Program
Day 1. Imagining Les Temps Qui Viennent
Inaugural Greeting
Panel 1. Living and Imagining
Micol Bez
Living without, ou faire avec
In the essay I wrote for the first phase of this project I proposed that we think of the virus as a critical agent that traces the limits of our socio-political thought. I still think that applies, and specifically that the virus is unveiling a fundamental breaking point in generational politics: the experience of futuricide. What my generation is experiencing is the impossibility of projecting into the future, the totalising structure of precarity as a mode of consciousness. In my previous text I tentatively proposed, to counteract this loss, the development of an affective critical register. So, let us keep talking about feelings, about and political feelings. I want to talk about feelings as modes of existence of consciousness, be it individual, generational, national or social. I want to ask: how does precarity make you feel? And how are such feelings limiting the kind of meaning-making activities you’re capable of, our social and political modes of existence, our imaginaries? I would like, in other words, to take this conference as an occasion to further pursue the questions I had sketched in my article, focusing on the affects of generational politics, asking: how does it feel to say, “I don’t want to have children, you know… because of climate change, COVID and temporary employment”? I we are to pinpoint what marks the difference between our world and that of our parents, we are forced to look at the radical transformations in our relationship to time. We grew up in economic crisis and climate catastrophe, they are our conditions of emergence. We came to adulthood expecting precarity. We are building ourselves in a pandemic. It is a futuricide. A loss of future and, possibly, of world. What we are being denied is the possibility of protention (Husserl) and futurality, and this is why precarity entails an existential loss, a deprivation that touches on the very structure of consciousness: our need to project onto the world and onto the future (Crépon). Then, possibly, what we lost is the whole world, or a substantial part of it — the world as a complex structure of relational meaning-making experiences. Some meanings, some modes of existence of consciousness are not possible for our generation. This is one of the critical limits the virus is tracing. But how to explain it to our parents? Can we do so emotionally? An emotion, says Sartre, is a transformation of the world, “la saisie de rapports nouveaux et d’exigences nouvelles.” Thinking of emotions in this manner can help understand what precarity is really doing to us, how it is reshaping the modes of existence of a whole generation in the midst of “le devenir nègre du monde” (Mbembe), but also how we can mobilise our feelings to resist (Lordon, Povinelli, Cvetkovich). If all we know is uncertainty and futuricide, how do we nevertheless continue to think about the future? Are we still capable of projecting ourselves ? I mean, can we live without a future?
This is really a work-in progress, a new thread that emerged from thinking about this project. So, I would be particularly thrilled to have your critiques and suggestions.
Micol Bez is currently teaching in the CPES (Cycle Pluridisciplinaire d’Études Supérieures) at the University of Paris Sciences and Letters. She is a graduate of the École Normale de Paris. Her research focuses on race and whiteness in post-kantian philosophy and on the political uses of the quasi-transcendental. She is working currently on sexual violence and on phenomenological approaches to fear in sexual abuse. Originally from Italy, she did her undergraduate work at Georgetown University, and has studied at Sciences Po, the University of Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint Denis, and theCentre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (Kingston University London) before entering the École Normale Supérieure in 2016. She is also a published poet, playwright, and dedicated teacher. In 2019 she taught as a temporary lecturer at the University of Johannesburg.
Perrine Simon-Nahum
To Remake History
The COVD pandemic has changed the world. Did it for all that open onto a new era? What is this “afterward” we hear about? Does it belong to the regime of an apocalyptic history similar to that advanced by the defenders of collapsology, a kind of history which turns us into the passive spectators of humanity’s destiny? I will instead posit that, by opening ourselves to a philosophy of relationships, the pandemic allows us to remake history, that is, to become once more actors in our own lives. I will explore what the modalities of this “return” entail from the perspective of philosophy but also of our relationship to institutions.
Perrine Simon-Nahum is Director of Research at the CNRS Centre de recherches historiques, attached to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Professor Simon-Nahum specializes in contemporary history, notably Judaism and the history of Jews in France. She is the author of La cité investie; La science du judaïsme français et la République; André Malraux: L'engagement politique au XXe siècle; and Les Juifs et la modernité: l'héritage du judaïsme et les sciences de l'homme en France au XIXe siècle.
