Poster for NASS 2015

Here's the poster for the upcoming Sartre Society meeting. The organizers are still finalizing the schedule, but last I looked I'm giving a talk on an existentialist response to Eugene Thacker's cosmic pessimism and Ray Brassier's nihilism on Friday afternoon. It looks like I'll be name-dropping Bataille, Beauvoir, and Nietzsche along the way.

Anti-Humanism and Public Ethics Program

Something that Matt and I will be participating in next week:

Thursday, March 12^th

Morning 

09:30 – 10:00            Registration / Coffee

10:00 – 10:05            Welcome, by Chantal Beauvais, Rector of Saint Paul University

10:05 – 11:05            Marc De Kesel (Saint Paul University):

Between Sade and Labre: Modernity’s Impossible Humanism

                                    Respondent: Andrew Pump (University of Ottawa)

11:05 – 11:15            Coffee Break

11:15 – 12:15            Hélène Tessier (Saint Paul University):

Humanisme et Démocratie: le rationalisme esthétique de Thomas Mann 

Respondent: Anna Djintcharadze (Dominican University College)

12:15 – 13:30             Lunch

Afternoon

13:30 – 14:30             Jean-Pierre Couture (University of Ottawa):

Le posthumanisme de Peter Sloterdijk: du berger génétique à l’athlète anthropotechnique

                                    Respondent: Marc De Kesel (Saint Paul University)

14:30 – 15:30            Mark Salter (University of Ottawa):

Global Ethics: Sovereignty and New Materialism

                                    Respondent: Michael Hijazi (Saint Paul University)

15:30 – 15:45            Coffee Break  

15:45 – 16:45            Devin Z. Shaw, (University of Ottawa and Carleton University):

Curmudgeonly Humanism: From Sartre to Vonnegut

                                    Respondent: Matthew R. McLennan (Saint Paul University)

18.00                           Conference Dinner       

Friday, March 13^th

Morning

10:00 – 11:00            Christopher Sauder (Dominican University College):

De l’existence à la logique : le système hégélien et les origines de l’antihumanisme français

                                    Respondent: Joshua Lalonde (University of Ottawa)

11:00 – 11:15            Coffee Break

11:15 – 12:15            Deniz Guvenc (Carleton University):

Locating Anti-Humanism within Contemporary Anarchism

                                    Respondent: Martin Samson (Saint Paul University)

12:15 – 13:15            Erica Harris (McGill University):

Ethics of Transgression: The Perverse Human Condition and Anti-pornography Legislation

                                    Respondent: Iva Apostolova (Dominican University College)

13:15 – 14:00            Lunch

Afternoon

14:00 – 15:00             Geraldine Finn (Carleton University):

Of all Things Man is the Measure: It is no longer, but it is still a Science of Man

            Respondent: Naomi Goldenberg (University of Ottawa)

15:00 – 15:15              Coffee Break

15:15 – 16:15             Matthew R. McLennan (Saint Paul University):

Medical Humanism: Putting the Ghost into Language

            Respondent: Monique Lanoix (Saint Paul University)

16:15 –16:30               Closing Remarks by Sophie Cloutier (Director of Public Ethics, Saint Paul University)

16:30 – 17:00              Closing Discussion

 

Day 2: German Idealism: How Soon is Now?

Today is Day Two of the German Idealism: Legacies and Controversies conference here at the University of Ottawa. For more information, the full schedule is here, a synopsis of my plenary address is here, and a short post about Day One is here.

The remaining portion of today's schedule, concluding with a keynote address by Iain Macdonald (Université de Montréal), entitled "How Soon is Now? Hegel’s Futures", is copied below:

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

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

And, finally, The Smiths:

While I doubt Hegel is "the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar," he might give a new twist to being "the son and heir of nothing in particular."

