Events

After the Human: Thinking for the Future 920 528 Tom Carlson

After the Human: Thinking for the Future

Wednesday, February 28 – Friday, March 1, 2024

The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Not since the height of the Second World War and the Cold War have ideological oppositions both nationally and internationally been so tense. At this critical moment, the longing to return to a past that was never present is creating political paralysis that makes it impossible to act reasonably and responsibly. Higher education is torn apart and distracted by internal and external conflicts at the precise moment it is needed most. Meanwhile, accelerating technological changes ranging from genetic engineering and synthetic biology to biobots and artificial intelligence are creating new worlds in which human beings will either be radically transformed or become extinct. What role can the arts and humanities play in understanding the past and present and imagining a future that offers hope?

For this three day conference, former students, colleagues, and collaborators gather to discuss this and related questions with Mark C. Taylor, Distinguished Visiting Fellow in UCSB’s Humanities and Social Change Center and Visiting Professor in UCSB’s Department of Religious Studies.

Conference Schedule

Wednesday, February 28

Morning Session (in Social Sciences and Media Studies, 3145)

9:30-9:45 — Welcome and Introductory Remarks

9:45-12:15

  • Jeffrey Kosky, “‘So Write About it’: Thinking Puppets and Artificial Intelligence”
  • Cole Fishman, “The Possibility of Thinking Beyond Thinking: Post-Hegelian Philosophy as Artificial Intelligence”
  • Armand Latreille: “Men and Machines in Factories

Afternoon Session (in Wallis Annenberg Conference Room, Social Sciences and Media Studies, 4315)

1:45-3:45

  • Alethea Harnish, “Performing Theory”
  • Kimerer LaMothe, “The Dance of Erring”

Keynote Session (in Wallis Annenberg Conference Room, Social Sciences and Media Studies, 4315)

4:00-5:30

  • Jack Miles, “A Time to Mourn: Reflections on Mark C. Taylor as a Man of Faith”

5:30-7:00 — Reception

Thursday, February 29

Morning Sessions (in Social Sciences and Media Studies, 3145)

9:30-11:15

  • William Little, “Dead Against”
  • Jose Marquez, “Mostly Kidding”

11:30-12:30

  • Mark C. Taylor, “Humanities After the Human”

Afternoon Session (in Social Sciences and Media Studies, 3145)

1:45-3:45

  • Miguel Vatter, “Earth as Home: Towards a Planetary Political Theology”
  • Thomas A. Carlson, “Inheriting the Future: World, Time, Diligence”

Keynote Session (in Wallis Annenberg Conference Room, Social Sciences and Media Studies, 4315)

4:00-5:30

  • Mark Z. Danielewski, in conversation with Rita Raley and Mark C. Taylor

5:30-7:00 — Reception

Friday, March 1

Morning Session (*** in Humanities and Social Change Center, Robertson Gymnasium 1000A ***)

9:30-12:30

  • Joseph Blankholm, “Recovering Poetic World-Making for the Secular Tradition”
  • Mark Stapp, “Plato Was Right: Philosophers Should Run the City”
  • Priscilla Tucker: “Indoctrinated Twerps: How Elite Universities Taught Truth not Knowledge and Created Trump World and Fake News”

Afternoon Session (in Social Sciences and Media Studies, 3145)

1:45-3:45

  • Scott Moringiello, “What Has Alexandria to do with Jena? Agapic and Gnostic Subjectivity in Clement of Alexandria”
  • Scott Edward Anderson, “A Philosopher’s Secret Garden: Mark C. Taylor and His Landscape of Ideas”

Keynote Session (in Wallis Annenberg Conference Room, Social Sciences and Media Studies, 4315)

4:00-5:30

  • Michael Govan, in conversation with Mark C. Taylor

5:30-7:00 — Reception

Addiction: Consumption and the Dilemmas of Freedom 640 564 Tom Carlson

Addiction: Consumption and the Dilemmas of Freedom

Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

This one day conference will examine the ambiguous concept of addiction and discuss the questions that addiction’s prevalence raises about individual freedom, consumerism, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States today.

Session I, 10:00AM – 12:00PM
Presentation by Susan Zieger
Discussion

Session II, 1:00 – 2:30PM
Presentation by Natasha D. Schüll
Discussion

Session III, 3:00 – 4:30PM
Presentation by Lucas McCracken
Discussion

Susan Zieger is a professor of English literature at the University of California, Riverside, specializing in the Victorian period. Her works include Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (2008) and The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (2018). She is currently researching her next book, Logistical Life.

Natasha D. Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, exploring the psychic life of technology. Schüll has authored two books, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (2012) and Keeping Track (forthcoming), as well as directed and produced an award-winning documentary film BUFFET: All You Can Eat Las Vegas (2005).

Lucas McCracken is a Humanities and Social Change dissertation fellow in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studying the modern secular legacy of ancient Christian ideas. His latest article,”Christian Addiction: The Metaphor of Debt-Bondage in Roman Theology,” is forthcoming with the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

This event is co-sponsored by UCSB’s Department of Religious Studies.

Free and open to the public.

Energy: Ecology, Extraction, and Religion 733 550 Tom Carlson

Energy: Ecology, Extraction, and Religion

Thursday, May 4, 2023
Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

A symposium on the occasion of the publication of Clayton Crockett’s Energy and Change: A New Materialist Cosmotheology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). The afternoon will feature presentations by Crockett and Terra Schwerin Rowe, as well as discussions on the theological and ecological significance of energy—its potentiality, its extraction—for the modern world and for the future of human life on Earth.

Session I, 12:30PM-2:30PM
“Energy, Ecology, and Spirit”
Presentation by Clayton Crockett
followed by a seminar-style discussion

Session II, 3:00PM-5:00PM
“Petro-theologies: Energy, Extraction, Religion”
Presentation by Terra Schwerin Rowe
followed by a seminar-style discussion

Illustration by Yurchanka Siarhei / Shutterstock

Clayton Crockett is Professor of Philosophy and Religion and the Director of the Religious Studies program at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Radical Political Theology (2011) and Derrida After the End of Writing (2017), and most recently, Energy and Change (2022). Crockett is also a member of the Westar Institute’s Seminar on God and the Human Future, as well as a Distinguished Research Fellow for the Global Centre for Advanced Studies.

Terra Schwerin Rowe is Associate Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Texas, a leading program in environmental philosophy. She received a PhD in Theological and Philosophical Studies from Drew University as well as two master’s degrees in the Protestant tradition and theology. Her current research focuses on energy, extraction, and religion. She is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group and co-director of the AAR seminar on Energy, Extraction, and Religion. Her most recent book, Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theology (T&T Clark, Bloomsbury) was released in 2022.

This event is co-sponsored by UCSB’s Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life, and the Environmental Studies Program.

Free and open to the public.

Untying Things Together: Philosophy, Literature, and a Life in Theory 683 1024 Tom Carlson

Untying Things Together: Philosophy, Literature, and a Life in Theory

Monday, June 6, 2022 at 3PM.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

This seminar with Professor Santner will focus on themes from his most recent book, Untying Things Together: Philosophy, Literature, and a Life in Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which takes up “the sexuality of theory–or, more exactly, the modes of enjoyment to be found in the kinds of critical thinking that, since the 1960s, have laid claim to that ancient word, ‘theory.” Santner unfolds his argument by tracking his own relationship with this tradition and the ways his intellectual and spiritual development have been informed by it.

If you would like access to the suggested reading for the seminar, please send an email request to tsnediker[at]ucsb.edu.

Eric Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at The University of Chicago. He works at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, and religious thought. He is author of numerous major works, including On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (University of Chicago Press, 2001); On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (University of Chicago Press, 2006); The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (University of Chicago Press, 2011); The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy [The Tanner Lectures in Human Values] (Oxford University Press, 2016); and Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (with William Mazzarella, Aaron Schuster) (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

Free and open to the public.