Panel 2: Three Tales From Pandemos
Daniel Cohen
The Economy in Times of Virus
The virus has suddenly made society fearful of face-to-face contact. People have been trying to protect themselves from the risk of infection others may be carrying. Restaurants, cafés, and concert halls—essential sites where urban civilization can flourish—were closed. Life withdrew to the family cell, and the burden of stress and frustration followed. During the lockdown, every possible step was taken to allow people to work online easily, to purchase goods without having to physically enter a store, to entertain themselves without venturing out to a theater or concert hall. As it happens, the key feature of what can be called digital capitalism is precisely to reduce physical interactions, to dispense with the need for people to meet face-to-face. Under the assault of the health crisis, fine-tuning digital capitalism has come into the spotlight: increasing its efficiency by dispensing human beings to meet in person. Many activities have been rendered virtual. In medicine, for example, many consultations are now conducted remotely. The big winners in the crisis were Amazon, Apple, and Netflix, whose control of the market exploded during the lockdown. The virus arrived at just the right time for the dominant players in digital industries, who were able to conduct a full-scale experiment on the virtual world’s assimilation of the physical world.
Daniel Cohen is Professor and Chair of Economics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He is the author of Richesse du monde, pauvretés des nations; Nos Temps Modernes; La mondialisation et ses ennemis, Trois leçons sur la société post-industrielle; La Prospérité du vice: Une introduction (inquiète) à l'économie; and The Infinite Desire for Growth.
Nathalia Justo
Following rice in Brazil: Covid-19 and the global unchaining of food production
In Brazil, as in other countries around the globe, Covid-19 has also behaved like another kind of plague. Much like grasshoppers threatened to devastate plantations earlier this year in the middle of the health pandemic, the Coronavirus has also wreaked havoc in Brazil's food supply. In the past twenty years, Brazil has increasingly fine tuned its agrobusiness model to favor the production of soy and corn for exportation - a new version of the centuries old model set up through colonization which has nonetheless relied on further land concentration and Amazon’s deforestation. Brazil’s position on global food chains has meant that the local prices of these and other basic food items - rice in particular, has skyrocketed during the pandemic due to production shortages, importation limitations, and increased exports. Thus, I ask: How does living and dying during the Covid-19 pandemic help us to rethink hunger in Brazil intertwined with global chains of food production? In this chapter, I argue that the pandemic has created renewed pressure on the need for agrarian reform in Brazil where the small farms model has the potential to better provide for the needs of the population and preserve the environment. Inspired by the global turn and multisited ethnographic methodologies, I follow and compare two different, and interrelated, chains of rice production. I look at prices, labor conditions, environment preservation practices, and circulation and distribution routes of rice produced locally in small farms, and rice that is imported from abroad to Brazil. I will conduct zoom interviews with producers, distributors, agrarian reform advocates, consumers, and people who work in food donation centers. I will also rely on data that can be found online such as in the website of Emprapa - Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, especially regarding prices, production and importation amounts, distribution routes, and countries of importation/exportation.
Nathalia Justo is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. Her dissertation explores how deservingness relates to the shortcomings of legal categories at the margins of citizenship and delimits possibilities for political responsibility in global politics
Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Africa Schools the West
The pandemic was expected to bring devastation and chaos to Africa. Religious gatherings in particular were supposed to be the superspreader events that would inevitably cause the collapse of the fragile sanitary infrastructures of the continent. Until now, with the exception of South Africa, the continent has responded better to the pandemics than Europe or America. Why? The answer will come later with more hindsight. Still there are already lessons to be learned from the African response to the pandemics. I will examine a few of those.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne received his academic training at the École Normale Supérieure and now teaches both philosophy and francophone literature at Columbia University. Professor Diagne is the author of Islam and the Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal; African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude; The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa; Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition. His book, Bergson postcolonial: L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal is forthcoming in an English version.
