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On Thursday, 8 June 2023, between 16:00-18:00, an event titled Philosophy Talks will be held with the participation of Assoc. Prof. Adriel M. Trott and Assoc. Prof. Jeffrey Gower from Wabash College, moderated by Prof. Dr. Çiğdem Yazıcı. Information about the event is given below. We will be pleased to welcome your participation in the event.
PHILOSOPHY TALKS
8 June 2023, Thursday, 16:00-18:00
Üsküdar Üniversitesi, Kısıklı Cad. Altunizade, Güney Yerleşke, E Blok, Sokrates Salonu
Liberatory Indifference to Sexual Difference in the Politics of Alain Badiou
Assoc. Prof. Adriel M. Trott
Abstract: In a 2011 lecture that appeared to advocate for sexual difference championing a unique and specific creative role for women, Alain Badiou inquires, what is a woman who engages in the four truth procedures of politics, art, science, and love? Louise Burchill concludes from Badiou’s remarks that he claims “truth processes can no longer be considered as indifferent to sexual difference.” I argue in this lecture that Badiou’s politics does not need sexual difference in the way that political theories that assume a universal from a hegemonic particular position do. After raising concerns with the limits of sexual difference feminism in light of its seemingly inescapable tendency to essentialize its ground, I argue that Badiou’s politics affirms the universal from the site of exclusion, manifesting the Marxist credo, “We are nothing, let us be everything,” thereby addressing the problem the appeal to sexual difference set out to rectify. Badiou’s universal political subject aims to disrupt the order of things from the position of exclusion, which serves not as evidence for giving one group more attention than another, but as a call to remake the world so that it is one rather than divided between those who have and those who have not.
Biography: Adriel M. Trott is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Wabash College in Indiana, USA where she holds the Andrew T. and Anne Ford Chair in the Liberal Arts. Trott publishes on ancient Greek philosophy, continental philosophy, and feminist philosophy. She currently serves on the executive committee of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.
Of Majesty and Disaster: Heidegger and Sovereign Violence
Assoc. Prof. Jeffrey Gower
Abstract: In the mid-1930s Heidegger’s treatment of sovereignty seems to undergo a rapid development. 1935’s Introduction to Metaphysics affirms a world-forming, state-founding sovereign violence that still exhibits an affinity with the Führerprinzip evident in the Black Notebooks of the early 1930s and in other texts of the same period. In Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), dated from 1936-1938, Heidegger develops a twofold conception of sovereign mastery (Herrschaft), on one hand deconstructing a metaphysical concept of sovereignty while on the other hand developing an inceptual sense of sovereignty associated with what he calls the other beginning. This second sense wavers ambivalently on the threshold of sovereignty and non-sovereignty, exhibiting features of both and thereby resembling what Derrida analyzes as “hyper-sovereignty” and what Agamben analyzes as the “sovereign ban.” To complicate matters further, recent scholarship on the non-public writings from 1936 onward convincingly demonstrate that Heidegger increasingly attempts to decouple sovereignty from violence and, eventually, to disavow sovereignty altogether. Even if these developments are taken to confirm a received narrative about Heidegger’s intensifying criticism of National Socialism throughout the 1930s, however, a question remains about structures left in place by the later Heidegger which might be revivified in support of an oppressive politics. Reconstructing a debate between Heidegger’s more recent defenders and critics, I argue for the radicalization of a tendency latent in Heidegger and his critical inheritors—to decouple collective world-formation from sovereign violence.
Biography: Jeffrey D. Gower is Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wabash College. His research focuses on questions of sovereignty, political economy, and ecology in Continental philosophy and Ancient Greek philosophy.
Moderator and Organizer: Prof. Dr. Çiğdem Yazıcı, cigdem.yazici@uskudar.edu.tr