Crisis
Knowledge History Law
Social Critiques of Law
University of Kent
Kent Law School
Social Critiques of Law
29 January 2016
Darwin Conference Suite 3
One-day workshop of the Social Critiques of Law Research Group (SoCriL)
Organizer: Thanos Zartaloudis (Kent Law School & AA School of Architecture)
Assistants: Michalis Zivanaris & Gian Giacomo Fusco
Funded by: Social Critiques of Law Research Group
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Kent Law School, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/socril/events/2016/crisis.html
Thanks to the very kind support by Sarah Gilkes, Jasper Van Dooren and Ed Fairhead, Michalis Zivanaris and Gian Giacomo Fusco. This workshop would not have materialized if it were not for the collegiality and vision of the co-directors of the Social Critiques of Law Group at Kent Law School, Emilie Cloatre and Donatella Alessandrini. Photography (cover) kindly offered by Kiriakos Sifiltzoglou © 2015.
General Useful Information
Darwin College – Maps and Directions
https://www.kent.ac.uk/maps/canterbury/canterbury-campus/building/darwin-college
Wi-Fi access: Connect to the Cloud (while on Campus)
Taxis
Canterbury Taxi phone numbers: 01227 710777 or 01227 458885
Train Station
Canterbury West Train Station (for trains from/to London)
Coffee Places
(Coffee/Tea on Campus can be found at the Gulbenkian – on your way to Darwin College next to the Templeman Library).
Refectory Kitchen [Opposite Agnes Hotel]
16 St. Dunstans Street, Canterbury, CT2 8AF
Willows Secret Kitchen (on Stour Street just of the high street)
42 Stour Street, Canterbury, CT1 2PH
Micro Roastery (just off the high street)
4 Saint Margaret's Street, Canterbury CT1 2TP
The Goods Shed [Next to Canterbury West Train Station]
Station Rd W, Canterbury, Kent CT2 8AN
Bars
Abode Hotel (Hotel Bar)
The Goods Shed
The Falstaff (Hotel Bar)
Programme
Darwin Conference Suite 3
9.15 Registration
Michalis Zivanaris (University of Kent, Law School) & Gian Giacomo Fusco (University of Kent, Law School)
(Bring your Coffee/Tea; Best to get it from town before you come up to Campus. Coffee/Tea on Campus can be found at the Gulbenkian – on your way to Darwin College next to the Templeman Library).
9-30-9.35 Welcome
Toni Williams (University of Kent, Head of School of Law)
Thanos Zartaloudis (University of Kent, Law School & Architectural Association)
9.35-11.00 Session 1
Chair: Maria Drakopoulou (University of Kent, Law School)
Marika Rose (University of Durham, Department of Theology and Religion)
Crisis of judgement: on the juridical logics of Christian identity.
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Ilias Papagianopoulos (University of Piraeus, International and European Studies)
Crisis and modern Greek genealogies.
11.00-11.15 Tea/Coffee Break
11.15 – 12.45 Session 2
Chair: John Ackerman (University of Kent, Law School)
Bo Isenberg (Lund University, Faculty of Sociology)
Permanent crisis, epoch of the provisional – Images and experiences of classical modernity.
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Esther Leslie (University of London, Birkbeck College, Department of English and Humanities)
To Gamble in the Light of Crisis.
12.45 – 13.45 Lunch
13.45 – 15.15 Session 3
Chair: Thanos Zartaloudis (University of Kent, Law School & Architectural Association)
Emanuele Coccia (Centre d'Histoire et Théorie des Arts (CEHTA - EHESS), Paris and The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University)
From Krisis to Krasis: The Cosmology and Politics of Total Blending.
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Anton Schütz (University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)
Crisis, peirasmós, escalation : for an archaeo-theology of the unsustainable.
15.15 – 15.30 Tea/Coffee Break
15.30 – 17.00 Session 4
Chair: Iain MacKenzie (University of Kent, School of Politics and International Relations)
Marina Lathouri (Architectural Association, London, School of Architecture & University of Cambridge, School of Architecture)
Crisis and economies of living
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Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia University, Classics, English; Institute for Comparative Literature and Society)
Fortress Europe in Critical Condition.
17.00 – 17.15 Tea/Coffee Break
17.15 – 18.45 Session 5
Chair: Donatella Alessandrini (University of Kent, Law School, Co-Director SoCriL)
Marinos Diamantides (University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)
Western political theology, civil religion and the empire of management.
