Suchergebnisse

The lesson taught by every historical attempt to construct society in accordance with an idea: where utopia is, wreckage will follow. So we have been told, and do, in large part, believe. The empire of capitalist parliamentarism, sovereign police, and conventional skepticism rises from the ruins of futures past. This symposium invited four inventive, provocative, and engaged thinkers to reflect upon utopia and its wreckages, to help us understand the valences of realization and ruination, of wreaking and wrecking, within socialist/post-socialist, sovereign/post-sovereign, imperial/post-imperial, feminist, and queer political programmes. Boris Buden is a writer and cultural critic. He studied philosophy in Zagreb and cultural theory at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Among his many publications are Barikade (Zagreb 1996) and Zone des Übergangs. Vom Ende des Postkommunismus (2009). Among his translations into Croatian are two books of Sigmund Freud. Bini Adamczak is an unstable alliance of everyday reproduction modes, unwanted heritages, and quarrelsome spectres, such as deconstructivist feminisms and the orthodox critique of value. She's a performer, visual artist, and independent author of borderlining texts such as Kommunismus. Kleine Geschichte wie alles anders wird (2004) and Gestern Morgen. Über die Einsamkeit kommunistischer Gespenster und die Rekonstruktion der Zukunft (Münster, 2007). Daniel Loick teaches social and political philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt. His book on sovereignty, Ironien des Politischen. Elemente einer kritischen Theorie der Souveränität (2011) will be published this fall. He is also co-organizer of the international conference Re-Thinking Marx at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Karen Tongson is associate professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture, and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, will appear in August 2011. She is on of the editors of the series Postmillennial Pop ...

In times when norms of commerce and technology seem to pervade all activities, the example of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht stands out. Until its recent entrepreneurial recasting under austerity measures, the Academie had been a site of encounters which had surpassed the sterile confines of academia and the consensual norms of market-oriented work: it welcomed examinations and radical critiques of the spaces of artistic creation, theoretical inquiry and design, while also questioning the relations and boundaries between these fields. Building upon this experience, while at the same time surpassing its institutional limitations, it was our intention to construct a platform for collaboration between theorists, designers and artists by suspending the borders between their respective disciplines, by affirming the need for collective and experimental work, by engaging in projects which do not shy away from questioning the very possibilities of different domains, whether aesthetic, scientific or political. Within the framework of a three-day inaugural meeting, we presented and discussed works in design, art and theory by people formerly related to or supporting the Academie as well as others who are joining us. A series of lectures and performances, seminars and screenings, as well as displays of works and book presentations served not only as materials for a broader discussion, but also as a nucleus for future collaborative work.Monday 15 July 10:30 Welcome 10:45 Pietro Bianchi: Looking With No Eyes. The Lacanian Gaze and the Problem of Formalization of the Visual Field 11:15 Alan Smart: How to Design? 11:45 Coffee Break 12:15 Jonathan Short: On the Sovereignty of Value 12:45 Sami Khatib: Non-Realist Realism, Notes on Benjamin and Brecht 13:15 Benjamin Dawson: Why Practice? 13:45-15:45 Lunch Break 15:45 Nathaniel Boyd: Who Thinks Concretely? Hegel's Critique of Political Abstraction 16:15 Agon Hamza: Žižek's Althusser on Ideology 16:45-17:15 Coffee Break 17:15 Simone van Dijken: Mumbling with the Devil ...