Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute will jointly present the conference “Political Theology Today as Critical Theory of the Contemporary: Reason, Religion, Humanism,” to be held at Deutsches Haus at NYU, from February 15-17. Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III will deliver one of the keynote speeches. For a detailed conference schedule, please click here.
Across the globe the liberal logic of capitalism and technocracy has seemingly triumphed, and with it a culture of secularism, now the dominant ideology of the liberal establishment that prefers progress to tradition, an individualized identity to a sense of shared belonging, and free choice to common purpose. As much as this regime has produced wealth, it has also generated inequality and dissatisfaction. The populist insurgency that is sweeping the West is in large part a repudiation of this secular politics, opening the space for a post-liberal political theology. A resurgence of religion is underway that marks the failure of the secularization thesis and the need for alternative cultural resources, beyond positivism, to understand the place of humanity within the cosmos. Is this our new “Great Awakening”?
Amid the crisis of rationalism, critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas have sought to rescue the project of a reasonable humanism from the twin threats of religious fundamentalism and secular naturalism. Yet Habermas’s conception of postsecularity remains residually secularist because he does not permit faith to make any substantive or critical contribution to public discussion that could undermine the primacy of formal, procedural reason. In response Pope Emeritus Benedict invoked Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment because the slogan “reason alone” leads to the dissolution of reason—to the conclusion that only will and power have any reality. The only way to avoid this outcome is to recall—so Benedict’s argument in his much-commented but poorly understood 2006 Regensburg address—that the West’s commitment to humanist reason is grounded in the classical and Christian idea that human rationality participates in the infinite reason of transcendence. Otherwise the rational is but the illusion of our own and of nature’s will to power.
The 2019 Telos Conference will discuss the role of political theology as critical theory of the contemporary: the reappearance of faith in civic life. The focus will not be on intellectual history but rather on how faith is reshaping politics and culture today.
Please note: Sessions taking place at Deutsches Haus at NYU will be open to the general public. Attendance for break-out sessions will be limited to conference participants who have registered with the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute only. Events at Deutsches Haus are free and open to the public. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. As space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event to ensure you get a good seat. Thank you!
Speakers:
Cristina Alberini (NYU, Neural Science)
Heather Berlin (Mt. Sinai, Psychiatry)
Mark Solms (Cape Town, Neuropsychology)
Robert Stickgold (Harvard, Psychiatry)
This conference will discuss the role of digital spaces such as social media in being a public philosopher or theologian. The conference will choose papers that explore different digital platforms, how these platforms can aid in being a public philosopher or theologian, as well as the specific challenges these spaces pose. Sessions will explore how digital spaces have become arenas for philosophers and theologians to discuss ideas with other scholars and with the public, and how the discussion of concepts in this format affects the delivery and reception of the ideas. We will solicit papers that specifically discuss how digital spaces can positively facilitate the goals of public philosophy. Internet spaces are an important tool for the contemporary public philosopher and the full implications of their usage has not yet been fully explored.
Main speakers: Barry Lam, Vassar College
Contact Information
Dr.Joel Whitebook, Philosopher and Psychoanalyst will discuss his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography
As Hegel observed, the “Objective Spirit” never stands still — an observation that is especially true today. As a result, members of every generation have to return to the classics and reappropriate them for themselves. This is what Joel Whitebook has done in his recently published intellectual biography of Freud (Cambridge University Press) that we will be discussing in this workshop.
Cutting through the tired clichés of the “Freud Wars,” the author presents us with a radically new portrait of the founder of psychoanalysis. Because Whitebook is a philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst, he has been able to integrate many of the profound transformations that have taken place in psychoanalytic theory and practice, infant research, gender studies, philosophy, and critical theory since Ernest Jones and Peter Gay published their canonical studies in the last century. Whitebook thereby succeeds in creating an account of Freud’s achievement that speaks to our cultural situation.
Furthermore, in addition to presenting the unfolding of Freud’s thinking in the context of the developments in his personal life and in the society at large, Whitebook has also succeeded in bringing this iconic man to life in compelling fashion. Where Freud often tried to protect himself by hiding behind the forbidding mask of an authoritarian patriarch and unbending rationalist, we come to see him as the vulnerable, complex, and all-too-human person that he was.
Presented by The New School for Social Research and Philosophy Department and it is co-sponsored with the Ferenczi Center.
