Please join Cornel West, 2021-2022 Presidential Visiting Scholar at The New School, for a public in-person lecture, “Philosophy in Our Time of Imperial Decay.”
Welcome by Dwight A. McBride, New School President
Moderated by Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy
PLEASE NOTE: Proof of vaccination and a booster are required for campus access; no exceptions will be granted. You must remain masked during the event. You will receive additional information about this closer to the event date.
Dr. Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects — including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music.
Dr. West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.
Dr. West is a frequent guest on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span and Democracy Now. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.
Since Plato, western philosophy has been set down a path paved by a disavowal of the sensuous, bracketed material bodies, and delimited aesthetic conceptions, leaving human beings and their built environments separated from the natural world. Such exclusions have left philosophy ill-equipped to deal with the various environmental crises we currently face, as economic rationality and utilitarian logic further de-animate the world and sharpen the human/nature distinction. Even the concept “environment” often, and ironically, brings with it implicit anthropocentric assumptions, conceptualizing, and thereby separating, the human as independent from the surrounding world and reinforcing the human/nature divide. As a result, our (mis)understandings of “nature” and “environment” may make us insensitive to and perpetuate, rather than address, climate change and other environmental catastrophes. To avoid ambiguities and clarify our understanding, we must ask: what role does Nature play within our theories and practices concerning so-called Environmental Philosophy? Furthermore, what spaces, practices, and questions are made possible when we broaden our understanding of “environment” to include a more robust conceptualization of the natural world and how the human being ought to be contextualized within it?
This conference asks how we might reorient the language and practices of philosophy in a way that can enable us to adequately respond to ongoing environmental crises. As a starting point, we propose a need to reimagine the concepts “human,” “nature,” and “environment,” as well as the reciprocal relations that constitute them. To recognize humans as natural organisms, we must reevaluate the sensuous, the material, and the aesthetic and the roles they play in our attempts to construct, understand, and preserve our environment(s). How should we make sense of our practices and our relations to those with whom we share our surroundings? How can we re-situate the human with/in the environment? Do we have the right tools to guide these investigations? How might philosophy look beyond itself—to literature, architecture, music, film, design—to better bring Environment, and thus the world, into view? In the spirit of this, we invite paper as well as project submissions from current graduate students in any discipline.
Possible Topics:
● Environmental Aesthetics: Re-Considering Beauty + the Sublime
● Environmental Justice + Restorative Justice + Transformative Justice
● Environmental Ethics + Sustainable Practices
● Diversity + Biodiversity
● Capitalism and Climate
● Eco-phenomenology
● Eco-deconstruction
● Environmental Racism/Racist Environments
● Ecofeminist conceptions of nature
● Land Rights and Property Relations
● Posthumanism + Object Ontologies
● Afrofuturism + Technological Utopias
● Environmental Ethics In Narratives
● Mastery of Nature in Philosophy
● Anarcho-primitivism
● Queer and Trans Ecologies
● Local and Global Ecologies
● Regionalisms and Globalisms in the Ecological Imagination
Confirmed Conference Keynotes:
Sandra Shapshay, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
Emanuele Coccia, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris
Dates and Location:
This conference will be held at the New School for Social Research in New York City from Thursday, April 14, to Saturday, April 16. While we (tentatively) plan to hold the conference primarily in-person we would also like to provide a hybrid option for those who would prefer to participate remotely. Following the conference, on Sunday, April 17, all participants and attendees are invited to participate in a conference hike in Cold Spring, NY (about an hour and a half north of NYC and accessible by the Metro North commuter train).
Call for Papers: Submission Procedure:
Please submit complete papers (Word Limit: 3500) and an abstract of 250 words or less by January 1st in the form of a Word attachment (.docx) or PDF to WithInEnvironments@gmail.com. Please prepare your submission for blind review by removing any identifying information from the body of the paper. In your email please include your name, affiliation, and paper title. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 15.
Call for Projects: Submission Procedure:
Please submit a project description (Word Limit: 1000) by December 1st in the form of a Word attachment (.docx) to WithInEnvironments@gmail.com, as well as:
For Visual Arts projects: submit 5 images of your work as .jpeg.
