Research Seminar - Silvia Orlandi

‘Working on Pirro Ligorio: manuscripts, paper editions, digital databases’ - joint paper for colleagues & students in Dept of Classics & Ancient History and Centre for Study of the Renaissance.

Followed by refreshments in the Classics Academic Studio, 2nd Floor, FAB. Sponsored by Institute of Advanced Study.

In this talk I will look at the methodological role of ‘place’ (lieu, place, topos) across different thematic contexts in the writings of Louis Althusser. These concern 1) discussions of Marx’s metaphor of capitalist society through an edifice – topique – containing the base and superstructure, and its comparison with Freud’s topographical description of the function of the unconscious; 2) topique and topology as what allows to capture and deconstruct the nature of Western philosophical practice; and 3) a rethinking of the relations between politics and philosophy, or theory, through a reading of Machiavelli. In the discussion of Machiavelli, in particular, the concept of place has an important role in thinking political agency. Looking at the concept of place, I want to understand the relation between theory and political practice, the spatio-temporal structures constituted through that relation and the questions concerning strategy implicated in it.

Jussi Palmusaari currently teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, at Kingston University London, where he also holds a PhD. His book For Revolt: Rancière, Abstract Space and Emancipation is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.

In the 1960s and 70s, when anti-Zionism became rampant among the independent New Left in Germany, Jean Améry was the first to publicly criticize anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism. He called it “virtuous antisemitism”, as the new antisemites deemed themselves righteous and morally superior. A survivor of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, he is mostly known – if at all – for his reflections on being a Shoah victim, and this experience doubtless bled into all his later work. Yet, the other part of his oeuvre has been largely ignored. Améry’s political essays were not convenient. He has lost his home twice. In the 1930s, he was cast out of his physical home, Austria and the German cultural sphere, by his own compatriots. In the 1960s, he was cast out of his political home, the left, by his former allies. He was a misfit in the literal sense of the word. His loss of trust in the world and the perspective of an outsider rendered his critique piercingly sharp and precise.

Améry’s analyses read as if they were written for the current situation. He showed how closely interlinked antisemitism and anti-Zionism are, and that Israel’s role as a shelter from antisemitism remains indispensable. Today, this notion is repeatedly attacked – not least by leftist groups and individuals. For all those who believe that obsessive criticism of the Jewish state benefits the supposedly weak, Améry’s essays will make for instructive reading.