Professor Alan Bass (New School for Social Research) will deliver a talk entitled: “A Reading of On the Cult of Fetish Gods by Charles de Brosses (1760)”
Alan Bass, PhD, Licensed Psychoanalyst, is in the private practice of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and supervision in Manhattan. He is Training and Supervising Analyst and faculty member at the Contemporary Freudian Society, IPTAR, and NPAP. He is author of Interpretation and Difference (Stanford University Press, 2006), and Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford University Press, 2000), as well as numerous articles and book reviews, and has presented at many psychoanalytic institutes. He is also well known for his translations of works by Jacques Derrida.
Joel Whitebook,Ph.D.Director,Psychoanalytic Studies Program,Columbia University.Faculty,The Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Author, Sigmund Freud: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming), will give a talk entitled:
“Some Comments on Moses and Monotheism: ‘Geistigkeit‘ — A Problematic Concept”
The Thursday Night Workshop is a longstanding tradition of the philosophy department. In the past, speakers have included Robert Brandom, Adriana Cavarero, Michael Frede, Klaus Held, Jürgen Habermas, Claude Lefort, Jean-Luc Marion, and Richard Rorty. Students are encouraged to attend the Thursday night department lecture series as well as the post-lecture reception.
This event is sponsored by The New School for Social Research.
The Liberal Studies department at the New School for Social Research and the Culture & Media Department at Eugene Lang College are pleased to jointly present “Appetite for Distraction: Social Media and Today’s Attention-Economy,” an evening lecture by Chair and faculty memeber Dominic Pettman, which also marks the publication his forthcoming book Infinite Distraction (Polity Press, 2016).
It is often argued that contemporary media homogenize our thoughts and actions, without us being fully aware of the restrictions they impose. But what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same motions or moments, but rather dispersed into countless different emotional micro-experiences? What if the effect of so-called social media is to calibrate the interactive spectacle so that we never fully feel the same way as other potential allies at the same time? While one person is fuming about economic injustice or climate change denial, another is giggling at a cute cat video. And, two hours late, vice versa. The nebulous indignation which constitutes the very fuel of true social change can be redirected safely around the network, avoiding any dangerous surges of radical activity.
Infinite Distraction examines the deliberate deployment of what Pettman calls hypermodulation, as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. His account challenges the various narratives that portray social media as a sinister space of synchronized attention, in which we are busily clicking ourselves to death. This critical reflection on the unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distraction that our latest technologies now allow.
A Q&A will follow the lecture and refreshments will be on hand.
Keynote Speakers:
Alan Bass: New School for Social Research
Rudolf Bernet: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
James Dodd: New School for Social Research
3:00pm – 9:00pm in EST
(3:00pm – 4:50pm)
James Dodd, “Violence and Religion (On Levinas)”
(5:00pm – 6:50pm)
Rudolf Bernet (K.U. Leuven), “Husserl on Desires, Drive, and Affect”
(7:00pm – 8:50pm)
Alan Bass, “The Handkerchief and the Fetish: ‘Being and Time’ §17”
Beginning in 2003, a seminar or lecture course connected to the Husserl Archives has been occasionally offered by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Scholars and advanced students in the field of phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy have been invited to present and discuss their work.
The topic of the fall 2015 seminar will be: Intersections between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. This year’s seminar will place the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas in conversation with psychoanalytic thought through a close reading of selected texts. Our speakers this year will be James Dodd, Rudolf Bernet, and Alan Bass.
(Prof. Dodd’s paper will be circulated in advance – along with a selection from Bataille’s Theory of Religion. We are also soliciting questions for this portion of the seminar. Email P.J. Gorre [gorrp967@newschool.edu] to receive the appropriate materials and to send your questions).
Paul Kottman, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, gives a lecture entitled “Love as Human Freedom”.
Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, or as a reflection of reigning ideologies, this lecture presents love as a practice that changes over time, through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, via interpretations of literary works, Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives, and is a fundamental way that we make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.
About the speaker:
Paul Kottman is the author of Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), A Politics of the Scene (Stanford University Press, 2008) and is the editor of Philosophers on Shakespeare (Stanford University Press, 2009), and The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy and Early Modernity (Fordham UP, forthcoming). His next book is tentatively entitled Love as Human Freedom. He is also the editor of a new book series at Stanford University Press, called Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities.
Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
9th Meeting of the SIPP-ISPP
Our next meeting on ‘Any Body, Anybody : The Matter of the Unconscious’ will take place from November 9-12, 2016, at the New School for Social Research, New York.
With this title, we invite reflections on the body and the materiality of the unconscious. How does psychoanalysis help us think about how bodies become laden with and deprived of identity in a social and political space? The term “Anybody” also asks us to think about how the unconscious is not bound to a known identity but rather emerges from and belongs to a “nobody” that is nevertheless material; the phrase “Any body,” conjures up the psychic ambiguities subtending the way sexuality affects every body including but not limited to trans-sexual bodies. This conference also offers us an opportunity to think about how the targets of recent acts of terrorism are construed as “anybodies” and/or “nobodies.”
For more information, please read our CFP or write to 16SIPP@gmail.com.
David Kishik (Emerson College), Dr Zed Adams (New School for Social Research)
Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Joe Gould’s Oral History of Our Time, and Joseph Mitchell’s memoir each existed more in their respective author’s imagination than on the written page. In this Friday evening event, David Kishik will discuss the significance of such imaginary literary works for his own Manhattan Project (Stanford, 2015), which draws upon Benjamin, Gould, Mitchell, and others to develop a theory of Manahattan as the capital of the twentieth century. At the event, Kishik will be introduced and interviewed by New School faculty member Zed Adams.