Calendar – Blog of Noah Greenstein

The Paris School of Jewish Thought: An Intellectual, Philosophical, and Spiritual Renewal in the Wake of the Holocaust @ Maison Française East Gallery

Tickets

Mar 29 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm

In France, during the decades that followed World War II and the Shoah, an impressive attempt was made to rebuild Jewish life and thought, and to invent new ways of being Jewish in the post-Holocaust secular world. Known as the Paris School of Jewish Thought, this collective enterprise gathered an incredible variety of Jewish scholars, rabbis, philosophers, scientists, and writers, both religious and secular, from a wide range of backgrounds. This talk sheds light on the major role played by these thinkers who addressed political, philosophical, and spiritual challenges that remain relevant today.

Sophie Nordmann teaches Philosophy, Ethics, and Jewish Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris (PSL University). A specialist of modern and contemporary Jewish thought, her early work focused on Judeo-German Philosophy in 20th century Europe (H. Cohen, F. Rosenzweig, M. Buber) and its extension in the United States and Israel. Among her current projects, Dr. Nordmann studies how post WWII France became a laboratory for Jewish thinkers who undertook to rethink the modern Jewish condition after the Shoah.

This talk is co-presented by the Columbia Maison Française and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, and sponsored by the Knapp Family Foundation.

Categories: Independent Tags: aesthetics culture music social

Feb

29

Thu

Culture & Freedom: Thinking Universality with Aimé Césaire and Sylvia Wynter presented by Elisabeth Paquette @ Wolff Conference Room/D1103

Tickets

Feb 29 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Serving as a response to Aimé Césaire’s call for a universal filled with particularity from his infamous resignation from the French Communist Party in 1956, I focus on the role of culture for a project of universal emancipation. To do so, I follow Sylvia Wynter’s statement that the Négritude movement is an example of a universal and cultural project. Recalling Césaire’s words in “Return to My Native Land,” culture that serves universal emancipation must be “free of the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the world.” To this end, I develop a conception of culture that is both local and universal, that centers on the importance of what it means to be human, as life, as being, and as experience by reading culture as necessarily local, collective, disenchanted, and related to play.

Bio:

Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her book, titled Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), engages French political theorist Alain Badiou’s discussion of Négritude and the Haitian Revolution to develop a nuanced critique of his theory of emancipation. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the writings of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. She is also the Founder of the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop, which takes place annually during the summer.