Public Lecture by Judith Butler: “Interpreting Non-Violence”
Utjecajna autorica Judith Butler (na hrvatski su prevedene njezine knjige “Nevolje s rodom: feminizam i subverzija identiteta” i “Neizvjesni život: moć žalovanja i nasilja”) održat će 18. lipnja 2018. javno predavanje u Rijeci te sudjelovati na konferenciji “The Critique of Violence Now” i na drugim događanjima tim povodom.
Public Lecture by Judith Butler: “Interpreting Non-Violence”
Venue: Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc in Rijeka
Date and time: June 18th 2018 at 6 p.m.
This year’s Summer School opens with a public lecture by Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley), entitled “Interpreting Non-Violence.” The lecture will be held on Monday, June 18th 2018, at 6.00 p.m. at the Croatian National Theatre ‘Ivan pl. Zajc’, and will be moderated by Sanja Bojanic (UNIRI CAS SEE; Academy of Applied Arts; Center for Women’s Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences).
“Interpreting Non-Violence”
“If non-violence is to make sense as an ethical and political position, it cannot simply repress aggression or do away with its reality; rather, non-violence should emerge as a meaningful concept precisely when destruction is most likely or seems most certain.
We need to think first about an ethics of non-violence that presupposes forms of dependency, and interdependency that are unmanageable or become the source of conflict and aggression. Second, it proposes that we consider how our understanding of equality relates to the ethics and politics of non-violence. For that connection to make sense, we would have to admit into our idea of political equality the equal grievability of lives. Only a disorientation from a presumptive individualism will let us understand the possibility of an aggressive non-violence, one that emerges in the midst of conflict, one that takes hold in the force field of violence itself.”
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She served as Founding Director of the Program in Critical Theory. A prolific author, she is perhaps best known for “Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France” (1987); “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990); “Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’” (1993); “Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?” (2009); and “Is Critique Secular?” (co-written with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Saba Mahmood, 2009). Her most recent books include: “Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly” (2015); “Vulnerability in Resistance,” (2016), edited with Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay.
Butler is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Andrew W. Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13). She is currently the principal investigator in a four-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. Her visit to Rijeka is part of this endeavor, since the Center for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe and the Center for Women’s Studies (both of the University of Rijeka) and the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (University of Belgrade) are Consortium members.
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Panel discussion: “Political Violence: Is Counterstrike Possible?”
Rijeka | June 19th at 5 p.m. | City of Rijeka Town Hall
“Southeastern Europe has seen more than its share of violence. It has also seen loud proclamations of anti-violent ideology from states and governments, from organizations of civil society, down to sundry public voices. The region has seen the adoption and implementation of various EU laws and policies to a far greater and more drastic extent than even in their countries of origin. This trend is partly a symptom of identity crises and identity insecurity, for which policies are designed to curtail all kinds of societal violence, shifting power towards ever-increasing prerogatives of wanton administrations. Instances of violence tend to be interpreted as systemic social degeneration that needs to be uprooted by draconian control and repressive policies. The results are a police force and state institutions with sweeping authority over individuals on the one hand, and widespread apathy and defeatism among ordinary people, on the other. Thus, the study of violence as well as anti-violence policy addresses a core quality of life issue in Southeastern Europe.”
The panel discussion “Political Violence: Is Counterstrike Possible?,” in addition to Judith Butler and the mayor of the city of Rijeka, Vojko Obersnel, will include by Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore di Firenze), Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky (Ruhr University Bochum), Peter Fenves (Northwestern University) and Marc Crepon (Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris), and will be moderated by Vedran Dzihic (oiip/UNIRI CAS SEE). The discussion will be held in English.
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Round Table with Judith Butler “In Tribute to Saba Mahmood”
Rijeka | June 20th 2018, 5:30 p.m. | Art-kino Croatia
The round table discussion, entitled In Tribute to Saba Mahmood, is dedicated to the recently deceased anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley who dedicated her scientific research career to studying the relationship of different religious forms and sexual practices, in particular as regards women. At the conversation in Art-kino Croatia, guests from the region will join Judith Butler in evoking Saba Mahmood’s book Religious Difference in a Secular Age. A Minority Report, focusing specifically on aspects directly relevant to the regional context. Participating in the conversation are Rebeka Anic (Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar – Split), Zilka Spahic Siljak (University of Stanford, TPO Foundation Sarajevo), Sanja Potkonjak (University of Zagreb), Adriana Zaharijevic (IFDT, University of Belgrade), Senka Bozic (University of Zadar), and will be moderated by Sanja Bojanic (CAS SEE, APURI). The discussion will be held in Croatian and English. The round table will be followed by the projection of Martha Rosler’s film Semiotics of the Kitchen (USA, 1975).
http://cas.uniri.hr/public-lecture-by-judith-butler-interpreting-non-violence/
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The fourth ICCTP Conference
We are pleased to announce the fourth conference of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP) to be held at Rijeka, Croatia on June 16-19, 2018 on the topic of “The Critique of Violence Now”. The conference will take place at the Center for Advanced Studies – South East Europe, University of Rijeka, and will be sponsored in conjunction with the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Serbia.