On Schelling's "Philosophy and Religion"

At the end of this week, the graduate students in philosophy at the University of Ottawa will be hosting a conference on German Idealism: Legacies and Controversies. I will be giving a plenary address on Friday night on Schelling's absolute idealism and the recently translated Philosophy and Religion. What follows is a short synopsis of my talk.

If we are going to talk about the legacy of the work of F.W.J. Schelling, especially if we are going to talk about his work prior to the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, we must confront two difficulties: first, we need to demonstrate the falsity of the caricature of Schelling as a protean thinker; and second, we need to bring some clarity to the relative obscurity of his thought during the period of absolute idealism or identity-philosophy. Both of these difficulties can be overcome if we can identify the threads in Schelling's thought that repeatedly emerge through his transition from his early attempts to mediate between Fichte and Spinoza, through his absolute idealism, to his philosophy of freedom or revelation.

I have discussed Schelling's persistent interest in the philosophy of art elsewhere. In my talk tomorrow, I will look at how he thinks, and rethinks, the problem of the transition from the infinite to the finite from the Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795-1796), the Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1801), to Philosophy and Religion (1804). 

I will argue that once he rejects the subjective idealism of his work through 1800, Schelling finds it necessary to reconceptualize the ‘transition from the infinite to the finite’ that had been crux of his distinction between criticism and dogmatism. In the Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, Schelling (like Jacobi before him) argues that philosophy cannot speculate on the transition from the infinite to the finite; however, unlike Jacobi, he argues that critical idealism’s emphasis on practical reason provides an account of how the infinite can be intuited in the finite as a categorical imperative, which for Schelling is the realization of freedom (I: 314-316). This, he argues in 1795-1796, avoids the so-called dogmatism of Spinoza, but in 1801, how can Schelling avoid reconsidering the relation of the infinite and finite when he announces a system of absolute idealism (or identity-philosophy) that takes Spinoza as its explicit forerunner “in terms of content or material and in form” (IV: 113)?

I will argue that in Philosophy of Religion Schelling develops several important aspects of the solution to this contradiction that anticipate those in Of Human Freedom. In Philosophy and Religion, Schelling argues that the only a “leap” can accomplish the transition from the infinite to the finite. This leap is conceptualized as a series of falls: “there is no continuous transition from the absolute to the actual; the origin (Ursprung) of the phenomenal world is conceivable only as a complete falling-away from absoluteness by means of a leap (Sprung)” (VI: 38). First, nature—the phenomenal world—falls away from the absolute and the ideas, and second, the fall of man occurs so that human freedom emerges, which opens the possibility of finitude's reconciliation with the Absolute (VI: 43). The concept of the fall, especially as the fall of humanity, plays an important role in Of Human Freedom. We will see that, far from being a protean thinker who repeatedly takes up questions only to quickly abandon them, or who develops them without a logical aspect, that Schelling rigorously pursues the consequences of thinking the relationship between freedom, ground, and system.

A CSCP Roundup

Over the previous weekend I attended this year's meeting of Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy in St. John's, Newfoundland. Which brought with it a number of firsts, including the first time I had participated in a CSCP conference, and first time I had traveled that far east--at one point I visited Cape Spear--in North America. I found the locals--the organizers and participants from Memorial University--and the CSCP committee to be a welcoming and hospitable bunch, and most importantly, I left the conference feeling that I wanted to dive into more:  more reading, more writing. A paper here, a book review there, and an abstract for the first annual SSNA meeting.

The conference ended, on Saturday night, with a panel on the 'Theological-Political Schelling,' featuring papers by Joseph Carew and myself with Sean McGrath and James Bradley of Memorial. Sean likes to say that one of the great benefits of Schelling research is that everybody has their own favored 'period' of his thought, which means a plurality of Schellings (Sean's comment is actually wittier), and this panel was no exception.

