Conference Report archive

News Affectivity British Society for Phenomenology Conference, 3–5 April 1998, OxfordWebbʼs critical questioning focused on the issue of whether Heidegger is able to think radically enough the differentiation – which occurs in and through the saying of language – between a thing and its horizon of givenness, which is thereby the dimension of the thingʼs […]

Exhibition review Empire and ITerra Incognita, Pitshanger Manor and Gallery, London, 22 January–13 March 1999Empire and I is an exhibition of nine visual artists, who, in the words of its press release, ʻhave been commissioned to respond to the impact of colonial thought and history on contemporary ideas of “race” and nation.ʼ Situated in Pitshanger […]

n celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Second Sex, feminists from all continents gathered in Paris in January to hear a selection of historical, political and philosophical papers and testimonials to the continuing influence and I News Cinquantenaire du Deuxième Sexe, Paris, 19–23 January 1999relevance of Simone de Beauvoirʼs magnum opus. […]

Conference reports PleasantvilleAnnual Conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 6–8 September 1999, OxfordThe Hegel Society of Great Britain annually ensconces itself in the fortified quaintness of Pembroke College, Oxford, whose charms of exclusivity are as menacingly kitsch as its dining table mats, which picture an idyllic escape that is merely the quadrangle outside, […]

In his History of the World in 10½ Chapters Julian Barnes remarks that to say that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, makes it sound too grand and considered a process. History just burps, he says, and we taste the rawonion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago. The opening […]

News Cloudy, with sunny intervals Political Studies Association Annual ConferenceLondon School of Economics, 10–13 April 2000The organizers of the PSAʼs fiftieth annual conference noted the appropriateness of choosing the LSE as its venue, since the Association had been founded there. Perhaps they also reflected on the appropriateness of hosting a conference whose theme was ʻThe […]

Conference report Who cares? ‘Gendering Ethics / The Ethics of Gender’, University of Leeds, 23–25 June 2000 The Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, University of Leeds, did a superb job in organizing this conference, accommodating over 150 papers and drawing philosophers from analytic and continental camps alike, in dialogue with political theorists, sociologists, literary theorists, […]

News Lenin in Essen Towards a Politics of Truth: The Retrieval of Lenin Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, 2–4 February 2001 Essen, home of Krupps and other behemoths of German industry, is where Slavoj Ziek has spent the past year at an interdisciplinary research college sponsoring his million-mark research prize for a project on ʻThe Antinomies of […]

News Hegemony or Socialism? 15 Years: Hegemony and Socialist StrategyTate Modern, London, 3 June 2001 The historical claims of the conference celebrating the fifteenth (actually, the sixteenth) anniversary and second edition of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffeʼs Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, were ambivalent. Sitting in the Tate Modernʼs ʻRed Roomʼ […]

Conference report Rearguard actionImmanent Choreographies: Deleuze and Neo-aesthetics,Tate Modern, 21–22 September 2001 This conference, organized by Tate Modern and Staffordshire University, brought together an impressive array of speakers from the UK (Alexander García Düttmann and Peter Hallward), Europe (Robert Fleck and Pascale Criton), the USA (Dorothea Olkowski and John Rajchman), and Australia (Ian Buchanan), including […]

Conference report Scholasticism and swaggerMarxism and the Visual Arts Now University College London, 8–10 April 2002 The title of this conference produced the expectation that critical analysis relating specifically to current artistic practices would be an issue of some urgency for contributors. For a surprising amount of them it was not. Nevertheless, the conference came […]

Rendezvous Return(s) to Marx? Institut français and Tate Modern, London, 31 May–1 June 2002 In the summer of 1977 more than 6,000 people attended the Communist Partyʼs ʻPeopleʼs Jubileeʼ at Alexandra Palace in London, at a time when the Party could boast 28,000 comrades. Twenty-five years later, ʻReturn(s) to Marx?ʼ was one of the few […]

Conference report Letdown ‘Siegfried Kracauer’, University of Birmingham 13–14 September 2002 Only the superstitious would argue that the omens should have been heeded. Was it really the power of Friday the 13th that jinxed the event, such that all four ʻbig nameʼ international speakers failed to show at this two-day conference devoted to the work […]

Conference report As if‘Philosophy As…’ Philosophy Programme of the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, and the Centre for Theoretical Studies, University of Essex, Senate House, University of London, 28–30 November 2002With five plenary speakers – Simon Critchley, Manuel DeLanda, Michael Friedman, Hilary Lawson and Christoph Menke – and a somewhat daunting fifty-four professionals […]

Locality, locality, locality[Anti-]Globalica: Conceptual and Artistic Tensions in the New Global Disorder, Wroclaw, Poland, 1 May 2003. Organized by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa from the Institute of Digital Art and Technology at the University of Plymouth, this symposium was part of ʻGlobalicaʼ, WRO3, 10th International Media Art Biennale. It undertook to ʻinvestigate the local […]

Conference report Quoi? ‘Questioning Religion’, British Society for Phenomenology, University of Greenwich, 11–13 July 2003n some of the hottest days of the summer, amidst the designs of Wren and Hawksmoor at the University of Greenwichʼs Maritime Campus, around forty speakers and many more participants attended the BSPʼs ʻQuestioning Religionʼ conference. Perhaps the surroundings gave a […]

The year 2003 has belonged to Adorno in Frankfurt. Across the city the Frankfurt sonʼs hundredth birthday was celebrated. Ten-foot-high bookshop displays pushed doorstop biographies, picture books and collations of ephemera revealing such littleknow details as Adornoʼs penchant for hippopotamus. Week after week the Literaturhaus hosted a series of salons where other Frankfurters shared their […]

News Walls of theoryNOISETHEORYNOISE#1, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, 6 March 2004 ‘n oise is an unmapped continent, in comparison with which everything we recognize as music remains a parochial backwaterʼ, announced the organizers of this conference. Disdaining ʻpostmodern academicismʼs ostentatious displays of theoretical chicʼ, noise will invent its own theory. […]

Conference report Il profeta? Politics, Subjectivity, Event: A Workshop with Antonio Negri on his book Time for Revolution, Birkbeck Col ege, University of London, 25 June. Antonio Negri in Conversation, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 26 June. Antonio Negri visited London this summer for the first time since 1978. His recent release from prison and […]

Conference report Strangers in the city Philosophy of Architecture/Architecture of Philosophy Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH) Congress, National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, 9–11 July 2004 The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television – now the most visited museum in the UK outside of London – has, on its […]