Day 2. The Virus, the Sovereign, and the State of Exception
Panel 3: Arkhein, or, To Lead
Audrey Nicolaides
A Spring Without End: COVID-19 and the Failure of the American State
In the last chapter of his classic analysis of the Nazi state Behemoth (1942), Franz Neumann asked whether Nazi Germany had a theory of the state and whether it could in fact be considered a state at all. To both these questions, the answer was no. Nazism, Neumann argued, possessed no solid core, theoretical, ideological, or institutional. In contrast to the overwhelming fullness of the totalitarian Leviathan, the Nazi state was characterized by a fundamental shapelessness: “National Socialism has no theory of society as we understand it, no consistent picture of its operation, structure, and development. It has certain aims to carry through and adjusts its ideological pronouncements to a series of ever-changing goals … It has certain magical beliefs—leadership adoration, the supremacy of the master race—but its ideology is not laid down in a series of categorical and dogmatic pronouncements.” Devoid of a unified coercive state machinery, Germany was instead run by a quadrumvirate of powerful but distinct interest groups--the army, the Nazi party, large capitalist firms, and the bureaucracy--that dealt with each other on an ad hoc basis outside the rule of law and the institutions of the state. Unification in turn was not institutionalized in the state but personalized, i.e. expressed through the personality of the charismatic leader. Taking inspiration from Neumann’s analysis, this paper will ponder the question of the state in the contemporary United States at a time when ‘fascism’ and ‘failed state’ have entered the mainstream American political lexicon. My analysis will center on the COVID-19 pandemic as revealer, symptom, and accelerant of institutional decay. In doing so, I will also draw from a long tradition of Western political thought from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War to Hobbes’s Leviathan and Behemoth to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks in which plagues have often been associated with institutional decay, corruption, and civil war. This paper will try to identify some of the main trends that characterize American politics at the present moment of crisis and offer some conjectures for moving forward. In doing so, it will pay particular attention to the healthcare debate, the fate of small businesses, and the failure of pandemic response at various levels of government.
Audrey Nicolaides is a critical theorist and Ph.D. candidate in political science at Northwestern University. Her dissertation project “Progressive Internationalism and the Philosophy of History” ponders the conditions of possibility of a renewed left-internationalist project for the twenty-first century.
Samuel Weber
A Literary Case of Misplaced Sovereignty: The Marquis of Saluzzo
Saluzzo is a town south of Turin lying in the foothills of the Alps. Between 1142 and 1548 it was ruled by a series of Marquises, one of whom was named Gualtieri. Little is known of this Marquis, who is named only in a document dating from 1174-75. In fact, he would have been entirely forgotten, were it not that he appears as the main figure in the final story of the final day of Boccaccio’s Decameron. And as far as anyone knows, this story is entirely fictional. Unlike almost all the others in the Decameron, no antecedent has ever been found for it. In short, the Marquis of Saluzzo, who will be the main subject of this paper, never existed, except as an invention of Boccaccio. What possible justification then could there be for taking a purely fictional literary character as the subject of a discussion of sovereignty? None whatsoever, unless it could be the same one that leads Boccaccio to introduce his stories by a gruesome description of the plague that was to reduce the population of Florence, and of Europe, by at least half in the following three years (1348-1351). For Boccaccio insists that to appreciate the significance of his stories, it is necessary to begin, and perhaps end, with the most horrific plague and pandemic of the 14^th^ century, if not of all time. It is this insistence on a connection linking the all too serious world of reality and the all too unserious world of fiction that I prefer to call “frictional.” For in these stories reality and fiction never simply exclude one another but overlap and interact, “rub up” against each other, transforming and deforming themselves in the process. This is particularly evident in narratives that respond to plagues ... and pandemics. The “case” of the Marquis of Saluzzo can be read as one such response. If so, it is one that may help us to better understand how sovereignty – or rather its attempt, for it is doubtful that it has ever existed as such – may have been misplaced from its very beginnings and why this is precisely its destiny.
