Avital Ronell and Judith Butler. Contemporaneity of Philosophy. 2006 2/3

http://www.egs.edu/ Lecture with Avital Ronell and Judith Butler at European Graduate School, focusing on contemporaneity of philosophy. European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies Department Program Saas-Fee, Switzerland 2006

Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and an American feminist and post-structuralist philosopher interested in feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, ethics, zionism, israel, oppression, academic freedom and cultural narrative. Judith Butler is the author of Giving An Account of Oneself; Undoing Gender; Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence; Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek); Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection; Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"; Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; and Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France.

Avital Ronnell, is a Professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University. Her research interests include literary and other discourses, feminism; philosophy, technology and media, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and performance art. She is the author of The Test Drive (2005), Stupidity (2003), Stupidity; The Test Drive (2001), French translation forthcoming by Galilee Press, France, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989), Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992), Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986/1993), and Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millenium (1994)

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• Butler
• Bataille
• Friedrich
• Nietzsche
• contemporaneity
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[sshuck]

@bertinotti

Talking about "broads" and "excrescences" in the same comment does not make you a winner. Repeat: does *not*.

[Nostressinthefarwest]

I can't understand the joke about the new agers (about 6). Can someone help me ? The sound isn't very good (as is my english...)

[mayakronfeld]

I'm not sure I see the point. All her critique of "contemporaneity" seems to show is that some present states of affairs are CAUSED by past states of affairs. But that doesn't show that those present states of affairs are THEMSELVES past states of affairs!

[bertinotti]

This is painful. Two broads aching for attention and a laugh. Convolutions and parentheses. "Spin offs and regurgitations"? It is lovely to watch someone so comfortable in her gaseous excrescensces.

[matheme]

The challenge is to find the facts were the truth shines through, like Davis does...not to endlessly proliferate caveats from Nietzsche in order to arrive at the insight that New Agers are kind of retarded.

[matheme]

i can't believe she denies even the most basic materialist conception of history. Yes, "there is no contemporary," in some Lacanian sense of incompleteness, or because the ancients are modern or something paradoxical, the but there also kind of is a contemporary constellation of forces, that someone like Mike Davis works so hard to find.

[felixunus]

Jesus, will she please shut up. And I *like* postmodern theory.