http://www.egs.edu/ Avital Ronell, Judith Butler and Laurence Rickels conducting a joint seminar in which they discussed Martin Heideggers essay What is Thinking? and how it relates to Hannah Arendt and her ideas on judgement. They spoke about Arendts feeling of not being welcome in the league of male philosophers and Arendts view that she was a political theorist and therefore public versus Heideggers solitary philosophy. They discussed the ontology of thought, as well as the active creation of ones being through thinking. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2009 Judith Butler Avital Ronell Laurence Rickels
Avital Ronell is a professor of German, comparative literature and English at New York University. After receiving her PhD from Princeton University, Ronell continued her studies in France with Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous. Avital Ronell translated Derridas work into english and introduced his work to the American academy. Though often labeled a philosopher (as well as a key player in critical and political theory, cultural and literary criticism), Ronells thoroughly transdisciplinary work, discussing the telephone directory, Rodney King, Madame Bovary, Martin Heidegger and schizophrenia, consistently slips the bounds of traditional academic castes. Avital Ronell is often determined to be deconstructive, Derridian, Heideggarean, post-feministic, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic and yet her writing continually works beyond these labels remaining utterly singular. In The Telephone Book, Ronell seems to seek to undermine, or at least address through direct intervention, commonly held views of the addressee and the author.Avital Ronells published works include Telephone Book (1989), Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1993), Crack Wars; Literature, Addiction, Mania (1993) Stupidity (2001), The Test Drive (2005), and recently, in 2007, the Uber Reader (ed. Diane Davis).
Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a post-structuralist philosopher working in contemporary politics, cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics. Butler discusses questions about the creation of identity and subjectivity, following the process in which one becomes a subject through the donning of identities, most notably those of gender, race and sexual orientations. Butlers work investigates the formation of identity, be it an identity of gender, sexual persuasion, or political thought—and through what processes these formations come into existence. Her work is dialectical in style, posing question upon question—investigating—while resisting a final synthesis and allowing a/the question to remain open. Butlers interrogations focus in the most part on five concepts—the subject and its formation; gender; sex; language, and finally, the psyche. Through these five ideas, her work encompasses a wide scope, moving deftly from art criticism to cultural theory to political activism, as well philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and politics and the investigation of power.Judith Butler is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000). In 2004, she published Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning with (Verso Press, 2004), Frames of War (Verso 2009).
Larry Rickels is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous books, including Aberrations of Mourning (1988), The Vampire Lectures (1990), Looking After Nietzche (1990) and most notably of the three volume set, Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002). In this newly seminal work, Rickels traces the interstices of psychoanalysis and National Socialism, examining the works of Kafka, Adorno, Freud and Lacan, as well as Heidegger to describe the constructs and conjunctions within twentieth century political thought. Drawing widely on such influences as the Frankfurt School and Walt Disney, Rickels attempts to make a case the the human psyche and the world wars of the last century are closely and intimately joined. His latest book, I Am That I Am, on the writer Philip K. Dick, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2010.
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@bertinotti "What gives us this gift, the gift of what must properly be thought about, is what we call most thought-provoking. Our answer to the question what the most thought-provoking thing might be is the assertion: most thought-provoking for our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking." Think that, the thought that you can only think the theatricality when you negate the theatricality for a thought you have not even begun to think.
labsencedumythe 11 months ago
A risk in "the formal rudiments of presentation" is that they can obliterate the opportunity for thinking. There are certainly times where a bit (or a lot) of work on the part of the listener or reader is entirely appropriate. Its always important to clearly distinguish entertainment from learning. If you can't or don't wan't to there's always TED talks.
kirrmy 11 months ago
there is a self important theatricality to their presentations which is annoying, because they do not have even the basic formal rudiments of presentation down . . . also, Jews and Arabs do not argue about the shape of the table, that is a botched reference to negotiations during Vietnam. Avital is dropping the beat all over the place.
bertinotti 2 years ago