Nevertheless, it stands out in my mind as the first time that an important conference event (for instance, a concluding panel on a Saturday night) that I had participated in, at a big tent thing like the CSCP, was oriented around Schelling. It, of course, is not the first time for others, but it provided a stark contrast with those three years during which I was writing my dissertation and later book. During that time, I don't think I ever gave a paper at a conference that had more than one paper on Schelling. This sounds like a complaint, but I would like to stress that it seems that Schelling has slowly become a more prominent figure for those who are interested in German idealism in particular (recall that many of these scholars still say 'German idealism' and mean "Kant or Hegel maybe Fichte") and 'continental' philosophy in general. Until the CSCP I had never received that impression.

Before closing, I must thank Peter Gratton for his hospitality during my stay in St. John's, and also the APTPUO (the part-timer's union at the University of Ottawa) for funding my travel.

Links and News from Paris

Although I don't want to get into the routine of starting posts with apologies about not blogging more frequently, here are a few autobiographically related thoughts and links:

• I should be writing more frequently now that the fog of jet lag has dissipated, but I'm also working on my keynote address for a conference, entitled "Dialectical Models: Reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit after Schelling's Philosophy of Art." I updated the title a bit to reflect the theme of the conference, which is "In the Aftermath of German Idealism." If you just happen to be in Germany, and more specifically Wuppertal, from May 12-14, I recommend attending. The schedule, which looks very strong, is available here (scroll down to find the PDF).
• I also noticed that New APPS has an interview, by John Protevi, of François Raffoul. Although it's not mentioned, he used to teach at CSU Stanislaus (over a decade ago, while I was an undergraduate there--to be clear, I didn't expect that this parenthetical part would be mentioned). I can't say I knew him very well, but I took his course on responsibility and action (Heidegger, Sartre, Lévinas) while I was in my fourth year. It was an impressive course, even if he couldn't convince me to keep reading Lévinas. On an unrelated note: I heard that he used to do the reverse commute to CSUS; while most commuters drive from the Central Valley to the Bay Area, he apparently used to drive from Berkeley to Turlock when he had to teach.

The PIC Roundup

Being buried under a stack of grading, I will be brief. I had a good time at the recent PIC conference. It was great to meet Scu, after reading his blog Critical Animal (his thank yous are here) and occasionally corresponding via email, and he and his co-organizer Cecile Lawrence did a great job getting everything together. 

Peter Gratton delivered a sharp (and polemic) keynote address, wedging his position on what he calls 'real time', and 'temporalism' (that "all political categories must stand the test of time"), between the new materialisms (many iterations of which sound like 'new' vitalisms) and the permutations of speculative realism. I discovered that, not only do we share agreement on the critique of the concept of equality, but also that I might be marching on some of these other problems from a very different direction. Peter's brief thoughts are here, and his summary of his Monday talk at Cornell are here.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Daniel Barber, who was also part of the panel I was one, and, who not only presented a strong paper, but managed to convince many of us (this was during the evening, not the panel) that "buying back in" had a much more humorous and subtle series of significances than much more often used "doubling down."

Finally, a big thanks to Ross Birdwise, who split the four to five hours of driving time between Ottawa and Binghamton, with good conversation.

Roundtable Roundup

I'm back from the Society for Social and Political Philosophy's roundtable on Marx's Capital, Volume 1 (here), down in College Station, Texas. There were lots of great presentations (and people), and I found the roundtable format congenial, since we were all, in the general sense, developing our work from the same starting point. In that regard, I also learned quite a bit. The only downside is that the keynote speaker, Harry Cleaver, canceled due to illness.

I also learned, thanks to the local participant Cody Moore, the local game for dominoes, called 42.

As might be expected, new friends mean links to new blogs: I suggest the SSPP's, Nicole Pepperell's Rough Theory, Jason Read's Unemployed Negativity, and Will Roberts' Accelerate the Contradictions. If I missed anybody, let me know.