For Performing Arts projects: submit video/ audio of your work in .mp4 format
Please prepare your submission for blind review by removing any identifying information. In your email please include your name, affiliation, and project title. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 15.
If you have any questions please email WithInEnvironments@gmail.com
Book Panel with:
Chiara Bottici (NSSR and Lang College), Judith Butler (UC Berkeley and NSSR) and Romy Opperman (NSSR and Lang College).
Abstract:
How can we be sure the oppressed do not become oppressors in their turn? How can we envisage a feminism that doesn’t turn into yet another tool for oppression? By arguing that there is no single arche explaining the oppression of women and LGBTQI+ people, Chiara Bottici proposes a radical anarchafeminist philosophy inspired by two major claims: that there is something specific to the oppression of ‘the second sexes’, and that, in order to fight that, we need to untangle all other forms of oppression and the anthropocentrism they inhabit. On the basis of a Spinozist philosophy of transindividuality, Anarchafeminism calls for a decolonial and deimperial attitude and for a renewed awareness of the somatic communism connecting all different life forms on the planet. In this revolutionary vision, feminism does not mean the liberation of the lucky few, but liberation of the planet from both capitalist exploitation and an anthropocentric politics of domination. Either the entire planet, or none of us will be free.
External visitors must comply with the university’s guest policy as outlined here: https://www.newschool.edu/covid-19/campus-access/?open=visitors.
Audience members must show proof of a full COVID-19 vaccination series (and booster if eligible), ID, and remain masked at all times.
Sponsored by the NSSR Philosophy Department & The Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute (GSSI)
11:00am: Cinzia Arruzza and James Dodd, Greetings and Introduction
Part 1. Celebrating Ross Poole
11:05-12:35am: Ben Nienass, “The Force of Memory” and Basak Ertur, “Learning to Live with Ghosts”
12:35-12:40 pm: Coffee Break
12:40-1:30 pm: Roundtable Discussion
Participants:
Omri Boehm, Lynne Segal and Mick Taussig
1:30-3:30 pm: Lunch Break
Part 2. Celebrating Bernard Flynn
3:30-6:00pm: Roundtable Discussion on the Work of Bernard Flynn
Participants:
Peg Birmingham, James Dodd, Frank Chouraqui, and Simon Critchley
External visitors must comply with the university’s guest policy as outlined here: https://www.newschool.edu/covid-19/campus-access/?open=visitors.
Audience members must show proof of a full COVID-19 vaccination series (and booster if eligible), ID, and remain masked at all times.
9:30am EST OPENING REMARKS
Scott Shushan, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Sarah Lawrence College
Dr. Renée T. White, Provost and Professor of Sociology, The New School
Alice Crary, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research
9:45-11:15 PHILOSOPHY AS PEDAGOGY
Karen Ng (moderator), Associate Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
Roy Ben-Shai, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Sarah Lawrence College
Megan Craig, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University
Judith Friedlander, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Hunter College, and former Dean of The New School for Social Research
11:30-1:00 PHILOSOPHY AND THE PUBLIC GOOD
Simona Forti (moderator), Professor of Political Philosophy, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy
Axel Honneth, Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities, Columbia University
Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Columbia University
Joel Whitebook, Professor, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
1:00–2:00pm Lunch Break
2:00 REFLECTION
Cinzia Arruzza, Associate Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research
2:10-3:50 PHILOSOPHY IN A PLURALIST SPIRIT
David Clinton Wills (moderator), Professor, New York University-Gallatin
María Pía Lara, Professor and Researcher, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
Chiara Bottici, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies,The New School for Social Research
Lucius Outlaw, Jr., W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, McGill University
4:05-5:35 DEMOCRACY AS A TASK BEFORE US
Dmitri Nikulin (moderator), Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research
Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Philosophy and Political Science. Emerita, Yale University and Senior Research Fellow, Columbia Law School and Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Theory
Rainer Forst, Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science, The New School for Social Research
Organized by Marcia Morgan and Scott Shushan in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research.
Abstract:
As a specific form of rights insecurity the revocability of reproductive rights manifests contradictory understandings (privative and productive) of the political status of pregnancy.
