McCarter, Jeremy. "He Gave Liberalism a Good Name." NEWSWEEK September 27, 2008.

Lionel Trilling is a hero—one of my heroes, anyway. And for the Trilling devotee, this has been an annus mirabilis. Over the summer, Northwestern University Press published a paperback edition of The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, a career-spanning selection of his essays on Keats, Orwell, Austen and more. They showcase his genius for literary sculpting, which is what great critics like Trilling do: use hammer and chisel and inspiration to carve meaning out of a block, whether the substance is marble or something less agreeable. This year has also seen the publication of The Journey Abandoned, the surviving first third of a novel he never finished. It doesn't have the force of his single completed novel, The Middle of the Journey, a political drama about Moscow-sympathizing fellow travelers. But in its best moments, it has a superior style to his other novel's, one that dazzles in its own right, and not just when graded on a critic-who's-moonlighting curve. When describing the boyhood of the central character of his bildungsroman, he's wry and anthropological without being clinical, like the narrator in a Truffaut film. Now, from New York Review Books, comes the grand prize. In 1950, Trilling—then a 45-year-old English professor at Columbia University—assembled 16 essays he'd written over the preceding few years, all unified by what he called "an abiding interest in the ideas of what we loosely call liberalism, especially the relation of these ideas to literature." It was a characteristically mild way to describe a uniquely provocative book. For in The Liberal Imagination, Trilling didn't confine the well-honed tools of his profession to the books under review. He showed how our creative life shapes our political life (and vice versa), and our sentiments shape our ideas (and vice versa), along the way forcing his fellow liberals to confront their blind spots and weaknesses. As the new edition demonstrates, he attained insights in this gutsy, far-seeing book that prove as urgent in the 21st century as they did in the middle of the 20th. Trilling had an intensely dialectical mind, given to thorough bouts of self-qualification, which makes it tricky to boil down the argument of his masterpiece. In quick strokes, he believed that as liberalism works toward the freedom and equality that it insists can be attained, it tends to simplify, leading it into the unintended consequences that conservatives love to deplore. ("Liberalism is always being surprised," he wrote, damningly, in a short book on E. M. Forster.) Because the liberal imagination needs constant refreshing, it ought to turn to literature, which Trilling called "the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty." At a time when worthy authors offered endless worthy attacks on social injustice, Trilling gave his book a subversive punch line: literature doesn't need more white hats and black hats, it needs "moral realism," books that don't just attack the misdeeds of the bad people but "lead us to refine our motives and ask what might lie behind our good impulses." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/161197.

Menand, Louis. "Regrets Only." NEW YORKER September 29, 2008.

Lionel Trilling was not completely happy about being Lionel Trilling. “I have one of the great reputations in the academic world,” he wrote in his journal after being promoted to full professor in the Columbia English Department, in 1948. “This thought makes me retch.” Two years later, he published The Liberal Imagination, a book that sold more than seventy thousand copies in hardcover and more than a hundred thousand in paperback, and that made Trilling a figure, a model of the intellectual in Cold War America. He represented, for many people, the life of the mind. Trilling was baffled by the attention. “I hear on all sides of the extent of my reputation—which some even call ‘fame,’ ” he wrote in the journal. “It is the thing I have most wanted from childhood—although of course in much greater degree—and now that I seem to have it I have no understanding whatever of its basis—of what it is that makes people respond to what I say, for I think of it as of a simplicity and of a naivety almost extreme.” He hated being regarded as a paragon of anything. In 1955, he complained to his analyst about “the effect on my emotional and sexual life of my sense of my prestige” and “my feeling of disgust with my public ‘noble’ character.” He became a University Professor at Columbia, but he did not consider himself a scholar: he had no languages except English and he didn’t see the point of the systematic study of literature. He did not consider himself a critic, either, and was surprised when he heard himself referred to as one. His ambition was to be a great novelist; he regarded his criticism as “an afterthought.” He disliked Columbia; he disliked most of his colleagues; he disliked teaching graduate students—in 1952, after a routine disagreement over the merits of a dissertation, he refused to teach in the graduate school again. He was depressive, he had writer’s block, and he drank too much. He did not even like his first name. He wished that he had been called John or Jack. But although he may not have wanted what he had, and he may not have understood entirely why he had it, he appreciated its value and tended it with care. This meant cultivating a discreet distance from any group with which he might be too quickly identified—professors, public intellectuals, liberals, Jews. He was all of those things, of course; he would never have denied it. But he resented being understood under the aspect of anything so insufficiently nuanced as a category. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/09/29/080929crat_atlarge_menand.

"Nietzsche on Mind and Nature," Friedrich Nietzsche Society, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, September 11-13, 2008.

Plenary speakers: Prof. Günter Abel, Faculty of Philosophy, TU Berlin, Germany. Prof. Brian Leiter, Faculty of Law, University of Chicago, USA. Prof. Graham Parkes, Faculty of Philosophy, Cork, Ireland. Dr. Peter Poellner, Faculty of Philosophy, Warwick University, UK. Prof. Bernard Reginster, Faculty of Philosophy, Brown University, USA. Prof. John Richardson, Faculty of Philosophy, NYU, USA. St. Peter’s College: http://www.spc.ox.ac.uk/ Directions and transport to St. Peter’s College http://www.spc.ox.ac.uk/downloads/165/maps.html Conference organizers: Dr. Manuel Dries (manuel.dries /at/ philosophy.ox.ac.uk) Dr. Peter Kail (peter.kail /at/ philosophy.ox.ac.uk) Faculty of Philosophy University of Oxford 10 Merton Street Oxford OX1 4JJ Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/events/nietzsche_mind_conference.

Wilson, A. N. "The Archbishop's Dostoevsky." TLS October 8, 2008.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s views on religion are notoriously hard to pin down with confidence. If you collected up the criticism devoted to Tolstoy, there could be no doubt about what he believed at any stage of his journey. Yet in the history of Dostoevsky criticism we find, for example, Henry Miller reading Dostoevsky as a great social revolutionary, whereas others have seen him as a diehard conservative. Rowan Williams, in his latest book, quotes (and rebuts) William Hamilton, who sought to enlist Dostoevsky as a forerunner of “Death of God” theology; Georges Florovsky, who saw Dostoevsky as an exemplar of Russian Orthodoxy; Malcolm Jones, who has linked him to “post-atheism” in contemporary Russia, and judged him to exemplify the workings of “minimal religion”. Clearly, all these contradictory readings cannot be right. Or can they? Is that precisely the nature of the difficulty? We need a guide who combines the gifts of a literary critic and a trained theologian to work out how far the novels of Dostoevsky can be used as vehicles for such explorations. We also need a guide who is deeply versed in the ethos and spiritual traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church to place Dostoevsky, and the tormented exchanges of his characters, within some intelligible historical framework. Luckily, the Archbishop of Canterbury combines all these qualities, and more. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4905068.ece.

Schiff, Stacy. "The Woman Who Never Stopped Talking: the Secret of Madame de Stael's Success" SLATE MAGAZINE October 6, 2008.

Gray, Francine du Plessix. Madame de Stael: the First Modern Woman. Atlas, 2008. I'll be honest: First Modern Woman does not constitute what I would call a dream job. Someone had to step up, however, and—assuming royal and Ptolemaic women are off limits—one looks to Enlightenment Europe for volunteers. French residency if not nationality was a plus. A fortune was de rigueur. It helped to be an only child; generally one goes further in the absence of pesky male heirs. And what never hurts—arguably even today—is an adoring, intellectually inclined father. Such were the blessings showered on Germaine de Stael, and though I might argue that Mesdames du Chatelet and de Charrière challenge her title —and the subtitle of Francine du Plessix Gray's new biography—few have done as much with those advantages as Madame de Stael. Certainly no one caused as much trouble. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://www.slate.com/id/2201499/pagenum/all.

Early, Gerald L. "The End of Race as We Know It." CHRONICLE REVIEW October 10, 2008.

