ICLS Talks, Panels and Conferences

Chief Clara Soaring Hawk, Deer Clan Chief of the Ramapough Lenape Nation gives the opening blessing at the symposium on "Global Justice for Indigenous Languages" at Columbia University on April 21, 2018. Introductions and welcoming remarks from Elsa Stamatapolou and Lydia H. Liu.

First panel of writing workshop with opening remarks by Stathis Gourgouris "Spinoza's Politics of Error," led by Siarhel Biareishyk; Respondent: Raphael Kurt-Landau "Hobbes and Spinoza on Scriptural Interpretation, the Hebrew Republic and the Deconstruction of Sovereignty," led by James R. Martel; Respondent: Nicola Marcucci

Second panel discussing Spinoza's Theological Political Treatises "Spinoza and the hydraulic discipline of affects: From the theologico-political to the economic regime of desire," led by Chiara Botticiand Miguel deBeistegui; Respondent: Jacques Lezra "Philonomianism: Spinoza and Arendt on Authority, Violence and History," led by Dimitris Vardoulakis; Respondent: Arthur Jacobson

The Psychoanalytic Studies Program at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society presents: Death of a Factoid: Freud, Theatricality, and the Primal Scene of Theory

In an informal discussion, professors Honneth and Whitebook will return to their earlier “debate” on psychoanalysis and recognition (Psyche, 2001), revisit the questions they addressed there, and attempt to clarify how their thinking has developed in the interim

After a short introduction where Mr. Panayotis Yatagantzidis will present some tentative definitions of the concept of human rights as delineated in different schools of thought, he will move towards a constitutional cartography of the right to health in nations-members of the European Union. From within that perspective he will examine the international protection provided by the Treaty of the EU and the European Declaration of Human Rights and he will analyze the existing international legal discourse. He will locate the limits of protection provided by the existing legal framework in the EU, and with a commitment to the social welfare state and the principles of Democracy, he will arrive at a number of conclusions that will envelope within them the protection of health

Simona Forti will discuss issues that arise from her new book The New Demons. Rethinking Evil and Power Today (Stanford University Press, 2014). She will be in conversation with Adriana Cavarero, Professor of Political Philosophy at the Università degli studi di Verona and Miguel de Beistegui, Professor of Philosophy at University of Warwick.

Taking his point of departure in Foucault’s work from the mid to late 1970s, Professor de Beistegui will argue that the lecture courses and books from that period lay the ground for a genealogy of the western subject as a subject of desire. Beyond Foucault’s own genealogy, he’ll ask about the connections and tensions between the rationalities of the sexual instinct and economic interest , and suggest that they require a third rationality, and a third sense of desire, which involves the Law and the symbolic order, the significance of which Foucault recognizes, but doesn’t explore.

Crossed Geographies: Endō and Fanon in Lyon Respondent: Aamir Mufti (UCLA) Bandung Humanisms is a collaboration between the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia and the Seminar in Global Critical Humanities at UCLA. This is the inaugural workshop for a longterm collective project, whose events —public conferences, workshops, joint publications, pedagogical innovations -- will take place not just at our institutions but in various sites outside the Euro-American sphere.

Misreading Mao: Afro-Asian Cultural Exchanges and the Legacy of Bandung Respondent: Lydia Liu (EALAC, ICLS) Bandung Humanisms is a collaboration between the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia and the Seminar in Global Critical Humanities at UCLA. This is the inaugural workshop for a longterm collective project, whose events —public conferences, workshops, joint publications, pedagogical innovations -- will take place not just at our institutions but in various sites outside the Euro-American sphere.

The Non-Aligned Movement and Cultural Politics in the Former Yugoslavia Respondent: Kostis Karpozilos (Blinken Institute) Bandung Humanisms is a collaboration between the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia and the Seminar in Global Critical Humanities at UCLA. This is the inaugural workshop for a longterm collective project, whose events —public conferences, workshops, joint publications, pedagogical innovations -- will take place not just at our institutions but in various sites outside the Euro-American sphere.

To Turn Our Backs to Europe: The Interwar Year Origins of Non-Alignment Respondent: Souleymane Bachir Diagne (French, ICLS) Bandung Humanisms is a collaboration between the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia and the Seminar in Global Critical Humanities at UCLA. This is the inaugural workshop for a longterm collective project, whose events —public conferences, workshops, joint publications, pedagogical innovations -- will take place not just at our institutions but in various sites outside the Euro-American sphere.

