Spring Term: Session 3

Examined Life

DVD Screening

6pm, Wednesday 15th February

Senate House,

*** Room G35 (please note room change) ***

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

—Socrates

Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets...

In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.

Peter Singer’s thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue’s posh boutiques. Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture’s fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be. Offering privileged moments with great thinkers from fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy’s power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it.

Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

All are welcome to attend.

Second Session: Terror and Trauma

Our second meeting will take place on Thursday 25th February in Room GSB2, 2 Gower Street between 1 and 3pm, and we will discuss chapter 2 and chapter 5 of Judith Butler's Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 'Violence, Mourning, Politics,' and 'Precarious Life.'

As optional secondary reading, we suggest Adriana Cavarero's Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

The session's key questions will be as follows:

'From the subsequent experience of loss and fragility, ... the possibility of making different kinds of ties emerges' ('Violence, Mourning, Politics', p. 40). Does Butler's theory of mourning and vulnerability provide an adequate ethical response to acts of terror in the West?

'[W]e would be wrong to think that the First World is here and the Third World is there, that a second world is somewhere else, that a subaltern subtends these divisions. These topographies have shifted, and what was once thought of as a border ... is a highly populated site ...' ('Violence, Mourning, Politics', p. 49). Has a shifting of global borders in the early twenty-first century rendered ideas of 'otherness' and 'difference' newly problematic?

'The Other makes an ethical claim upon us ... the Other is the condition of discourse' ('Precarious Life', pp. 138-9). What does Butler mean when she uses the term 'discourse', and does she employ it in an appropriate way?

'The derealization of loss - the insensitivity to human suffering and death - becomes the mechanism through which dehumanization is accomplished. This derealization takes place neither inside nor outside the image, but through the very framing by which the image is contained' ('Precarious Life', p. 148). In what ways can literature and/or critical theory effectively respond to a dehumanising 'derealization of loss'?