End Date :
Second Floor Common Room,
The Heyman Center for the Humanities
A collaborative project between the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, and the Writing and Society Research Centre and Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney.
ICLS at Columbia and the Writing and Society Research Centre and Philosophy@UWS at the University of Western Sydney come together in the first of a series of co-sponsored conversations across the continents to reflect on the crucial political and philosophical problems of our time.
Languages of Crisis: The Writing/Thinking Workshop
Convenors: Stathis Gourgouris and Dimitris Vardoulakis
After the consensus on the plurality of interpretations and the dissolution of universal values, there is a need to adopt a theoretical position that avoids relativism. This need can be expressed by examining the relation between writing and thinking.
Writing refers to the particular. It is the actual activity of writing as well as the stories we tell and the poetic horizons we invent that shape our world views. In its broadest sense, writing includes everything that is open to interpretation and as such it is a provocation to thinking. The ambition of thinking is to acknowledge the particular but move beyond it so as to account for how living in common can be achieved in the face of ineradicable differences.
The aporias of the relation between writing and thinking are indicated by their complex conjunctions and disjunctions. Are we to think of this relation as “writing and thinking,” as if the two can happily operate alongside but independently of each other? Or it is “writing or thinking,” indicating a struggle for a decision between them? Or maybe it is a kind of subordinate relation, such as “writing but thinking” or vice versa, as if one activity includes and incorporates the other. And so on.
The Writing/Thinking Workshop leaves this undecidability in abeyance in order to put it the spotlight. Our annual meetings, which alternate between New York and Sydney, thus aim to interrogate the political, cultural and theoretical significance of the transversals of writing/thinking. This will open up questions that intervene in contemporary debates in the humanities.
Languages of Crisis
Inaugural gathering of The Writing/Thinking Workshop
The conceptualization of crisis permeates a wide array of fields and languages. From the crisis of representation that leads to avant-garde art, to the political crises that determine the dispensation of crisis, to crisis as judgement (krisis) as a characteristic of the human, the concept of crisis seems to adapt itself easily to any area of production of meaning.
This diverse conceptual range of crisis is itself a problem that requires critical engagement. If crisis is so wide-ranging, what does it really mean? Might it not be just an epiphenomenon of particular histories?
To engage this problem it is perhaps better to address the ways that crisis articulates its historical specifics. Instead of an axiomatic supposition of the centrality of crisis, we are asked, by history, to discover the various languages – literary, political, philosophical – that give crisis a precise articulation.
Program Schedule
9:45 – 10:00 Introduction: Stathis Gourgouris (ICLS Director)
10:00 – 11:00 Charles Barbour (UWS)Under Oath: Perjury, Secrecy, and the Law Respondent: Nadia Urbinati (Columbia University)
11:00 – 12:00 Dimitris Vardoulakis (UWS) Lying: The Crisis of FreedomRespondent: Andrew Parker (Rutgers University)
12:00 – 2:00 LUNCH BREAK (lunch on your own)
2:00 – 3:00 Lorraine Sim (UWS) A different war landscape: Lee Miller’s war photographyand the ethics of seeingRespondent: Neni Panourgia (New School)
3:00 – 4:00 Paul Alberts (UWS) Failed Frontier Respondent: Tom Keenan (Bard College)
4:00 – 5:00 Jessica Whyte (UWS) Fail again: Fail better? The ‘weak state crisis’ and the language of failure Respondent: Andreas Kalyvas (New School)