Bandung Humanisms is a collaboration between the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia and the Seminar in Global Critical Humanities at UCLA. This is the inaugural workshop for a longterm collective project, whose events —public conferences, workshops, joint publications, pedagogical innovations -- will take place not just at our institutions but in various sites outside the Euro-American sphere.

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Recorded February 1, 2013 at the Miller Theatre, Columbia University Daniel Barenboim and Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra perform: P. Boulez: Mémoriale P. Boulez: Messagesquisse K. Azmeh: “Prayer, a tribute to Edward Said“ F. Schubert: Piano Quintet in A major D.667, "The Trout" This event is the first in a series of activities at Columbia University in 2013 remembering Edward W. Said on the 10th anniversary of his passing. Co-sponsored by the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Recorded February 1, 2013 at Columbia University. A panel discussion on Edward W. Said's Music, featuring: Kinan Azmeh(a former member of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra), Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia University), Ara Guzelimian(The Julliard School), Ilham Khuri-Makdisi(Northeastern University), and Michael Steinberg(Brown University.) Part of a series of events remembering Edward W. Said in the tenth anniversary of his passing.

Recorded February 1, 2013 at the Miller Theatre, Columbia University A conversation between Maestro Daniel Barenboim and Ara Guzelimian(Provost and Dean of The Julliard School)about Edward W. Said and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. This event was the first in a series of activities at Columbia University in 2013 remembering Edward W. Said on the 10th anniversary of his passing. A 7pm conversation between Daniel Barenboim and Ara Guzelimian (Dean and Provost, The Juilliard School) will be followed by an 8pm performance by Daniel Barenboim and members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Co-sponsored by the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Panelists Steven Lukes is Professor of Sociology at New York University, and teaches political and social theory. Nadia Urbinati is Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies. She is a political theorist who specializes in modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic and anti-democratic traditions.

Recorded on November 28, 2012 at Columbia University. The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society presents a talk by Dimitris Papanikolaou, University Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies, University of Oxford, and Visiting Fellow, Remarque Institute, NYU. This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies. Dimitris Papanikolaou engages with recent cultural work produced in Greece in the context of (and as a response to) the current economic and socio-political crisis – specifically, what can be seen as a ‘turn to archive’ in recent site-specific performance and conceptual art produced in Greece. Even though not a new trend in global art, the ‘turn to archive’ in Greece is taking a much more radical and more readily political dimension. Combining reflections on archival poetics, biopolitics and precarity, while also taking theoretical cues from Derrida’s Archive Fever and Athens Still Remains, and Butler’s Gender Trouble, Papanikolaou argues that what we see emerging in Greece at the moment is a larger, conscious and embattled cultural politics of Archive Trouble. The lecture will include examples from recent Greek films, novels, and works of visual art and performance.

"In any case, we know only that if there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden within socialism and its texts. It cannot be deduced from them. It must be invented." Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: 94 This colloquium brings together five organizers and radical thinkers from different corners of the planet who will address the question of Occupy, the Left and the new governmentality. Brief presentations will be followed by a discussion open to the general public. Sarah Hawas -CU and Jan25 Marianne LeNabat- NSSR and OWS Dotan Leshem- CU and J-14 Nadia Urbinati- CU Dimitris Vardoulakis- UWS Moderator: Stathis Gourgouris- CU In the four years since the outbreak of the financial crisis, the world witnessed a growing loss of popular consent to the neoliberal regime in both liberal democracies and autocratic post-imperial states. Although grasping the magnitude of the opportunity embedded in the moment, the Left has failed to seize it. Both organizers and thinkers alike tend to agree that one of the main reasons for that is their personal failure to formulate a novel form of governmentality to which Michel Foucault referred. While political thinkers, whether reformists or radical, are struggling to gain ground in their attempts to formulate a much needed novel rationality of government, a younger generation of Occupy organizers are gaining invaluable experience performing various forms of government and are painfully aware of the challenges yet to be met.