In our bull sessions, some of us would talk about jihad, or righteous war, against the whites. (It was all talk.) Some of us actually became Muslims (very few — we were Christians to the bone, despite our chatter about "the white man's religion") or joined some Eastern religious sect and adopted certain garb and mannerisms. Many of us wore wild Afros, making them wilder with blowout kits, and thought we were revolutionaries of a sort. After all, some of the black upperclassmen among us had seized buildings in protest, and a few even brandished weapons during the sieges. Looking at The New Yorker cover as a middle-aged, black baby boomer, far removed from any of the Orientalism and racial and political romanticism of my youth, reminded me of a certain kind of silliness, but it also, strangely, moved me deeply. The cover told the story of a rite of African-American passage that occurred at a particular time for the generation of blacks who would become the most successful in the history of the group, and the most integrated. The relatively difficult years that my generation endured integrating white institutions — difficult not in any material sense, but in the sense that we were not very well prepared academically or emotionally to cope with our surroundings (we were given more than we knew what to do with, so much that one felt simultaneously intoxicated by the riches and stressed to the breaking point by how alien it all felt) — made us clutch at any sort of feeble identity protection we could muster. We had to "act black" because, after all, that is why we were at the university in the first place: to provide diversity in the only way we knew how. Basically, entrapped in our excessive and youthful self-consciousness, our special sort of juvenile insecurity, we were trying, ironically, to show that we belonged, to protect ourselves from being considered "dumb niggers," or, even worse, "charity cases," the ragtag tail end of the American bourgeois elite. Some succeeded (by graduating). Many didn't. It is a modern story about integration in America — not the bloody civil-rights struggle of gaining access, but rather how people can sometimes be killed by kindness, paddled by paternalism, undone by philanthropy. I think back on it all as a remarkable form of self-hazing. . . . The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has raised the question of what happens to the black American meta-narrative of heroic or noble victimization if he wins. (Presumably nothing happens to it if he loses; the loss can be blamed on racism, as it will, in fact, be another example of victimization. White folks will always find a way to cut down a successful black man, to not let him get too far, is the common belief. That sort of black cynicism, expressed in different political and aesthetic modalities, underscores both the blues and rap. If Obama loses, he becomes, in black folklore, John Henry, the "natural" man with the courage to go up against the political machine. The moral of the tale, in politics as in life, is that the machine always wins.) . . . Many of us black professionals, members of the black elite, keep the embers of our victimization burning for opportunistic reasons: to lev-erage white patronage, to maintain our own sense of identity and tradition. In some respects, this narrative has something of the power in its endurance that original sin does for Christians. In fact, our narrative of victimization is America's original sin, or what we want to serve as the country's original sin, which may be why we refuse to give it up. We have used it shamelessly — especially those who are least entitled to do so, as we have suffered the least — hustled it to get over on whites, to milk their guilt, to excuse our excesses and failures. Being the victim justifies all ethical lapses, as the victim becomes morally reprehensible in the guise of being morally outraged. Being the victim has turned into a sucker's game, the only possible game that the weak can play against the strong with any chance of winning. Nonetheless, the narrative does a kind of cultural work that serves our purposes in some profound ways, and it may be good for the country as a whole in reminding everyone about the costs of American democracy, its fragile foundation, its historically based hypocrisy. The conservatives are right: Freedom isn't free, and the black victim narrative reminds us all of that. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i07/07b01101.htm.

"Literary Reading and Emotion," Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts, July 13-14, 2008.

(This conference has already taken place but I include information on it for readers who might be interested in the intersection of literary criticism and cognitive science.) The Literary Reading and Emotion symposium is designed to bring scholars together in an informal environment to discuss the role of emotional response in literary reading and explore avenues for further research. Some issues for consideration are indicated below. Modern theories of cognition and emotion and increasing knowledge about the workings of the human mind provide possibilities for more systematic approaches to the role of feeling in literary response than have been the case in literary scholarship in the past. Among literary scholars the feelings of readers have so far received little attention (exceptions include Opdahl, Robinson) and they have largely been overlooked by the new discipline of cognitive poetics (but see Tsur). Yet a number of important features of literary response appear to depend on feeling. Empirical studies have shown that it correlates reliably with stylistic and other foregrounded features in texts (Miall & Kuiken, 1994); it increases the “depth of response” to literary texts (Eva-Wood); it is reflected in the absorption or “transport” that enables readers to imagine themselves in a scene or as a given character (Gerrig, Green), with consequent influence on some readers’ ethical understanding (Hakemulder); and feeling for some readers can be self-modifying, a wider concept than catharsis, bringing renewed understanding of the self and its social context (Miall & Kuiken, 2002). In addition, feeling presents us with some puzzling paradoxes that point to its independence from cognitive functions: we feel real feelings for characters in narrative or poetry that we know to be fictional (Carroll); we often feel as vividly on second or subsequent readings of a narrative when we know the outcome; and we appear to seek out and take pleasure in experiencing negative emotions, as in tragic drama (Nussbaum). This proposal to study feeling is also timely. Given that literary studies is now “after theory,” it provides an opportunity to renew our understanding of how literary reading influences the ordinary reader, and to re-engage with questions of what it means to experience literature rather than interpret it. In a time of declining readership in North America (NEA report, Reading at Risk, June 2004), the study of feeling may also lead to a better understanding of literature in the classroom, and help retrieve the literary experience for readers of the future. The colloquium will include literary scholars working in poetics or empirical studies of literary reading, as well as scholars from other fields interested in questions about feeling and literature: philosophers, psychologists, linguists, and neuropsychologists. Some specific issues: 1. Does feeling have precedence in the early phases of literary response? What is the nature and scope of feeling in the first seconds of response, especially in the first 300 msec prior to conscious awareness? What do event-related potentials (ERPs) show about early language processing, and how far is this relevant to our understanding of the response to foregrounding, the array of unusual textual features (sound effects, metre, figurative expressions, etc.) that readers often find striking? Is there evidence of “pre-categorical processing” of foregrounding, as proposed by Tsur (1992)? Does foregrounding, in Barfield’s (1964) words, create “the strangeness” that has “an interior significance,” that is “felt as arising from a different plane or mode of consciousness” (pp. 170-1)? 2. Does literary reading have a creative, self-modifying power? Does literature have a role in creating novel feelings, and if so what are their implications? There is evidence from historical documents of readers appearing to experience new feelings (Rose, 2001; Long, 2003). Among contemporary empirical studies, Cupchik and his colleagues (1998) reported that readers experienced “fresh” feelings in response to certain passages in Joyce’s short stories; compared with emotion memories, such feelings were more frequent both in response to descriptive passages and when readers were identifying with a character; and they also tended to occur in response to passages later in the text. Frijda (2007) suggests that emotions generate fresh feelings: “Emotion experience provides novel motivations and new knowledge that lead to novel emotions and actions” (p. 221). 3. What role does empathy play in literary reading? Empathy is often cited as a benefit of literary reading. This raises the paradox that we feel real emotions for fictional characters, i.e., it conflicts with the Law of Apparent Reality proposed by Frijda (2007). Can empathy be characterized by Oatley’s (1994) proposal that readers are simulating, “taking on the character’s goals, and experiencing emotions as these plans meet vicissitudes”(66)? Are Theory of Mind approaches relevant here, and if so does simulation (which seems supported by the finding of mirror neurons) or the theory-theory approach provide the better account of empathy? How far is empathy to be distinguished from sympathy, compassion, or emotional contagion (Keen, 2006: pp. 208-9)? Read more on the conference here: https://sites.google.com/a/case.edu/myrifield/Home/symposia/literary-reading--emotion. For more on the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts, visit: https://sites.google.com/a/case.edu/myrifield/Home.

"Many Marxisms," Annual HISTORICAL MATERIALISM Conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, November 7-9, 2008.

Ever since its foundation in 1997, Historical Materialism has sought to contribute to the intellectual recomposition of the global Left by serving as an international venue for critical Marxist research. The journal's initial wager - that Marxism remains a vital, and heterogeneous and many-faceted political and theoretical tradition - has been borne out in a conjuncture where Marxist thinkers have amply demonstrated the critical resources at their disposal (witness recent debates on imperialism and neoliberalism). Within the academy, the facile dismissal of Marxism seems to have run out of steam, and the attitudes of new generations of students and researchers have changed accordingly. Marxist intellectuals are no longer simply forced to survive in hostile conditions or to retreat into isolated academic subcultures, despite an often adverse global political context. In this setting, they face new challenges, which this conference seeks to address. How can we develop the plurality of Marxist debates, fields and schools without making concessions to eclecticism, narcissism or compartmentalisation? How do we square the concrete multiplicity of Marxisms with the strong commonalities in intellectual vocabularies, theoretical sources and political aims? Hasn't the question of the diversity of Marxism - of many Marxisms - accompanied the tradition’s entire development, a testament both to its internationalist horizon, and to the inexhaustible potential of its many critical insights and conceptual formulations? What strategies can allow us to confront, and perhaps overcome, some of the disparities or even misunderstandings born of these processes of differentiation? Having tried to foster a form of critical cosmopolitanism and debate in past conferences, bringing together thinkers working in different fields, and out of different traditions, this year's Historical Materialism conference wants to emphasise problems and opportunities raised by the existence of 'Many Marxisms'. To this end, it aims to take stock of recent developments in Marxist thought, surveying the most vibrant recent debates; to confront critical moments in the historical development of Marxism; to identify crucial concepts and areas of research that can cut across any preconceived academic specialisation or geographical isolation of Marxism; to reflect on the ways in which Marxism has and continues to intervene in mainstream intellectual debates; and, finally, to generate a space in which the outlines of the many twenty-first century Marxisms may be delineated. For more information, visit the conference homepage: http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/hm/conference2008.htm.

Nobel Prize in Literature 2008.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2008 has been won by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the French writer. For more information, visit: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2008/press.html.

CAHIERS POUR L'ANALYSE Workshop Series, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, 2008-2009.