Samuel Weber teaches Critical Theory, German and Comparative Literature at Northwestern and directs that University’s Paris Program in Critical Theory. In 2021 his new book “Singularity: Politics and Poetics” will be published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Hye Yun Kang
Performative Dēmos in the Pandemic: South Korea
This paper rethinks the people and state power during the Covid-19. South Korea provides an interesting point of departure. The South Korean government has been effective in terms of reducing cases and controlling the spread. Along with Singapore and Taiwan, South Korea has been praised as a successful case in a number of policy papers and in the media. The analyses of this success in the media coverage run from the technological advancement of tracking, data collecting, and behavioral modeling to the active participation of the South Korean public. Yet, general concern about surveillance and social control intensified by technological tools have also been raised. These concerns highlight reservations about public participation in government efforts. The Western media, particularly in the U.S., have described the cooperative behaviors of Korean people as the “Asiatic” characteristic of “deference to authority.” This description often stands out in contrast to defiant behaviors of people in the U.S. and (Western) Europe against government policies aimed at pandemic prevention. Whether it praises the country or not, the coverage of South Korea in the pandemic reveals a frame of perception. This frame shows us a contradiction between freedom and security, democratic and authoritarian practices, open and controlled societies, providing a perception as if we have a choice between these two. Rather than choosing, I suggest a new frame that illuminates the people as performative. This frame provides a different look of popular practices in South Korea as well as in the U.S. and others. In the paper, I focus on the pandemic as a crisis that opens up the space of performance. It changes the view that describes the Korean people as an object of security apparatus and risk management of state power. Rather, the public debate on deciding a calculable measure of limiting freedom shows a performative moment. This debate is not to decide on the necessary evil but is an opening for chance and threat. The defiant behaviors of American and European publics can be illuminated by this performative act as well.
Hye Yun Kang received her Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University, and in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, in June 2019. She was a doctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation (2018-2019) and a post-doctoral fellow of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. Kang’s research examines the intersection between law and security. It focuses specifically on how security policies are understood, communicated, and materialized performatively. Her dissertation, “Unintended Intentions: Security Script and Performative Enactment,” analyzes mass killings during the Korean War, McCarthyism and the red scare in the United States, and the implementation of migration controls in EU Schengen space.
Panel 4: The Virus and The Atom – Violence, Mythic and Divine
Hirokazu Miyazaki and Annelise Riles
Confronting Nuclear Truth: The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as Witness to the Absurd
In October 2020, the almost unthinkable happened: The 50th nation ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (the Nuclear Ban treaty). In 90 days, nuclear weapons would be outlawed under international law. None of the nuclear powers ratified the treaty, of course, and the US openly lobbied countries not to ratify it. The path to ratification was led especially by postcolonial states, including states which had been sites of nuclear testing by imperial powers, engaged by a savvy international network of NGOs.
This treaty represented a radical departure from the old realist "nuclear non-proliferation" framework, in which the nuclear powers met among themselves and agreed to either pause nuclear testing or reduce their nuclear stockpiles, all the while maintaining enough nuclear capacity to annihilate one another. Here, in contrast, the non-nuclear states united to demand not "non-proliferation," but a nuclear ban. In so doing, they also asserted that they had a sovereign right to make international law, irrespective of whether they held nuclear weapons or not. There was something strange about this document however: rather than careful wording aimed at consensus it deployed bold language of confrontation. In other words, it deployed the formalist grammar of state sovereignty against the "realist" vision of that international order and the modernist expert practices of international institutions.
Only a few months before, this treaty seemed like a fantasy, an impractical dream. Yet the events of 2020--from the rise of global digital social movements to the real threat from the US president of launching a "limited" nuclear attack (on the scale of Hiroshima or Nagasaki) on his adversaries, to the collapse of the non-proliferation regime with the withdrawal of the US and Russia from long standing treaties--ironically opened up new horizons of possibility under international law. The treaty was also a product of a larger global cultural moment--of which the Black Lives Matter movement is paradigmatic--in which the unimaginable becomes imaginable, and in which obvious and ever present state violence can be called out, made politically apprehensible.
Camus' The Plague is the story of a community threatened by a collective crisis which nevertheless refuses, for most of the novel, to recognize the obvious--the threat to its survival. The absurd, in the novel, is not ontological. The facts are rather highly scientific. What is absurd, rather, is the collective contortions of all involved to maneuver so that they need not see the threat in front of them, to dismiss this or that case as particular, something that does not apply to them, so that everyone can go on "with their backs to the sea"--acting exactly as before. The absurdity of the nuclear threat, as with The Plague, is that we all know the facts, and yet we have rendered these mundane, technical, the stuff of expert communities the price of admission to which is to proceduralize the violence of which they speak, so that we fail truly to understand, to recognize and react to the existential danger we face. In this context, this treaty does not purport to create a "framework for negotiation" among the nuclear powers. This is why it is rejected by certain critics, such as the Japanese government which refused to ratify it, as unrealistic, and therefore absurd.