I ask how and why we should understand reproductive rights as revocable, giving a broad meaning to the term “revocability,” and suggesting a conjoined vocabulary that includes conditionality, exceptionality, and disqualifying qualification.
I ask: what kind of grammar might help us understand more specifically how the concurrent action of conflicting combinations of power (such as sovereignty, discipline, security, necropower, and neoliberal expectation) coordinate together in relation to reproductive rights-bearing, and how heterogeneous combinations of power also produce a mutual disruptiveness, even auto-critique, manifesting as conflictual embodiment.
External visitors must comply with the university’s guest policy as outlined here: https://www.newschool.edu/covid-19/campus-access/?open=visitors.
Audience members must show proof of a full COVID-19 vaccination series (and booster if eligible), ID, and remain masked at all times.
Book panel: Anat Matar, The Poverty of Ethics (Verso books 2022)
Participants:
Anat Matar (Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University)
Simon Critchley (Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at NSSR)
Raef Zreik (Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College)
Abstract:
It is a common assumption that ethics must serve as the cornerstone of politics. Yet abstract moral arguments have always been used for justifying all kinds of atrocities; ethical sensitivity and compassion have been expressed towards particular kinds of victims, while totally ignoring others.
The liberal West, in particular, continually manifests such blindness. It is horrified by non-Western oppressive methods, but turns a blind eye to their Western equivalents.
The gratification of holding the moral high ground consistently serves as a political instrument in the hands of those seeking to shore up the existing order.
In The Poverty of Ethics, philosopher and activist Anat Matar argues for the conceptual primacy of political discourse over ethics and claims that only the political force which stands for equality, justice and democracy – the Left – can provide the coordinates for an ethical life under conditions of global injustice.
Appealing to philosophical ideas on the essence of language, Matar shows how the ethos of the Left, as it has evolved over years, underlies and gradually forms the basis for ethics.
Struggles against slavery, racism, colonization and militarization, protests against exploitation and the capitalist order, the feminist movement, global demands for climate action – all these are primarily motivated by a deep understanding of Left heritage rather than by abstract ethical requirements or by airy sensitivities. They, in turn, shape and reshape our notion of moralit
In 1931, Max Horkheimer proposed a model of interdisciplinary research that remains a benchmark for understanding how cultures function and might function better. He imagined an institute “in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration” (Horkheimer 1993, 9). The institute would not work with a single theory but would let data lead to new hypotheses (Horkheimer 1993, 10). But the work of Horkheimer and colleagues rarely lived up to the 1931 vision of an interdisciplinary, empirically grounded approach to culture. To understand why, my paper will juxtapose Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s history of humanity, as it is set out in Dialectic of Enlightenment, with current research on the development of early human cultures by Richard Wrangham, Sarah Blaffer Hardy, Kim Sterelny, Joseph Henrich and Cecilia Heyes. The comparison with recent research in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and cognitive science reveals some of the deep conceptual commitments that limit Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s focus on instrumental reason and conceptual violence. By contrast, current approaches jointly suggest that human subjectivity is scaffolded and embedded; that cooperation is the necessary default for cultural transmission; that learning occurs in context through imitation; and that customs and institutions develop contingently and by accident through processes of cooperation and collaboration. These new insights invite a radical re-thinking of the phenomena Horkheimer and Adorno grouped together as ‘mimesis.’ The resulting picture of environmentally embedded process of cultural evolution is a first step towards revitalizing the interdisciplinary potential of the early Frankfurt School, and suggesting new, practical, productive, and sustainable routes such critique can take in the 21st century.
Bio:
Benjamin Morgan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Worcester College. In 2019, and 2020/21 he was also Visiting Associate Professor of German at Harvard University. He is author of On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (Fordham UP, 2013), and numerous articles on modernist literature, film, and philosophy. He edited, with Carolin Duttlinger and Anthony Phelan, Walter Benjamins Anthropologisches Denken (Rombach, 2012), and with Sowon Park and Ellen Spolsky a Special Issue of Poetics Today on “Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture” (2017).
Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon began as a multidisciplinary, web-based journal in which an assemblage of contributions focused on a single concept with the express intention of re-situating its meaning in the field of political discourse. By reflecting on what has remained unquestioned or unthought in that concept, this all-around collection of essays seeks to open pathways for another future—one that is not already determined and ill-fated.