“Being dragged into the orbit of Webster’s mind is like entering the Magic Mountain: you go in as a visitor, and stay as a patient”
– Tom Mcarthy, author of Remainder and Satin Island
“Jamieson Webster’s new work reflects upon that aspect of hysteria—or conversion disorder—that has eluded the attention of most commentators: the indifference of the subject at the very moment that the symptom is most clearly enacted. This point of departure allows Webster to think about what the body contains but also what traverses the body at a level that is prior to speech, that is perhaps the condition of speech itself. This incisive and unsettling meditation gives us a form of psychoanalytic writing that tracks the transference as bodily transformation and impasse. It is written in and for our times, when the courage and difficulty of the slow labor of psychoanalysis provides a perspective that eludes the certitudes of dogma and the exhilarations of false promises. Webster’s book asks us to stay within the domain of difficult exchange where what registers and shifts at the level of the body lets us know more about what we can expect of life and what our own living carries of the lives of others. Beautifully written, theoretically brave, and disturbing in all the best ways”.
– Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/conversion-disorder/9780231184083
From the book:
Conversion disorder—a psychiatric term that names the enigmatic transformation of psychic energy into bodily manifestations—offers a way to rethink the present. With so many people suffering from unexplained bodily symptoms; with so many seeking recourse to pharmacological treatments or bodily modification; with young men and women seemingly willing to direct violence toward anybody, including themselves—a radical disordering in culture insists on the level of the body.
Part memoir, part clinical case, part theoretical investigation, this book searches for the body. Is it a psychopathological entity; a crossroads for the cultural, political, and biological in the form of care; or the foundation of psychoanalytic work on the question of sexuality? Jamieson Webster traces conversion’s shifting meanings—in religious, economic, and even chemical processes—revisiting the work of thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Foucault, Agamben, and Lacan. She provides an intimate account of her own conversion from patient to psychoanalyst, as well as her continuing struggle to apprehend the complexities of the patient’s body. When listening to dreams, symptoms, worries, or sexual impasses, the body becomes a defining trope that belies a vulnerable and urgent wish for transformation. Conversion Disorder names what is singular about the entanglement of the fractured body and the social world in order to imagine what kind of cure is possible.
Presented by The New School for Social Research and Philosophy Department and it is co-sponsored with the Ferenczi Center.
“Being dragged into the orbit of Webster’s mind is like entering the Magic Mountain: you go in as a visitor, and stay as a patient”
— Tom Mcarthy, author of Remainder and Satin Island
“Jamieson Webster’s new work reflects upon that aspect of hysteria—or conversion disorder—that has eluded the attention of most commentators: the indifference of the subject at the very moment that the symptom is most clearly enacted. This point of departure allows Webster to think about what the body contains but also what traverses the body at a level that is prior to speech, that is perhaps the condition of speech itself. This incisive and unsettling meditation gives us a form of psychoanalytic writing that tracks the transference as bodily transformation and impasse. It is written in and for our times, when the courage and difficulty of the slow labor of psychoanalysis provides a perspective that eludes the certitudes of dogma and the exhilarations of false promises. Webster’s book asks us to stay within the domain of difficult exchange where what registers and shifts at the level of the body lets us know more about what we can expect of life and what our own living carries of the lives of others. Beautifully written, theoretically brave, and disturbing in all the best ways”.
— Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/conversion-disorder/9780231184083
From the book:
Conversion disorder—a psychiatric term that names the enigmatic transformation of psychic energy into bodily manifestations—offers a way to rethink the present. With so many people suffering from unexplained bodily symptoms; with so many seeking recourse to pharmacological treatments or bodily modification; with young men and women seemingly willing to direct violence toward anybody, including themselves—a radical disordering in culture insists on the level of the body.
Part memoir, part clinical case, part theoretical investigation, this book searches for the body. Is it a psychopathological entity; a crossroads for the cultural, political, and biological in the form of care; or the foundation of psychoanalytic work on the question of sexuality? Jamieson Webster traces conversion’s shifting meanings—in religious, economic, and even chemical processes—revisiting the work of thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Foucault, Agamben, and Lacan. She provides an intimate account of her own conversion from patient to psychoanalyst, as well as her continuing struggle to apprehend the complexities of the patient’s body. When listening to dreams, symptoms, worries, or sexual impasses, the body becomes a defining trope that belies a vulnerable and urgent wish for transformation. Conversion Disorder names what is singular about the entanglement of the fractured body and the social world in order to imagine what kind of cure is possible.
Presented by The New School for Social Research and Philosophy Department and it is co-sponsored with the Ferenczi Center.