Going to Texas to Read Marx

I'll be heading to the Society for Social and Political Philosophy's roundtable on Marx's Capital, Volume 1, tomorrow. The schedule is up here, and it looks like a strong selection of presentations. I'll be giving a paper entitled "Equality and Differentiating Totality: Reading Marx after Rancière," in which I argue two things:

1. That Rancière's principle (as he sometimes calls it) of equality must be thought as a contribution to a praxis that seeks to produce forms of social relations that both break the governmentality of elitist expertise and overturn the logic of capital.
2. That his critique of the intersection of state functions of expropriation and the logics of capital under neoliberalism should be complimented by David Harvey's work on the uneven geography of capitalism, including his analyses of capital accumulation and accumulation by dispossession.

Before going, with the news of people fighting the attack against unions in Wisconsin and Indiana (among other states), I would like to mention that my travel is funded by our part-time professors union's (the APTPUO) travel grant fund. Yet another benefit of union membership.

Thoughts on the RPA Conference

I am finally caught up with most of the things I needed to do when I returned to Ottawa, so now I've got a chance to record a few impressions about the Radical Philosophy Association conference that took place last week at the University of Oregon, Eugene. 

What I liked: The vibe is always welcoming. It's possible to converse and befriend other participants without, in most cases, observance of the distinctions that hold in most academic settings. It's possible to see some very sharp panels, such as the one Sean participated in, or 'The World as Concept,' which included presentations by Stuart Elden, Marie-Eve Morin, and Peter Gratton. If you look to the right, you will see that I've added Stuart's blog Progressive Geographies to our 'Friends, Comrades, Allies' links, and you might have noticed that Peter's blog Philosophy in a Time of Error has been there for a while. I'd add Marie-Eve as well if she blogged, but to my knowledge she does not. If you're not familiar with Stuart Elden's work, I'd highly recommend checking out  (aside from his books, obviously) his walkthrough of his recent project The Birth of Territory (see here). And for the moment, Peter has an account up about their panel. I finally had a chance to meet Peter in person, and there's a very strong likelihood that we will be co-authoring a paper in the future so that phrases like 'I agree completely with Peter...' and 'as Devin said about Rancière...' become redundant. Hell, after enough talk about Jean-Luc Nancy between Marie-Eve and Peter I even considered  working up a paper about Nancy, Coleridge, and Schelling on tautegory, myth, and being-in-common.

What I didn't like: A majority of the panels I attended were above average, but I was taken aback by the plenary by Bat-Ami Bar On. Let's turn this one over to Peter for a moment because (see, here we go:) I agree completely with him:

Her claim was that, while she felt at home with these “radicals,” she could do so while (1) arguing that leftists need to just understand how tough Obama has it in that darn war on terror, (2) leftists don’t engage in policy discussions (despite the fact that they, uh, do all the time and no link is even necessary), and (3) that she supposedly does, despite her only references being the widely read National Security Estimate and Bob Woodward’s recent book on Obama.

What's worse is that several audience members expressed, during the Q & A, a general agreement with her. At the RADICAL PHILOSOPHY ASSOCIATION! It's one thing to be browbeaten everywhere else because we radicals "don't take anything seriously," but at the RPA? It's the last place I would expect the plenary to condescend to us about our so-called irresponsibility. Sorry, but anti-imperialism is not only a serious position, but it's also the only correct position. But, you might say, what about the "six to twelve" places that might explode at any moment across the world (the number grew as the talk went on)? Why not put down the Bob Woodward book and ask why these situations might explode? Isn't that why we were there?

What I learned: I still have to work on my paper about Agamben and Benjamin. I now have a good idea of what I want to say (here), but I had the realization after presenting that I no longer have a paper about Agamben, rather it's a reinterpretation of Benjamin. Which means it has now moved from the Agamben section of my next project, to the section on Benjamin. Due to being over-prepared for a short panel, I had to skip much of the material, and I'm afraid I might have, from the audience's perspective, lost the thread. I received two or three very supportive comments, but also heard two serious misunderstandings, for which I am mostly willing to take the blame. By the time I get back to the RPA in 2012, I should be able to present something that actually fits in a twenty minute time slot.

