Abstracts ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ Antonia Birnbaum (Philosophy, University of Paris 8 ) For the Greek tradition, crisis is associated with kairos; together they point to a decisive moment. Kairos is the difficult art of seizing a situation, its sum of uncertainty and unforeseeability, the moment where a decisive judgment will have the most impact. […]

Abstracts ‘Is Representation Possible Without Reification?’ Tim Bewes (English, Brown University) In his famous essay on reification, Lukács writes that thought and existence are ‘aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process’. What are the implications of this statement for the thought-form known as reification? Taking issue with other recent attempts to […]

Abstracts: ‘Bilingual Thoughts on Knowledge and Action’ Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Workshop on Andean Oral History, Bolivia) The talk will concentrate on aymara concepts such as taypi, ch’ixi, pachakuti, tari and others, reflecting on the aymara modes of knowledge of the pacha (space/time) and on the collective and individual relations with the cosmos through action. A […]

Abstracts ‘Capitalist Resilience’ Mark Neocleous (RP/Politics, Brunel University, London) The paper will take up the recent rise of resilience as a concept. Resilience has come to the fore as an idea under which security measures are being enacted and the war on terror is being planned for. The paper explores why this has happened by […]

Commentary The manhunt doctrine Grégoire chamayou George W. Bush had warned us early on: the United States has launched itself into a new kind of war, a ‘war that requires us to be on an international manhunt’. [1] It would be wrong to believe that Barack Obama’s ‘justice has been done’, echoing Bush nearly ten […]

Dossier What is German media philosophy? Subjectivity as medium of the media Boris groys Contemporary, let us say ‘post-modern’, discourses on media, communication, information and so on are functioning in our society in at least two different – if interconnected – ways.* First, they describe scientifically the functioning of contemporary media and their growing role […]

Ontogenetic machinery Lorenz engell Media, as considered by media philosophy, are not what you expect them to be. In the first place, they have almost nothing to do with information, or transmission, or communication, or storage. They do not as such produce sense or distribute meanings. If they do so, it is as a side […]

The map is the territory Bernhard siegert When I read the expression ‘The map is not the territory’ for the first time, it occurred to me that it contained the quintessence of Anglo-American philosophy of common sense. The defiant insistence on a logic of representation, a common-sense belief in the evidence of an objective ‘reality’ […]

De-definition of media A telegraphic postscript Éric alliez In my view, the question raised by this short and sharp Dossier concerns the relationship of the ‘regime’ of German media philosophy to the contemporary philosophy involved in its major operation: the de-definition of media. This is shown, immediately, by the very un/common notion used by Professors […]

Robinson in Ruins New materialism and the archaeological imagination Paul dave Robinson in Ruins (2010) is the third of Patrick Keil er’s fictionalized documentaries featuring the investigations and struggles of his character, the ‘wandering, cracked scholar’ and political visionary, Robinson. [1] The first in the trilogy, London, was released in 1994, and the second, Robinson […]

Universities Devolving public universities Lessons from America Christopher newfield It is easy enough to be fatalistic about the current funding situation in higher education. US public universities have locked themselves into a model that has led to the slashing of public funding off and on for thirty years and that has been forcing public universities […]

Euphemism, the university and disobedience Alexander garcía düttmann Euphemism is the linguistic condition of contemporary society and spreads through the university as much as through any other institution. But what, exactly, is a euphemism? After having turned his attention to the different meanings of the Greek word from which ‘euphemism’ is derived, and having considered […]

Reviews Well, the Ukraine girls really knock me out…Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. 300 pp., £25.95 hb., 978 0 26202 650 5. One of the more interesting recent Russian blockbusters, Valeriy Todorovskys 2008 Stilyagi, is a musical set in 1950s’ Moscow. The historical Stilyagi were the Soviet […]

Friday 21 October 2011 Columbia University, New York (Note: Click on session titles for abstracts) 9.00–9.30 – Registration 9.30–9.45 – Introductions: Gayatri Spivak, Peter Osborne, Etienne Balibar 9.45–11.15 – Opening Plenary: Postcolonial Worlds 1 Chair: Gayatri Spivak ‘Bilingual Thoughts on Knowledge and Action’ Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Workshop on Andean Oral History, Bolivia) ‘On the Question […]

Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. 300pp., £25.95 hb., 978 0 26202 650 5. Owen Hatherley One of the more interesting recent Russian blockbusters, Valeriy Todorovskys 2008 Stilyagi, is a musical set in 1950s’ Moscow. The historical Stilyagi were the Soviet Union’s beatniks, enthusiasts for modern jazz and […]

Abstracts ‘Speculative Realism As Symptom: Computationalist Ideologies’ David Golumbia (English, Virginia Commonwealth University) The theoretical movement called by its adherents Speculative Realism has at its center a 2008 volume by Quentin Meillassoux called After Finitude. This book is said by some to have provided a devastating critique of ‘correlationism’, a term for a philosophical error […]

Abstracts ‘Caring about the Universal?’ Souleymane Bachir Daigne (Philosophy, Columbia University) Emmanuel Levinas has written that the postcolonial world (he actually said “decolonized”) is “de-westernized” but also (therefore?)  “dis-oriented”. By that he meant that innumerable cultures considered equivalent in a postcolonial global world cannot truly meet without some sense of the universal. The questions I […]

Friday 21st October 2011, 9am – 7.30pm. Venue: Room 311 School of Social Work Columbia University 1255 Amsterdam Avenue & 121 Street Map Sessions: Postcolonial Worlds ∙ Representing Capitalism ∙ Biocapital and Security ∙ Temporalities of Crisis ∙ Politics of Information ∙ Speakers: Claudia Aradau – RP/International Relations, King’s College London Souleymane Bachir Daigne – […]