We propose to analyze the treaty as "event" in anthropological terms rather than as legal framework. What this first postcolonial treaty achieves, we argue, is to jolt us, collectively, out of the absurdity of our lack of apprehension of the threat that we face. In this respect, it offers a different response to the possibility of living with the absurdity of the threat of collective destruction--not simply finding quotidian possibility for connection and reflection in the small gestures and relations of everyday life, but rather using the powers of colonial sovereignty against themselves, to move to a new moment, beyond "realism" in which we are able to recognize, to apprehend, to confront, the collective threat we face.
Annelise Riles is the Executive Director of the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University, Associate Provost for Global Affairs, and Professor of law and anthropology. Professor Riles is the author of Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets, The Network Inside Out, and Central Banking.
Hirokazu Miyazaki is Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. His research, by his own description, is driven by the question, how do we keep hope alive? His book, The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge engages critically with Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope and attempts to carve out a space for a new kind of anthropological encounter with philosophy. Professor Miyazaki’s second book, Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance, examines the hopeful (and sometimes utopian) visions that animate the daily life of traders, and how those visions extend to facets of life beyond the market. He is currently completing a book on the U.S.-Japan friendship doll exchange of 1927 and its contemporary permutations.
James Martel
How a Plague can give life as well as death
In this paper I will describe how plagues and pandemics intersect with another form of life and death struggle, namely that between what I call archism (the hierarchical and violent regimes that correspond to what Benjamin calls mythic violence), which is a form of death and anarchism (the unscripted, cacophonous and dynamic forms of politics that archism seeks to control) which is itself the political expression of life. Going off of Benjamin’s insights, I claim that archism is empty at its core and so must ceaselessly engage in violence in order to prove to itself as much as to its subjects that it actually exists. It is a dead thing, a parasite that lives off the life that it predates upon. It promises its subjects (at least its privileged subjects) eternal life but really it offers them nothing but nihilism and more death. It cannot however ever fully extinguish the life that it parasitizes because it needs that life to draw upon to give itself a lifelike appearance. This is where plagues come into play. Insofar as plagues are themselves a harbinger of death, they would seem to align themselves perfectly with archest power. And, indeed, there have been many instances of states, religions, capitalism and other archest formations using plagues for their own nefarious purposes but the viruses and bacteria that cause plagues are real in a way that archism is not and so archism can never totally control them. In our own time, i would argue that the covid 19 pandemic has exposed the way that the archist state in the US context is not about life but about death. The kind of death that is dealt out by the virus contrasts and exposes the kind of death that is dealt out by the state, hence teh electrifying power of the movement that followed from teh murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. When faced with actual death, the faux life that archism promises becomes a bit more murky and the real death that it deals out becomes more vivid. Hence, for all the destruction that they wrought plagues and pandemics sometimes have a silver leaning in that they also highlight the way life itself is under attack and as such how it can and must defend itself against archist and viral predations alike.
James Martel is Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University. His books include Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead; The Misinterpellated Subject; and a trilogy of books on Walter Benjamin that includes The One and Only Law: Walter Benjamin and the Second Commandment; Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty; and Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory. Professor Martel is co-editor of How Not to be Governed: Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left. .
Michael Loriaux
Dr. Strangelove, Coal, Steel, and Vatican II: The Last Time the World Came to an End
The sovereign, writes Carl Schmitt, is he who decides on the state of exception. In the case of the state of exception caused by the corona virus pandemic, sovereign decision-making has not been very impressive. It has not slowed the spread of the virus, and in many cases it has been woefully unequal to the challenge. Sovereignty, as an institutional given and a common-sense practice, has also proven to be less than effective against the imminent environmental and biological challenges that are placing the survival of humanity, as a species, in peril. The concept of sovereignty doesn’t foster cooperation. It connotes secession from the “rest” of humanity and autonomy vis a vis other sovereign entities. Moreover, the concentration of force and majesty in the person who embodies the sovereign tends to nurture self-obsession. It is difficult, however, to imagine an alternative. What would a “non-sovereign” decision on the state of exception look like? I examine two events that give us a hint: the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) and the Vatican II Conference of the Roman Catholic Church (1962-5). Both events are of world-historical importance. They both occurred during a time – between the launch and the culminating crisis of the nuclear arms race – of great existential distress. Both events evinced a non-sovereign style of deciding, and both events inaugurated practices that renounced or curtailed sovereign privilege. A crucial facilitating factor in each case was the emergence of sustained philosophical doubt regarding the Enlightenment assumption of the abstract, autonomous subject who is self-sufficiently endowed with judgment and reason. That assumption underpins the concept of sovereignty and endows “him” (almost always a him) with legitimacy. Doubt regarding the assumption subsided in the late twentieth century, but it may be acquiring new authority in the current crisis.
