Events

Reframing Ecofeminism in a Posthuman Era: A seminar with Alessandra Chiricosta 1024 576 Barbara Del Mercato

Reframing Ecofeminism in a Posthuman Era: A seminar with Alessandra Chiricosta
Venice, December 10 – 2.00-4.00 p.m.
Ca’ Bottacin, Dorsoduro 3911 (map), HSC seminar room (1st floor)

Registration is necessary: please email hsc@unive.it

The next seminar in our “Environmental Humanities Seminar and Lecture Series” is with Alessandra Chiricosta (Università di Roma Tre and Roma Tor Vergata, adjunt professor at Venice International University) who will be discussing

Reframing Ecofeminism in a Posthuman Era.

Alessandra Chiricosta is a philosopher and a historian of religions, specializing in Southeast Asian cultures. She carried out studies and field research in many Asian countries. Her work has a particular focus on issues related to intercultural philosophy and cross-cultural studies, and on Gender issues in a post-colonial and transcultural perspective. Her publications include: Filosofia Interculturale e Valori Asiatici, 2014, O-barra-O; Following the trail of the Fairy-bird. Feminist movements in Vietnam in Mina Roces and Louise Edwards (eds.) Women’s Movements in Asia: Feminisms and Transnational Activism, Un altro genere di forza, Iacobelli 2019.

Please sign up if you would like to attend: hsc@unive.it

Any preparatory reading will be posted here (none available at the moment)

A seminar with Alessandra Chiricosta: Reframing Ecofeminism in a Posthuman Era

December 10, 2019, 2.00-4.00 p,m. 

This seminar is in English/Seminario in lingua inglese

Registration is necessary: please email hsc@unive.it

Grazia Francescato. L’arte eretica della sostenibilità 1024 576 Barbara Del Mercato

Grazia Francescato. L’arte eretica della sostenibilità
Venice, December 5 2019 at 5.30 p.m.
Aula A Ca’ Bottacin (Dorsoduro 3911)

A new event in our “Environmental Humanities Seminar and Lecture Series”: Grazia Francescato – environmentalist, activist, politician – will discuss the “Heretical art of Sustainability”.
“Why is sustainability an art? And why ‘heretic’? Heresy means choice. In an age which is drugged by the myth of unlimited growth, sustainability forces us to divert towards the path of ‘care’ and ‘limit’ and it warns us that, if we want to preserve the planet and our future, we need a qualitative leap in collective consciousness”.

ITALIANO – Un nuovo appuntamento nella nostra “Environmental Humanities Seminar and Lecture Series”.
Grazia Francescato – ambientalista, attivista, politica – parla dell'”arte eretica della sostenibilità”.
Perché la sostenibilità é un’arte? E perché ‘eretica’? Eresia vuol dire ‘scelta’.In un’epoca drogata dal mito della crescita illimitata,la sostenibilità ci obbliga a scegliere invece la strada della ‘cura’ e del ‘limite’. E ci avverte che, se vogliamo conservare il pianeta e il nostro futuro, ci vuole un salto di qualità della coscienza collettiva.

Grazia Francescato. L’arte eretica della sostenibilità

Ca’ Bottacin, Dorsoduro 3911 – Venezia

December 5, 5.30 p.m. 

This event is in Italian/Evento in lingua italiana

Free admission/Aperto a tutti

The Strange End of the Catholic-Protestant Conflict and the Genesis of Europe’s Harsh Religious Pluralism 968 726 Tom Carlson

The Strange End of the Catholic-Protestant Conflict and the Genesis of Europe’s Harsh Religious Pluralism

Monday, December 9, 2019 at 6 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

A series of recent controversies has raised many questions about Europe’s treatment of its religious minorities. Why do societies that claim to respect religious freedom and tolerance so routinely discriminate against Muslims, Jews, and others? This talk will explore the origins of Europe’s contemporary thinking about religious pluralism to the recent peace between Catholics and Protestants. It will show how this development, which unfolded between the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and the era of decolonization in the 1960s, helped shape both the scope and rigid limits of the continent’s religious landscape.

Udi Greenberg is an associate professor of history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of the award winning The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton 2015) as well as many articles on religion and politics.

Perfection and Disaster 1024 768 Tom Carlson

Perfection and Disaster

Friday, December 6, 2019 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

In this essay I am less concerned with developing a cogent and persuasive argument than I am in posing and exploring a question. My question is a simple one: what’s the sense in talking about moral or political perfectionism in a world facing cataclysmic environmental collapse? At what kind of perfection might one aim in a world fundamentally out of balance: a world of mass extinction and dwindling biodiversity, collapsing ecosystems, super-sized droughts and storms, extreme heat waves, rising and rapidly warming and acidifying oceans and seas, massive displaced populations, increasingly limited access to clean water and adequate food, spreading pandemic disease, and the economic collapse and political chaos that such cascading disasters will bring in their wake?