The aim of this series of six workshops is to discuss the central ideas developed in the French philosophy journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966-1969). The first three sessions will be introductory, and will be focussed on an explication of the concept of ‘suture’, developed by Jacques-Alain Miller in the first volume of the journal, and elaborated and criticised across the remaining volumes by Serge Leclaire, André Green, Luce Irigaray, Jean-Claude Milner and Alain Badiou amongst others. There will be two or three short presentations at each session, but the emphasis will be on group discussion. Translations of each of the core texts are available from c.kerslake@mdx.ac.uk. Thursday 23 October 2008: The Concept of Suture in the Cahiers Reading: Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Suture: Elements for a Logic of the Signifier’ (CPA 1.3), trans. J. Rose, Screen, 18, 1978. Discussants: Peter Hallward, Christian Kerslake, Knox Peden Friday 14 November 2008: Lacanian Psychoanalysis in the Cahiers I Reading: André Green, ‘The Logic of Lacan’s objet (a) and Freudian Theory’ (CPA 3.2), trans. K. Kleinert & B. Schlossman, in J.H. Smith & W. Kerrigan, Interpreting Lacan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Discussants: Lorenzo Chiesa, Rosa Nogues Thursday 4 December 2008: Lacanian Psychoanalysis in the Cahiers II Reading : Luce Irigaray, ‘Linguistic and Specular Communication: Genetic Models and Pathological Models’ (CPA 3.3), trans. G. Schwab, in Irigaray, To Speak is Never Neutral ( London: Continuum, 2002). Discussants: Stella Sandford & tba Meetings are from 2-4 pm in the Saloon, Mansion Building, Trent Park campus, Middlesex University, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ.

Morris, Michael. "Review of Nathan Ross' ON MECHANISM IN HEGEL'S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY." NDPR (October 2008).

Ross, Nathan. On Mechanism in Hegel's Social and Political Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2008. Nathan Ross's book examines the role of mechanism -- as a metaphor and a logical category -- in Hegel's political philosophy. He argues that careful attention to Hegel's comments on mechanism should help us (a) to position Hegel's political philosophy within contemporary debates between liberals and communitarians, and (b) to understand Hegel's critique of civil society in relation to his conception of the state. With regard to these objectives, Ross counters the more traditional conception of the Hegelian state as an organic totality, a conception that, in his opinion, both skews Hegel's political philosophy in the direction of contemporary communitarianism and too closely associates it with the views of Romantic thinkers like Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. In taking this position, Ross continues a marked trend in recent Anglophone scholarship on Hegel. This vigorous trend, one represented with a high degree of sophistication in the works of philosophers like Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, seeks to rehabilitate the more individualistic and socially critical elements of Hegel's political philosophy. This form of rehabilitation seems to be the sine qua non for any sympathetic reconstruction of Hegelian political philosophy as a genuine option within the context of contemporary debates. Even the casual reader of the Philosophy of Right will see the motivation behind this rehabilitation and, at the same time, the challenges that such rehabilitation must face. In at least apparent conflict with theories about the sanctity and autonomy of the individual, Hegel claims that the ethical community -- the highest sphere of social reality -- consists in "powers" or forces to which "individuals are related as accidents to substance." Further, in at least apparent conflict with the kind of social criticism we expect from politically engaged intellectuals, Hegel praises "rectitude" as the "simple conformity" of the individual with "the duties of the station to which he belongs." He then goes on to contrast "rectitude" with "morality," attributing the latter attitude, with its critical and detached standpoint vis-à-vis the established norms of society, to the individual's "craving to be something special." While Ross does not directly address difficult passages such as these, his general argument against communitarian interpretations of Hegel clearly presents an attempt to assuage concerns about Hegel's apparent anti-individualism. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14385.

CFP: Annual Meeting, Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric, McGill University, July 22-26, 2009.

The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (CSSR) invites you to submit proposals for papers at its annual conference to be held at McGill University in Montréal. These proposals should be sent by October 31, 2008. The meeting will include a special session entitled 'The Embodiment of Rhetoric / The Rhetoric of Embodiment.' Other open topics are listed below. Please note that this conference will be held in conjunction with the conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric [ISHR], July 22-26 2009. Information on fees for the 2-day CSSR conference and the 6-day joint CSSR/ISHR conference will be posted on the ISHR website. As always, papers concerning more general aspects of rhetoric are welcome: * Rhetorical theory * Rhetorical criticism * History of rhetoric * Rhetoric in popular culture * Media communication * Discourse analysis * Rhetoric of political and social discourse * Pedagogy of communication * Rhetoric and the media * Sociolinguistics and pedagogy * Semiotics * Professional and technical communication Special Session: 'The Embodiment of Rhetoric / The Rhetoric of Embodiment' Session Chair: Pierre Zoberman, Université Paris 13 The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric invites proposals for a special session entitled "The Embodiment of Rhetoric / The Rhetoric of Embodiment" at its annual conference. Papers for this session should engage questions of embodiment, broadly defined, and rhetoric. A contested term in contemporary thought, "embodiment" signifies in various ways the experience of our own flesh, the intimate fit of social space around bodies, physiological presence and the habitus, perceptive experiences of our own physiologies: it might be seen to describe phenomenological processes that appear in language, that occasion description and redescription, that question individual agency and its social exigencies. Philosophers, theorists, and historians have explored questions of embodiment in the past, but frequently neglect the rhetorical elements of embodied selves, the ways in which bodies appear and function in discourse, and the multiple and variegated meanings of 'the body' historically. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to, the following: * bodies and souls * bodies and gender * bodies and identity * the rhetoric of gesture * the rhetoric of sickness and health * medical discourse * bodies politic * having/being a body: rhetorical perspectives * bodies and the history of rhetoric * rhetoric and the history of bodies * the body and argument Deadline: October 31, 2008 How to submit a proposal: Your proposal may be submitted in either English or French. It may be up to 300 words in length and it will be printed in the program if your project is accepted. The presentation should be no more than 20 minutes. Please include the title of your paper. Please indicate clearly methodology, the texts or phenomena under scrutiny (a complete bibliography is not necessary), and the central importance of rhetoric to the inquiry. Work from various disciplines and from across all historical periods is welcome. If you need electronic equipment for your presentation, please send a request along with your proposal. Preferably, please send your proposal by e-mail to Shannon Purves-Smith. In addition, proposals will be accepted by mail to the following address: Shannon Purves-Smith 31 Arthur St. N. Elmira, Ontario N3B 1Z6 CANADA (519) 669 - 1327 Inquiries may be made by telephone to: (519) 669-1327. In order to present a paper, you must be a member of the CSSR. Membership fees should be paid before the presentation of the paper (at the conference is fine). Presenters are strongly encouraged to take part in discussions that follow the papers. Our members thoroughly enjoy the fruitful discussion that often arises. Please make every effort to attend the papers in your session.

(New) Journal: SUBJECTIVITY (formerly INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY).

Subjectivity (previously International Journal of Critical Psychology) is an exciting and innovative transdisciplinary journal in the social sciences. Re-launched by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008, it examines the socio-political, cultural, historical and material processes, dynamics and structures of human experience. Subjectivity has been an important concept for academic research as well as for intervening in social and political life since the 1960s and 1970s. The idea of subjectivity had a catalytic impact in changing the terms of the debate in the social sciences: in anthropology, geography, psychology, sociology, post colonial theory, gender studies, cultural and media studies, social theory as well as the humanities. Subjectivity attempts to capture ongoing debates and activities and to foster a discourse on subjectivity which goes beyond traditional dichotomies between the various disciplines. The journal aims at a re-prioritization of subjectivity as a primary category of social, cultural, psychological, historical and political analysis. It wishes to encourage a variety of transdisciplinary engagements with this topic in theory as well as empirical research, and, accordingly, to advance the potential of engagement with subjectivity/subjectivities as a locus of social change and a means of political intervention. Free access to 22.1 (2008): Editorial: "Creating Subjectivities" by Lisa Blackman, John Cromby, Derek Hook, Dimitris Papadopoulos and Valerie Walkerdine Abstract Full Text PDFTop of page Original Articles: "I Eat an Apple: on Theorizing Subjectivities" by Annemarie Mol Abstract Full Text PDF "Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism" by Isabelle Stengers Abstract Full Text PDF "What Divides the Subject? Psychoanalytic Reflections on Subjectivity, Subjection and Resistance" by Lynne Layton Abstract Full Text PDF "Subjectivity or Psycho-Discursive Practices? Investigating Complex Intersectional Identities" by Margaret Wetherell Abstract Full Text PDF "I Just Don't Know What Got into Me: Where is the Subject?" by Nigel Thrift Abstract Full Text PDF "A. N. Whitehead and Subjectivity" by Paul Stenner Abstract Full Text PDF "Intersubjectivity and Intercorporeality" by Thomas J. Csordas Abstract Full Text PDF Visit the journal homepage here: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/index.html.

CFP: "Greenscapes: Sense and Meaning: Fields of Dreams (Landscapes of Myth and Imagination)," Brock University, October 1-3, 2009.

Our landscapes have long been the unconscious repository of cultural hopes, fears and desires. From the Garden of Eden to aboriginal Dreamtime, societies have perceived their surrounding natural environment to express cultural values reflected in their myths, legends, sacred texts and belief systems. The occupation, transition, or representation of landscape constitutes an imaginative exercise for both subject and object. Yet imagination is not a consciously controllable process, and dreams can be unsettling portents as well as expressions of wish-fulfillment. We welcome papers that explore landscapes of myth and imagination in real and virtual sites, literary texts, images, and installations and invite proposals on the following topics: • Landscapes of allusion (texts, myths, folktales, legends) • Sacred and Secular Utopias • Profane imagination: ruin, decay and social transgression • Gardens of the ‘first time’: origin myths and social legends • Dream landscapes: fear, desire, and exploring the unconscious. Please send abstracts (up to 250 words) and a brief biography to greenscapes@brocku.ca by January 5, 2009. . . .

CFP: "In Statu Nascendi: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, Psychotherapy," Vilnius, October 28–November, 2009.

6th Central & Eastern European Conference on Phenomenology, The conference is aimed at clarifying the heuristic potential as well as the limits of the phenomenological method in the fields of pedagogy and psychotherapy. They are the fields, where corresponding theoretical reflection is immediately rooted in a certain social-cultural practice which, in its turn, deals with becoming and ‘renaissance’ of the Self. Moreover pedagogy and psychotherapy are intersubjective experiences of a special kind because both of them presuppose a constitutive asymmetry which conditions the very possibility of helping the Other in her/his self-renewal. What does the contribution of phenomenology to pedagogical and psychotherapeutic activity consist in? To what extent does (or should) the pedagogical/psychotherapeutic work involve the phenomenological one? These questions must be answered in the dialogue of the representatives of philosophy as well as psychology and pedagogy. Further information may be found here: http://phenomenology.ro/newsletter/pages/CFP_In_statu_nascendi.pdf.

Campbell, James. "Derek Walcott: a Life in Writing." GUARDIAN October 4, 2008.

As a poet, Walcott stands in opposition to many of his contemporaries. Whereas the prevailing tone of modern poetry is idiomatic and conversational, he repeatedly returns to traditional forms, risking exotic flights in language (leaving him open to the charge of being airily rhetorical). Few of the younger Caribbean poets have aligned themselves with the Walcott manner; many prefer forms tailored to live performance - rap, dub, narrative. In the 1970s, Walcott came under attack from the Black Power movement on Trinidad, and later, on St Lucia, a group of performance poets staged a protest against his traditional loyalties - which are always in danger of being misread as "English" or "colonial" allegiance. When his name was mentioned in connection with the vacant post of Poet Laureate a decade ago, he did nothing to discount himself. On a visit to St Lucia in 2004, the New Yorker journalist Hilton Als observed that while the central square in Castries, the main town of St Lucia, was renamed Walcott Square after the Nobel award, local bookshops still failed to stock his books. (To date, Walcott has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, including The Castaway, The Star-Apple Kingdom, Another Life and Tiepolo's Hound, illustrated with his own paintings.) In the US, where he taught for many years before retiring recently from Boston University, Walcott was frequently accused of being not black enough. Bruce King, author of the biography Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, observes that while Walcott was "much in demand on the Black Studies circuit", he regarded cultural black separatism as "continuing segregation". For his own part, Walcott dismisses the misconception of a white/black dichotomy in the Caribbean, preferring to stress the ethnic variety. "My generation produced some terrific writers, from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race." Harry Ross, the managing director of Manning Camerata, points out that "Derek was very keen that there not be an all-black cast for The Burial at Thebes. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/04/poetry.derekwalcott.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. "Why It Matters." LRB September 25, 2008.

Skinner, Quentin. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. Is it possible, Quentin Skinner asks, that an entire tradition of political thought, including the most influential conception of freedom in anglophone political theory in the past half-century, ‘has been insensitive to the range of conditions that can limit our freedom of action’? A reasonable question, one might think, not only about Isaiah Berlin’s influential defence of ‘negative’ against ‘positive’ liberty but about the whole tradition of liberalism. Yet Skinner’s own understanding of liberty is not immune to the same awkward question. The contest between republicanism and liberalism has had continuing currency in Anglo-American political theory; and no one has contributed more than Skinner, a hegemonic figure in the study of political thought, to promoting the republican tradition. He has challenged Berlin’s conception of ‘negative’ liberty not by endorsing the ‘positive’ but by counterposing the liberal version of negative liberty to what he has preferred to call the ‘neo-Roman’ idea. Hobbes has long been his principal villain. He is, for Skinner, the philosopher who systematically replaced the ‘neo-Roman’ – or republican – conception of free citizenship with the restricted notion of liberty as nothing more than the absence of external impediments to action. Hobbes effected this theoretical transformation, at a particularly turbulent historical moment, with deliberate polemical intent. In his new book, Skinner traces in scrupulous detail the refinements and changes in Hobbes’s ideas about freedom as the English Civil War proceeded. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n18/wood06_.html.

Olivier, Bert. "Foucault on Intellectuals." THOUGHT LEADER September 23, 2008.

In "Truth and Power" (1980), Michel Foucault elaborates on different kinds of intellectuals – the ‘universal’ and ‘specific’ intellectual, respectively – in the context of the question regarding the political status of science and its potential ideological functions, especially within universities. The issues raised by this are summed up by Foucault in ‘two words: power and knowledge’. The ‘political significance’ of science has to be seen against the backdrop of what he says about propositions (scientific or otherwise) being ‘governed’ by a ‘discursive régime’ – broadly speaking, the implicit rules according to which certain utterances may be accepted as being legitimate and meaningful. For example, within patriarchal discourse certain utterances, such as those predicated on the autonomy of women, do not make any sense. It is essential that Foucault’s understanding of ‘discourse’ be grasped, otherwise his distinction between the ‘universal intellectual’ and the ‘specific intellectual’ cannot be understood, in so far as each is situated within a different ‘régime of discourse’. Moreover, he believes that the ‘régime’ relevant to the universal intellectual has made way for a different discursive ‘régime’, within the ambit of which such intellectuals no longer have a place. So what is discourse, for Foucault? Get the answer here: http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/bertolivier/2008/09/23/foucault-on-intellectuals/.

Pappas, Nickolas. "Review of Marcel Detienne's THE GREEKS AND US." BMCR (September 2008).

Detienne, Marcel. The Greeks and Us: a Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Marcel Detienne's new book does not systematize fields of information in the manner of his most renowned earlier works.1 While visibly engaged in the same enterprise as, say, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, The Greeks and Us is a more programmatic and polemical book. It proposes a double-disciplinary approach to the ancient Greeks in which history conjoins with anthropology, so that while continuing to amass and assess historical knowledge of the Greeks in particular, one also looks at them as at one culture among many, always available for comparative study with other human communities at varying distances (temporal, spatial, conceptual distances) from the modern West. Detienne characterizes the enterprise he proposes as comparative (4) and experimental (10). Comparison first of all means denying oneself the indulgence of "uniqueness"- thinking, whether that be the thought of the Greeks' own appearance in history or of a modern nation's special status as heir to the Greek legacy. Comparing means denying the singularity of the thing compared. "[C]omparativism is more vibrant and more stimulating if ethnologists are able and willing to lend an ear to dissonances that at first seem 'incomparable'" (12). The comparative method so described might recall Aristotle's distinction between history and poetry, history telling what things did happen to which individuals and poetry what general kinds of things might happen. But although Detienne's history does play a recognizably Aristotelian role, the anthropology he calls for does not search for poetry's generalizations. The empiricism at work in his book is rather the kind that seeks out differences among observed phenomena. Detienne pursues the stubborn datum that a hastier theorist would force into generalizations, that he instead will inspect for the ways it does not fit such generalizations. He speaks of anthropology's "taste for dissonance," a taste that leads one to examine "the components of neighboring configurations, each of which, with its own particular differential features, may help an attentive comparativist to spot the deviation from the norm that distinguishes . . . the particular formula of one micro-configuration of politics" (125). Each political possibility is marked by such a deviation. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/09/20080945.html.

Shea, Christopher. "Against Intuition." CHRONICLE REVIEW October 3, 2008.

"If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can," the esteemed Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson told the Aristotelian Society, of London, a few years ago. That may sound like an innocuous truism: No one pictures Bertrand Russell doing his philosophical cogitation anywhere but in a club chair, or perhaps in bed, postcoitally (given his adventurousness in that arena). But, in fact, Williamson's remarks are fighting words these days, thanks to the rise of a cohort of philosophers who believe that the armchair arguments of philosophers need to be probed and tested through surveys of ordinary people and laboratory experiments using human subjects. If philosophers want to demonstrate that their arguments comport with how the mind really works, say the proponents of experimental philosophy, they need to get off their duffs. Does that sound like an incendiary charge? Indeed, an armchair in flames has become the informal symbol of the experimental-philosophy movement, also known as "x-phi." Online you can buy a burning-armchair T-shirt or watch a burning-armchair YouTube video, accompanied by the x-phi alt-rock anthem. The aggressive symbol is only partly tongue-in-cheek: some experimental philosophers believe they are simply augmenting and supplementing traditional philosophical work, but others view themselves as overturning a significant number of philosophical projects. They think they are calling into question methodologies that philosophers have made use of "for 2,400 years," as the Rutgers philosopher Stephen Stich, a pioneer of x-phi, puts it. Experimental philosophy has percolated on the edge of the discipline for several years, yet remains dogged by this question: Will it mature into a central, respected strand of philosophy or remain a semi-fringe endeavor, viewed from the mainstream as the kind of work that should be done (if at all) in psychology departments — with the results perhaps pondered later by "real" philosophers? . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=ymjzflppxc1tw7sv18k5fsvdw0yk8136.

McLemee, Scott. "The Playboy Philosopher." INSIDE HIGHER ED October 1, 2008.

