Schedule for NASS 2015

The final schedule is now available for the North American Sartre Society meeting happening this weekend. It is available here. I'll be giving a talk during the first session on Friday (2:00–3:45), and then I'll be moderating this panel:

Perhaps I'll gain a better picture of whatever it is that my friend Storm Heter has been working on. I know it has something to do with authenticity and aesthetics, and, at least at one point, it discusses Jean-Michel Basquiat. That is probably where our last face-to-face discussion had left off. Since then he's tweeted tantalizing clues:

My working title = "black noise" pic.twitter.com/1iA1w2WrE7

— T Storm Heter (@Storm_Heter) February 9, 2015

From what I can tell, he takes his coffee black, but I want to know about the rest of it.

Schelling Society Conference Schedule

FIRST ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SCHELLING SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA (SSNA) 

AUGUST 30 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2012 

SEATTLE UNIVERSITY (SEATTLE, WASHINGTON USA) 

THURSDAY EVENING AUGUST 30, 2012 

Except where otherwise noted, the conference takes place in Piggott 100

6:00 PM Address and words of welcome: Jason Wirth and Sean McGrath

6:15 PM – 7:45 PM SESSION 1 Moderator: Sean McGrath (Memorial University)
1. Lore Hühn (Freiburg University), “Schelling’s Metaphysics of the Will: Schelling’s Freedom Essay and 19th Century Philosophy”
2. Markus Gabriel (University of Bonn), “Mythology and Modality: On the Very Idea of a Positive Philosophy”

7:45 PM Reception Piggott 106

FRIDAY, AUGUST 31, 2012 

9:00 AM-10:30 AM CONCURRENT SESSIONS (SESSIONS 1A AND 1B)
PANEL ONE-A Moderator: James Kilcup (Loyola Marymount)
1. Benjamin Berger (Warwick, UK), “Schelling’s Speculative Astrophysics”
2. James Depew (Western Ontario), “Schelling’s “Ethnogony”: Indigeneity as Lived Mythology”

PANEL ONE-B Moderator: Anthony Bruno (University of Toronto) ROOM TBA
1. Jared McGeough (University of Western Ontario), “An Indigestible Remainder: ‘Spinoza’ in Schelling and Hegel”
2. Christopher Yates (Grove City College), “Offspring of Chaos: Artistry and Imagination in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift”

10:30 AM-10:45 AM coffee

10:45 AM-12:15 PM SESSION 2 Moderator: Jason Wirth (Seattle University)
1. Rainer Zimmermann (University of Munich), “Deriving Kalokagathía from Schelling’s Grounding of Nature”
2. Iain Hamilton Grant (UWE Bristol, UK), “The Depth of the Unfathomable: Epistemology and Potency in Schelling’s Dynamics”

12:15 PM-1:45 PM lunch (on your own)

1:45 PM-3:15 PM SESSION 3 Moderator: Benjamin Graham Woodard (Western Ontario)
1. Michael Vater (Marquette University), “Bringing Nature to Light: Schelling's Naturphilosophie in the Early System of Identity”
2. Devin Zane Shaw (University of Ottawa),“‘From the Original Night of Particularity’: Nature and System in Schelling’s Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature”

3:15 PM-3:30 PM coffee

3:30 PM-5:00 PM SESSION 4 Moderator: Tilottama Rajan (Western Ontario)
1. Bruce Matthews (Bard College), “Plato's “Sublime Idea” and Schelling's Inversion of the Kantian Architectonic”
2. Edward Beach (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire), “Schelling versus Hegel on the Problem of Circular Logic”

5:00 PM -5:15 PM break

5:15 PM-6:45 PM SESSION 5 Moderator: Kyriaki Goudelli (University of Patras)
1. Joe Lawrence, “The Harrowing of Hell: On the Birth and Death of God”
2. Philipp Schwab (Freiburg University), “Schelling’s ‘Failure’ and the Non-ground: Heidegger’s Readings of the Freedom Essay”