The Consortium is jointly housed at the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The task of the Consortium is to establish an active network of programs, projects, centers and institutes that will expand the global reach and form of critical theory for our time. The Consortium seeks to document, connect, and further the new and varied forms that critical theory has assumed in light of contemporary global challenges, including economic and political challenges to the university as an institution charged with the task of safeguarding and promoting critical thought.
The Consortium is meant to open new institutional links, overcome forms of hemispheric disconnection, and to pursue collaborative forms of interdisciplinary knowledge, guided by questions such as these: What are the current historical and global conditions in which the value of critical thought is challenged? How do we best describe and evaluate the prevailing forms of global power in their regional specificity that shape and constrain our intellectual life as it crosses academic and popular spheres, and how can critical thought rise to the challenge of these new global challenges through effective and thoughtful political engagement? By now, three conferences have been held, in Bologna, São Paulo and Johannesburg, on the topics of the critical tasks of university, the ends of democracy and reflections on memory and political time.
The issue of violence will be the focus of the fourth ICCTP conference, framed by the question, “what is a critique of violence for the present?” Can we have develop a global notion of “critique” without a “critique of violence”? Walter Benjamin asked this question in the early 1920s and he offered his own account of legal violence. Many of the traditional debates about violence and non-violence presumed a common understanding of both terms: we were assumed to know how best to identify violence and how to go about justifying or opposing its use. What challenge does the idea of “legal violence” pose to those traditional debates? And what forms does “legal violence” take now? What is the relation between spectacles of massacre, for instance, and those forms of legal violence, including administrative violence: how are they related, and how are they identified? Does it matter how we understand regional violence (and how we designate regions) when we seek to answer this question? In addressing the topic “the critique of violence now,” we will be focusing in this meeting on the question of how we might re-appropriate Walter Benjamin’s influential and controversial essay “Critique of Violence” (Zur Kritik der Gewalt) in the context of our present political terrain.
The participants of the fourth conference of the ICCTP, The Critique of Violence Now, are: Petar Bojanić (IFDT/CAS), Judith Butler (UC Berkeley), Marc Crépon (ENS), Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Başak Ertür (Birkbeck College London), Peter Fenves (Northwestern University), Anne-Lise François (UC Berkeley), Dario Gentili (Roma Tre), Julia Ng (Goldsmiths), Pablo Oyarzún (Universidad de Chile), Massimo Palma (Suor Orsola Napoli), Michelle Ty (Clemson University).
The ICCTP conference will take place in tandem with the Summer School Critique of Violence Now: From Thinking to Acting against Violence (June 18-22).
Conveners
Judith Butler
Principal Investigator, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant for an International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs
University of California, Berkeley
Petar Bojanić
Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade
Center for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe, University of Rijeka
Sanja Milutinović Bojanić
Academy of Applied Arts
Center for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe, University of Rijeka
Gazela Pudar Draško
Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade
Adriana Zaharijević
Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade
THE CRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE NOW
June 16-19, 2018
June 16th
5-7 PM
Planning meeting, discussion of existing and future projects.
(Judith Butler, Petar Bojanić)
June 17th
9.30 AM-12.30 PM
Opening paragraph on law and justice, focusing on the means/ends distinction, explicating the meaning of critique for this essay (Peter Fenves)
Paragraphs 2-3: The problem of natural law (Massimo Palma)
Paragraphs 4-6: “The question of the justification of certain means that constitute violence”: the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence; the introduction of legal violence as a problem; violence of the law and violence outside the law (Julia Ng)
2-5 PM
Paragraphs 7-8: Introduction of class struggle and the general strike, its relation to “pure means” and to non-violence; its relation to military law; the introduction to law-making in relation to Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (Marc Crépon)
Paragraphs 9-11: The police, its ghostly presence; transition to the non-contractual character of non-violent resolution, its relation to language and understanding; the relation between parliamentary power and violence; the non-violence as “unalloyed means” or “pure means” (Dario Gentili, Başak Ertür)
June 18th
9.30 AM-12.30 PM
Paragraphs 12-13: Non-violent resolution of conflict; techniques of civil agreement; the prohibition of fraud, “a policy of pure means,” the general strike (Anne-Lise François)
Paragraphs 14-17: Violence imposed by fate, the nonmediate function of violence, transition to mythic violence and the unwritten law and its relation to retribution; fate and the introduction of the mythical; the distinction between mythical and divine violence, the examples of Niobe and Korah (Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Michelle Ty)
2-5 PM
Paragraph 18: Divine power and “educative power”; Judaism and the commandment against killing; the doctrine of self-defense; the condition of “man”; the question of sacred life (Judith Butler, Petar Bojanić)
Paragraph 19: The formulation of the critique of violence as the philosophy of its history; breaking the cycle of the dialectical rising and falling of law-making and law-preserving violence. How to name that break, that “attack on law”? The expiatory power of violence; its invisibility; the final speculations on “true war” and “divine violence” (Pablo Oyarzún)
June 19th
10.00 AM -12.00 PM
Informal discussion of ICCTP and future plans for collaboration.
http://cas.uniri.hr/icctp-conference-the-critique-of-violence-now/