Badiou at the theatre

Alain Badiou’s Political Theater

With talks by

Alain Badiou, Ward Blanton, Lee Edelman, Joe Litvak, Ken Reinhard, Eric Santner, and Martin Treml

and

A reading of scenes from Badiou’s plays Incident at Antioch and Ahmed the Philosopher organized by

Sommer Ulrickson

July 2, 2011 in HAU 1 (4:00-7:00PM and 8:00-10:00PM; 1600-1900 and 2000-2200)
HEBBEL AM UFER – HAU 1: Stresemannstr. 29 / 10963 Berlin

For information and tickets: http://www.hebbel-am-ufer.de/de/spielplan_folge_1_hau1.html?HAU=1



Also please join us for a talk by Alain Badiou,
“Towards a Contemporary Conception of the Absolute,”
In conversation with Frank Ruda and Jan Völker

On July 4 at 8:00 in the Roter Salon at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

To Have Done with Life (Zargreb)

Schedule
June 17 [Friday]

Morning Session 10:00-12:00 Stephanie Wakefield & Jason Smith
Wakefield: “Dasein is Design: Form-of-Life, World, Environment”Smith: “Parallel Lives: Form-of-Life, Living Labor”

Afternoon Session 14:00 – 16:00 Nathan Brown & Alexi Kukuljevic
Brown: “The Lucidity of the Unliving: Crystallography and Inorganic Poetry”Kukuljevic: “Notes on Lifeless Matter”

Evening Session18:00 – 20:00 Evan Calder Williams & Benjamin Noys
Williams: “Imitation of Imitation of Life”Noys: “The Poverty of Vitalism”

June 18 [Saturday]
Afternoon Session1 3:00 – 14:30 Martin Hägglund15:00 – 16:30 Ray Brassier
Hägglund: “The Trace of Time and the Death of Life”
Brassier: “Life in Mind: Critique of Thompson”

Evening Session 19:00 – 21:00 Roundtable (Brassier, Hägglund, Johnston, Malabou)

June 19 [Sunday]
Afternoon Session 13:00 – 14:30 Adrian Johnston 15:00 – 16:30 Catherine Malabou
Johnston: “Second Natures in Dappled Worlds: John McDowell, Nancy Cartwright, and Hegelian-Lacanian Materialism”
Malabou: “Epigenesis and the Plasticity of Life”

Evening Session19:00 – 21:00 Roundtable (Brassier, Hägglund, Johnston, Malabou)

Ontology and Politics Workshop CFP

*MANCHESTER Workshops in Political Theory 2011 -

31 August - 2 September 2011

Call for Papers - Ontology and Politics Workshop

Convenors: Paul Rekret (Queen Mary), Simon Choat (Kingston), Clayton Chin (Queen Mary)

*Despite its pervasiveness, the question of the relation between ontology and politics continues to be a crucial one for Continental philosophy. While the place and status of the question of being in the realm of the political has occupied much of social theory in the past twenty or thirty years, we remain no closer to drawing any common ground on these themes. Post-structuralist or post-foundational political thought has insisted on the inherent contingency of any political ontology and has, from this notion, sought to draw out a framework for an emancipatory politics groundedin the concepts of difference and otherness.

However, such a stance finds itself increasingly challenged today. On the one hand, thinkers such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere call for the need to think a politics grounded in a conception of universality rather than alterity, while on the other hand, so-called speculative realism more fundamentally challenges the very notion of ontology as it has been conceived by the majority of Continental thinkers in recent decades.

This panel aims to explore the intersections of politics and ontology and the resulting implications for thinking both the political and the philosophical.

We invite papers addressing the following and any other related themes:-

• 
  
  Is there a place for reflection on ontology in the theorisation and study of politics?


• 
  
  Is there a necessary transitivity between the ontological and the political? How should this relation be conceived?


• 
  
  Is there a necessarily leftist or emancipatory ontology?


• 
  
  Should the politics which has generally been thought to follow from post-foundational or post-structuralist ontologies be re-evaluated in light of recent critiques?


• 
  
  Does a new and different relation between ontology and politics follow from recent speculative materialist ontologies?

If you would like to present a paper at this workshop, please submit an abstract of 300-500 words (or a full paper to Dr Paul Rekret or Dr Simon Choat by 15 June 2011.

For more information on the conference

Can Art and Politics be Thought?

The UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory and the Hammer Museum present a conference on June 4 & 5, 2011 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles:

Can Art and Politics Be Thought? Practices, Possibilities, Pitfalls

Curated by Kenneth Reinhard and Drew Daniel

Featuring talks by

Alain Badiou (Being and Event, Logics of Worlds)

Matthew Barney (Cremaster, Drawing Restraint)

Lauren Berlant (The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship)

Joshua Clover (1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About, Madonna Anno Domini: Poems)

Joan Copjec (Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation)

Drew Daniel (Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure [Matmos])

Steve Goodman (Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Black Sun [Kode9])

Allan Sekula (Performance under Working Conditions, Polonia And Other Fables)

And featuring performances by Ultra-Red, Kode9, and Matmos (June 4)

And a reading of scenes from two plays by Alain Badiou, Incident at Antioch and Ahmed the Philosopher (June 5)

For more information

ALL HAMMER PUBLIC PROGRAMS ARE FREE. Tickets are required, and are available at the Billy Wilder Theater Box Office one hour prior to start time. Limit one ticket per person on a first come, first served basis. Hammer members receive priority seating, subject to availability. Reservations not accepted, RSVPs not required.

The Cussedness of Objects

The Cussedness of Objects, on Saturday 21 January 2011 (details here)

Events for early 2011

‘Spaghetti Communism? The Politics of the Italian Western’, Marxism in Culture seminar, Senate House, London (25 March 2011)

‘Screening Series: ‘Critical Criticism. Radically funny’, Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), INC research group in continental philosophy, Goldsmiths, London (18 February 2011).

Dark Materialism

Dark Materialism
Date:
12 January 2011 , 13:00 to 18:00
Location:
Flett Lecture Theatre, Natural History Museum
Fee:
£30/£20

This symposium draws on recent paradigms in contemporary philosophy, physics and critical theory. It assembles unique and multidisciplinary reflections on the idea of darkness in its relation to matter in diverse locations, namely: physics, astronomy, ecology, mysticism, speculative realism, psychoanalysis and literature. As a conceptual framework, dark materialism engages with matter at the thresholds of its annihilation and disappearance beyond the topographies of ‘base materialism’ and at the very edges of forms of thought where the objects, things, Things and no-things on which it depended exert their independence. Darkness, in matter, energy, ecology and life itself, in black holes in the universe and in the mind, emerges as baseless and founding, exterior and interior at once. It leaves thought in the void, enabling disruptions and speculative realignments of diverse concepts and the real itself, reshaping not only the world of ideas but also the very order of things.

Click here for more information and for the registration link for this event