Speaker: Serge Trottein (CNRS/École Normale Supérieure/PSL Research University)

Title: 'Kant and Postmodern Aesthetics'

Speaker: Joanna Zylinska (Department of New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths)

Title: 'Artificial Intelligence, Anthropocene Stupidity'

ABSTRACT

'My talk will engage with two defining apocalyptic narratives of our times: the Anthropocene and AI (Artificial Intelligence). Both of these narratives, in their multiple articulations, predict the end of the human and of the world as we (humans) know it, while also hinting at the possibility of salvation. Looking askew at the conceptual and aesthetic tropes shaping them, and at their socio-political contexts, I will be particularly interested in the way in which these two stories about planetary-level threats come together, and in the reasons for their uncanny proximity. Concurring with Marshall McLuhan that art works as a 'Distant Early Warning system' for all kinds of apocalypse, I will suggest that it can also serve as a testing ground for the making and unmaking of such apocalyptic scenarios. And it is in art that I will seek the possibility of envisaging a better and more prudent relationship with technology - and with the world - from within the Anthropocene-AI nexus. The talk will include a presentation of some visual work from my own art practice'.

Speaker: Rachel Bowlby (Department of Comparative Literature, UCL)

Title: 'Unnatural Resources: Changing Arguments and Reproductive Technologies'

Speaker: Naomi Waltham-Smith (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Warwick)

Title: 'Homofaunie: Non-Human Tonalities of Listening in Derrida and Cixous'

Speaker: Josh Robinson (School of English, Communications, Philosophy, Cardiff)

Title: 'Crisis in Theory'

Josh Robinson teaches modern and contemporary critical theory in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at the University of Cardiff. Most recently, he is author of Adorno’s Poetics of Form, which appeared last year in SUNY’s Contemporary Continental Philosophy series): https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6556-adornos-poetics-of-form.aspx

Crisis in Theory: Beyond the Representational Paradigm

This paper aspires to offer a critical account of a set of assumptions that are widespread in literary and critical theory, both in its historical emergence (as seen primarily through its institutional histories) and in several more recent developments (including the various ‘turns’ that arise from time to time. My focus is on what I term the representational paradigm: in its simplest and broadest formulation, the assumption, explicit or otherwise, within literary studies that works of literature matter insofar as they are representative; that what matters about literary works is their representative character.

This paradigm persists in multiple, not always interdependent (or even necessarily compatible) manifestations, which include: an analytical focus on events represented within works of literature (what might be called a focus on content at the expense of form); a set of analytical procedures that rely on an implicit theory of allegory whereby readings are produced that see elements of a work as representing elements outside it; attempts to reconfigure the canon and/or redesign our curricula such that the works and authors within it are more representative of global society. I outline a tentative taxonomy of these different versions of representationalism, and relate them to a set of shared democratic assumptions about political representation—assumptions which have a tendency to place themselves beyond scrutiny. I argue that while the democratic aspirations expressed at least in progressive versions of representationalism paradigm constitute a commendable alternative to the (not only cultural) conservatism of the tendencies against which they are in many respects a reaction, these underlying assumptions ultimately overlook or even limit the potential of literature’s ways of thinking to contribute to a transformation of our understanding of the political. I thus set out some of the ways in which criticism and theory might move beyond the representational paradigm.

Speaker: Kate Soper (Philosophy, University of Brighton/London Metropolitan University)

Title: 'The Dialectics of Progress: Towards a Post-Growth Aesthetic and Politics of Prosperity'

Speaker: James MacDowell (Department of Film and TV, Warwick)

Title: 'Regarding YouTube as Art'

Guest Speakers:

Kate Soper (Philosophy, University of Brighton/London Metropolitan University)

Title: 'The Dialectics of Progress: Towards a Post-Growth Aesthetic and Politics of Prosperity'

James MacDowell (Department of Film and TV, Warwick)

Title: 'Regarding YouTube as Art'

Tuesday 7 July

20.00 Christopher Watkin (Monash), Welcome and introduction

20.15 Ali Alizadeh (Monash), ‘La liberté guide nos pas’: the dialectic of freedom in a French revolutionary poem

20.35 Nick Hewlett (Warwick), Karl Marx and the concept of freedom

20.55 Questions and discussion

21.10 Keynote 1: Peter Hallward (Kingston), A law unto ourselves: autonomy as mass sovereignty

21.50 Questions and discussion

22.10 Serhat Tutkal (National University of Colombia), Autonomy against authoritarian neoliberalism: the removal of Kurdish mayors in Turkey

22.30 Taylor Lau (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Against the economic view of time in the workplace: the claim to free time

22.50 Kayte Stokoe (Birmingham), Crip autonomy and external limitations

23.10 Alex Corcos (Warwick), UK Higher Education in 'A Century for Foxes’: or, a case study in the role of privilege and luck in establishing conditions for radical autonomy

