Hello! A new term awaits. We have an exciting line-up to maintain our theoretical spirits during the Credit Crunch. As ever, all postgraduate students and faculty are welcome to attend. We usually go for a drink nearby afterwards, and sometimes for dinner. Reading texts will be uploaded as PDFs on the adjoining page, ‘Texts for Reading Groups’, as soon as they become available.
All sessions run from 6-8pm on Wednesday evenings, in NG15. That’s the ground floor of the North Block of Senate House, Russell Square. A map is on the adjoining page, ‘About the seminar’, and signs will be up on the day of each session to point you in the right direction.
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Weds 8th October - Speaker Session
“Time and Discontinuity: Aristotle, Bergson, Deleuze”
Nathan Widder, Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London
Nathan Widder is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Royal Holloway. He is the author of Reflections on Time and Politics (Penn State University Press, 2008), and Genealogies of Difference (University of Illinois Press, 2002). For further details of his publications and research interests please see Nathan’s home-page
Please see the ‘Texts for Reading Groups’ page for a PDF of around 40 pages from Nathan’s new book, as optional preparatory reading for his visit.
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Weds 22nd October – Reading Group (in advance of Laura Salisbury’s paper)
Extracts from Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do with our Brain?, trans. by Sebastian Rand (forthcoming). We will make this text available on the website or by email as soon as possible. If you prefer, it’s already available in French: Que faire de notre cerveau? (Paris: Bayard, 2004)
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Weds 5th November – Speaker Session
“Language, Neurology and the Subject of Modernity”
Laura Salisbury, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College
Dr Laura Salisbury is RCUK Research Fellow in Science, Technology and Culture in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Current projects include a monograph on Beckett, comedy and ethics, a book entitled From Late Modernism to Postmodernism, and a study of the relationship between modernity and early twentieth-century neuroscientific conceptions of language. For further details of her research, please see Laura’s home-page
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Weds 19th November – Reading Group (in advance of Stella Sandford’s paper)
Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s ‘Symposium’ (189c-193d), in any modern edition. We will make a version available as a PDF on the ‘Texts for Reading Groups’ page.
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Weds 3rd December -
“The Origin of Sex”
Stella Sandford, Middlesex University
Stella Sandford is Principal Lecturer in Modern European Philosophy, and author of Plato and Sex (forthcoming 2009, Polity Press), How to Read de Beauvoir (Granta Books, London, 2006), and The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (Continuum, London, 2000). For details of her research interests, other publications and some online versions of her work, see Stella’s home-page