Recorded October 19, 2012 at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University. Giacomo Marramao discusses his new book The Passage West: Philosophy After the Age of the Nation State. He will be introduced by Jean L. Cohen and Étienne Balibar. Giacomo Marramao is a Professor of Political and Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Rome III and Director of the Fondazione Basso. His publications also include Kairos: Towards an Ontology of Due Time and La passione del presente. Program: In introducing his argument - which resumes and develops the philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of globalization advanced in his book The Passage West: Philosophy After the Age of the Nation State (Verso, London-New York 2012) - Giacomo Marramao takes the film Babel, by the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, as the point of departure for his discussion: the film depicts the globalized world as a complex space at once interdependent and differentiated in character, constituted like a mosaic, composed of a multiplicity of "asynchronic" ways and forms of life which are brought together by the manifold flux of events that traverse them. This cinematographic depiction perfectly captures the disconcerting bi-logic of globalization: the logic through which the mix of the global market and of digital technologies operating in "real time" generates an increasing diaspora of identities. The Babel of our contemporary world thereby reveals itself as a kind of planetary extension of the world of Kakania described by Robert Musil: a cacophonous compendium of proliferating and mutually untranslatable languages. In order to conceptualize, and produce a suitably fluid and dynamic account of this new "world picture," we must not only dissolve the spurious dilemma between universalism and relativism, but move beyond the current impasse encouraged by a normative political philosophy which tends to reify "cultural identities" and "struggles for recognition" by treating these as givens rather than as problems. The philosophical approach pursued in the following discussion attempts to liberate the concept of "the universal" - despite the etymology of the word - from the logic of the reductio ad unum, and apply it instead to the realm of multiplicity and difference. Developing a double phenomenology of the increasingly homogenising phenomenon of the market on the one hand and of the internally conflicted pandemic of identitarian and communitarian approaches on the other, the author indicates a variety of universalizing tendencies whose potential can only fully be evaluated in the context of a new theory and practice of translation. Marramao's proposal for a universalism of difference is predicated on the failure of the two principal models of "democratic" inclusion that have previously been attempted in the West: the republican or assimilationist model (that of a République founded upon what could be called a universalism of indifference) and the "strong" multiculturalism model (the so-called Londonistan model that derives from a mosaic of differences that also provides fertile ground for the growth of fundamentalist ideas). But to advance beyond the antagonistic complicity generated by this dilemma calls for a re-enchantment of the Political: the only way in which we may be able to read the signa prognostica, the “prognostic signs” of our present.

Recorded November 19, 2012 at Columbia University. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, television icon of the North American religious right, Reverend Jerry Falwell, made a guest appearance on the Christian Broadcasting Network's 700 Club in which he claimed that feminists, among others, were at least partially to blame for ‘God’s wrath descending on America’. As outrageous as Falwell’s remarks may have been, they made an explicit connection between the occurrence of terrorism on United States’ soil, and the circulation and institutionalization of feminist principles and practices within dominant North American culture. In Falwell’s formulation, feminism is, however indirectly, causally connected to, and responsible for, terrorism. For the televangelist moral right, feminism, like terrorism, is constructed as a political threat to the United States. This talk seeks to establish the grounds upon which feminism can be constructed as aligned with terrorism. I argue that, in the United States, the discursive cross-wiring of feminism with terrorism – which extends well beyond the texts of the religious right – finds its origins in a particular constellation of forces informing the rise and representation of second wave feminism in the 1970s; in particular, the rise of both ‘home-grown terrorism’ (terrorism carried out by US citizens on US soil) and, the ‘new’ threat of the female terrorist. By asking what are the conditions of possibility for the discursive cross-wiring of feminism with terrorism, this talk aims to open up a space to reflect upon the ways that feminism resonates within the popular domain today.

Presented at ICLS at Columbia University on March 20, 2012. Minata Koné writes: Mahatma Ghandi wrote about Indian contribution to the Kenyan struggle in The Young India. The relationship between India and Kenya should be extended to the literary level. In that perspective, I have chosen to examine the work of radical thinker Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and acclaimed East African writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. Spivak’s Can the subaltern Speak? and what I term Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s “Trilogy” will be my trumpets. There is a possibility of delineating a single prison personality from the Trilogy books which discuss a personal and collective Kenyan history of struggle. In her interview with Leon De Kock (A Review of International English Literature, 23:3, July 1992), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls for a better understanding of the term “subaltern” transformed in many disciplines by returning to its meaning as used by Gramsci. Future works will hear her voice, and I am not pretending either to be the first to reactivate the term. The point today resides in this question: Why must one read or continue to read Antonio Gramsci today? The Gramsci-Spivak understanding of the subaltern concept is the tool that helps explore all the aspects of the Trilogy.

Moderated by Gergely Romsics of the Hungarian Cultural Center and with an introduction by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Co-sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the Hungarian Cultural Center. Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical. In The Holocaust as Culture,Kertész recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self. The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.