Talk at CSU Stanislaus Friday, October 29th

If you've got some time to kill this Friday, and if you live in the area, I'll be giving a talk at CSU Stanislaus tomorrow afternoon, entitled "Benjamin, Sorel, and the Critique of Violence." It takes place from 4pm to 6pm, and while the room hasn't been announced yet, you should be able to get information at the Department of Philosophy office at L185 (which, if I remember correctly, designates the Vasche Library). 

As I wrote a few weeks ago: I did my last two years of undergraduate work at CSUS. I suppose that makes it a homecoming of sorts. It's also the first time I will have given a paper in the Central Valley, which means some of my old friends who are academically inclined and interested in what I have been researching, and who still live in the area, will have a chance to see some of that research in progress. And, as I'm still ironing out some of the kinks, it is a work in progress.

Talk, Talk, Talk at CSU Stanislaus

One of the new features of the Fall semester at the University of Ottawa is what is called the Fall 'study week,' a week off from October 24th to October 30th (those are the official dates; you'll see that they don't exactly line up with weekdays). We (my wife and I) originally planned the trip to visit family and friends out in California, but I've also arranged to give a talk, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, on "Benjamin, Sorel, and the Critique of Violence." It will be an early draft of a paper that I will be giving a few weeks later at the RPA conference on violence in Eugene; some of my thoughts on the lesser known Sorel are already posted here.

For those who know me, I did my last two years of undergraduate work at CSUS. I suppose that makes it a homecoming of sorts. It's also the first time I will have given a paper in the Central Valley, which means some of my old friends who are academically inclined and interested in what I have been researching, and who still live in the area, will have a chance to see some of that research in progress.

When I have a time and room number, I will post them. Here's the information thus far:

"Benjamin, Sorel, and the Critique of Violence"

Devin Zane Shaw

October 29, 2010, California State University Stanislaus 

The So-Called Report on the Conference...

For somebody who defended his dissertation last November and who successfully landed a contract to turn it into a book, I probably over-scheduled the last academic year. In November, I presented a paper on Sartre at the North American Sartre Society, and just recently participated in a panel on Marx, Heidegger, and Benjamin at the CPA and gave a paper on Badiou and Heidegger at the EPTC. For the next academic year, I've already got an abstract under review for the Radical Philosophy Association's meeting, which, if accepted, would make it the fourth time I will have gone to one of their meetings.

Now, I don't have a very extensive report to give on the conference(s). I was in Montreal for two full days, Tuesday and Wednesday, and spent three hours each day participating; Tuesday at our panel, and at  the  EPTC for three papers the next day, each related to my participation or a friend's: Wes Furlotte commented on a paper, I went to see what Chris Nagel, professor at CSU Stanislaus, was up to lately, and then I gave my paper. So, in total, six hours at the Humanities conference. Which isn't very much. At the last NASS meeting, I think I spent a majority of my time watching papers, commenting, arguing, schoozing, etc. 

From whence the question: why?

I've been thinking about this for a few days. There are a few answers I could possibly give, but I think it's related to the professional politics of large conferences. Nevertheless, I have two very different impressions of the CPA and the EPTC. Let's start with the CPA. I get the general impression that it's an analytic philosopher's  game. It's difficult not to get that impression when reading the schedule; and it's even harder not to get that impression when you start your panel on Tuesday morning at 9am and nobody's there. Yes, you read that correctly: Matt, David and I had no audience until perhaps 9:30am (and only 3 people passed in or out). Now, it was raining on a Tuesday morning, which is a strong motivator for somebody not to jump up and rush to a conference, and other panels didn't seem to runneth over in attendance. 

