This is the third in a series of lectures Professor François Laruelle is giving at the London Graduate School, London. This talk was presented with the support of the School of Art, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts.

To listen, click here.

Professor Laruelle has taught at both the University of Paris X and the Collège international de philosophie, and is a Visiting Professor at the London Graduate School, Kingston University, London. He is the author of over twenty books, including Philosophies of Difference (trans. 2010), Future Christ (trans. 2010), Principles of Non-Philosophy (trans. 2013), and, most recently, The Concept of Non-Photography (2011) and Anti-Badiou (2011, trans. 2013).

Professor Peter Hallward (Kingston) – Vitalism or Voluntarism?

To listen, click here.

Over much of the modern period, social criticism has been associated with forms of emancipatory political theory, and has helped clarify what is at stake in various struggles to escape from forms of ‘enslavement to necessity’. In moments when this association has been challenged or disrupted (for instance, in Europe, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century), emancipatory thinkers have sometimes sought more immediately ‘affirmative’ foundations, in appeals to religion, nature, authenticity or action. This talk will consider how far recent and contemporary critical theory might be understood as structured by a comparable disruption, and how far the central issue at stake might be interpreted in terms adapted from an old argument about how best to read thinkers like Bergson and Gramsci – as vitalist, or voluntarist?

Professor Scott Wilson (Kingston) – Spider Universe: Lars von Trier and the Fear of Philosophy

To listen click here.

‘Let us recognise the subject’s efficacy in the gnomon he erects, a gnomon that constantly indicates truth’s site to him.’ Lacan, Ecrits.

This is a paper about the creativity of fear in film and philosophy, focussing on Lars von Trier and Gilles Deleuze.  The former is a film maker who has a long history of psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment for phobic anxiety which he has used both critically and creatively as material for his films. The latter, we discover from his biographer Francoise Dosse, had a phobia for both milk products and schizophrenics. In this paper, the understanding of phobia developed in the cinema of von Trier will be deployed in order to disclose the link between a fear of milk and the figure of the schizophrenic and offer a different way of understanding the dynamic genesis of Deleuze’s philosophy, particularly his logic of sense. Neither exactly a structure nor a symptom, phobia is a problematic category in psychoanalysis. Here, psychoanalytic, schizoanalytic and neuroscientific accounts of phobia are discussed by way of elaborating a ‘gnomonology’ that articulates a critical and clinical understanding of cultural production, particularly in its engagements with scientific discourse.

Vitalism or Voluntarism?

Peter Hallward

Over much of the modern period, social criticism has been associated with forms of emancipatory political theory, and has helped clarify what is at stake in various struggles to escape from forms of ‘enslavement to necessity’. In moments when this association has been challenged or disrupted (for instance, in Europe, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century), emancipatory thinkers have sometimes sought more immediately ‘affirmative’ foundations, in appeals to religion, nature, authenticity or action. This talk will consider how far recent and contemporary critical theory might be understood as structured by a comparable disruption, and how far the central issue at stake might be interpreted in terms adapted from an old argument about how best to read thinkers like Bergson and Gramsci – as vitalist, or voluntarist?

Add this event on Facebook

Professor Éric Alliez (Kingston) – Duchamp à Calcutta

Recorded 2nd May 2013

To listen click here

No, Duchamp didn’t go to Calcutta and it is a terribly bad pun, used here to refresh the tautological inquiry into Duchamp’s ‘meta-eroticism’ (a tautology since Duchamp, readymade included, is the meta-ironic specialist in precision ass and glass works –precision oculism). But it is a productive tautology if the whole Duchampian corpus can be rearticulated – via Lacan and against Lacan’s phallogocentrism – through the passage from the principle of contradiction to the principle ‘there is no sexual relation’; and from the latter to the transexuation of Rrose Sélavy, subverting the grammaticality of painting (‘the arrhe of painting’), ‘feminine in gender’. Duchamp à Calcutta, or, Duchamp du sexe.

Scott Wilson

Spider Universe: Lars Von Trier and the Fear of Philosophy

Thursday, 23rd May 2013 6-8PM at Central Saint Martins

‘Let us recognise the subject’s efficacy in the gnomon he erects, a gnomon that constantly indicates truth’s site to him.’ Lacan, Ecrits.

This is a paper about the creativity of fear in film and philosophy, focussing on Lars von Trier and Gilles Deleuze.  The former is a film maker who has a long history of psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment for phobic anxiety which he has used both critically and creatively as material for his films. The latter, we discover from his biographer Francoise Dosse, had a phobia for both milk products and schizophrenics. In this paper, the understanding of phobia developed in the cinema of von Trier will be deployed in order to disclose the link between a fear of milk and the figure of the schizophrenic and offer a different way of understanding the dynamic genesis of Deleuze’s philosophy, particularly his logic of sense. Neither exactly a structure nor a symptom, phobia is a problematic category in psychoanalysis. Here, psychoanalytic, schizoanalytic and neuroscientific accounts of phobia are discussed by way of elaborating a ‘gnomonology’ that articulates a critical and clinical understanding of cultural production, particularly in its engagements with scientific discourse.   

Add this event on Facebook

Éric Alliez

Duchamp à Calcutta

Thursday, 16 May 2013 6-8PM at Central Saint Martins

No, Duchamp didn’t go to Calcutta and it is a terribly bad pun, used here to refresh the tautological inquiry into Duchamp’s ‘meta-eroticism’ (a tautology since Duchamp, readymade included, is the meta-ironic specialist in precision ass and glass works –precision oculism). But it is a productive tautology if the whole Duchampian corpus can be rearticulated – via Lacan and against Lacan’s phallogocentrism – through the passage from the principle of contradiction to the principle ‘there is no sexual relation’; and from the latter to the transexuation of Rrose Sélavy, subverting the grammaticality of painting (‘the arrhe of painting’), ‘feminine in gender’. Duchamp à Calcutta, or, Duchamp du sexe.

Add this event on Facebook

May 20, 2013 6:20 PM

Get Tickets Here

USA 1956
Directed by John Ford
With John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood
Running time 119 mins

In the latest in our series exploring film through a philosophical lens, Pierre Lauret (Professor of Philosophy at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris) presents a screening of The Searchers, and then considers the troubling absence of ‘home’ in John Ford’s Western masterpiece through an insightful talk. Lauret identifies a void at the heart of this tale of a Civil War veteran doggedly hunting the Comanches who have kidnapped his niece: where will he return with her upon victory? The Comanches have burnt her home out, and have killed the rest of the family. The hero who protects the family and the community, has no family and no community, just like his charge. He must, in the end, return to the desert, as Ulysses returns to the land of the dead.

The screening will be followed by a talk and in-depth discussion. Presented with the London Graduate School and the College International de Philosophie.

Add this event on Facebook

CRMEP and LGS in collaboration with Art and Philosophy at Central St Martins present:

Professor Catherine Malabou (Kingston) – Whither Materialism? Althusser/Darwin

Recorded 2nd May 2013

To listen click here

In an important shift in materialism announced in his late writings, Althusser affirms the necessity of moving from a teleological dialectical materialism (Hegel and Marx) to a “materialism of the encounter” (Epicurus, Spinoza). According to the latter, chance, “void,” absence of intention, and purpose are essential ontological conditions of possibility for a self-differentiating real. Darwin’s concept of natural selection will be analysed here as a possible example of such a movement. The question will then be: how can we transfer what works at the level of nature to the political? What is the difference between natural and social selection? Where is the “encounter” when norms, criteria, values and inequalities seem to be the only reality? Is it possible to build a new materialism which would inscribe the logic of nature in that of the community? In other terms, is social selection compatible with materialism?