6:45 PM Reception Piggott 106

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2012 

9:00 AM-10:30 AM SESSION 1 Moderator: James Kilcup (Loyola Marymount)
1. Kamalini Martin (Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram, Bangalore, India), “Schelling’s Idea”
2. Marcela Garcia (University of Munich), “Emphatical Being and the Late Schelling’s Interpretation of the Copula”

10:30 AM-10:45 AM coffee

10:45 AM -12:15 PM SESSION 2 Moderator: Moderator: Bernie Freydberg (Duquesne)
1. Sean McGrath (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Post-Ecclesial Christianity: Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation”
2. Jason Wirth (Seattle University), “Plasticity: Art and Nature”

12:15 PM-1:45 PM lunch (on your own)

1:45 PM-3:15 PM SESSION 3 Moderator: Elizabeth Sikes (Seattle University)
1. Scott Scribner (University of Hartford), “Idealism's Corpse and the Prosthetics of Suicide”
2. Christopher Lauer (University of Hawaii-Hilo), “Be Still, Our Beating Heart: Schelling on the Organics of Intimacy”

3:15-3:30 PM coffee

3:30 PM-5:00 PM SESSION 4 Moderator: Benjamin Graham Woodard (Western Ontario)
1. Bernard Freydberg (Duquesne University), “’…More Aristophanic than Tragic…’?: Schelling’s Provocative Urfaust Interpretation”
2. Kyriaki Goudelli (University of Patras, Greece), “The Eternal Beginnings of the Divine and the Present Future”

5:00 PM-5:15 PM break

5:15 PM-6:45 PM SESSION 5 Moderator: Bruce Matthews (Bard College)
1. Tilottama Rajan (Western Ontario), “’Idea’: The History of the Term in German Idealism from Kant to Schelling”
2. Andrzej Wiercinski (Freiburg University), “The Restoration of the Unity between Nature and Spirit: Schelling’s Eschatology in the Stuttgart Private Lectures”

6:45 PM Reception Piggott 106

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2: OPTIONAL NATURFORSCHUNG AT MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK

THE 2013 MEETING WILL TAKE PLACE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO AND THE 2014 MEETING WILL TAKE PLACE AT BARD COLLEGE IN NEW YORK

German Idealism: Legacies and Controversies

If you're in the Ottawa region, this promises to be a good conference...and I believe that you will recognize Friday's plenary speaker. 

German Idealism: Legacies and Controversies

L’idéalisme allemand : héritages et enjeux

April 6-7/6-7 avril

University of Ottawa/Université d’Ottawa

Conference Program/ Programme de la conférence

April 6/6 avril

Location: Arts Building (70 Laurier Av. Est.) Room 509 (5th Floor)

12:00-12:30     Welcome, Opening Remarks and Refreshments
                        Accueil, introduction et rafraîchissements

12:30-13:30    Vedran Grahovac (University of Guelph)—The Necessity of Mutual
                       Conditioning in Kant and Husserl: Circularity in the Judgment of Taste
                       and the Whole-Part Relationship

13:30-14:30   Blandine Parchemal (Université de Montréal)—Fichte : un
                      achèvement de l’idéalisme transcendantal kantien ou une initiation à
                      l’idéalisme absolu hégélien ?

14:30-14:45    Coffee Break/Pause café

14:45-15:45    Patti Nyman (York University)—The Necessity and Necessary
                       Overcoming of Revealed Religion in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

15:45-16:45    G. Anthony Bruno (University of Toronto)—Schelling and the Unsung
                       Role of Death in German Idealism

16:45-17:00    Coffee Break/Pause café

17:00-18:00    Plenary Speaker: Devin Zane Shaw (University of Ottawa)—Into the
                       Void: Schelling on Religion and Absolute Idealism 

April 7/7 avril

Location: Arts Building (70 Laurier Av. Est.) Room 509 (5th Floor)

Morning Session/ Matin

9:00-9:15     Opening Remarks/Introduction

9:15-10:15    Olivier Huot-Beaulieu (Université de Montréal)—Heidegger, lecteur de
                     Hegel : la négativité en litige

10:15-11:15    Ryan Krahn (University of Guelph)—Derrida, Bataille, and the Victory of
                       the Slave in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 

11:15-11:30    Coffee Break/Pause café

11:30-12:30    Ardevan Yaghoubi (University of Chicago)—Contemporary Theories of
                       Normativity and the Revitalization of German Idealism

12:30-14:00    Lunch Break/Dîner

Afternoon Session/Après-midi

14:00-15:00    Matthias Peter Lorenz (Université de Montréal—on exchange from
                       Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität of Munich)—Hegelian Marxism and
                       Negative Dialectics: A Comparison of Lukács' and Adorno's Dialectical
                       Approaches in Relation to their Hegelian Heritage

15:00-16:00    Claire Pagès (ATER, Université Nancy 2—Archives Poincaré)—
                       Le principe d’historicité : de Hegel à Herder

16:00-16:30    Coffee Break/Pause café

16:30-18:00    Keynote Speaker: Iain Macdonald (Université de Montréal)—
                       How Soon is Now? Hegel’s Futures

18:00-18:15    Closing Remarks/Fermeture

NASS 2011 Conference Schedule

In a few weeks, from April 27-29, the North American Sartre Society will be meeting in Montréal. The schedule for the conference is up here (PDF). As you will see, I will be giving a paper on Thursday, the 28th, around 2:15. For those who have looked, I'd like to clarify that I'm giving the paper entitled "The Being and Nothingness of Equality: Sartre’s Influence on Rancière," and not the one listed on Michel Henry (I would suppose that this talk will be delivered by the other panelist, Ian Coleman).

This paper has been, unlike a few others over the past few years, fun to work on. I had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to do when I submitted the abstract, and the process of writing has fleshed out the connections that I thought were there. However, I say that now, having established the transition from Disagreement to Being and Nothingness--but I still have to write something about the latter.

Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture Conference

I didn't mean for this week to be dominated by conference information, but so it goes. March 25-26 is the 21st annual Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture conference. The schedule is here.

The keynote speaker is Peter Gratton, who you might know from his blogging at Philosophy in a Time of Error. I will be presenting on “Spinoza versus Schmitt: The Politics of Theology and the Theology of Politics.” Other presenters include my long time friend and sometimes band mate Ross Birdwise, who has some internet presence here. Finally, I will have a chance to meet in person Scu, who blogs at Critical Animal, and is one of the organizers of the conference.

Hegel and Negativity Schedule

The schedule is up for the upcoming conference "Hegel and Negativity - Negativity and Hegel" on the events page at the Department of Philosophy at University of Ottawa. This promises to be a great conference, and I say that as an attendee and not a presenter. Here's the information:

Hegel and Negativity - University of Ottawa - April 1 -3
Friday April 1
7:30 - 9:00 Keynote speaker: Paul Redding (Sydney) and discussion

Saturday April 2 (each 25 min. presentation is followed by 20 min. discussion)
9:15 - 9:40 Jennifer Bates, Duquesne, "Hegel and the Concept of Extinction"
10:00 - 10:25 John McCumber, UCLA, "Dialectics and Speculation in Hegel's Logic"
10:45 - 11:10 Christopher Lauer, Indiana U. of Pennsylvania, "Beyond Restlessness: Hegel on Becoming the Negative"
11:30 - 11:55 Jon Burmeister, Boston College, "Language as Divine Reversal"
12:15 - 12:40 Tim Brownlee, Xavier, "Intersubjective Recognition, Freedom and Negativity in Hegel's Practical Thought"
1:00 - 2:30 Lunch
2:30 - 3:40 Graduate Student Research Panel (4X10 plus 30 min. discussion)
3:45 - 4:10 Emilia Angelova, Trent, "Negativity in Hegel's Phenomenology: On Making Thinking More Thoughtful"
4:30 - 4:55 Ulrich Schloesser, Toronto, "Hegel's Methodology of Immanent Critique"
5:15 - 5:40 Douglas Moggach, Ottawa, "Modernity's Shadow"

