Sasha Langford: "An Atmosphere of Certain Uncertainty": Knowledge, Embodiment, and Ecology in Thick Time March 25, 2019 Anthropocene discourse over the past decade has often framed global warming as a form of "certain uncertainty" that demands new empirical and speculative methodologies in order to be properly known. In this talk, I consider the "certain uncertainty" of climate science and ecological theory in relation to postcolonial and psychoanalytic accounts of embodiment that situate the bo...
Apr 23, 2019
Nermin Gogalic in conversation with Jerry Zaslove: Transition and Identity in the Post-Yugoslav Environment March 18, 2019 What was then seen as "The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama was actually the beginning of a long lasting catastrophe for many of us living in the former Yugoslavia. The turmoil of political transition, which in our case coincided with a civil war, brought upon a state of unrest and confusion. What happened with identity in the midst of such radical changes? What strategie...
Mar 19, 2019
Christine Kim: Brutalist Imaginary - North Korea through a Minor Transpacific Lens March 11, 2019 For audiences located in the West, and perhaps beyond, North Korea is a dystopic spectacle that appears ludicrous, terrifying, and tragic. This effect is created through periodic media coverage, films, memoirs, and other cultural representations that fashion North Korea as a cultural fantasy of the inhuman for the West. In this talk, I examine the film The Interview as well as the security concerns ...
Mar 12, 2019
March 4th, 2019 - 7pm Geoff Mann: Permanent Emergency The effort to understand contemporary sovereignty (“rulership”) might best be pursued not through Schmitt’s influential characterization of sovereignty as inaugurated in the decision on the exception, but by concentrating on necessity. If, as has been said for a century, we are in a “permanent state of emergency”, the exception loses its critical grip. If the “exception” becomes the rule, what does the sovereign decide? Necessity points to a ...
Mar 05, 2019
March 19th - Hilda Fernandez - Will a Cyborg Steal My Jouissance? Unconscious Labour and the Enjoying Body of the Virtual. Jouissance, understood as a sort of pleasurable pain, expressing an excessive tension of psychical nature, coded in the body, consumptive, and inaccessible to the symbolic order, is a universal characteristic of the human subject as bestowed by psychoanalysis. Based on the premise that jouissance and the body share interrelated yet separate spaces, as the latter is always di...
Mar 29, 2018
March 5th - Lee Su-Feh - Wrestling for Autonomy: choreographic gestures How do I know my body and its pleasures are mine when they have developed under oppressive systems? If our conscious sense of self is a social construct, how do we discern between our autonomous self and our socially-obligated or machine-mediated self? Lee Su-Feh will discuss how these questions drive her work and practice as a choreographer and teacher; and how they show up in her current work Dance Machine. Dance Machine w...
Mar 15, 2018
From climate change to mushrooming authoritarianisms, natural disasters to economic and humanitarian crises, contemporary ontology is overwhelmingly problematized as a multiplicity of emergencies, which calls for faster and swifter modes of action, and ostracizes any other engagement as regressive, reactionary, and unrealistic. This talk puts a question mark to the political imperative of conceptualizing social and political issues on the basis of emergencies. For that, it resuscitates Dostoevsk...
Feb 27, 2018
“The Utopia of Finance Capital: Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street ” In this talk, derived from a book forthcoming in the fall of 2016, I argue that Martin Scorsese’s film T he Wolf of Wall Street is best understood via the critical theory of Fredric Jameson. Just as Jameson argued The Godfather is really about capitalism, we can see that Scorsese’s film is really a gangster picture. Further, through its mobilization of a “brocialist” subjectivity, the movie offers a critique not only o...
May 25, 2017
“Small Effects from Big Causes: The Dialogic Documentary Practice of Natalie Bookchin” In her digital video work Mass Ornament (US, 2009), the Testament series (US, 2009), and Now He’s Out in Public and Everyone Can See (US, 2012), Natalie Bookchin gathers clips from vlogs where people perform dances and discuss issues both personal and political, from sexuality to racism and losing their jobs. In this essay, I argue that Bookchin’s work makes an important feminist intervention into discourses t...
Apr 19, 2017
"Adorno's Reading of 'Endgame': Between Autonomy and Authenticity" Theodor W. Adorno's central philosophical contribution is the development of "negative dialectics." Negative dialectics, itself, emerges as the recognition of the crisis of what Adorno calls "metaphysical meaning" or the Hegelian idea that history can be understood as embodying a rational purpose. Such a crisis becomes especially acute when seen through autonomous artworks. In particular, this essay looks at the manner in which S...
Apr 19, 2017
"13 Ways of Looking at a Crocodile" Starting from one of the more obscure and often overlooked literary references in Freud’s Das Unheimliche– a tale about haunted houses and reptilian ghosts – my talk will engage with a series of texts that feature a strange theoretical animal: the crocodile. In a trajectory that leads from Freud’s Viennese home to Max Ernst’s collages from 19th century illustrated journals, I will explore some of the curious literary apparitions of ‘the beast in whose mouth we...
Apr 19, 2017
There is still a great deal of investment, among writers, scholars and readers, in the idea of "canons" of "great books" that cultured persons are supposed to have read.Mancini's talk will introduce his proposal that certain texts, positioned para-canonically (alongside or nearby canons) antagonize the mythologies of literary canons. While functioning as "paracanonic," texts undermine the privileged aesthetic certainty that canons embody. Mancini will first revisit canon debates since the 1960s,...
Apr 18, 2017
This talk will explore dust and materiality through multiple mediations. In general, it will examine processes, and the invisibility of production, distribution, and consumption. Framed through Jussi Parikka’s critical lens, we will study how the “seemingly immaterial is embedded in wide material networks,” and how technoculture is anchored in a transformation of materials—from mining to waste. Specifically, the presentation proposes an approach to dust as media in relation to the body. We will ...
Apr 18, 2017
