Equality, Vulnerability, Precarity

Reading Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Frames of War

Pavilion Parade, University of Brighton

30th April – 11th June 2014

In this term-long reading course, hosted by the Critical Studies Research Group and the Understanding Conflict Research Cluster, we will engage in a close critical reading of Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009). In these texts Butler further develops her recent ethical work, offering a theory of generalised precariousness to interrogate the conditions necessary for a life to be livable. She situates her analysis in the context of modern warfare, focusing her critique on the ‘war on terror’ and the Israeli State’s occupation of Palestine. This course will be relevant to those interested in philosophy, political theory, history, law, sociology, war and peace studies, memory studies, gender studies, queer theory, international relations, cultural studies and geography.

The reading course is free and open to all members of University of Brighton and University of Sussex. All sessions will be held between 16:00 and 18:30 on Wednesday afternoons in B5 Pavilion Parade, BN2 1RA.

To register interest please contact Tim Huzar: t.huzar1@uni.brighton.ac.uk.

The Critical Studies Research Group (CSRG) was founded in 2011 by postgraduate students in the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of critical ideas and practices in light of the socio-political struggles we face today. The challenges that interdisciplinarity might pose are counteracted by our shared interest in the role and scope of critical thought and practice in the context of contemporary capitalism. For more information on the CSRG, please visit: brightoncsrg.noblogs.org.

The recently established Understanding Conflict research cluster brings together expertise in humanities and social sciences from across the University of Brighton. The cluster aims to develop, over a number of years, a valuable interdisciplinary synthesis for understanding and engaging with the forms and legacies of recent and contemporary violent conflict.

Course Outline

All sessions will be held between 16:00 and 18:30
on Wednesday afternoons in B5 Pavilion Parade, BN2 1RA.

Precarious Life

30th April

‘Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear’ – Chapter One
‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’ – Chapter Two

7th May

‘Indefinite Detention’ – Chapter Three
‘The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and the Risks of Public Critique’ – Chapter Four

14th May

‘Precarious Life’ – Chapter Five
‘Violence, Non-Violence: Sartre on Fanon’ in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 27:1, 2006

Frames of War

21st May

‘Introduction to the Paperback’
‘Introduction: Precarious Life, Grievable Life’

28th May

‘Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect’ – Chapter One
‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag’ – Chapter Two

4th June

‘Sexual Politics, Torture, Secular Time’ – Chapter Three
‘Non-Thinking in the Name of the Normative’ – Chapter Four

11th June

‘The Claim of Non-Violence’ – Chapter Five
Mills, C. (2007), ‘Normative Violence, Vulnerability and Responsibility’, Differences, 18:2
Jenkins, F. (2007), ‘Toward a Nonviolent Ethics’, Differences, 18:2

Protest and the University of Brighton

One Day Symposium

Critical Studies Research Group
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics

Saturday 10th May 2014

The Critical Studies Research Group (CSRG) and the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) are organising a one day symposium on the topic of ‘Protest and the University of Brighton’. The symposium aims to offer a history of protest at the University of Brighton; a counter-narrative identifying Brighton as a political university (as opposed to its typical identification as ‘non-political’, contra University of Sussex’s ‘politicalness’); and a theoretical account of protest in higher education more generally.

To this end we are accepting abstracts for presentations that respond to these aims. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• the relationship between the University and the wider community;
• the Students’ Union and its relationship to protest;
• trade union protest at the University;
• privatisation at the University;
• the lived experience of academic life;
• the revolutionary past of the University;
• the ethics of disruptive protest;
• protest in education;
• protest as education;
• the function of occupation;
• the governance of the University;
• The ‘Prevent Strategy’, the University and the United Kingdom Borders Agency.

While we encourage papers that respond directly to the context of the University of Brighton, abstracts will also be accepted which deal with issues of privatisation, activism and the criminalisation of protest in other institutional contexts. In this way a key aim of the conference is to make visible the links between the struggles occurring within higher education, and the struggles surrounding immigration and asylum rights, anti-austerity protest, state racism, and other forms of resistance to “social abjection” (Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects).

The conference fee will be £20 waged, free for unwaged / students.

Abstracts of no more than two hundred words should be sent to Tim Huzar: t.huzar@brighton.ac.uk. The deadline for abstracts is Friday 28th February.

The CSRG was founded in 2011 by postgraduate students in the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of critical ideas and practices in light of the socio-political struggles we face today. The challenges that interdisciplinarity might pose are counteracted by our shared interest in the role and scope of critical thought and practice in the context of contemporary capitalism.

CAPPE was founded in 2005, with the aim of bringing together philosophy both with other disciplines and with the wider public. It intervenes in the public arena on the basis of a commitment to rigour, clarity and criticism and to extend the practice of philosophy beyond its narrowly academic boundaries.

Call for Papers

Ontologies of Conflict

3rd Critical Studies Research Group International Conference

School of Humanities, University of Brighton

16-17th June 2014

In recent times there has been a renewed interest in extending the understanding of conflict in both its scope and its effects; this has brought to the fore questions surrounding the relationship between conflict and ontologies. Conflict can now be understood as encompassing a broad range of phenomena, from its traditional preserve of violent confrontation, to structural or systemic violences, to the ‘private’ as well as the ‘public’, and to cultural and social antagonisms. Rather than simply a negative notion, positive valences of conflict have been embraced, whether from the neoliberal logic of competition or from the post-structural valorisation of ‘dissensus’. At the same time conflict’s traditional setting – war – has undergone a transformation, the forces of globalisation prioritising time over space, catalysing rapid technological change, and resulting in a shift in the strategies of war and in the relationship between the embodied human and the new technologies of injuring.

As our understanding of conflict broadens and deepens, and the new forms of war we wage (or are exposed to) alter dominant understandings of violence and bodily destruction, what effect does this have on the nature of selfhood and the worlds in which we live? In what ways has ontology itself become a target and site of violence, state or otherwise? Can conflict be universalised, or can it only be understood in its particular relationships to gender, race, class, sexuality and disability? In what ways are our understandings of conflict framed by underpinning ontologies? When we conceptualise a world mired in violence, what ontologies do we presuppose? What ethics can we draw from an analysis of conflict? Who is the privileged ‘we’ capable of explaining the topic of ‘conflict’, one of whose effects, it could be argued, is the very interruption and deconstruction of explanatory frameworks?

Topics for discussion and presentation might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Structural violence and the transformation of the self/world.

• Language and conflict: is language itself inherently, inexorably, violent?

• The relationship between the global and the local in conflict.

• Past, present and future paradigms underpinning the logic of conflicts.

• Ontology in time and space: contexts and scenarios for an ontology of conflict.

• Empathy, technology and the politics of (dis)embodied violence.

• Conflict and/as the political.

• Memory, narrative and the transformation of conflict.

• Conflict and the (re)construction of selves.

• The politics of life and Violence

The conference is interdisciplinary in its scope, and is particularly (but not exclusively) aimed at postgraduate colleagues working in philosophy, political theory, history, law, sociology, war and peace studies, memory studies, gender studies, international relations, cultural studies and geography.

The conference fee will be £60 (waged), £20 (unwaged / student).

Abstracts of no more than two hundred words should be sent to Tim Huzar: t.huzar@brighton.ac.uk. The deadline for abstracts is Friday 2dn of May.

The Critical Studies Research Group (CSRG) was founded in 2011 by postgraduate students in the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of critical ideas and practices in light of the socio-political struggles we face today. The challenges that interdisciplinarity might pose are counteracted by our shared interest in the role and scope of critical thought and practice in the context of contemporary capitalism.

For more information on the CSRG, please visit: brightoncsrg.noblogs.org.

We continue CSRG’s lunch seminars this Tuesday 21st of January with Ana Zivkovic Snowley. Her presentation is entitled: “British Discursive Constructions of the Struggle for Independence in Montenegro until the Congress of Berlin in 1878”:

This presentation examines British representations of the struggle for independence in Montenegro from the Ottoman Empire up to and until the Congress of Berlin in 1878. My analysis will show that discursive representations of Montenegro are not homogenous; they change and are modified under the influence of wider political and historical pressures, as well as a consequence of writers’ own experiences. I will illustrate shifts in perceptions by looking at extracts from works of several British observers with various backgrounds, political, diplomatic, naval, religious and literary. These texts reflect the writers’ positions as extensions of their own country’s political and economic aims on how to project power over other parts of the world. In addition, the writers enter into a dialogue with discursive constructs and codes of representation originating from their home culture.

It will take place in room 303 (Pavilion Parade) between 1-2pm.  As always, there is no need to register, but timely arrival is highly recommended due limited space available.

The Critical Studies Research Group resumes its activity with a new series of work-in-progress presentations. We conceived the series as a way to present our work within a supportive and welcoming environment, sharing thoughts and ideas over lunch break. This term we will start next Tuesday (January 14th) with Tim Huzar‘s presentation on Judith Butler’s concept of nonviolence. He’s prepared a brief outline of his presentation:

“In this presentation I offer an overview of Butler’s account of nonviolence, situating it in the context of ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ forms of resistance. As Judith Butler has noted, liberal understandings of nonviolence are flawed in that they typically refuse to recognise the ubiquity of the variety of forms of violence attendant to the modern subject. In this way the modern subject finds themselves “mired” in violence – a violence which is often beyond their control – making the notion of a nonviolent act, ethos, or ethics unsustainable. Nonetheless, Butler maintains that the question of what nonviolence could mean is still pertinent precisely because of the ubiquity of violence in the continuing formation of the modern subject. Can we understand nonviolence as an improper form of politics?”

We will continue meeting between 1-2pm in room 303, Pavilion Parade Building (between 12-13 Pavilion Parade and Pavilion Street). Entry is free and open to all students and staff of the Universities of Brighton and Sussex. For the door code to gain access to the building, please contact us.

The following work-in-progress presentation will be given the 21st of January by Ana Zivkovic on the British Discursive Constructions of the Struggle for Independence in Montenegro until the Congress of Berlin in 1878. We will post soon a full list of this term’s presenters, as a well as some more information about the graduate conference we are preparing.

This Tuesday 19th of November Doug Elsey will be presenting his work-in -progress, entitled “Is, Ought and Disenchantment”.  As always, the presentation will be in room 303 Pavilion Parade, 1-2pm.

The lack of a categorical material division between human and non-human worlds is often understood in terms dependency and embeddedness. The idea here is that human beings are necessarily embedded in a bio-physical environment upon which we are dependant. The problem for would-be non-anthropocentric ethicists is that it is argued that the ontological fact of humanity’s bio-embeddedness and inextricable interconnectedness the rest of nature does not logically imply that we ought or ought not to care about the so-called “natural world”. The idea is that our dependency upon, and connectedness to, the biosphere does not provide the basis for normative claims about how we ought to orient ourselves to the world given these facts.  For environmental politics, the problem is two-fold. In the first place, the normative content of those political and ethical theories that help us decide how we ought live cannot be deduced from natural facts about our existence; such content must be found somewhere else. Secondly, the question of how nature should be valued cannot be answered by discovering value in nature itself.

My aim is to show that the  necessary philosophical background for these problems is the notion of disenchanted nature. The idea is that the world revealed by the natural sciences is a world free from properties such as purpose, meaning, agency and value. Hence, this world could never provide the values and principles we’re after.  Of course the problem is that given that human beings are no less a part of nature than is anything else, the rising tide of disenchantment threatens to wash away that last bastion of meaning, purpose, value and agency – us.  One well-known philosophic response to the problem of disenchantment is some or other form of dualism. However, dualistic responses trade one set of philosophic problems for another.  Drawing on Wilfred Sellar’s notion of the manifest and scientific images of mankind, I consider two contrasting responses to the problems that emerge from the dualist solution to the quandary of disenchantment”.

The Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton is launching a new series of fortnightly semianars that will deal with the question of what it means to live in a neoliberal world. Everybody is welcome to those seminards and no registration is required. You can see the rest of the details below. We hope to see all you there.

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