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.

Session 3: Violence (Monday 28th February)

"It is no doubt possible to create conditions under which men are dehumanized ... and, under such conditions, not rage and violence but their conspicuous absence is the clearest sign of dehumanization."

- Hannah Arendt

VIOLENCE

6-8pm, Monday 28th February
Senate House, room 103 (1st floor)

Is violence endemic to the human condition? What role does it play in the contemporary world? Can it ever be justified? And what ethical concerns does it raise for literature, the arts and critical theory?

Our third session this term will be introduced with a 10-minute 'provocation' by Dr Eva Aldea (Westminster and Goldsmiths). Eva's current research focuses on beheadings, including videos of terrorist beheadings. It argues that such violence can be understood as a system of signs, and asks if this is what makes it uniquely human.

The readings are extracts from the following:

• Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
  

• Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2009).

All are welcome to attend.

Fourth Session: Criticism and Crisis

Our fourth session will take place on Thursday 25th March in room GSB2, 2 Gower Street, between 1 and 3pm. We will be looking at an extract from Slavoj Žižek's First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (London: Verso, 2009).

Discussion points will be as follows:

- Is it ideology, stupid?

- Within global capitalism, is choice ever choice at all?

- 'The best indicator of the Left's lack of trust in itself is its fear of crisis.' Do you agree?

- How can critical theory and/or literature respond to crisis?