Spring Meeting 2017 | 15th – 24th April | Jason Read, Danielle Macbeth, & Lauren Berlant
Submitted by Valentina Desideri on Fri, 2017-02-17 00:57
This will be the seventh edition of Spring Meeting. The format is probably familiar by now: three speakers, three days, five hours per day, no written papers. PAF continues to be orientated towards bringing together artists, theorists, scientists, and many others around something like discipline across disciplines. To this end Jason Read, Danielle Macbeth, & Lauren Berlant have been invited because they represent three diverse engagements with thought encompassing empirical and speculative dimensions of politics, culture, art, philosophy and science.
Jason will trace the genealogy of transindividuality from its roots in Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx to its contemporary theorization in thinkers such as Simondon, Virno, Stiegler, and Balibar. This will lay the ground for him to unfold his current research on the politics of work and the condition of 'transindividuality after solidarity'.
Danielle's sessions will concern the profound transformations in Western intellectual culture over the past 2500 years and what those transformations can teach us both about what it is to be human and about our cognitive relation to the world around us. Among more focused concerns will be, for example, the nature and role of systems of written signs in the practice of mathematics and the implications such systems have for our understanding of the nature of mind (and the prospects for artificial intelligence), and the idea of the end of science and its implications for the humanities.
Lauren proposes to speak about 'Intimacy, after Belonging: Inconvenient, Dissociated, Humourless', with a day devoted to each of these structural relations and atmospheres. These sessions will focus on problems of ambivalent attachment that shape the affects and atmospheres of contemporary cosmopolitical and national spaces, spaces that are simultaneously suffused with nostalgia and sentimentality while also being radically fractured in structural and affected terms.
PAF has a commitment that these problematics, these ways of thinking, might not be opposed, might be part of a collective endeavour. Around the main sessions will orbit more talks, performances, reading groups, concerts, walks, and whatever else those present wish to propose.
The fees are as usual: 18€ per night for the rooms, 12€ for yearly membership, and 17€ for three meals a day prepared by our kitchen, with a little hand from everyone who will lend it. We can only accept payments in cash or French cheques, so please bring one or the other along (there is an ATM in the village).
PAF gets very full these days, sometimes overly, so please book early, we’d like you to be there. It is only possible to book for the full period 15-24 of April. The first lecture starts at 16h on the 15th. The last lecture ends the evening of the 23rd.
Reservations at contactpaf@gmail.com
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Jason Read is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY 2003) and The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill 2015/Haymarket 2016). He has published essays on Spinoza, Deleuze, Foucault, and The Wire.
Danielle Macbeth is the T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of Frege’s Logic (Harvard UP, 2005) and Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing (Oxford UP, 2014), as well as many essays on a variety of issues in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, the history and philosophy of mathematics, and other topics. She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, USA, in 2002 – 3, and has been awarded both an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Burkhardt Fellowship and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Department of English, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is author of many books and edited volumes, most notably Cruel Optimism (Duke, 2011) and a trilogy on national sentimentality, The Anatomy of National Fantasy (Chicago, 1991); The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2009); and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke, 1997).
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