Michael Loriaux is Professor of European and international politics in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Europe Anti-Power, of European Union and the Deconstruction of the Rhineland Frontier, and of other works on European and French politics. He is the founder and director of the French Interdisciplinary Group.
Day 3. What Civilization After the Plague?
Panel 5: Translation, Deliberation, Critique
Jackie Stevens
The University's Role in the Decay of the Demos: Insights from Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers
As democratically elected governments worldwide reel from decisions of "the people," and social scientists frantically plow through public attitude surveys and cross tabs for hundreds of demographic indicia, it is worth wondering about how these very academics and our own institutions of higher education are contributing to the public health crises of our age, from the climate disaster to the pandemic. The paper I would like to present will draw on the decades-long correspondence between Hannah Arendt and her dissertation adviser, mentor, and then friend Karl Jaspers to elicit insights on how the university system itself is implicated in the capitalist and nationalist projects that attract study if not critique by faculty. Jaspers wrote a book The Idea of the University. Jaspers has a lot to say about the German university and the Nazis, the finishing school nature of the university, and the cowardice of his colleagues. Both Jaspers and Arendt are despondent about how military and corporate interests in the U.S. have destroyed higher education in the country they had held out as the world's best hope to thwart injustice. I hope to put their insights in conversation with our present moment.
Jackie Stevens is Professor of Political Theory at Northwestern University. Her current studies of deportation law enforcement engage European fantasies of conquest in the 12th through 17th centuries as well as the quotidian of government documents that reveal contemporary illegalities. Her research on deportations has enabled successful lawsuits challenging government misconduct. Stevens is the author of Reproducing the State; States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, and is co-editor of Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness. Stevens directs the Deportation Research Clinic, which supervises undergraduate and graduate students interested in scholarship that advances forensic intelligence. The clinic has filed hundreds of requests under the Freedom of Information Act and successfully litigated over 30 requests in federal court.
Marc Crépon
Participatory Democracy at the Crossroads
The purpose of this paper is to stress the need for democratic governments and to pay greater attention to the counter-expertise of the governed in order to move toward a more participatory democracy. Governments could thus avoid a double-bind : on the one hand, populism which pretends to embody the voice of the people, on the other, a vertical power whose haughtiness is perceived as a sign of ignorance or contempt.
Marc Crépon is a philosopher and academic who writes on the subject of languages and community in French and German philosophy and in contemporary political and moral philosophy. He has also translated works by philosophers such as Nietzsche, Rosenzweig, and Leibniz. Three of his books have appeared in English: The Thought of Death and the Memory of War, Murderous Consent, and The Vocation of Writing. He has served as Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, and is director of research at the Archives Husserl, National Center for Scientific Research.
Ginevra Martina Venier
Translation and “Positive Crisis”
My paper will deal with the notion of crisis and the possibility of elaborating a response strategy inspired by translation. The practice of inter-linguistic translation suggests a move upon which a translation paradigm allowing for a collective overcoming of the crisis can be built along with the production of a social imaginary escaping the trappings of ideology and ineffective utopia. Translation emerges as the model of a “positive crisis.” This hypothesis, however, must be assessed against the objection of irreducible untranslatability as formulated, among others, by Jacques Derrida. Reflecting on the concepts of translatability and untranslatability then becomes necessary.