23.30 Questions and discussion

23.50 Close

Wednesday 8 July

20.00 Keynote 2: Louise Amoore (Durham), Of autonomies and algorithms

20.40 Questions and discussion

21.00 Charlotte Heath-Kelly (Warwick), The extremist across history: changing relations of liberty, threat and detection

21.20 Oliver Davis (Warwick), Algorithmic governmentality and the Modern bureaucratic ideal: species of abstraction and autonomy

21.40 Simon Angus (Monash), How liberating is liberation technology?

22.00 Questions and discussion

22.15 Yurii Sheliazhenko (KROK), Informed autonomy: conceptualization of freedom in the digital age

22.35 Alesja Serada (Vaasa), Blockchain owns you: from cypherpunk to a self-sovereign identity

22.55 Ken Archer (independent scholar), Freedom, agency and the hermeneutics of technology

23.15 Questions and discussion

23.30 Close

Thursday 9 July

20.00 Nupur Patel (Oxford), Emancipating the female body: pudeur and Louise Labé’s expression of sexual desire in selected poetry

20.20 Felicity Chaplin (Monash), Freedom and autonomy in the post #MeToo world

20.40 Kirsty Alexander (Strathclyde), The biophilic threads in feminist visions of autonomy

21.00 Ji-Young Lee (Bristol and Copenhagen), Autonomy and assisted reproductive technologies

21.20 Questions and discussion

21.50 Trine Riel (independent scholar and artist, Copenhagen), To what end? Ascetics between renunciation and emancipation

22.10 Andrea Rossi (Koç), Pastoral power: on finitude and autonomy

22.30 Christopher Watkin (Monash), The critique of emancipatory reason

22.50 Questions and discussion

23.10 Close

See the Centre for Attention Studies at King's.

Zoom link:

Zoom link:

The theme of cheerfulness in Nietzsche's philosophy has recently been at the centre of an important debate in the literature between Robert Pippin (2010) and Lanier Anderson and Rachel Cristy (2017). Engaging with these scholars, I will consider three major questions: (1) What is cheerfulness? (2) What is its value for philosophy? (3) Is Nietzsche a cheerful thinker and writer? If yes, in what sense? As insinuated by the title of this presentation, I propose that it is possible to argue that starting from his middle writings Nietzsche thinks and writes cheerfully in some of his works, including a number of significant ones.

In person and on Teams:

Click here to join the meetingLink opens in a new window

Panelists Eileen John, Nick Lawrence, and Emma Williams (Warwick), with comments by Professor Zumhagen-Yekplé (who will join us on Teams)

Elaborating decolonial and intersectional methods, aesthetics has developed rich tools for tackling power differences. How to comprehend the cultural field if it is at once a site of heinous expropriation and violence and one of vital social and political possibility? This essay explores this question through Claudia Llosa’s film The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada) (2009). The film, I indicate, reworks racial, gendered, and colonial logics and supplants a model of transculturation, magical realism, and syncretism by a cultural vision of a web of multivalent, pluri-directional aesthetic promises and threats. Thus it presents a young indigenous woman as a contemporary decolonial actor who renders memory livable and opens up unforeseen futures for her shantytown and country. I signal the implications for the positioning of the decolonial feminist spectator or culture maker and for the notion of a decolonial aesthetics. Aesthetic existence at the intersection of oppression and liberation, although tremendously impure and troubled, functions as a bountiful font of feminist energy and sustenance and a site of communal caring and imagination.

Organisers: Antonia Hofstätter and Christine Achinger (German Studies/Modern Languages)

Caroline Summers (Warwick SMLC)

5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 30 Jan '24 Location: Ramphal R3.41

Narrative afterlife: translating lived experience into literary texts

Literary studies is fond of the metaphor of an ‘afterlife’ to describe the enduring resonance and visibility of an author’s work long after they have died. Meanwhile, in Translation Studies, the term has a more specific meaning, rooted in Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the concept in his 1923 essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Benjamin tells us that true translation is the point at which ‘a work, in its continuing life, has reached the age of its fame. […] In [translation], the original’s life achieves its constantly renewed, latest and most comprehensive development’. Thus, for Benjamin, translation is a form that embodies something not otherwise captured in the original text. The possibility of translation is something that both is inherent in the essence of an original and contributes to its transformational fulfilment of self: it is at once a remainder of the past and a projection of the future.

Building chiefly on the work of Bella Brodzki (2007), who frames the text as a ‘literary invigoration’ of memory, this paper reads the literary narrative as a ‘translation’ of experience and asks what Benjamin’s reading of afterlife might teach literary studies more broadly about the relationship between the stories we live and those that we read or write. Exploiting the intersection between literary narratology and a sociological understanding of experience as narrative, the paper draws on literary accounts of German Reunification (1989/90) to explore how these texts create a space in which the spectres of experience can enjoy a long afterlife.

In collaboration with the Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies