The Centre for Modern Thought

Prof. Eduardo Cadava, of Princeton University, will be giving a lecture and a seminar at Aberdeen the week after next. Both events will take place in MacRobert 028 (CPD 1), from 16.00.

On the Monday the 16th, Prof. Cadava will deliver the lecture “Of Veils and Mourning: Fazal Sheikh’s Widowed Images.”

On Tuesday the 17th, he will give a seminar titled “On Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.’” Benjamin’s text is provided in full for download here, as a PDF.

Rachele passed this along to me — the announcement of a conference at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities that may be of interest to the Centre, given our seminar topic this semester (Badiou will be one of the speakers): “On the Idea of Communism”. 13th,14th and 15th March, featuring among the speakers Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui, and Slavoj Zizek.

Dear Friends:

Let me call your attention to a sustained discussion happening at http://posthegemony.blogspot.com/ that might be of interest to some of you.

As you will see, one of the entries calls for more blog activity on the part of our blog, which they say is swallowed up by announcements and the like. See if we can get something going this semester, perhaps around Nick’s seminar.

All the very best,

Alberto

The page for the Centre’s spring 2009 seminar is up! (The syllabus is also available for download as a Word document.) It will meet every Thursday from 3.30 - 5.30, in NK1 for the first eight weeks and KCF7 for the remaining weeks 9-12.

Additionally, students interested in the Centre’s work may find some other courses at the University of Aberdeen of interest — I’ll add more as they come in, so check back or email Eve McGill to get on our mailing list. Read more ...

On Saturday 6 December, 9.30 a.m. - 5 p.m. the Centre for Modern Thought and the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies Research Seminar will jointly conduct a workshop on concepts of presence human and divine. It will take place in Committee Room 2, University Office and will contain papers on numerous aspects of ‘presence’. (Please note: FOR THOSE OF YOU USING PUBLIC TRANSPORT, THE FIRST COMPANY BUS DRIVERS WILL BE ON STRIKE ON SATURDAY; PLEASE RE-ADJUST YOUR TRAVEL ARRANGEMENTS ACCORDINGLY). The schedule of speakers and topics:

9.30-10.30: Prof. Raul Ruiz: ‘The Unshootable’ (including features from Raul Ruiz’s internationally acclaimed films)

10.30-10.45: Coffee break

10.45-11.45: Prof. Read more ...

A number of scholars who first gathered together at the international Knowledge, Culture and the Transformation of Society conference in Vienna, in December 2007, will be gathering here for a remarkable afternoon continuing the discussion. The description of the panel follows, and you can download attachments below that include the full announcement with participant bios, and the Northern Scotland journal article which will act as the starting point of the conversation. Read more ...

This week’s Modern Thought seminar, featuring a visit from Alessandro Portelli, will be held in KCT2, in the Cromwell Tower (the tower in the King’s College quadrangle with the little observatory on top) on the third floor, from 3.30-5.30 on Thursday 27 November.

As a reminder, all the readings for this week — one paper and four chapters — are available for download from our site:

• “Memory and Globalization: the Terni General Strike, 2004”
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11

The remaining readings for the seminar this week have arrived: four chapters from Portelli. (The first reading, posted in the previous entry, can be downloaded directly here.) They can be downloaded below, as individual PDFs or as a zip file containing all four.

The next few weeks of the seminar will concentrate on the work of Alessandro Portelli, who will be visiting the Centre.

We’re having some temporary technical difficulties getting the remaining scanned chapters of his readings for this week; they’ll be available shortly. In the meantime, the first reading, “Memory and Globalization: the Terni General Strike, 2004” can be downloaded below.

We have a busy calendar of talks and film showings over the next few weeks around Raul’s visit.

This Wednesday, the 19th, at 5.00 in Committee Room 2, Raul will discuss Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. (Committee Room 2 is located next to the entrance of the Reception desk in the Administration Building on Regent Walk. It’s next to the Court Room.)

UPDATED: This Friday the 21st at 2.00, in Taylor C11, Dominique Lestel of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris will present a lecture: “Are We Intelligent Enough to Understand the Intelligence of Non-humans?”

The following Wednesday, the 26th, at 5.00, Raul will give a talk on the situation of world cinema. Read more ...