New EGS Workshop with David Kishik

October 27, 2021 (8 p.m., CEST – Paris)

If Foucault is right that the most elementary civic duty in an ancient democracy is the care of the self, then the Greek answer to the question, what is philosophy? is already autophilosophy, which is always a practice or an activity, never a doctrine or an imperative. Autophilosophy is not a preparation for life but a form of life in and of itself, occupying the center of the classical experience.

The workshop, however, takes its cue from traces of this bygone thought in our contemporary culture: from autofiction to autotheory, from esoteric performance art to popular TV shows. It invites the participants to imagine what a new field of self studies might be. Where, for instance, does the line lie between a philosophical selfie and a conceptual dick pic? And why seek personal justice in a world rallying for social justice?

David Kishik is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emerson College in Boston, and a former Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. He is the author of Wittgenstein’s Form of Life (Continuum, 2008), The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics (Stanford University Press, 2011), The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City (Stanford, 2015), and The Book of Shem: On Genesis Before Abraham (Stanford, 2018). He is also the translator of Agamben’s What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford, 2006) and Nudities (Stanford, 2009). Some of his shorter pieces appeared in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, 3:AM Magazine, and Public Seminar.