The European game having finally ended, at least so he thought, Frantz Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth that “we today can do everything”. In this lecture Mbembe will reflect on the dialectics of the end/closure and boundless possibility evoked by Fanon and the ways it is played out under contemporary conditions. Using South Africa as a starting point, he will also assess the place contemporary struggles for emancipation assign to the key Fanonian concepts of time, creation and reconstitution and the extent to which they truly transcend the law of repetition, which he foresaw as the biggest threat to difference and newness.

Free-market globalization has led to the systematic dismantling of accountability of the state, which is increasingly taking on a managerial role. Ironically, the loss of legitimacy of the state has opened up new opportunities of action for civil society actors in the fields of global justice and radical democracy. The popularity of protest movements like Occupy fosters the belief that an empowered civil society automatically strengthens democracy.

Following its Paris premiere in June 2012 at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Baradaran’s performance of “Marry Me to the End of Love” will make its U.S. debut during his UC Berkeley campus visit. In this interactive performance, Baradaran will marry anyone he can convince to enter a temporary marriage. This playful, performative act of marriage draws from the Shi’a Islamic tradition of temporary marriage (Sigheh) and attempts to introduce these traditions into the performance art lexicon.

Amir Baradaran discusses his past and current artistic works involving Augmented Reality (AR) and poses critical questions for the future of AR and art practice. AR as a form of new media offers a live view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. Under the title “FutARism,” Baradaran suggests that AR presupposes significant conceptual shifts, as it expands our definitions of ownership and trespassing while triggering dialogue about a new medium for interactive installations.

For most of the modern period, war has been understood in essentialist terms, as a timeless category of thought and action. Yet arguably, the concept of war has undergone a series of significant changes from the sixteenth century to the present, and many of these changes have had a profound impact on the sociopolitical world. Hence, in this talk, I will explore how changing conceptualizations of war have conditioned the ways in which war has been conducted from the early modern period to the present.

In his critical philosophy Kant constructs freedom as the ideal form of practical reason with a strictly determined form: it is self-determining, self-identical, and it posits itself as its own purpose. One of the conditions to conceptualize freedom this way lies in Kant’s presumption of ‘time’ as a pure a priori form of (outer and inner) intuition. This talk asks about some of the different determining effects this Kantian conception has had on subsequent theory building. What is the post-Kantian space in which practical philosophy has been thought?

This seminar explores anonymity in the work of Alfred Schutz and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, looking at the role anonymity plays in several areas of phenomenological inquiry: otherness, common sense, and the social world. The concept of anonymity offers a helpful way to mediate between phenomenology understood as a transcendental project or an “eidetic science” in Husserl’s words and phenomenology as the study of the perspectival situatedness of, and local practices in, the social world. Recent feminist phenomenology has turned to anonymity in order to think about the function of gender in the social world, and I suggest that anonymity understood in this sense can help elucidate the events surrounding the murder of Larry King, a gender-variant 15 year old student shot and killed by a classmate in his Oxnard, California junior high school in 2008.(Salamon)

This seminar explores anonymity in the work of Alfred Schutz and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, looking at the role anonymity plays in several areas of phenomenological inquiry: otherness, common sense, and the social world. The concept of anonymity offers a helpful way to mediate between phenomenology understood as a transcendental project or an “eidetic science” in Husserl’s words and phenomenology as the study of the perspectival situatedness of, and local practices in, the social world.

This two-day symposium at UC Berkeley explores the uses of race and religion to establish war as a strategy of political power, and conversely the uses of war to stabilize the epistemologies of race and religion as intimately linked organizing categories of social life—what we might call the “race/religion/war” nexus.

This inquiry finds its proximate cause in the racialization of Islam that has animated the contemporary U.S. led “war on terror,” as well as its doppelgangers in places like London, the Parisian Banlieues, Chechnya, Palestine, Darfur, Kashmir, and the Huiger regions of China.