Gnosis and the Covert Theology of Antitheology: Heidegger, Apocalypticism, and Gnosticism in Susan and Jacob Taubes 864 631 Tom Carlson

Gnosis and the Covert Theology of Antitheology: Heidegger, Apocalypticism, and Gnosticism in Susan and Jacob Taubes

Friday, June 3, 3:00PM.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

This seminar discussion will treat central themes from Professor Wolfson’s recently completed manuscript on the writing and thought of Susan Taubes, focusing specifically on the readings of Martin Heidegger that may be elicited from her writings and those of her husband Jacob Taubes. While far more attention has been paid by scholars to the work of Jacob Taubes, Wolfson argues that Susan displayed an intellectual and spiritual depth that is well deserting of increased attention in its own right. Her gnostic interpretation of Heidegger, to be explored in this seminar, is, he contends, nuanced and innovative and not to be considered ancillary or subordinate.

Recommended readings can be found here.

The Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at UCSB, Elliot Wolfson is a world renowned expert not only in Jewish mysticism from late antiquity through modernity and in medieval and modern Jewish philosophy but also in the comparative study of mysticism in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, in the modern and contemporary European traditions of hermeneutic, phenomenological, and deconstructive philosophy; and in psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, and critical theory. He has authored numerous major works including, most recently. The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (2018, Columbia U. Press) and Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiesis (2019, Indiana U. Press).

Free and open to the public.

The Fetish as a Critical Term for Religious Studies 600 450 Tom Carlson

The Fetish as a Critical Term for Religious Studies

Monday, May 16, 2022
3:00-5:00PM
Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

Beginning from Jacques Derrida’s definition of the fetish as a ‘bad substitute,” Hammerschlag will moderate a seminar discussion in which she argues for the critical importance of the fetish to the study of religion by considering what its history tells us about the field, and what it might mean to reclaim it in light of that history. Beyond a historical review, she will consider with us its role in psychoanalysis, philosophy, Marxism, and contemporary anthropology, asking finally how the term might help us embrace the contingency of our existence as scholars and humans. 

Recommended reading: pp. 208-213 of Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (University of Nebraska Press, 1986). You can find the reading here.

Sarah Hammerschlag is Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions, and History of Judaism at the University of Chicago, Sarah Hammerschlag is author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), and, most recently, Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2021), co-authored with Constance Fury and Amy Hollywood. Editor of Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics (Brandeis University Press, 2018), she has written essays on Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot which have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Jewish Quarterly Review and Shofar, among other places. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Sowers and Sages: The Renaissance of Judaism in Postwar Paris.”

This event is free and open to the public.

Neuromatic: Religion, Secularity, and the Techno-Scientific Today 1024 867 Tom Carlson

Neuromatic: Religion, Secularity, and the Techno-Scientific Today

Friday, May 13, 2022
Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

This one day conference will take up themes and questions at play within and surrounding John Lardas Modern’s recent book Neuromatic: or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain (University of Chicago Press, 2021), which argues that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses.

Session I, 10:00AM-12:30 PM
A presentation by Elizabeth Wilson, entitled “Trapdoors,” followed by a seminar-style discussion

Session II, 2:00-4:30 PM
A presentation by Mayanthi Fernando, entitled “This is your brain on drugs: Psychedelic medicine and the problem of religion,” followed by a seminar-style discussion

*In case those who wish to attend the event want to do some reading ahead of time, please note that Professors Wilson and Fernando will be focusing their discussion on the Introduction, Chapter 4, and Conclusion of Neuromatic. The readings can be found here.

John Lardas Modern is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College and author of Neuromatic; or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (2021), Secularism in Antebellum America (2011), and The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (2001). University. 

Elizabeth A. Wilson is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Affect and Artificial Intelligence (2010, University of Washington Press) and Gut Feminism (2015, Duke University Press). Her most recent book, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations For Affect Theory (2020 University of Minnesota Press), is co-authored with Adam Frank (University of British Columbia). 

Mayanthi L. Fernando is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is also co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies. Her research interests include secularism; Islam; multispecies ecologies; liberalism and law; and gender, sexuality, and the body. Her first book, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (2014), examined the intersection of religion and politics in France. She is currently working on a second book on nonsecular ecologies, the secularity of post-humanism, and the capacious possibilities of multi-species world-making.

