Speaker: Andrew Patrizio (History of Art, Edinburgh College of Art)

Title: 'The Ecological Eye: Setting Agendas Across Art History, Theory and Politics'

Respondents: Olga Smith (IAS/Art History), Jonathan Skinner (ECLS), Nick Lawrence, Diarmuid Costello (Philosophy)

Co-sponsored by Warwick Environmental Humanities Network)

Followed by Drinks Reception at 7.30pm

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

Title: 'Kant and Postmodern Aesthetics'

Speaker: Carlos Soto Román's Experiments in Poetry

An evening of poetic reading and discussion with the Poet.

How does poetry defend itself in the court of philosophy? Does it have any say in the matter; or does someone, or something, speak on its behalf? Does philosophy, in a perverse inversion, ever get tried in the court of poetry? This reading group places itself in the thick of these trials, tracing the debates they wage and the judgements they provoke. Readings will include 21st century texts that have taken the challenging entanglement of poetics and philosophy forward. These texts will be read beside the poems they discuss or the poems that suggest themselves through the text. We invite students and Faculty members from Departments across the University to join us!

Session 1: The Affect of Poetry

Rei Terada, 'Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction', Kant to Adorno (p.35-73)

Adrienne Rich: 'What is Found There'

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 'Constancy to an Ideal Object'

Vinod Kumar Shukla: 'I Toss a Bunch of Keys'

Guest Discussant: Dr Stacey McDowell

Please contact Alex Obrigewitsch for further information (Alex.Obrigewitsch@warwick.ac.uk)

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'.

Please contact Alex Obrigewitsch for further information (Alex.Obrigwitsch@warwick.ac.uk)

We are a group dedicated to collectively reading the core works of the German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). Our goal is to facilitate a better understanding of the often difficult contents of Hegel's texts and to provide a forum for meaningful engagement between his thought and contemporary questions. Although we are primarily made up of postgraduate students working on Hegel, we happily welcome non-philosophers and beginners in Hegel's philosophy to join us at any point.

This term we will be working on the third part of Hegel's Science of Logic, the Doctrine of Concept. Please bring a copy of the book for the session. We will mainly use the Di Giovanni translation, but there are usually no problems if people bring other translations (Miller, etc).

Contact: Mert Yirmibes: m.yirmibes@warwick.ac.uk

website:https://hegelwarwick.wordpress.com/

Please contact Alex Obrigewitsch for further information (Alex.Obrigewitsch@warwick.ac.uk)

Please contact Alex Obrigewitsch for further information (Alex.Obrigewitsch@warwick.ac.uk)

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

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

Please contact Alex Obrigewitsch for further information (Alex.Obrigewitsch@warwick.ac.uk)

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

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

This reading group, or 'communion', focuses on the work of Georges Bataille and his henchmen, including but not limited to Andre Masson, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, Pierre Klossoski, Raymond Queneau. Alexandre Kojève and Lev Shestov, as well as literary figures including Colette Peignot, Jacques Vaché, Lautréamont, Marques de Sade, Baudelaire, Catherine of Siena and Meister Eckart.

A few key texts will be analysed:

Le Coupable (1944) Guilty

L'Erotisme (1957) Eroticism

La Haine de la Poésie (1947) The Hatred of Poetry

L'Impossible (1962) The Impossible

La literature et le Mal (1957) Literature and Evil

Open to all.

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.