Rebecca Comay teaches in the Philosophy Department and in the Center for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she is also co-director of the Literary Studies Program, and has affiliations with Architecture, German, and Jewish Studies. She works at the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, and has published widely on continental philosophy, memory studies, literature, and contemporary art. She is recently the author of Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, 2011).

Mahmoud Darwish spent his life as a poet, a public intellectual, and a politician ‘in defense of little differences.’ Read by almost all Palestinians and celebrated as the god of their idolatry, Darwish is often quoted by his fellow compatriots to explain their seemingly inexplicable history. Since the Nakba of 1948, the nightmare of the Palestinians and the beginning of the ceaseless provocation of a dream to end it at once, a lot of ‘little differences’ were subjects of defense when an entire defenseless nation became subject to one of the harshest colonial conditions ever.

There have been few engagements with the question of what Critical Theory (CT) has endowed contemporary social and international thought. In social theory, Axel Honneth has framed this as a question of the ‘legacy’ of CT and in Critical International Relations Theory (CIRT), Andrew Linklater has framed this as a question of its ‘achievements’. This paper builds upon these analyses and argues that by including what I call ‘cosmopolitan social-relations’ to its study of social-life, CT may overcome some of the key limitations identified by Honneth and Linklater regarding the problems of historical agency and historical sociology.

Michael Roth will discuss issues of mediation and recognition with respect to both “photography’s representation of trauma” and “the role of affect in the classroom.” Roth, a Hegelian-Freudian with neo-liberal commitments, is concerned with what professors DO with affect — and with the institutional challenge of developing teachers who, in working through and acknowledging affect, make a difference in the lives of their students.

Michael S. Roth became the 16th president of Wesleyan University in 2007.

Michael S. Roth became the 16th president of Wesleyan University in 2007. He is a graduate of Wesleyan (1978) and received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University (1984). In 1996, Roth moved from Scripps College, where he was Hartley Burr Alexander Professor of Humanities and founding director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute, to join the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, becoming associate director in 1997. In 2000, he became president of the California College of the Arts in Oakland and San Francisco. Under his leadership the institution became known as “one of the most progressive art schools in the country” and one of the “leading schools of design in the world.”

In the context of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, in the midst of a sudden deepening of the economic crisis partly or entirely overshadowing the occasion, we hear raised from every corner primordial demands for the necessity of sacrifice and self-inflicted wounding as the only adequate response to the gravity of the situation. The intensification of the economic calamity itself has by any measure been intentional, while nationwide the only audible voices seem to be those calling for austerity and for every budget to be ‘cut.’

Samera Esmeir is an Assistant Professor in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her present research focuses on British rule in Egypt and the powers of modern law constitutive of colonization. Her forthcoming book manuscript is titled Losing the Human: The Rise of Juridical Humanity in Colonial Egypt. Esmeir’s research interests also span issues around violence, war and the security state in the contemporary Middle East, and legal history, including the history of the colonial legal profession in Egypt, the colonial history of comparative law and the international legal histories of revolution.

Hon-Lam Li is Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, China.

Suggested Readings for the Bernstein and Critchley seminar:

J.M. Bernstein: Students might wish to read the chapter on “Torture” and on “The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew” from Amery’s book At the Mind’s Limits; and the chapter on violence from Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.

Simon Critchley: Slavoj Zizek, Violence; Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” ; Judith Butler, “Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s Critique of Violence”; Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Preface’ to Totality and Infinity.

In this talk, I would like to reflect on the hugely difficult question of the nature and plausibility of a politics of nonviolence. In particular, I would like to focus on how such a politics has to negotiate the limits of nonviolence and in what circumstances it might become necessary to transgress those limits. The complex necessity for such transgression will be captured in Judith Butler’s paradoxical formulation, ‘nonviolent violence.’(Critchley)

Simon Critchley teaches philosophy at the New School for Social Research.

In an incident in Auschwitz, Jean Amery describes how, at a particular moment, he was forced to give “concrete form to my dignity by punching a human face.” Professor Bernstein’s paper interrogates the thesis, common to Amery and Frantz Fanon, that, as a consequence of the particular character of human embodiment, violent reprisal belongs to the grammar of human dignity.

J.M. Bernstein teaches philosophy at the New School for Social Research.

Staged reading directed by Rush Rehm (Artistic Director Stanford Summer Theatre) with Phoebe Moyer, David Mendelsohn, Joy Carlin and Courtney Walsh.
Followed by a panel discussion.

Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno were intellectual giants of the first half of the twentieth century.