Reading

Andrew Norris, “Perfection and Disaster.”

Modalities of the Perhaps: Secularity, Post-humanism, Uncertainty 1024 767 Tom Carlson

Modalities of the Perhaps: Secularity, Post-humanism, Uncertainty

Monday, December 2, 2019 at 6 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

Even as multispecies and post-humanist scholarship expands definitions of being, it nonetheless restricts other-than-humans to entities that previously went under the sign of the “natural.” Secular attachments to the material and the visible as the site of the real make it difficult to think the “supernatural” alongside nature-culture. And yet, many otherwise-secular folk consistently have stories – experiences – that do not square with secular- modern notions of the real. What might these stories tell us about the secular, about the ghostly undercurrents that weave back and forth beneath its stark distinction between natural and supernatural, visible and invisible, reality and superstition, truth and falsity? How might post-humanism, read against the grain and alongside other non-secular traditions, offer a framework to rethink non-human worlds and our entanglements with them? Might a true post-humanism propose that there exist nonhuman worlds we cannot possible know, given our sensory limitations? Finally, how might we as scholars write this uncertainty in ways that refuse the terms of secular academic narrative, including the quest for certainty and argument?

Mayanthi Fernando is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests include Islam and secularism; liberalism and law; gender, sexuality, and the body; and humanism and its others. Her first book, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke University Press, 2014) examines the intersection of religion and politics in France. She is currently working on a second book on the secularity of post-humanism and the possibilities for thinking the nonhuman more capaciously and less secularly.

Attending to the Lessons of the Pond: Henry David Thoreau’s “Revery” 1024 768 Tom Carlson

Attending to the Lessons of the Pond: Henry David Thoreau’s “Revery”

Thursday, November 21, 2019 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

In the forced labor camp of attention that is society today, many find that being attentive leads to distractedness, their mind literally pulled apart. Looking carefully at the inverse, one might suspect, then, that some of what gets called distraction or daydreaming might belong to a deep attentiveness and focus. In 1845, for two years, Henry David Thoreau made his life an experiment in such a hypothesis when he stepped back from everyday life in Concord, Massachusetts, and went into the woods to live in the neighborhood of Walden Pond and learn from it….what exactly? To hoe seven miles of beans? To contemplate the shifting colors and vague shapes on the surface of a lake? Distraction or attention?

Reading

Jeffery L. Kosky, “Attending to the Lessons of the Pond: Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Revery’.”

Henry David Thoreau, “The Bean-field”; “The Village”; “The Ponds”; “Walking,” in Walden & Other Writings (New York: 1992).

Author of the award-winning Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity—Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and of Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion(Indiana University Press, 2001), and translator of several works by Jean-Luc Marion (most recently, In The Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, Stanford University Press, 2012), Jeffrey L. Kosky is Professor of Religion at Washington and Lee University.

Meaning and Melancholia: Leo Tolstoy, Max Weber, William James 150 150 Tom Carlson

Meaning and Melancholia: Leo Tolstoy, Max Weber, William James

November 15, 2019 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

For a century now, Max Weber’s famous description of the genesis of the modern world as a gradual process of “disenchantment,” offered in a 1917 lecture entitled “Science as a Vocation,” has been adopted as a shorthand for the withdrawal of religious traditions. With the phrase, Weber had sought to name the effect of the extension of calculation to all domains of human life—and more specifically a crisis of meaning in the sciences created by a concept of progress. But the paradigm of this crisis of meaning Weber finds, oddly, in Leo Tolstoy’s Confession, which recounts the writer’s crisis of faith and his eventual return to God.

Fifteen years before Weber’s lecture, the American philosopher William James, in a set of lectures published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, wrote at length about Tolstoy’s Confession, identifying it as a paradigm of religious melancholy, and as a state of mind that can lead to an experience of regeneration. James, too, spoke of “disenchantment” but he parsed the fact/value distinction differently, because he sought not to substitute religion with the ethics of teaching but to establish a permanent place for religion alongside science in human life.

In this seminar, we will discuss Tolstoy’s text, and the divergent interpretations formulated by Weber and James. Those pressed for time should focus on Lectures VI and VII in The Varieties of Religious Experience, where the Tolstoy is cited at length.

Reading

Leo Tolstoy, A Confession (Oxford, 1940).

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Longmans, Green, and Co, 1902), Lectures VI and VII: “The Sick Soul”; Lecture XX: “Conclusions”.

Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, ed., Max Weber: The Vocation Lectures (Hackett, 2004).