In Paris, it’s just the done thing to bash BHL. . . . Recently I featured an awesome graphic that went along with a BHL piece on Sarah Palin in New York magazine — an image of Palin getting bopped on the head with a baguette — and I included a link to the NY mag article, because hey, I re-used their graphic, I owed them a link. The comments that followed amounted to taking the baguette and turning it on BHL!” (Well, at least it wasn’t a cream pie.) Usually the expressions of exasperation are “all in good fun,” says Elkin. But one item at her blog — linking to a BHL piece on Simone de Beauvoir — provoked an exceptionally pompous display of aggravation from a French journalist. “You and your fellow Americans,” he wrote, “should realize that BHL is not a philosopher but a clown and a buffoon. You want real French philosophy, read Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, Baudrillard, if you are a right winger, read Aron, but please forget about this pompous arrogant shmuck BHL and his unending and shameless self-promotion. As a Frenchman, I am ashamed of BHL. . . . Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/01/mclemee.

Bourdeau, Michel. "Auguste Comte." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY October 1, 2008.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is the founder of positivism, a philosophical and political movement which enjoyed a very wide diffusion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It sank into an almost complete oblivion during the twentieth, when it was eclipsed by neopositivism. However, Comte's decision to develop successively a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of physics, a philosophy of chemistry and a philosophy of biology, makes him the first philosopher of science in the modern sense, and his constant attention to the social dimension of science resonates in many respects with current points of view. His political philosophy, on the other hand, is even less known, because it differs substantially from the classical political philosophy we have inherited. Comte's most important works are (1) the Course on Positive Philosophy (1830-1842, six volumes, translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte); (2) the System of Positive Polity, or Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity, (1851-1854, four volumes); and (3) the Early Writings (1820-1829), where one can see the influence of Saint-Simon, for whom Comte served as secretary from 1817 to 1824. The Early Writings are still the best introduction to Comte's thought. In the Course, Comte said, science was transformed into philosophy; in the System, philosophy was transformed into religion. The second transformation met with strong opposition; as a result, it has become customary to distinguish, with Mill, between a “good Comte” (the author of the Course) and a “bad Comte” (the author of the System). Today's common conception of positivism corresponds mainly to what can be found in the Course. . . .

Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/comte/.

Gopnik, Adam. "Right Again." THE NEW YORKER October 6, 2008.

Reeves, Richard. John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand. Atlantic Books, 2007. Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil who is the subject of a fine new biography by the British journalist Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Overlook; $40). The book’s subtitle, meant to be excitingly commercial, is ill chosen; a firebrand should flame and then die out, while Mill burned for half a century with a steady heat so well regulated that it continues to warm his causes today—“Victorian Low-Simmering Hot Plate” might be closer to it. Mill believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the common intelligence of all the races of mankind. He led the fight for due process for detainees accused of terrorism; argued for teaching Arabic, in order not to alienate potential native radicals; and opposed adulterating Anglo-American liberalism with too much systematic French theory—all this along with an intelligent acceptance of the free market as an engine of prosperity and a desire to see its excesses and inequalities curbed. He was right about nearly everything, even when contemplating what was wrong: open-minded and magnanimous to a fault, he saw through Thomas Carlyle’s reactionary politics to his genius, and his essay on Coleridge, a leading conservative of the previous generation, is a model appreciation of a writer whose views are all wrong but whose writing is still wonderful. Mill was an enemy of religious bigotry and superstition, and a friend of toleration and free thought, without overdoing either. (No one has ever been more eloquent about the ethical virtues of Jesus of Nazareth.) . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/10/06/081006crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all.

Bruce, Michael. Review of Michael Ure's NIETZSCHE'S THERAPY." MOR September 30, 2008.

Ure, Michael. Nietzsche's Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Michael Ure's new text contributes to the competitive field of Nietzsche scholarship. The aim of the book is well defined and not overly ambitious. Ure investigates the role of self-cultivation in Nietzsche's middle period that spans from Human, All Too Human to the first three quarters of The Gay Science. In this carved out space, Ure shows how Nietzsche's thought shifts from his earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy, to his "free spirit trilogy." Critiquing his own pessimism and metaphysical inheritance from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche's middle texts are concerned with self-cultivation. Ure is able to bring this thematic into dialogue with many other figures, namely, Nehamas, Freud, Foucault, Rousseau, Seneca and the stoic tradition, and more. At less than three hundred pages it is impressive how many connections are linked from within the philosophical tradition and also the psychoanalytic field. . . . Read the rest here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4503.

"Nietzsche's THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA," Department of Philosophy, University of Wales, Lampeter, November 14-16, 2008.

This weekend conference has been organised to celebrate the release of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise (Continuum International Publishing), a volume of essays by an international team of scholars who will be on hand to share their explorations of Nietzsche’s seminal work. Keynote Speaker: Graham Parkes, translator of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Oxford University Press) Speakers: Arno Boehler Thomas Brobjer Vanessa Lemm Uschi Nussbaumer-Benz Graham Parkes Yunus Tuncel Gudrun Von Tevenar Peter Yates Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.lamp.ac.uk/philosophy/events/nietzsche.html.

Pierpoint, Claudia Roth. "The Florentine." THE NEW YORKER September 15, 2008.

One method of torture used in Florentine jails during the glorious days of the Renaissance was the strappado: a prisoner was hoisted into the air by a rope attached to his wrists, which had been tied behind his back, and then suddenly dropped toward the floor as many times as it took to get him to confess. Since the procedure usually dislocated the shoulders, tore the muscles, and rendered one or both arms useless, it is remarkable that Niccolò Machiavelli, after reportedly undergoing six such “drops,” asked for pen and paper and began to write. Machiavelli had nothing to confess. Although his name had been found on an incriminating list, he had played no part in a failed conspiracy to murder the city’s newly restored Medici rulers. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/09/15/080915crat_atlarge_pierpont.

Greif, Mark. "The Corrupter of Youth." THE AMERICAN PROSPECT September 19, 2008.

Gross, Neil. Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher, 1931-1982. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. By the last years of the 20th century, Richard Rorty was probably the best-known university-based philosopher in the United States. In recent years he has been surpassed in notoriety by the utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer, known for his advocacy of animal rights and the acceptability of euthanizing severely disabled newborns. Rorty, in his time, was accused of murdering truth. He argued the position that there was no standpoint outside of human descriptions of the world from which to decide that any one view was false and another true. There were only descriptions in more or less convincing language, with more or less convincing uses, by which people might persuade one another how to live in the world. Read the rest here: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_corrupter_of_youth_08.

Wynn, Mark. "Phenomenology of Religion." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY October 1, 2008.

This entry examines the relevance of phenomenological considerations for the concept of God (or the sacred otherwise characterised) and the question of what sort of rational sense is implied in the adoption of a religious point of view. The discussion distinguishes various perspectives on the subjective character of religious experience, and examines the relation between religious experience and experience of the material world. It also considers the interaction between experience, conceptual framework (including religious doctrine) and practice, and the contribution, if any, of emotional feelings to the epistemic significance of religious experience. In all of these ways, an appreciation of the 'phenomenology of religion' proves central to an understanding of what is involved practically, cognitively and affectively in a religious way of life. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology-religion/.

"German Idealism and the Foundation of Philosophy," Technische Universität, Berlin, Germany, October 10-12, 2008.

The Conference brings together a group of internationally renowned philosophers. They will discuss the ways in which authors belonging to the so-called German Idealism (from Kant to Hegel) conceived philosophy, its nature, limits and tasks. The general aim of the conference is to focus on those aspects of transcendentalism and German idealism that may be fruitful for philosophical practice nowadays. The basic insight is that contemporary culture and science are facing now fundamental questions, concerning the nature and limits of life, the conditions of truth and justice in global or multicultural regimes. The philosophy of German Idealism seems to be particularly apt to deal with these topics. Keynote Speakers: Franca D'Agostini Karin De Boer Klaus Düsing Diogo Ferrer Marco Ivaldo Angelica Nuzzo Stefano Poggi Birgit Sandkaulen Visit the conference homepage here: http://beta.a-priori.eu/node/23 (in German).

CFP: "Global Language, Local Cultures," Annual Meeting, American Comparative Literature Association, Harvard University, March 26-29, 2009.

From the early spreading of languages such as Greek, Chinese, Latin, and Arabic across broad regions to the present age of globalization, local literary cultures have long had to interact with hegemonic languages and literatures of foreign origin. As Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett argued in his book Comparative Literature as early as 1886, world literature first arose in antiquity long before the rise of the individual national literatures. The theme of “Global languages, local cultures” can offer avenues into many lines of inquiry: explorations of “minor literatures”; regionalism and transregional relations; empires and postcolonial situations; interactions of literature with religious and philosophical traditions; classical literatures and modern offshoots or responses; “standard” languages, creoles, and vernaculars; movements of genres into new cultural spaces; translation theory and practice; relations of literature, music, film, and other arts. The ACLA’s annual conferences have a unique structure in which most papers are grouped into 9-12 person seminars that meet two hours per day, for the three days of the conference, in order to foster discussion. Some 8-person seminars meet the first two days of the conference. Previous conference programs that show this structure are available at the ACLA website. The conference will also include plenary sessions, workshops, a business meeting, a banquet, and other events on and off the Harvard campus. We invite proposals for seminars as well as individual paper proposals. Seminar Proposal Deadline: September 15, 2008 Paper Proposal Deadline: November 1, 2008 Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.acla.org/acla2009/.