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Janet Roitman (The New School for Social Research, New York)
Anti-Crisis.
19.15 – 21.30 Dinner (Location TBC)
Abstracts & Bios (in order of presentation)
Marika Rose
(University of Durham, Department of Theology and Religion)
Crisis of judgement: on the juridical logics of Christian identity
The Hebrew scriptures understand judgement as salvation, an active process of righting wrongs in which the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up. The narrative of Pilate and Jesus marks the emergence in Christianity of a new logic of judgement not as salvation but as crisis, in which – as Agamben argues – ‘judgement and salvation mutually exclude one another’. What are the implications of this shift for Christian theology and for the logic of capital which emerges from Christianity?
Marika Rose is a Research Fellow at the CODEC Research Centre for Digital Theology, Durham University. She is Reviews Editor of the Journal “Theology and Sexuality”. She recently completed a PhD thesis on the relationship between the Christian apophatic tradition and contemporary continental philosophy, particularly the work of Slavoj Žižek. Her current project focuses on angels, cyborgs, and the theology of work.
Ilias Papagianopoulos
(University of Piraeus, International and European Studies)
Crisis and Modern Greek Genealogies
During the Greek crisis, political discourse has had very often porous borders with concepts and patterns originated in cultural narratives. Those patterns revive and reproduce a discussion which originated in the nineteenth century and between its ideological camps. On the one hand, in the so-called 'hellenocentric' paradigm and its variations, modern Europe is seen in a negative light and pre-modern Greek traditions in a positive one, whereas for the 'eurocentric' narrative, the view is the exactly opposite one. In the first part of my presentation, I will refer to three modern and contemporary examples of the second case, that had an important effect in the public discourse of the recent years. Although the three paradigmatic thinkers of my focus (K. Axelos, P. Kondylis and S. Ramfos) come from very different philosophical traditions, they nonetheless coincide in their central claim: that modern Greece lacks access to modernity's temporality and, thus, to the political subjectivity which is linked with that specific temporality. Modern Greece would remain fragmentary and deprived of a living heritage, enclosed in an ahistoric crypta.
After analyzing aspects of that argument, in the second part of the presentation I will question the very basis for the distinction between the two main narratives, suggesting that the actual structure of their argument reveals a hidden opponent, who is surprisingly common to them: while they both claim a pure ontological basis as their departure point, provided before the domain of the historical experience, they both construct closed political ontologies and schemes of historicity. On the other hand, casting an eye on public debates, but also on the literature of the nineteenth century, shows that modern Greece was marked from the very beginning by the historical experience of a lack of foundational continuity and of a hovering in a constant exceptional state of historical bordering. In other words, the common opponent was none other than the traumatic modern Greek historicity itself, which remained unformulated in philosophical terms; and the main opponent of the most prominent figures of modern Greek philosophy, equally 'hellenocentric' and 'eurocentric', are visible only through literary and artistic expressions.
In that sense, the so-called crisis can be seen as the constellation of a return to the initial symbolic void of the modern Greek historical experience. The question would thus be whether an affirmative position towards that void and a different relation to the idea of an origin, could lead philosophical thought to a different kind of understanding Greece as a European subject, with the potentiality of a post-foundational political and historical agency.
Ilias Papagiannopoulos studied philosophy and history at Innsbruck where he was also awarded his doctoral degree with a thesis on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. He held seminars and lectured at the Universities of Innsbruck (1997-2003), Panteion (2004-2007) and Thessaly (2015) and was a research fellow at the Greek Academy for Sciences and Arts (2001-2004). Since 2008 he is Assistant Professor for contemporary political philosophy at the Department of International and European Studies of the University of Piraeus. He has written two books in Greek, on Moby-Dick (Exit stage left, 2000) and King Oedipus (Beyond absence, 2005), and he has edited one more (Present past and present future, 2011). His most recent publication is 'Krise und neugriechische Genealogien', in his co-edited Griechenland im europäischen Kontext. Krise und Krisendiskurse (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016). In 2016 a collection in Greek of recent essays of his is forthcoming. These essays concern the politics of time in Arendt, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida and others, as well as inquiries into modern Greek political philosophy and literature.
Bo Isenberg
(Lund University, Faculty of Sociology)
Permanent crisis, epoch of the provisional – Images and experiences of classical modernity
The presentation offers an outline of classical modern reflection (sociology, cultural theory, literature) on the constitution and transformation of modernity, and its cultural and mental dispositions. It will be argued that classical modernity may be conceived as an archive of influential concepts on culture today. Core references are Siegfried Kracauer, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies.
Bo Isenberg is a Reader at the Sociology Faculty of Lund University. He specializes in social theory, cultural sociology and social psychology. He has published in subjects like identity, culture, globalization, modernity, crisis, sociology’s relation to the novel. Presently he is involved in a research project on identity and cosmopolitanism in the Weimar Republic. Some of his recent publications in English include: “Critique and crisis. Reinhart Koselleck's thesis of the genesis of modernity” Eurozine – Network of European Cultural Journals, 2012; and “Mammonist Capitalism – Ubiquity, Immanence, Acceleration and the Social Consequences” in Nordicum-Mediterraneum (E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies), vol.8:2, 2013.
Esther Leslie
(Birkbeck College, Department of English and Humanities)
To Gamble in the Light of Crisis
This paper draws on Benjamin’s Arcades Project, exploring it as a text about finance, or casino capitalism. Like its Benjaminian model, this paper explores the intermingling of economy, gesture, pleasure, terror in the locations of burgeoning commodity capitalism, a capitalism that is in crisis from its start. In addition, this paper sets a history of capitalist crisis in relation to the fluctuations of light and darkness.
Esther Leslie is Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, School of English, University of London. Esther Leslie has research interests in Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Other research interests include the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation, colour and madness. Her books include: Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto 2000), Hollywood Flatlands, Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso 2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005) Walter Benjamin (Reaktion 2007), and Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Unkant, 2014). Her translations include Georg Lukacs, A Defence of 'History and Class Consciousness (Verso 2002) and Walter Benjamin: The Archives (Verso, 2007). Her next book is on the poetics and politics of liquid crystals.
Emanuele Coccia
EHESS, Paris – Italian Academy, Columbia University, New York)
From Krisis to Krasis: the Cosmology and Politics of Total Blending.
In pre-Socratic cosmology krisis was the name for the power of judgment and the force of the distinction of things: a krisis as a power or a force was opposed to an opposite one, the force which produced blending, mixture, confusion. In the vivid Anaxagorean version, krisis is embodied in a separated cosmic mind, which is facing the universal surrounding mass, wherein all “things are together, infinite both in number and in smallness” and nothing is clear and distinct. Following this cosmological model, the genesis of the world is then the act, through which the mind separates, judges, distinguishes and produces differences out of the mixture of all things: cosmogony is, here, an affair of critique. Against this crude opposition the stoic cosmology tried to describe the world as the place of the total blending (krasis) of all elements, where everything is in everything and the universal mind is at the same time the cause and the form of this total blending. I will claim that the shift from Modernity to Postmodernity is not a pure historical but a cosmological one, and that it could be interpreted as a transition from an Anaxagorean cosmological model to a Stoic one. Rationality is nowadays the name for the process of systematic blending and mixing of the elements of the worlds and of the methodical disengagement of every form of distinction and judgement (and therefore of critique). In front of the contemporary world, critique is not only powerless: it has literally no more place.
Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Florence and was formerly an Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany. He worked on the history of European normativity and on aesthetics. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. Among his publications are: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), La vie sensible (Paris 2010, translated in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian; English translation in press) and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan 2009).
Anton Schütz
(University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)
Crisis, peirasmós, escalation: for an archaeo-theology of the unsustainable
Well-known maps of the undoable are split in a moral-cum-legalist and a possibilistic half, separating that which ought not, from that which cannot be done. Throughout most of the history of Philosophy they were associated with the domains known as practical inquiry in the first, of theoretical inquiry in the second case. This has changed to the extent that that which ought to be « done » (leaving aside, for the occasion, the most decisive issue: by whom?) is now increasingly seen as a dependent variable of that which can be. What is the relation, if any, between these changes and the appearance of the terrorizingly inflationary supernova of « crisis »? And how should we understand the new galaxy of more re-assuring themes or disciplines such as management, oikonomia, functional differentiation, and the quest for a new science – a quasi-ontology of process and happening, roughly – that they respond to? The theme of a "mystery of sustainability" will serve us as a guide into the long build-up of a very contemporary problematic.