 

But let's put it this way: at some point you've got to make decisions about where to present your work, because these events cost money, and require a significant time commitment. So it's probably best to present work where you will get helpful commentary, suggestions, polemics, and contacts from people who have some familiarity with the subject matter (and you might learn a thing or two at other talks). Now, if the CPA is an analytic philosopher's game (and this might not be true in all cases), then it might not be the place for continental papers. However, even if it's not an analytic philosopher's game, the non-thematic orientation means that any response that you may get will be fairly broad. I didn't used to think like this because I was writing on Schelling, and almost anywhere you go, few people have any familiarity with his work.

However, I've started working on more contemporary figures, so my expectations have changed. Next year, at least, I will only be sending a paper to the EPTC. Not just on the response my paper received, but because I've had two good experiences with them. And rather than my rushed schedule this year, I can spend a few days at a few panels, participate a bit more. I know that this might not be the strongest reasoning, but it's the impression I've been trying to work out for the past few days.

So on to the Badiou paper: it was about the differences between Badiou and Heidegger on mathematics and technology. It's been a cursed paper. I wrote it about 3 and a half years ago, and the EPTC is the only group to take it; it was full of set theory formulas, and then it was intentionally polemical, talking about how Badiou's work disproves Heidegger's 'oracular proferring' on technology (the phrase is from J-L. Nancy). The commentator, Jonathan Blair, caught the rhetorical gambit behind the paper (the insistence on the opposition of Badiou and Heidegger), and pointed out how in some ways Badiou does not get beyond some possible Heideggerian objections, and that at some point, a decision is behind their differences. Which is the set up I expected. But this kind of objection leads us to a different set of problems (which we didn't actually get to because chaos broke out during the Q & A that had very little to do with my paper). 

 

The most important problem, I think, is that if a decision is the basis of ontological procedure, then ontology itself is a strategic discourse, and is not 'first philosophy.' I think the very problem is the idea of first philosophy itself; that rather than fetishizing the 'proper' beginning as securing philosophical discourse, we need to return a method of thinking totality in media res (which is why I'm not doing something like Derrida; in addition, this is going to have something to say about political economy...), without collapsing the distinction between philosophy and politics. One of the strong points of Badiou's philosophy is how he organizes a way of thinking that seeks to avoid the "passion of the real," which distinguishes his work from the 'oracular proferring' of Heidegger.

Thoughts on the Sartre Conference

I can't say I saw too much of Memphis (mainly the neighborhood at Cooper/Young, Beale Street and the National Civil Rights Museum), but I can say that I saw a lot of good papers at the most recent North American Sartre Society meeting, and that I met a lot of good people.

Before going, I was struck by how the conference was organized: the papers were held on the University of Memphis campus, but there was also a performance of Sartre's No Exit at the Brooks Museum on Thursday night and the keynote addresses and dinner at the Civil Rights Museum. For most conference organizers, multiple destinations over a city as large as Memphis, pose a lot of logistical problems, but the NASS organizers pulled it off admirably.

The conference was an excellent time. The staged reading of No Exit was so strong that it was easy to forget that the actors were holding their scripts through parts. I would reference the director, but her name is not in the schedule, which is too bad: she deserves a lot of credit for her work.

The plenary session on the anniversary of the Critique de la raison dialectique, including talks by Robert Bernasconi, Ronald Aronson, and Thomas Flynn, was thought provoking, and during the question period, Flynn's quick wit carried the day. The panel on Aronson's Living without God was also a high point, with contributions from Adrian van den Hoven, Ron Santoni, and Matt Eshleman. To list all the people I met and all the good conversations I had would be a bit much, but I can note that Bill Martin convinced me that I should be reading the later Althusser, which I already knew, but was just trying to put off. Needless to say, when I returned home I ordered a copy.

Most importantly, the conference motivated me to keep working on Sartre and the questions and problems that I find in his work, that it is worth taking up a new project and seeing where it goes, and (almost) wherever it goes, the next Sartre society meeting will be willing to listen. The organizers, primarily (to my knowledge) Christine Daigle and Jonathan Judaken, deserve praise for their efforts to make the conference both welcoming and worthwhile.