End Date : April 4, 6:30 pm
Casa Hispanica
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of English & Comparative Literature, Department of Germanic Languages, Department of Italian, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Department of Slavic Languages, Centre for Contemporary Critical Thought, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Department of Art History and Archaeology, and The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.
An interdisciplinary, graduate student conference with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society Columbia University, New York.
“Crisis and Critique”
An interdisciplinary, graduate student conference hosted by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Casa Hispanica, Columbia University, New York.
Saturday, April 4th, 2015
Keynote Speaker: Cesare Casarino
Professor and Chair of the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota
Keynote Lecture Title: “Beyond Critique: Spinoza, Gramsci, Bergson”
What are the links between methods of critique today and moments of historical and disciplinary crisis?
Languages of critique often arise at moments of simultaneous semantic and material vulnerability. Words coined in times of crisis are often themselves symptoms of the disturbances they explicate. Distress produces language, and our language is likewise fraught with distress. This Conference is an occasion to reflect upon the artillery of concepts and techniques that our respective disciplines today offer us, as scholars, in the practice of critique. Disciplines always have their crises; they are likewise compelled to respond to crises. In our training, we inherit grammars premised on abstraction—when are they faulty, when do they support us, and when do they break down?
Featuring a variety of presenters and respondents from a broad range of disciplinary fields, we will attempt to articulate the requirements and limits for a method of critique that belongs to this second decade of the 21st century.
With panel moderators:
Gayatri Spivak (University Professor, ICLS Founding Director)
Reinhold Martin (Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation)
Nadia Urbinati (Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies, Department of Political Science)