This lecture considers the relationship between Nietzsche’s Christian form of atheism and Idn Al-Rawandy’s criticism of prophecy, arguing that the latter constitutes a form of Islamic atheism, and that both the Christian and Islamic forms call into question the temporal break between religion and atheism (often assumed to be unproblematically secular).

Both Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead” and the theological argument that “God does not exist” assume that modern conceptions of atheism are fully emancipated from theology, its language and its logic.

This lecture, “Affect and Vulnerability: Spinoza and Deleuze on Negativity” responds to criticisms that Spinoza cannot account for vulnerability since he does not have a strong enough conception of negativity that could account for loss and mourning (Butler). This lecture argues that affects, as with the social in Spinoza, support the conception of relational individuals, and that elements of negativity both in Spinoza and in Deleuze’s conception of death can help us redefine social vulnerability.

These two lectures consider recent notions of vulnerability and their implications for a critique of the liberal subject and the grounding of a common social world. The notion of vulnerability has recently provided a ground for a critique of the autonomous subject in the work of Martha Nussbaum who proposes that one must think vulnerability together with autonomy to provide a renewed conception of the liberal subject. By contrast, if one starts with the conception of conatus in Spinoza’s Ethics, III, prop. 7-9 (i. e. the desire to live or “the striving to persevere in its own being”)

This talk explores sexual fantasy, violence, border control and Arab masculinity in the French-Lebanese film “Lila dit ca” (2006). “Lila dit ca” narrates inter-ethnic teen romance in a North African immigrant neighborhood of Marseilles. The film also highlights an impasse in contemporary feminist thought: the inability to address the intersection of violence and pleasure, or to think of these two things together. I ask how sexual fantasy and violence work together in “Lila dit ca” to “fix” geopolitical borders, as well as particular fantasies of racial, cultural, ethnic and sexual belonging.

The catastrophe of the presidential plane clash in April 2010 was of course a far-reaching event in Polish politics, with consequences still very present. The paper describes and interprets various ways of speaking about the catastrophe. I consider this rhetoric in the context of a clash of ideologies: that of modernization and of national-religious values. The conservative camp insists on inscribing the crash into Polish history, and claims that it reveals a division into two Polands: one of true patriots, and another of collaborators.

Elzbieta Jablonska is one of the leading artists in Poland. She has made a name for herself by producing a series of large-format photos titled “Supermother.” She plays with conventions and stereotypes concerning women’s position in the contemporary, but still deeply traditional, society. The source of her work is everyday routine which Jablonska tries to domesticate and to see its beauty. Her art is helpful to survive monotony and intrusive nature of the everyday duties. Very often in her works the body, and in particular its discomfort in the maladjusted space, was the chief vehicle of meaning.

This event is a conversation and discussion with Professor Jameson about an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Antinomies of Realism, and also about Jameson’s work more generally.

Fredric Jameson is William A. Lane Professor in the Program in Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. He has published a wide range of works analyzing literary and cultural texts, while developing his own Marxist theoretical perspectives and offering important critiques of opposing theoretical schools and positions.

Habermas’ view that contemporary philosophy and social theory can learn from religious traditions of thinking calls for closer consideration. I accept his claim that religious traditions constitute a reservoir of potentially important meanings and that these meanings can be translated without emptying them of their motivating and inspirational power is granted. I argue, however, that due to two core elements of his conceptual framework, and contrary to what he implies, his theory allows for learning from religion only to a very limited degree.

2008 estimates claim that South Africans were dying at a rate of 600-800 people a day from HIV related causes. It takes the work of the imagination to make that number meaningful. It is this work of the imagination that I somewhat riskily term “poetics” in this paper, bearing in mind throughout the famous twentieth century British poet, W.H. Auden’s reminder that “poetry makes nothing happen.” This task of imagination is obviously globally stratified; ‐ those of us living and dying in the heart of the global pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa will feel and experience it differently from those of us elsewhere.