Date: 12 December 2013

Time 13.00–20.00, followed by a drinks reception.

Venue: Lecture theatre E002, Granary Building

Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, London N1C 4AA

Organiser Hager Weslati

Please register free here.

The work of Ernst Bloch posits a utopian impulse that Fredric Jameson has described as ‘governing and encompassing everything, from games to patent medicines, from myths to mass entertainment, from iconography to technology, from architecture to Eros, from tourism to jokes and the unconscious’.

This one-day event, organized by the Kingston London Graduate School, with the support of CRMEP, revisits Bloch’s work in four themed panels on materialism, atheism, time & aesthetics, and political economy of hope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Programme

12:30–1:00 pm:                  REGISTRATION

 

PANEL 1: BLOCH TODAY: CONTEMPORARY THEORY, ARTS & POLITICS

1:00–2:00 followed by discussion 2:00–2:30

Chair:  Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck, University of London

Full Frontal Philosophy

Johan Siebers, University of Central Lancashire and Middlesex University

The Political Interpretation of Utopia

Richard Noble, Goldsmiths, University of London

Bloch’s Objective Fantasy

Silvia Mazzini, Humboldt University and University of Arts, Berlin

 

PANEL 2: MATERIALISM/ ATHEISM

2:45–3:45 followed by discussion 3:45–4:15

Chair: Christopher Kul-want, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London

Living in Blochian times: The importance of the ‘not-yet’ for prefigurative politics

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, University of Bath

Bloch’s Speculative Materialism

Catherine Moir, Cambridge University

Bloch-Kojève: Divine Nonexistence

Hager Weslati, London Graduate School, Kingston University

 

PANEL 3: TIME/ AESTHETICS

4:30–5:50 followed by discussion 5:50–6:20

Chair: Hager Weslati, London Graduate School, Kingston University

Discussant: Fredric Schwartz, University College London

Concrete Utopia: Consciousness of Anticipation and Praxis

Arno Münster,  Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France

The Problem of a Multilayered Temporal Dialectic

Peter Osborne, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University

 

PANEL 4: POLITICAL ECONOMY OF HOPE

6:40–7:40 followed by round table discussion 7:40–8:00

Chair : Stella Sandford, CRMEP, Kingston University

The Concentric Promiscuities of Utopia

Caitriona Ni Dhuill, Durham University

The Ontology of Hope

Agata Bielik Robson, University of Nottingham

The Future of Hope and the Metaphysics of Contingency

Peter Thompson, Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies, University of Sheffield

 

8:00 PM: Drinks Reception, sponsored by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP)