Astra Taylor (2008), Polish Premiere.
Introduction: Michał Paweł Markowski.
Place: Bunkier Sztuki.
Free entrance

Synopsis
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates

Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets...

In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.

Peter Singer’s thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue’s posh boutiques. Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture’s fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be. Offering privileged moments with great thinkers from fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy’s power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it.

Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

[From the Zeitgeist Films website, http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com]

See more at:

http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/examinedlife/