From this forum for engaged scholarship, a succession of academic conferences have sprung as a space for conversation and constructive debate, including last year’s Political Concepts Graduate Conference. Organized by students of the Departments of Anthropology, Philosophy, and Politics at the New School for Social Research, Political Concepts invites graduate students from all fields of study to participate in our upcoming graduate student conference in Spring 2023. Held at NSSR over March 24-5, the conference will serve as a workshop of ideas on the multiplicity of powers, structures, problems, and orientations that shape our collective life.
Because Political Concepts does not predetermine what does or does not count as political, the conference welcomes essays that fashion new political concepts or demonstrate how concepts deserve to be taken as politically significant. Papers should be dedicated to a single political concept, like an encyclopedia entry, but the analysis of the concept does not have to abide to traditional approaches. Some of the concepts contended with in last year’s vibrant conference included abolition, survival, statistics, solitude, resentment, statistics, dependence, imaginary, and solidarity. Other examples can be found in the published papers on thePolitical Concepts website.
The conference will take the format of a series of panels across two days. Panels will contain two presenters whose papers are thematically and theoretically related — creating a space for critical engagement between the authors, as well as with other attendees. Each presenter will have 25 minutes to present their paper, along with 40 minutes for discussion at the end. This year, there will be a faculty roundtable with NSSR professors serving on the Political Concepts editorial board, namely, Ann Laura Stoler, Jay M. Bernstein, and Andreas Kalyvas.
Abstracts should be no longer than 750 words in a pdf format, and prepared for blind review, so please ensure that your abstract is free from any identifying personal details. Abstracts must be submitted through this google form by December 15, 2022 EST. Any inquiries can be sent to politicalconceptsNSSR@gmail.com.
Applicants must be advanced graduate students and their concept must be a central part of a longer-term project in order to be accepted. Results will be informed in January.
The New School for Social Research Philosophy Department is hosting our annual Graduate Student Conference April 13-15th 2023 in person in New York City.
This year’s topic is Textures of Change: Social Imaginaries, Narratives, and the Possibility of Politics.
Keynote Speakers:
María Pía Lara (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana)
Fanny Söderbäck (Södertörn University)
Eva Von Redecker (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
It has become common for political theorists and philosophers to insist on the necessity of new imaginaries and narratives. Crises of authority, financial meltdowns, and environmental disasters compel us to look for alternative frameworks and practices. While the urgency of this claim is undeniable, the conceptual ground for the creation of new imaginaries and narratives is still unclear. How do we define imaginaries and narratives in relation to our political and social life? How can they become normative and generate conceptual and practical shifts? And who is in a position to shape, direct, and take ownership of these emergent conceptions?
This conference focuses on the current debate on political imaginaries and narratives to investigate some of these questions. As a starting point, we propose to challenge standard Marxist or epistemological approaches to the topic that either interpret imaginaries and narratives as ideological projections (a product of false consciousness) or merely as individual, cognitive faculties. Rather, we suggest thinking about imaginaries and narratives as larger sensuous and embodied practices that re-orient material structures of domination and allow for a reflective rearticulation of collective demands. In particular, we set out to clarify: the meaning of “imaginaries” and/or “narratives” as forms of sense-making; their ability to shift existing discourses and power relations; the way in which they foster different ways of feeling, seeing, acting-in, and experiencing the world in a time of crisis; the way in which they are embedded in artistic and literary practices; and the way in which they address—or fail to address—marginalized subjects.
We invite papers that focus on the concepts of “social imaginary” and “narrative,” as well as on the connection between the two, and on their political and ethical implications. It is our conviction that a critical understanding of these concepts can only emerge from attending to how they are practically embodied and situated in our practices. In this spirit, we welcome, in addition to papers aimed at conceptual clarification, papers that provide specific accounts of alternative forms of praxis, including (but not limited to) leftist, feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, abolitionist, indigenous, environmentalist, and utopian imaginaries and narratives.
We are accepting submissions of up to 4000 words. Please also submit a brief academic bio.
Please contact socialimaginarynarrative@gmail.com with any queries or submissions.
The deadline is January 3rd, 2023