To this day, many theorists regard the commodity theory and the credit theory as the two main rival accounts of the nature of money. Yet cryptocurrency has revolutionized the institution of money in ways that most commodity and credit theorists could hardly have anticipated. Assuming that cryptocurrency is a new form of money, the question arises whether the commodity and credit theories can adequately account for it. This talk argues that they cannot. It first offers an interpretation of the commodity and credit theories according to which these theories uphold differing claims about the origin of money, the ontology of money, and the function of money. It then argues that thus understood, neither theory can accommodate cryptocurrency. Finally, it proposes a novel hybrid hylomorphic account of money which draws on aspects of both the commodity and credit theories, and it argues that this hybrid account can accommodate cryptocurrency.
Interviewer: Graham Hubbs (University of Idaho)
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new and thought-provoking interview series: “In Conversation: Exploring the Philosophy of Money and Finance”. The series kicks off with a selection of esteemed contributors to the recently published book, The Philosophy of Money and Finance (OUP, 2024).
Each interview will be followed by a live debate, encouraging active audience participation. The sessions (interview plus debate) will be 30 minutes long.
chair: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome)
organization: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome); Joakim Sandberg (University of Gothenburg); Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)
info: phinancenet@gmail.com; lwarenski@gc.cuny.edu ; emiliano.ippoliti@uniroma1.it
Philosophers tend to assume that money has only an instrumental relation to state legitimacy. This discussion explains how money raises state legitimacy issues of its own. Assuming a credit/debt theory of money, the state can be seen as an active participant in a credit economy of its own making. Insofar as a state issues or recognizes a money as a means of ruling people’s lives, it is subject to promissory requirements of redemption. This has significant implications for its legitimate and equitable management of a modern economy, the centerpiece of a social compact.
Interviewer: Richard Endörfer (University of Gothenburg)
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new and thought-provoking interview series: “In Conversation: Exploring the Philosophy of Money and Finance”. The series kicks off with a selection of esteemed contributors to the recently published book, The Philosophy of Money and Finance (OUP, 2024).
Each interview will be followed by a live debate, encouraging active audience participation. The sessions (interview plus debate) will be 30 minutes long.
chair: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome)
organization: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome); Joakim Sandberg (University of Gothenburg); Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)
info: phinancenet@gmail.com; lwarenski@gc.cuny.edu ; emiliano.ippoliti@uniroma1.it
This talk examines the instruments suggested by the key policy document driving sustainable finance in the European Union, the Action Plan on Financing Sustainable Growth. It uses a reflexive law approach coupled with insights from epistemology. The chapter first discusses the Action Plan and the concept of reflexive law (which focuses on such epistemic instruments as disclosure, reporting, and labelling). It discusses a number of challenges the plan faces (about, e.g., investor ignorance, long-termism, scenario analysis, accounting standards). It then introduces an alternative to reflexive law (called “epistemic law”), and argues that disclosure, reporting, and labelling improve by taking into account insights from epistemology and social science concerning the form and content of information. The talk’s recommendation is, in a slogan, to provide different information, and to provide information differently.
Interviewer: Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new and thought-provoking interview series: “In Conversation: Exploring the Philosophy of Money and Finance”. The series kicks off with a selection of esteemed contributors to the recently published book, The Philosophy of Money and Finance (OUP, 2024).
Each interview will be followed by a live debate, encouraging active audience participation. The sessions (interview plus debate) will be 30 minutes long.
chair: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome)
organization: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome); Joakim Sandberg (University of Gothenburg); Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)
info: phinancenet@gmail.com; lwarenski@gc.cuny.edu ; emiliano.ippoliti@uniroma1.it
The author argues that the credit system may improve distributive justice, but only indirectly, via job creation and government spending. The reason for this is that cheap credit on commercial terms is only available to people in the upper half of the wealth distribution. By contrast, the forms of credit available more widely are too expensive to make taking out credit a realistic option to escape poverty for most. However, credit can improve distributive justice indirectly, if entrepreneurs and corporations borrow for purposes that create jobs, or states spend borrowed funds on programs that address poverty or inequality. For these reasons, the author suggests that improving access to credit is less important from the perspective of distributive justice than how the credit system interacts with the tax system and labor laws.
Interviewer: Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new and thought-provoking interview series: “In Conversation: Exploring the Philosophy of Money and Finance”. The series kicks off with a selection of esteemed contributors to the recently published book, The Philosophy of Money and Finance (OUP, 2024).
Each interview will be followed by a live debate, encouraging active audience participation. The sessions (interview plus debate) will be 30 minutes long.
chair: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome)
organization: Emiliano Ippoliti (Sapienza University of Rome); Joakim Sandberg (University of Gothenburg); Lisa Warenski (CUNY Graduate Center and University of Connecticut)
info: phinancenet@gmail.com; lwarenski@gc.cuny.edu ; emiliano.ippoliti@uniroma1.it