McLemee, Scott. "Darkness Becomes Him." THE NATION September 23, 2008.

Levy, Bernard-Henri. Left in Dark Times: a Stand against the New Barbarism. New York: Random House, 2008. The interest of Lévy's latest book comes from watching him apply his version of phenomenology to something grander than our provincial struggle between being and nothingness. Published in France following the election of Nicolas Sarkozy last year, the book opens with BHL receiving a phone call from the candidate. We eavesdrop on Sarko angling for an endorsement and are given a quick tour of the grounds for abundant mutual admiration between philosopher and politician. But, hélas, Lévy must withhold his support, for, as he says, "the Left is my family"--a remark that surprises, not to say unhinges, Sarko. The naïve reader, too, and perhaps even an American one, may find this claim of leftist affiliation coming out of nowhere. Thirty years ago, Lévy was the coordinator and chief publicist for the New Philosophy--a school of thought, largely staffed by ex-Maoists, that argued that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had not been such a boon to humanity (in all, a reasonable thesis) and so any radical critique of capitalism would lead to the Gulag Archipelago (a judgment that does not seem beyond all argument). . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/mclemee.

Morrison, Anna. "Teaching THINGS FALL APART." MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE April 23, 2008.

The complaints began the moment I started passing out copies of the novel Things Fall Apart to the 17 and 18-year-olds of my English IV classroom. "What this book is?" moaned LaJohn, a big football player who always nabs a seat in the back of the room. J.T. was even more pointed when he turned to Tierra, shook his book in the air and said, "Man, she ain't gonna make us read this whole book!" As a public-school teacher in the Mississippi Delta, I have become accustomed to this sort of aversion towards literature. My students are not comfortable readers. They have been raised almost entirely on television and the Internet; very few have access to books at home. The majority of the teachers in our school system use the textbook exclusively, so many students will finish high school having read only one or two books in total. With this in mind, I try to teach plot-driven stories that operate on a fairly basic reading level, without denying depth of content. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe weaves his tale of Nigeria in the 1800s with beautifully simple language. He enriches his descriptions with poetic references to the Ibo culture, filling the pages with their proverbs and natural metaphors. My slower readers would be able to keep up, while the more advanced might find some of the nuance in the poetry. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/node/973.

Zizek, Slavoj. "What is the Question? Interview with Christopher Lydon." OPEN SOURCE September 23, 2008.

In New York on the last day of an American tour, absorbing the demise of Yankee Stadium and maybe of Wall Street as we thought we knew it, Zizek’s talk is a blast-furnace but not a blur. The theme through all Zizek’s gags is that the financial meltdown marks a seriously dangerous moment — dangerous not least because, as in the interpretation of 9.11, the right wing is ready to impose a narrative. And the left wing is caught without a narrative or a theory. “Today is the time for theory,” he says. “Time to withdraw and think.”. Read / listen to the rest here: http://www.radioopensource.org/slavoj-zizek-what-is-the-question/.

Lichfield, John. "Poisoned Penpals: Clash of the Literary Titans." INDEPENDENT September 23, 2008.

Levy, Bernard-Henri, and Michel Houellebecq. Ennemis Publics. Paris: Flammarion, 2008. Two of the most self-promoting, outspoken, and hated, men in France will go head-to-head next month in a literary "clash of the Titans." The re-make of Godzilla vs King Kong will pit Michel Houellebecq, dishevelled curmudgeon and best-selling novelist, against Bernard-Henri Levy, dandy philosopher and telegenic human rights activist. Their joint book, Ennemis Publics, has been the subject of a masterful "advertease" campaign for the past three months. The publishers, Flammarion, let slip in June that they were printing 150,000 copies of a hush-hush, two-handed book. Even before the identity of the writers was known, bookshops placed orders for 100,000 copies, guaranteeing the tome best-selling status in France. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/poisoned-pen-pals-clash-of-the-literary-titans-938933.html.

Hitchens, Christopher. "Bons Mots and Betes Noires." NEW YORK TIMES September 19, 2008.

Levy, Bernard-Henri. Left in Dark Times: a Stand against the New Barbarism. New York: Random House, 2008. The election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency of the French Republic, on a ticket of the Gaullist and centrist right, was marked by two kinds of defection from the left. In advance of the vote, a number of former Marxist Parisian intellectuals like André Glucksmann announced their intention of voting for Sarkozy and against the rather vapid and temperamental quasi-spousal Socialist party team of Ségolène Royal and her significant other, François Hollande. And then, once the victory of Sarkozy had been assured — probably rather more by the votes of former rightists than former leftists — the new president offered some plum jobs to prominent Socialists like Bernard Kouchner, the ex-Communist and cofounder of the campaigning internationalist outfit Doctors Without Borders, who is now foreign minister, before himself proceeding to give new meaning to the term “husband and wife team” by marrying the former supermodel Carla Bruni in the Élysée Palace itself. You might say that this situation was superbly designed for an address from Bernard-Henri Lévy — universally known in France as BHL — who cuts a commanding figure both in the circles of the Left Bank intelligentsia and in the world of Parisian high fashion and salon society (and whose lovely wife, Arielle Dombasle, could look Carla Bruni in the eye any day). But the fact is that these developments make him feel extremely uncomfortable. He happens to have known Sarkozy since 1983, when Sarkozy was elected mayor of Neuilly; yet when he received a telephone call from Sarkozy last year, demanding to know when the BHL endorsement would be coming, he found himself unable to play ball. In fact, he found himself abandoning intellectual terrain for a moment and saying that he would cast his vote for the left candidate, as ever, because it was la gauche that was his “family.” . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/books/review/Hitchens-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin.

Turley, Richard Maggraf. "Second Only to Byron." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT September 3, 2008.

In July 1820, Keats’s career was in the doldrums. Having pinned all his hopes for “living by the pen” on the delayed Lamia, he was dismayed when the collection, despite containing tours de force such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “The Eve of St Agnes”, appeared to mixed or hostile reviews. For most Romantic readers, Keats remained the jejune, justifiably sidelined author of the biggest flop of 1818, Endymion. In August, however, a beacon arrived in the form of an unattributed review in Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, with a second instalment following in October. Written by an “outside contributor” with the “avowed purpose of gaining Keats a larger readership”, as Donald H. Reiman points out in his standard edition of Romantic reviews, the mysterious critique pronounced Keats a “poet of high and undoubted powers”. “If this be not poetry”, the reviewer declared, defiantly quoting excerpts from the vilified Endymion, while promising in the same breath a full-length review of Lamia, “we do not know what is”. The public relations exercise was effective, and marked the point at which the tide of negative reviews began to turn in Keats’s favour. . . .

Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4666844.ece.

Kaufer, Stephan. "Review of Michael Roubach's BEING AND NUMBER IN HEIDEGGER'S THOUGHT." NDPR (September 2008).

Roubach, Michael. Being and Number in Heidegger's Thought. London: Continuum, 2008. "Later investigations will reveal what I owe to my esteemed teachers of mathematics and physics; and I also will not let the influence of Professor Finke go to waste, who awakened the love and understanding for history in me, an unhistorical mathematician." So wrote Martin Heidegger in the preface to his 1914 doctoral dissertation, The Theory of Judgment in Psychologism. For all their breadth and depth the later investigations never do show much of an influence by the professors who taught Heidegger calculus and differential equations while he was enrolled in Freiburg University's Faculty for Mathematics and Natural Science. Rather it was the few courses Heidegger took during those years on neo-Kantian logic and epistemology that shaped his initial philosophical attempts. Nevertheless, Heidegger discusses topics of mathematics and the mathematical character of modern science in various guises in writings and lectures throughout his career. And since so much of his thought is devoted to ontology, it is an interesting question to what extent Heidegger's ontology is a mathematical ontology. Michael Roubach has asked this question and the merit of his study is that it obliges the reader to go back to and re-read some of Heidegger's passages on mathematics from his dissertations, Being and Time, and lectures from the 1930s (Roubach devotes one chapter to each of these three). . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14245.

Shields, Christopher. "Aristotle." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY September 25, 2008.

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) numbers among the greatest philosophers of all time. Judged solely in terms of his philosophical influence, only Plato is his peer: Aristotle's works shaped centuries of philosophy from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance, and even today continue to be studied with keen, non-antiquarian interest. A prodigious researcher and writer, Aristotle left a great body of work, perhaps numbering as many as two-hundred treatises, from which approximately thirty-one survive. His extant writings span a wide range of disciplines, from logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, through ethics, political theory, aesthetics and rhetoric, and into such primarily non-philosophical fields as empirical biology, where he excelled at detailed plant and animal observation and taxonomy. In all these areas, Aristotle's theories have provided illumination, met with resistance, sparked debate, and generally stimulated the sustained interest of an abiding readership. Because of its wide range and its remoteness in time, Aristotle's philosophy defies easy encapsulation. The long history of interpretation and appropriation of Aristotelian texts and themes—spanning over two millennia and comprising philosophers working within a variety religious and secular traditions—has rendered even basic points of interpretation controversial. The set of entries on Aristotle in this site addresses this situation by proceeding in three tiers. First, the present, general entry offers a brief account of Aristotle's life and characterizes his central philosophical commitments, highlighting his most distinctive methods and most influential achievements. Second are General Topics which offer detailed introductions to the main areas of Aristotle's philosophical activity. Finally, there follow Special Topics which investigate in greater detail more narrowly focused issues, especially those of central concern in recent of Aristotelian scholarship. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle/.