Re-Thinking Socialism 724 1024 Susann Schmeisser

Re-Thinking Socialism

Against the background of failed state socialisms and the crisis of socialism in Latin America, the term “socialism” was long frowned upon when it came to discussing current political and social problems. At present, however, in Western democracies the voices calling for a revival of socialist projects are becoming louder. In the mother countries of neoliberalism, the USA and Great Britain, politicians who openly plead for “democratic socialism” can mobilize broad masses in recent years. And there are also attempts in the academic world to initiate new debates on the concept of socialism. It is undisputed that any revival of the concept must critically reflect the history of real socialism. More controversial are the questions of how exactly a socialist future project should be understood and realized and which social areas it should cover. The answer to these questions determines what is meant by “socialism”.

How far-reaching are the societal transformations that are subsumed under the concept of socialism? Does a socialist future project essentially present itself as an alternative economic order? Or does the concept of socialism concern the deeper (moral) idea of an alternative understanding of freedom, which differs from that of liberalism? Is there even the idea of socialism or do we need manifold socialisms in order to initiate the path to a modernity based on solidarity?

We want to discuss these questions with Lea Ypi (London School of Economics), Giacomo Corneo (Freie Universität Berlin) and Michael Brie (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation) on December 12, 2019 in Vierte Welt. The event is the prelude to a series of events on the topic of Re-Thinking Socialism, which we will continue in the coming semesters.

50 Years on: New Readings of Adorno 800 800 Susann Schmeisser

50 Years on: New Readings of Adorno

Bei der Frankfurter Adorno-Konferenz 2003 konstatierte Axel Honneth eine „dramatische Abkehr“ von Adornos Philosophie und beklagte das Fehlen eines „vitalen, spannenden Forschungsmilieus“. Davon kann heute keine Rede mehr sein. Neue Interpretationsansätze haben Adornos Philosophie für die systematischen Debatten der Gegenwart fruchtbar gemacht. Anlässlich des 50. Todestages von Adorno veranstalten wir einen internationalen Workshop, der Vertreter*innen dieser neuen Interpretationsansätze zusammenbringt. Gemeinsam wollen wir diskutieren, inwiefern durch die Rückkehr zu Adorno aktuelle Debatten in der Sprach-, Moral- und Sozialphilosophie vertieft werden können. Adornos Beispiel folgend, verbindet der Workshop diese Themen dabei mit ästhetischen und epistemologischen Fragestellungen. So wollen wir nicht nur der Komplexität seines Denkens gerecht werden, sondern zugleich der Verengung der zunehmend spezialisierten Fachphilosophie entgegenarbeiten.

Mit Beiträgen von Jay Bernstein, Julia Christ, Fabian Freyenhagen, Katia Genel, Agnès Grivaux, Antonia Hofstätter, Philip Hogh, Bastian Ronge, Arvi Särkelä.

Da die Anzahl der Teilnehmerplätze begrenzt ist, bitten wir um Anmeldung bis zum 3. November 2019 unter workshops.sozialphilosophie@hu-berlin.de. Die Teilnehmer*innen werden zeitnah benachrichtigt und erhalten weitere Informationen sowie einen Reader mit den Texten der Vorträge.

Denying Reality: A Polanyian Theory of the Contemporary Crisis 810 455 Tom Carlson

Denying Reality: A Polanyian Theory of the Contemporary Crisis

November 8, 2019 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

The present global environmental situation seems to be one of crisis, a failure to secure a human future. Is this fundamentally a failure of knowledge or of affect (care, love)? I use Michael Polanyi’s conception of (tacit) knowledge, reality, and discovery to suggest that understanding our present situation involves appeal to conditions that are not only empirical but normative and, in some sense, religious—as indicated by the growing discourse of “climate apocalypse”—and that it makes sense to think of this normative dimension as part of the reality of our situation (and that a failure of affect might profitably be conceived as a failure to recognize some reality). I also want to propose, using Polanyi’s ideas of inquiry and research, that that an adequate comprehension of that situation demands a disciplined practice of attention and integration—not only of its practical components (environmental, psychological, political etc.) but also art, literature and other cultural productions which both refer to and constitute “our humanity,” and especially of those works that reflect the deep and threatening tensions within the human, from Moby-Dick to the art of Lee Bontecou. Finally, I argue that the failure to attend to our humanity as a historical and normatively conditioned reality is itself an integral aspect of the crisis.

Reading

Lin Atnip, “Denying Reality: A Polanyian Theory of the Contemporary Crisis.”

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, Preface & Chapter 4: Skills.

Recommended

Farhad Manjoo, “It’s the End of California as We Know It,” New York Times, October 30, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/opinion/sunday/california-fires.html.