Sunday  April 3
9:15 - 9:40 Jeffrey Reid, Ottawa, "For-another, For-me: Negativity and Irony"
10:00 - 10:25 Jacob Quinlan, Trent, "Dwelling within the Dark Night"
10:45 - 11:10 Joseph Arel, Guelph, "Confession and the Persistence of Unhappy Consciousness"
11:30 - 11:55 Theo Geraets, "Negativity in Hegel's System: At the Beginning and at the End"
12:15 - Close

Contact: Jeffrey Reid
Phone: 613-562-5800 ext. 3678
Location: Room 509, Arts Hall, 70 Laurier Avenue East

Hegel and Negativity Conference

The list of participants and dates for the conference Hegel and Negativity, Negativity and Hegel, which will take place here at the University of Ottawa.

Paul Redding (Keynote Speaker - University of Sydney), Emilia Angelova (Trent University), Joseph Arel (University of Guelph), Jennifer Bates (Duquesne University), Timothy Brownlee (Xavier University), Jon Burmeister (Boston College), Theo Geraets (University of Ottawa), Christopher Lauer (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), John McCumber (UCLA), Douglas Moggach (University of Ottawa), Jacob Quinlan (Trent University), Jeffrey Reid (University of Ottawa), Ulrich Schloesser (University of Toronto)

University of Ottawa, Arts Building, 70 Laurier Ave. East, room 509

Friday, April 1, 7:30pm; April 2 and 3, 9:00 a.m.

Sponsored by The University of Ottawa Faculty of Social Sciences and the Research Chair in Political Thought,with support from the Faculty of Arts and the Department of Philosophy

Getting Ready for the RPA: On Agamben and Benjamin

I'll admit that I didn't write much for The Notes Taken over the month of October. Instead, most of my time, outside of teaching, that I would spend writing was consumed by preparing job applications and preparing my paper for the upcoming Radical Philosophy Association meeting at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Take a good look at the schedule (PDF), and you will see that our own Sean Moreland is giving a talk on "Visceral Re:Visions: Genre and the Syntax of Violence in Haneke's Funny Games and Laugier's Martyrs" (Friday's 2:00-3:30pm session) our friend Mark Raymond Brown will be presenting on "A Remedy for Violence: The Necessity of Healthcare Reform in the US" which I swear has something to do with Sartre (during Saturday's 10:30am-12:00pm session), and I will be giving a paper on Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, and the critique of violence (during Saturday's 2:00-3:30pm session). At the moment the paper doesn't have a title (I've changed it several times), but I'm leaning toward "Anomic Violence: Toward a Benjaminian Critique of Agamben."

I read a less organized draft of my paper at the end of October at CSU Stanislaus. While it must have been confusing for the audience, as I jumped from Fredric Jameson to Agamben to Georges Sorel to Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," many of their questions helped me clarify why exactly (1) I was interested in this early essay of Benjamin's, and (2) why I need to cut the long sections on sovereignty and the state of exception out of the paper. 

Let's start with (2): Agamben is best known for returning sovereignty to the forefront of political thought. I know, because the first article I managed to publish applied Agamben's critique of the state of exception to the war on terror and its localization in Guantanamo Bay. I started writing the paper in early 2003 and it finally saw the light of day as "The Absence of Evidence is Not the Evidence of Absence: Biopolitics and the State of Exception" in Philosophy Against Empire, Today, Vol. 4, edited by Tony Smith and Harry van der Linden (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2006). Since then I've found that Agamben's critique brings with it a large amount of philosophical "history of metaphysics" baggage that he inherited from Heidegger, not to mention his extensive use of Schmitt. Back in 2006, the last few pages of the article dealt with the absence of the concept of event or the act as a moment of subjectification in Homo Sacer. But I found I needed to say more about what I found so off-putting.