Following my bachelor's in translation, theory of literature and contemporary philosophy, in September I have started a PhD at the École Normale Supérieure under the supervision of Mr. Marc Crépon and Mr. Dominique Combe̶
Panel 6: Life At Last
Isabelle Alfandary
Considerations on Life and Death in Viral Times
The Covid crisis seems to have abruptly modified our representations of life and death, the ways in which we think of health and of disease. The risk of death to which the pandemic has exposed us all has made the idea of individual death less bearable than ever. However this tendency is inseparable from what Michel Foucault in his lectures series "Society Must Be Defended", given at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1976, called “the excess of biopower,” a situation where man is given the technical and political possibility not only “to fix life, to make life proliferate, to make living things, to make monsters and to make – at the limit – uncontrollable and universally destructive viruses''. Humanity seems to have reached the possibility of the limit Foucault had foreseen nearly fifty years ago. What does this technical and political possibility of curing or contaminating on a global scale imply in terms of our conceptions, fictions and experience, of life and death ?
Isabelle Alfandary is professor of American literature and Critical Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is the director of the International College of Philosophy, having presided over its Collegial Assembly from 2016 to 2019. Her research focuses on the relations between literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. She is the author of many articles and three published monographs: E. E. Cummings. La minuscule lyrique (Belin, 2002), Le risque de la lettre: lectures de la poésie moderniste (ENS-Editions, 2012), Derrida-Lacan: l'écriture entre psychanalyse et déconstruction (Hermann, 2016). Her latest book on the concept of fiction in Freudian epistemology (Science et fiction chez Freud) will come out in 2021.
Jonas Rosenbrück
Queer Plagues, Uncontainable Life
What forms of life will emerge from the necessity to “live with plagues?” To approach an answer to this question, this paper will take a detour away from immediate, contemporary concerns and draw on a community that has for decades sought to invent, critique, and defend new plague-ridden forms of life: gay, queer men. Queer subjects have simultaneously been labelled a disease themselves and, in the past half a century in particular, have lived with diseases in disproportionate numbers. Due to this double exposure to “queer plagues,” the threats and promises of transmissibility and exposure as well as fantasies of contagion, protection, and “viral communities” lie at the heart of much writing in Queer Studies and queer literature. Out of these questions one might thus be able to articulate a concept of “uncontainable life:” of a “great health,” as Nietzsche would say, that does not exclude sickness but lives through and beyond disease. This paper will stage a confrontation between queer theory and twentieth century literature (possible critical objects might be as diverse as Mann’s Death in Venice, Bolaño’s Woes of the True Policeman or the contemporary writer Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You and Cleanness) to ask what futures emerge out of (queer) plagues.
Jonas Rosenbrück recently completed his Ph.D in Comparative Literary Studies and German at Northwestern with a dissertation titled “Senses of Smell: The Differentiation of Air in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Ponge.” Starting in Fall 2020, he will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern. He also serves as Director of Volunteer Development for the Northwestern Prison Education Program.
Lars Tønder
Between Bios and Zoe: Living with Plagues in an Anthropocene World
With COVID-19 spreading across the globe, we gradually come to realize that the end of the world also is the beginning of another world – one in which human and nonhuman modes of life are entangled to such a degree that it no longer is possible to distinguish one from the other. Whether this world (often called “the Anthropocene”) really is “new” – or whether it in fact always has been with us in one way another – is not as important as what it means for how to understand and engage with questions of life itself. To address these questions, I turn to a short text by Georges Canguilhem, written in 1947, with the title “Machine et organisme.” Particularly interesting for our purposes is the manner in which Canguilhem reverses the traditional relationship between machine and organism, and how this in turn produces a new conception of knowledge of life. Thus, Canguilhem’s text will allow us to explore how modes of human and nonhuman life form an intricate assemblage subject to norms of living that are partially biological and partially social in nature. By teasing out these connections, I hope to show how we might once again make sense of the living – only this time not merely as something that concerns human life (“bios”) but also as something that includes all the nonhuman modes of life subsisting within and across the “human” as such (“zoe”).
Lars Tønder is Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. His book, Tolerance: Sensorial Orientation to Politics, participates in the “sensorial turn” in political thought, which foregrounds the importance of affect, perception, and other registers of embodied experience in both structuring and subverting social institutions. Professor Tønder is currently completing a second book on power and the advent of the Anthropocene.
Header photo credit: “Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2” by Felipe Esquivel Reed , distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0
