The Centre for Modern Thought

I have written a pdf explaining how to post a forum topic. I hope it will be useful.

Please, write a comment to this post if there are more problems.

Carlo Galli’s Spazi politici. L’eta moderna e l’eta globale and La guerra globale. Read more ...

Here’s an upcoming conference in Paris that may be of interest: Read more ...

Dear Friends:

This is to announce the upcoming “Modalities of Imperial Reason.  A Workshop on Comparative Imperial History.”  It will take place at the University of Aberdeen on 23-24 June.  Participants, which include, from the Aberdeen side, Edith Doron, Danny James, Aday Jimenez, Alberto Moreiras, Nick Nesbitt, Michael Syrotinski, and Trevor Stack, and from elsewhere Jon Beasley-Murray, Bruno Bosteels, Patrick Dove, John Kraniauskas, Benjamin Mayer, Antonio Rivera, Jose Luis Villacanas, and Gareth Williams, will present a short position paper on any aspect of the general topic they choose.  In addition, we will discuss two recent books, one by Herfried Munkler entitled _Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States_ and another from Jose Luis Villacanas entitled _?Que imperio?_.  Anybody interested in participating or attending should let me know.  A full programme will be posted later on. 

All the very best,

Alberto

(Since it came up in The Exploit and in our seminar discussion, I thought I’d post the full text here.)

Postscript on the Societies of Control

Gilles Deleuze

( I. historical / II. logic / III. program )

I. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. Read more ...

I have been thinking about Dr Galloway’s Alternative Algorithms, particularly in relation to two of my obsessions in theoretical computer science: the P versus NP problem , and quantum computers. Here, I will try to improvise very quickly some ideas, simplifying or excluding some of the mathematical technicalities. Read more ...

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Professor Strathausen will visit our University this Friday. He has generously sent us two papers to complement his conference.

«Introduction: Thinking Outside In»

The title of this anthology calls for an explanation. It has become customary these days to denounce any reference to the “left” as mere rhetoric devoid of substance—a position propagated not only by John Stossel and mainstream media, but also in academic circles. A typical example is the increasingly positive reception of Carl Schmitt by the former “left-wing” academic journal Telos. Paul Piccone, one of its senior editors, recently argued that “the Left/Right split has actually been a political Trojan horse” ever since the French Revolution. Hence, it retains “some validity” from a historical perspective, but “makes very little sense today.” Similarly, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht continues to denounce the “soft terrorism” exerted by the various doxa that allegedly prevail in the Humanities today—the exhortation to be on the “left,” to be “critical,” and to denounce everything else as inherently conservative, naïve, or even fascist. Such academic conformism, Gumbrecht insists, restricts the very freedom of thought it claims to defend. Self-proclaimed leftists, in other words, are the true conservatives in today’s pervasive neo-liberal landscape, a view largely shared by “third way” proponents (Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck) and contemporary media theorists (such as Jean Baudrillard and Norbert Bolz). All of them have moved “Beyond Left and Right.”

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«The Relationship between Literature and Film: Patrik Süskind’s Das Parfum»

The debate concerning the relationship between literature and film is as old as the cinematic medium itself. Considered a low-level form of mass entertainment, early film sought to increase its cultural reputation by drawing from the already established arts such as music, theatre, and literature. Hence, cinematic adaptations of literary works or motifs became increasingly common, particularly after the bourgeoning film industry shifted its focus from documentation to narration, that is, after the end of what Noel Burch considers the “primitive mode of representation” before 1909, as opposed to the “institutional mode of representation” and its spectator-oriented approach thereafter.

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Professor Johnson will visit our University this thursday. He has generously sent us two 2007 articles¹ which complement his conference.

«How (Not) to Do Latin American Studies»

In the tenth “periphrase” of “Circumfession,” in the context of a particular genealogy in which he outlines his too-mortal place between two dead brothers and recalls what will have been his experience of the news of his mother’s imminent death, of the anticipation of her death, and thus the moment in which he begins to mourn a mother not yet dead, Derrida writes:

Whereas my sole desire remains that of giving to be read the interruption that will in any case decide the very figure, this writing that resembles the poor chance of a provisional resurrection, like the one that took place in December 1988 when a phone call from my brother-in-law sent me running for the first plane to Nice, tie, dark suit, white kippa in my pocket, trying in vain not only to cry but, I don’t know, to stop myself crying, et fletum frenabam, to get myself out of all the programs and quotations.

At stake in this confession of his desire to escape the program, to break out of the anticipated response and feeling, is the impossibility of personal experience and thus the impossibility of what might be considered a simple or simply-thus-absolutely-positioned subject.

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«As If the Time Were Now: Deconstructing Agamben»

With the exception of a brief comment in Rogues, Derrida seems to have ignored Agamben’s work. The same cannot, however, be said of Agamben, who throughout his career has consistently situated his work in relation to Derrida’s. In multiple texts Agamben honors Derrida, but he also challenges and ostensibly corrects Derrida’s understanding of phonocentrism, of authenticity and inauthenticity in Heidegger and of the status of divine violence in Benjamin. More recently, in The Time That Remains, he distinguishes his interpretation of the messianic event from Derrida’s and reinscribes the trace as if it were a frustrated Aufhebung incapable of “seiz[ing] hold of itself” or of “catch[ing] up with a void in representation.” Although Agamben acknowledges that Derrida “restored philosophical standing to” the Aristotelian concepts of presence and absence by “demostrating their connectedness to Hegelian Aufhebung”, he nevertheless claims that Derrida develops these concepts “into an actual ontology of the trace and originary supplement”. Agamben concludes, “The trace is a suspended Aufhebung that will never come to know his own pleroma”. Because Agamben conceives the messianic as “the very opening through which we may seize hold of time, achieving our representation of time, making it end”, for him, “Deconstrucion is a thwarted messianism, a suspension of the messianic”.

Insofar as Aufhebung operates only through the suspension of time, Agamben effectively accuses Derrida of suspending the suspension of time. He argues that deconstruction, unlike *Aufhebung” or messianic time, is thwarted by its inability to seize time, to take hold of it.

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