This event is co-sponsored by UCSB’s Department of Religious Studies.

Religion<>Science: A Devolved Manifesto 1024 768 Tom Carlson

Religion<>Science: A Devolved Manifesto

Thursday, May 12, 2022
3:30 PM
Robertson Gym 1000A

In scientific laboratories around the world ecstatic acts of attention are taking place. And in each instance, regardless of what, exactly, is being studied, the reification of the secular category par excellence—religious difference—is being conjured over and over again. Rather than assume that religion and science are inevitably in conflict or independent from one another, or in dialogue with one another, or even potentially integrated, this talk argues that scholars must, first and foremost, reflexively account for the historicity of this categorical distinction. Drawing from the neuromatic archive as well as the post-punk art scenes of Akron, Ohio (Devo, Kent State Chemical Group, and New Wave Psychology) the talk will explore the production of the religion-scientific difference as a way to counter approaches that frame religion instrumentally, that is, in terms of what is valuable, therapeutic, or pathological about its practice.

John Lardas Modern is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College; Modern is the author of Neuromatic; or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (2021), Secularism in Antebellum America (2011), and The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (2001). He co-curated Frequencies and co-edits Class 200: New Studies in Religion at the University of Chicago Press (both with Kathryn Lofton). Modern is currently producing a multimedia project called Machines in Between.

This event is co-sponsored by UCSB’s Religious Studies Department.

Stolen Time: Time and Money in Medieval and Modern Imaginaries 1024 814 Tom Carlson

Stolen Time: Time and Money in Medieval and Modern Imaginaries

Friday, April 29th, 2022 at 3PM

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

The medieval Mediterranean world saw widespread agreement that usury—the practice of lending money at interest, or pricing money in terms of itself—was a preeminent sin; but debate raged over the question of what, exactly, was wrong with it. According to one line of argument popular with Christian theologians in the 12th-13th centuries, the reason that usury is wrong is that the usurer is a thief. He sells, or claims to sell, time to the borrower. But time, the argument goes, is given by God alone, and so the usurer sells what he does not have, accepting money and giving nothing in return. Selling time, according to these Parisian theologians, is not only illicit; it is impossible. By claiming to sell it, lenders are engaged in an act of metaphysical fraud. Juxtaposing medieval theology against the modern conviction that ‘time is money,’ in this public lecture and discussion, Sean Capener asks about the costs and consequences of our claims to put a price on time.

Readings

Rei Terada, “The Racial Grammar of Kantian TimeEuropean Romantic Review 28:3 (2017), 267-278.

Immanuel Kant, “Transcendental Aesthetic, Section II,” in Critique of Pure Reason (excerpt).

Immanuel Kant, “Doctrine of Right, D,” in Metaphysics of Morals (excerpt).

Sean Capener is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Religions at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Straddling two eras of intellectual history, he studies the conjunction of race, religion, and economy in medieval and modern philosophy and theology. He is currently writing a monograph on conceptions of slavery and ‘selling’ time in 13th-century Parisian scholasticism and modern philosophy and political economy. His work has appeared in Rhizomes, Journal for Religious Ethics, and the Heythrop Journal.

A NICHE event: Christoph Mauch – Planetary Blues, American Environments and Slow Hope for the Future 1024 528 Barbara Del Mercato

A NICHE event: Christoph Mauch – Planetary Blues, American Environments and Slow Hope for the Future

Christof Mauch, Director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, will talk about Planetary Blues, American Environments and Slow Hope for the Future. He will be introduced by the Director of NICHE, Francesca Tarocco. 

This is the first event organised under the new name of The Center for the Humanities and Social Change, i.e. The New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (NICHE). Please visit our new website and refer to it for our future activities: www.unive.it/niche. 

This lecture also inaugurates the NEW BOOKS in Environmental Humanities series, which will continue into 2022.

Full information on Christof Mauch’s lecture here

Registration is required. Please email niche@unive.it to receive the registration form or Zoom link.