To get the current paper down to a manageable size, I've cut all the exegetical talk about sovereignty and assumed that my audience will be familiar with it. The exegetical discussions were adding too much weight to the presentation. All you get now is my central problem with Homo Sacer: Agamben accepts from Schmitt that the sovereign has a monopoly on the capacity to decide and the capacity for violence. This is important because Agamben's State of Exception rejects the sovereign monopoly on violence (there are passages in HS that hint at this, but Agamben doesn't pursue the consequences); the whole of the 'gigantomachy concerning a void' that he stages between Schmitt and Benjamin turns on the possibility of anomic violence, or, since violence is a cipher for human action, praxis (and subjectification) with no relation to law.

Which leads to (1): the task is now to show how Benjamin's concept of divine violence is one of the many figures he proposes for anomic praxis. Unlike Agamben, I think this kind of praxis and subjectification leads through Benjamin's work on aesthetics, as well as some of his theological debates with Gershom Scholem (which are really just debates about aesthetics and politics anyway).

Thus I've found my way back to something like the framework of my Schelling book, when I didn't really expect to: investigating how artistic production is presented as an alternative to law (which for Schelling was Kant's and Fichte's categorical imperatives) as a model for free human praxis. With Benjamin, the problem will be very different, given that his work on aesthetics is so closely connected to anarcho-syndicalist  (Sorel again!) and Marxian politics, although for the moment, it sets the course for how I will be approaching his work in the future (although Marx's critique of 'creativity' as found in the "Critique of the Gotha Program" hangs over part of this investigation).

And here we all thought I was joking when on my profile I wrote that I am "working on a book about the convergences and divergences of history, politics, and art in the work of Walter Benjamin, which is a loose sequel to Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art."

Historical Opportunity: Marx, Heidegger, Benjamin

Two of our contributors will be participating in a round-table at the Canadian Philosophical Association's annual meeting next week. Matt McLennan, Devin Zane Shaw, and their colleague David Tkach (also completing his PhD at the University of Ottawa) will be discussing "Historical Opportunity" in the works of Marx and Marxism, Heidegger, and Benjamin. We've included a partially updated version of their panel description below (the original is here in PDF format):

The collapse of Communist regimes in the late 80s and early 90s seemed to have offered a stark choice between two competing philosophies of history. On the one hand, grand narratives of progress and emancipation were claimed to have definitively foundered, leaving in their wake a plurality of individual viewpoints and social micro-histories (Lyotard). The collapse of Communism was also read in precisely the opposite way, as heralding the triumph of a grand narrative of historical progress, specifically that of liberal democracy (Fukuyama).

McLennan, Tkach and Shaw begin from the intuition that each option, starkly posed, misses something vital: a proper assessment of the concept of historical opportunity. Events since the collapse of Communism (the rise of religious fundamentalisms, the current crisis of capitalism) fuel the suspicion that we have neither reached the end of the era of grand narratives, nor properly accounted for the power of competing micro-histories. For theoretical and practical reasons, the present historical conjuncture renders a critical re-visitation of the “happy 90s” of utmost importance.

Matthew McLennan

Presenting a grand narrative of historical progress alongside an emphatic insistence on the importance of human agency, the works of Marx contain fascinating material for the philosopher of history. The seeming tension between determinism and freedom at the heart of his work has led to widely divergent interpretations of Marx, from the more or less deterministic, evolutionary historical picture of German Social Democracy and the Second International, to the voluntarism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Guevara. McLennan begins the proposed roundtable by arguing that Marx‟s philosophy of history is not only consistent, to the extent that the tension between determinism and freedom is only apparent, but also that it better lends itself to interpretations tending towards voluntarism. More specifically, after showing to what extent Marx was able to square his notion of the end of history with his emphasis on human agency, McLennan offers an argument that the Leninist notion of historical intervention, of “hitting upon the right moment”, was a more faithful application of Marx in its day than was that of the evolutionist faction of German Social Democracy and the Second International; this will set the stage for Shaw and Tkach‟s contributions by suggesting that Germany missed its opportunity to grasp the concept of historical opportunity, at least in the way Marx intended. Finally, tentative reflections will be offered with regard to the question of how such an interpretation of Marx might figure in an approach the present historical conjuncture.

