Spring Term 2013: Session 5

Are Critical Theories Conspiracy Theories?

Dr Devorah Baum

(Southampton)

6-8pm, Wednesday 20th March

Room 264, Senate House, Bloomsbury

This talk will trace certain of the strains and influences on the ‘suspicious hermeneutics’ of 20th Century critical thought – with reference to Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Sedgwick, Bloom, Žižek, &c – back to their origins in the Enlightenment (Cartesian) rationality to which these thinkers are normally counterposed, and forward on to our current era, described by journalist Jonathan Kay as the age of the conspiracy theory. In so doing, the talk will describe an ineluctable mirroring between conspiracism and rationality itself, making the case that claims to knowledge are, in a certain sense, bound to be paranoid. With examples from postwar literature (e.g. Saul Bellow) and with reference to Trutherism (a major contemporary conspiracy movement suspicious of the ‘official’ version of events on 9/11), it will be seen how the ‘radical doubt’ espoused by many critical theories and all conspiracy theories is very often a form of radical certainty predicated on parallel claims to have evaded worldly deceptions by means of the inoculating promise of self-knowledge. 

Dr Devorah Baum is Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. Her interests include the return of religion, the influence of religion on contemporary literature and philosophy, the relationship between religion and violence and between religion and psychoanalysis, and Jewish literature and philosophy; as well as more generally hermeneutics, critical theory, Jacques Derrida, psychoanalysis, and post-war American literature. 

Dr Baum has recently begun working on a project exploring the affective and rhetorical roles of Knowledge. Be it social, political, economic or scientific, Knowledge is widely assumed to be an unquestionable good whose validity and durability persists irrespective of the motives, desires, fears, needs or ambitions of those who pursue it, and seen variously as empowering, beneficial, and at base context-independent: transferable without fundamental changes to what it is. 

The project considers some of the side-effects of the ‘Information Age’ and the ‘Knowledge Economy’ (including paranoia, conspiracy theories, information addiction, fundamentalism, managerialism, political correctness, &c) and examines the ways in which Knowledge is variously used as a defence, refuge and inoculation against the anxiety of uncertainty, not Knowing, or the inevitable but strangely unbearable thought of being (in the) wrong.

This is our final session of the Spring term. All are welcome to attend.

Summer Term: Session 4

Something Lost: Words and the Voiding of Psychic Reality


Professor Josh Cohen

(Goldsmiths, University of London)


6-8pm, Wednesday 30th May
Senate House, Room G26 (Ground Floor)

In this paper, Professor Josh Cohen brings Freud and Blanchot into dialogue by way of the problem of externalization in psychoanalysis and literature. The passage from the thing to the word set out in the Freudian account of becoming conscious is ironically recapitulated in the Blanchotian account of the becoming of literature. A couple of very short stories by Lydia Davis (not coincidentally the translator of the relevant Blanchot essay) will help adumbrate this predicament.

Josh Cohen is Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (Pluto Press, 1998), Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (Continuum Guide to Holocaust Studies, 2003), and How to Read Freud (Granta, 2005). He specialises in contemporary literature and philosophy, and is also a practising psychoanalyst. His forthcoming book, The Private Life (Granta, Autumn 2013), explores the pervasive drive in contemporary life to eradicate the fundamental strangeness of the private experience.

Suggested Reading:

- Sigmund Freud, 'The Ego and the Id', Chapter 2. 
- Maurice Blanchot, 'Literature and the Right to Death,' from The Work of Fire. 

Session 4: Speaker: Dr Simon Glendinning (Wednesday 24th November)

For our next session, we are thrilled to welcome as a guest speaker Dr Simon Glendinning (LSE), who will be giving a talk entitled 'The Deepest Wounds: On Blows to Narcissism'.

The session will take place on Wednesday 24th November in room G35, Senate House, between 6 and 8pm. All are welcome to attend.

Simon is Reader in European Philosophy at the London School of Economics, and Director of the LSE Forum for European Philosophy. He realised he could make a career in philosophy when he spent two hours successfully untangling the twisted strings of a stunt kite. Wittgenstein says that 'philosophy unties knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but philosophizing has to be as complicated as the knots it unties'. Simon has a BPhil and a DPhil in Philosophy from Oxford University and has been exploring knots for a living since 1994. He is still not clear whether philosophy is a complicated education for grown-ups or just a simple occupation for grown-ups who never made it beyond childhood.