Nauert, Charles. "Desiderius Erasmus." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY September 22, 2008.

Erasmus never wrote a work, or a major portion of a work, on skepticism or on any issue in epistemology, but since he was the most distinguished humanist of his time, an ardent promoter of what his century defined as the studia humanitatis (humane studies), he was an expert on grammar (the study of language, in his case embracing Greek and classical and patristic Latin) and rhetoric (the study of eloquence). As a grammarian, he translated many ancient texts from Greek into Latin, published critical editions and Latin translations of classical authors, ancient patristic writers, and (most famous of all) the Greek text of the New Testament, accompanied by his own Latin translation and extensive annotations But Erasmus was also a rhetorician, the other major linguistic art included among the five academic subjects that constituted the studia humanitatis (Nauert 2006:12–16). Only one of the five humanistic subjects, moral philosophy, was avowedly philosophical; but in the practice of Erasmus and many other humanists, rhetoric functioned as a sort of anti-philosophy, a rival to the dialectical philosophy that had ruled medieval scholastic thought. The term rhetoric did not mean the windy, verbose decoration of oratory and writing that the term often implies today—“mere rhetoric.” Humanists regarded it as a practical way to investigate questions on which dialectical argumentation based on logic had proved unable to produce certitude. As noted in the preceding section of this entry, rhetoric was the procedure to be used in pursuit of conclusions that could not be proved beyond doubt but were the most probable choice among the alternatives explored. Many humanists, Erasmus among them, thought that many (or perhaps all) conclusions about abstract issues, including theological questions, were beyond the reach of human reason. Nevertheless, they believed, careful consideration of the various alternative solutions of a question could determine which one was the most probable opinion. Thus for Erasmus, rhetoric was the art of probable argumentation, ending not in the certitude claimed by logicians but in a conclusion that one of the outcomes was more probable than the others and could tentatively be regarded as true. (Nauert 2006:215–216). . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/erasmus/.

CFP: "African Intellectuals and Decolonization," Perspectives on African Decolonization, Department of History, Ohio University, October 2, 2008.

Update:

Speakers include:

• Oyeronke Oyewumi (Department of Sociology, SUNY, Stony Brook): "Decolonizing the Intellectual and the Quotidaian: African Intellectuals in the PostColonial Moment"
• Elizabeth Schmidt (Department of History, Loyola College in Baltimore): "Pan-Africanism, People's Power, and Decolonization in Ghana and Guinea: the Uneven Legacy of Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré"
• Tsenay Serequeberhan (Department of Philosophy, Morgan State University): "Decolonization and the Practice of Philosophy"

Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.african.ohio.edu/Conferences/index.html.

Original Post (April 23, 2008): In 1958, Guinea, under Ahmed Sekou Toure, chose political independence over continued association with France. The All-African Peoples Convention hosted by Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in the same year highlighted the links between and among Africans and peoples of African descent in the Diaspora. 2008 is also the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the seminal journal Presence Africaine by Alioune Diop. Focusing on African intellectuals and decolonization will allow for an interrogation of all three concepts as well as an opportunity to examine the roles intellectuals have played and continue to play in contemporary African efforts at liberation from economic neo-colonialism. Additionally, this conference will provide an opportunity to highlight the cutting edge work of contemporary African philosophers, the inheritors of the intellectual traditions established by the generations who fought for the liberation of Africa. The works of these scholars who are developing systems of thought rooted in African vernacular concepts will have significant implications for the Arts and Humanities and interpretations thereof as well as the (Westernized) Academy more broadly. Featured speakers include: Oyeronke Oyewumi, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Stony Brook; Elizabeth Schmidt Department of History, Loyola College in Baltimore; Tsenay Serequeberhan, Department of Philosophy, Morgan State University. Conference planners invite the submission of abstracts for papers and panels from scholars and graduate students in any academic discipline. Presentations that are interdisciplinary and/or transnational in scope will be particularly welcome. Abstracts for individual papers should be 250-300 words and accompanied by a brief CV (no more than two pages). Panel proposals should include abstracts and CVs for each presenter as well as a 250-500 word overview of the panel. Topics for discussion include but by no means are limited to:

• Who is African?
• Who is an intellectual?
• What do we mean by decolonization?
• Colonialism and decolonization in Africa
• Neocolonialism and (neo)decolonization in Africa
• Women and decolonization in Africa
• Decolonizing the (Westernized) Academy
• African philosophies and decolonization
• African indigenous knowledge systems and decolonization
• The Arts and African decolonization
• African literatures and decolonization
• The Sciences and decolonization in Africa
• Conservation of natural resources in Africa and decolonization.

As the conference will be held in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Guinea?s independence on October 2, 2008, we will particularly welcome panels and papers concerning Ahmed Sekou Toure, Guinea, and decolonization. Selected papers will be published in an edited collection of essays to commemorate these significant moments in African history and to reflect upon the legacies of fifty years of 'independence' in Africa.

Please submit paper and panel proposals to: Acacia Nikoi, nikoi@ohio.edu. The deadline for submission of proposals is May 30, 2008. Limited travel funding is available for graduate students. Please apply for a travel stipend on the conference registration page by May 30.

Pub: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ACROSS DISCIPLINES [CADAAD] 2.2 (2008).

Contents:

• Andreas Musolff What can Critical Metaphor Analysis Add to the Understanding of Racist Ideology? Recent Studies of Hitler’s Anti-Semitic Metaphors. pp. 1 – 10 (Download PDF)
• William R. Crawley and Lynnea J. Dehaan The Vocabulary of Quitting. pp. 11 – 30 (Download PDF)
• Antonio Reyes-Rodriguez Hot and Cold War: The Linguistic Representation of a Rational Decision Filter. pp. 31 – 47 (Download PDF)
• John M. Kobia Metaphors on HIV/AIDS Discourse Among Oluluyia Speakers of Western Kenya. pp. 48 – 66 (Download PDF)
• Steffi Retzlaff and Stefan Gänzle Constructing the European Union in Canadian News. pp. 67 – 89 (Download PDF)

Visit the journal homepage here: http://cadaad.org/ejournal/2008/2.

Cesario, Marco. "The Primacy of Perception in the Era of Communication." RESET DOC September 8, 2008.

A transversal study of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of time and space does not mean only analyzing the relationship between those categories and objects and events perceived by the conscience, but also to open a constructive dialogue between pure phenomenology and others sciences such as psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, neurology, biology, physics and arts. The objective is to reconstruct and develop Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “this space and this time that we are” through the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Bergson, and Whitehead, but also through the work of Proust, Claudel and Simon. These were the conclusions of the international congress of philosophy “Merleau-Ponty. L’espace et le temps”, which took place at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris to celebrate the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth. The congress gathered together many experts from France, the United States and Japan, who attempted to answer the questions posed by Merleau-Ponty’s main work, Phenomenology of Perception (1945). The event has today a special meaning, because we should not only discuss his philosophical positions, but also use his ‘phenomenological instruments’ to rethink the categories of space and time in the age of global communication. The new technological instruments and the media’s increasing power, provide us with free access to knowledge, as well as the possibility to become actors in spreading this knowledge. This is an advantage compared to period during which Merleau-Ponty debated ‘spatial consciousness’ because these new technologies have provoked an enlargement of cognitive structures and perceptive consciousness. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.resetdoc.org/EN/Merleau-ponty-cesario.php.

Salamon, Gayle. "Review of Dorothea Olkowski, et al., eds. FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF MERLEAU-PONTY." NDPR (September 2008).

Olkowski, Dorothea, and Gail Weiss, eds. Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2006. There are few philosophers more deserving of a feminist reconsideration than Merleau-Ponty, as this excellent volume demonstrates. Nancy Tuana describes the motivation of the 'Re-Reading the Canon' series in a general preface:

Feminist philosophers have begun to look critically at the canonized texts of philosophy and have concluded that the discourses of philosophy are not gender-neutral. Philosophical narratives do not offer a universal perspective, but rather privilege some experiences and beliefs over others.

Phenomenology presents itself as an unusually suitable partner in this endeavor, for like feminism, phenomenology also understands its project to be an unsettling of the fantasy of a universal perspective, and the means by which it accomplishes this unsettling is careful and close attention to the perspectival nature of experience and of the world. Co-editor Dorothea Olkowski provides a concise and useful introduction of phenomenology's place in philosophy, Merleau-Ponty's place in phenomenology, and prior feminist engagements with Merleau-Ponty, beginning (as so many feminist origins stories do) with Beauvoir. This volume is not an introduction to Merleau-Ponty, or to feminist philosophy, and each of the essays assumes some familiarity with Merleau-Ponty and early feminist responses to him, though Olkowski's introduction and the first essay by Sonia Kruks provide helpful orientation through the history of these engagements for less-familiar readers. It is instead a guided tour through the current state of feminist Merleau-Ponty criticism, and the result is a strong and impressively expansive collection. Merleau-Ponty's insights about the centrality of embodiment to subjectivity make him a particularly apposite interlocutor for feminists, though he has been an underutilized resource for feminist philosophy, with a few notable exceptions. This dearth of feminist attention may be in part due to the arguably masculinist readings of his theories of body and perception offered by some of his more prominent readers. One might think, for instance, of Hubert Dreyfus's contention that the Phenomenology of Perception describes the relation between self and world as one of maximal grip, a description confuted by the rather more delicate and ambiguous metaphors -- a soap bubble, or an intertwining -- that Merleau-Ponty himself relied upon, particularly in his later work, to describe the intricate styles of being that we are. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14206.

CFP: "Nietzsche's ECCE HOMO: a Centenary Conference," Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, November 27-28, 2008.

Update: For the full programme, visit the conference homepage at http://www.swan.ac.uk/german/conferences/eh.htm. Original Post (January 31, 2008): Keynote speakers include: Keith Ansell Pearson, Steven Aschheim, Paul Bishop, Lesley Chamberlain, Daniel Conway, Carol Diethe, Rüdiger Görner Friedrich Nietzsche’s intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo has always been a controversial book. Nietzsche prepared it for publication just before he became incurably insane in early 1889, but his sister and literary executor, Elisabeth, held it back until after his death, and it finally appeared only in 1908. For much of the first century of its reception, Ecce Homo met with a sceptical response and was viewed as merely a testament to Nietzsche’s incipient madness. It occupied a tenuous position in the canon of his works, and a definitive scholarly edition was published as late as 1969. In recent decades, though, there has been increased interest in the work, especially in the English-speaking world, where R. J. Hollingdale’s 1979 translation gained it a substantial new readership. Two more English translations have appeared in recent years, and another is pending. Ecce Homo represents in many respects both a summation of Nietzsche’s philosophical outlook and a supreme example of his stylistic strengths and weaknesses. Almost half the book is devoted to a reappraisal of his earlier works, often from a highly partial perspective. He is deliberately outrageous with the ‘megalomaniacal’ self-advertisement of his chapter titles, and brazenly claims ‘I am not a man, I am dynamite’ as he attempts to explode one preconception after another in the Western philosophical tradition. This centenary conference will re-assess Ecce Homo from both philosophical and philological viewpoints. Papers (in English or German, max. 30 minutes) are invited on any aspect of the text and its contexts, for example its:

• genesis, composition and complex publication history
• key concepts and philosophical arguments
• historical (in)accuracy and relation to Nietzsche’s earlier works
• intertexts, from the Bible to Paul Bourget
• rhetorical and narrative strategies
• hybrid generic status as literary-philosophical autobiography
• projected readership and reception by later writers
• contemporary relevance and relation to more recent philosophical developments
• theoretical interpretation (feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction …)

It is anticipated that selected papers from the conference will be published. Please submit proposals (max. 500 words) by 31 March 2008 to both of the organisers:

Professor Duncan Large (d.a.g.large@swan.ac.uk), School of Arts/German, Swansea University, Singleton Park, GB-Swansea SA2 8PP

and

Dr Nicholas Martin (n.c.martin@bham.ac.uk), Department of German Studies, University of Birmingham, Ashley Building, GB-Birmingham B15 2TT

INSTITUTE OF GERMANIC & ROMANCE STUDIES School of Advanced Study University of London Room ST272, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU Telephone: +44 (0)20-7862 8966 Fax: +44 (0)20-7862 8672 Email: jane.lewin @sas.ac.uk Website: http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/

"Rousseau's Legacies / Fortunes de Rousseau," Sixteenth Biennial Colloquium, Rousseau Association, UCLA, June 25-28, 20090.

Rousseau's legacies are multiple and contested. In philosophy, he was described as the Newton of the moral sciences by Kant, and yet alongside those who champion an ethic of rights and duties, are others, equally influenced by Rousseau who take forward his concerns with virtue, community or moral psychology. In social anthropology, Rousseau was hailed as precursor, by none other than Levi-Strauss. Rousseau's concern with the natural world and the environment has echoes both in the romantic movement and in the environmental politics of our own day. Rousseau's autobiographical writings prefigure a concern with subjectivity that finds later expression in Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. His writing on education has been rediscovered, championed or excoriated by successive generations of advocates or opponents of "child centred education". His political legacy has been bitterly contested between advocates of deliberative democracy, liberals, nationalists of various stripes, and those who see him as the harbinger of totalitarianism. We invite papers reflecting critically on any aspect of Rousseau's various legacies in philosophy, literature, political theory, theatre, music, biography, etc. Proposals on the above topic (title and short summary), in English or French, for papers of 20 minutes duration should be sent to the President of the Rousseau Association, Christopher Bertram, by electronic mail at C.Bertram@bristol.ac.uk or by ordinary mail at thefollowing address: Department of Philosophy University of Bristol 9 Woodland Road Bristol United Kingdom (If using ordinary mail, please also give if possible an electronic address for acknowledgement. ) The deadline for receipt of proposals is December 31st, 2008. Proposals will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee (Professors Christopher Bertram, Patrick Coleman, Ourida Mostefai) and a decision communicated by January 31st 2009. A preliminary program for the conference will be available in February 2009.

"Natality, Embodiment and the Political: Feminist Conversations," University of Dundee, May 28-29, 2009.

Keynote Speakers: Christine Battersby and Adriana Cavarero The conference will explore the productive conjunction between natality, embodiment and the political in contemporary feminist philosophy. The starting point will be the influential work of our keynote speakers - Christine Battersby and Adriana Cavarero. In different ways their work shows how philosophy and politics are transformed when natality and the female body that births are placed at the centre of our thought. The aim of the conference is not solely to establish their work as a point of reference for feminist appropriations. The objective is rather to think with them: to explore feminist lines of thought that open up from or intersect with key aspects of their thinking. We welcome papers on the following themes: ● The conjunction between natality and politics ● Rethinking the political in feminist theory ● Transforming philosophy for a body that births ● Phenomenological approaches to the female body and birth ● Thinking feminist theory after Arendt ● The relationship between power, bodies and the political ● Feminist approaches to embodiment, self and identity Proposals for a 3000 word paper or a panel of up to three speakers should be sent to j.k.oksala@dundee.ac.uk. The proposal should be max. 500 words for a paper and 1000 words for a panel. The deadline of proposals is 14th November. A limited number of student bursaries will be available. The bursaries will cover the registration fee plus a contribution towards travel (UK students £100, Overseas students £200). Please indicate in your proposal if you are applying for a bursary. For further information, please contact: Dr. Johanna Oksala Senior Lecturer Philosophy, School of Humanities University of Dundee j.k.oksala@dundee.ac.uk Dr. Rachel Jones Lecturer Philosophy, School of Humanities University of Dundee r.e.jones@dundee.ac.uk

Sommers, Christina Hoff. "Feminism and Freedom." AEI SHORT PUBLICATIONS August 1, 2008.

On February 10, 2001, eighteen thousand women filled Madison Square Garden for one of the more notable feminist gatherings of our time. The event--"Take Back the Garden"--centered on a performance of Eve Ensler's raunchy play, The Vagina Monologues. The "Vulva Choir" sang; self-described "Vagina Warriors"--including Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Donna Hanover (Rudolph Giuliani's ex-wife)--recited pet names for vaginas: Mimi, Gladys. Glenn Close led the crowd in spelling out an obscene word for women's intimate anatomy: "Give me a C. . . !!!" A huge banner declared the Garden to be a "RAPE FREE ZONE." The mood grew solemn when Oprah Winfrey came forward to read a new monologue called "Under the Burqa," which described the plight of Afghan women living under the Taliban. At its climax, an actual Afghan woman named Zoya, who represented the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), appeared on stage covered from head to toe in a burqa. Oprah approached her and, with a dramatic sweep of her arm, lifted and removed it. The crowd roared in delight. Later, an exposé in the progressive American Prospect would reveal that RAWA is a Maoist organization whose fanatical members are so feared by Afghan women that one human rights activist has dubbed them the "Talibabes." According to the Prospect, when Ms. magazine tried to distance itself from RAWA in 2002, a RAWA spokeswoman denounced Ms. as the "mouthpiece of hegemonic, U.S.-centric corporate feminism." But on that magical February night at the Garden, few knew or cared about Zoya's political views or affiliations. The evening was a near-perfect distillation of contemporary feminism. Pick up a women's studies textbook, visit a college women's center, or look at the websites of leading feminist organizations, and you will likely find the same fixation on intimate anatomy combined with left-wing politics and a poisonous antipathy to men. (Campus feminists were among the most vocal and zealous accusers of the young men on the Duke University lacrosse team who were falsely indicted for rape in 2006.) Contemporary feminism routinely depicts American society as a dangerous patriarchy in which women are under siege--that is the message of the "RAPE FREE ZONE" banner in the Garden. It therefore presents itself as a movement of "liberation," defying the patriarchal oppressor and offering women everywhere the opportunity to make contact with their "real selves.". . . Read the rest here: http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.28410/pub_detail.asp.