Update: Matt adds a more recent abstract:

Matt McLennan surveys the development of Marxist philosophies of history, providing a schematic interpretation. Weighing in on where he thinks the emphasis of a properly Marxian philosophy should lie with respect to the question of historical opportunity (i.e. the "right moment" for revolutionary or militant activity) as well as that of eschatology or "the end of history", he argues that the most important advances in recent Marxism come from David Harvey. The notion of historical opportunity is enriched via Harvey to include a necessary spatio-geograpihical dimension; essentially, historical opportunity is interpreted as meaning that there is a "right space-time" for revolution.

 David Tkach

David Tkach's paper is a close reading of several sections of Heidegger's Being and Time, conducted in order to outline the problem of 'historical opportunity' in relation to the understanding of political action derivable from that work. In light of the book's three interrelated concepts of historicity, freedom, and the eschatological understanding of death in relation to Heidegger's understanding of a people [ein Volk], the result for the purposes of the round table is ultimately to call into question any possibility of political action that is directed toward a better situation for everyone. Thus, in contradistinction to certain attempts to rehabilitate aspects of Heidegger's book for ostensibly 'progressive' political purposes, Tkach concludes that it is at least problematic, not to say impossible, to do so.

Devin Zane Shaw

Shaw argues that class struggle is central to Walter Benjamin's concept of history. It is Benjamin's solidarity with the oppressed class that drives his critique of progress, and that orients his discussion of the legibility of dialectical images. It is only when an image is recognized as an image of emancipation that the history of its transmission becomes legible. Thus history is not the site of realizing Progress (Soviet Marxism), nor is it the site of a recovery of a past or heritage that has been covered over by an inauthentic understanding of history (Heidegger). History can only be written by blasting the events of the past out of the continuum of linear (or as Benjamin states, "empty, homogenous") historical time. Only then is it possible to clearly evaluate the documents of culture as both redemptive and barbaric.

BE prepared to get up bright and early; the panel is on Tueday, June 1st, from 9:00 ­ 12:30 in MB ­ S2-455 -- which we hear is the John Molson School of Business building.

In addition, Devin will present a paper at this year's meeting of the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, on Wednesday, June 2nd, from 3:40-4:50pm at EV 2-204. He will be presenting:

"Cartesian Reversals: Badiou and Heidegger on Mathematics and Modernity"

This paper examines the relationship between philosophy, ontology (or onto-theology) and mathematics an in the work of Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou. Despite Badiou's praise for Heidegger's 'subtraction' of truth from the domain of epistemology, he attacks Heidegger's equation of mathematics with the essence of modern technology. Against Heidegger, Badiou shows that mathematics thinks ontology, because it must decide on what is. He does this by drawing the philosophical consequences of the continuum hypothesis. I argue that these consequences undermine Heidegger's connection between poeisis and ontology and his claims about the essence of technology. If mathematics is a thought, it cannot be essentially a projection of calculation into being or equated with the essence of technology.

Sartre Society 2009 Meeting

The North American Sartre Society has put its conference program online (PDF). If you look, I am there, bright and early on Friday morning, giving a paper called "Reading Sartre against the New Atheists," which will have been the result of reading Being and Nothingness almost cover-to-cover over the last two months.

It looks like there are lots of interesting papers, and for plenary and keynote speakers, they've brought Robert Bernasconi, Thomas Flynn, Ronald Aronson, Annie Cohen-Solal and Robert JC Young.