New public lecture: Aïcha Liviana Messina

The PACT Division of the EGS is introducing a new format in the context of its “Public Lectures” series. Discussions will be held with EGS faculty and other guests on recently published research.  We hope that these encounters will help bring attention to important work pursued in our community.

All discussions will be live-streamed on Zoom and they will start at 6 pm Paris time/12 pm New York time.

You can see the full schedule here .

Our first discussion will be devoted to Aïcha Liviana Messina’s The Writing of Innocence: Blanchot and the Deconstruction of Christianity .

March 6 at 6 pm Paris time/12 pm New York time.

In her book The Writing of Innocence: The Writing of Innocence: Blanchot and the Deconstruction of Christianity, Aïcha Liviana Messina suggests that innocence should be perceived is one of the key topics in the work of Maurice Blanchot. However, Blanchot never constructed the notion of innocence and he does not write about it in an explicit manner. This is the reason why the book of Aïcha Liviana Messina is not a work of thematic criticism. She describes innocence as (im)possibility and connects it with negativity and grace which enables her to reopen the question about ethics and politics in Blanchot’s work. Also, she devotes a special attention to Nancy’s political critique of Blanchot (from La Communauté désavouée) and focuses on a different relationship toward Christianity in the works of these thinkers. Participants in this discussion will attempt to bring forward various aspects of Aïcha Liviana Messina’s book and situate it within the field of contemporary studies of Blanchot’s oeuvre and legacy.

Zoom link for this event can be found here .

We are pleased to undertake this encounter with the collaboration of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade .

Participants:

Aïcha Liviana Messina is a Professor of Philosophy at Universidad Diego Portales and director of its Philosophy Institute. She studied literature and philosophy in Paris and  Strasbourg. Situated at the intersection of contemporary French thought, literary theory, and political philosophy, her work focuses on the relationship between language and violence, and on the political implications of critique. She has recently published The Writing of Innocence: Blanchot and the Deconstruction of Christianity (SUNY, 2022), and a monograph on Levinas’s political thought, L’anarchie de la paix. Levinas et la philosophie politique (CNRS, 2018). She has also published books on the recent political events in Chile such as, “Feminismo y revolución. Crónica de una inquietud”, seguido por: Fragmentos de una paz insólita (2020), and Una falla en la lógica del universo (together with Constanza Michelson).

Patrick ffrench is Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London. His work focuses on 20th-century French thought and literature as well as wider critical theory. His book publications include The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (Oxford, 1996), The Cut: Reading Georges Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil (British Academy, 1999), After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (Legenda, 2007), Thinking Cinema with Proust (Legenda 2018) and Roland Barthes: Myth, Eroticism, Poetics (Bloomsbury, 2019). He is co-editor with Roland-François Lack of The Tel Quel Reader (Routledge, 2000) and, with Ian James, of a special issue of the Oxford Literary Review on Jean-Luc Nancy (2005).

Christopher Fynsk is President of The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His work is closely involved with that of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, and several contemporary artists, including Francis Bacon and Salvatore Puglia. His works are Heidegger, Thought and Historicity (Cornell, 1986), Language and Relation: that there is language (Stanford, 1996), Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford, 2000), The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minnesota, 2004), Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (Fordham, 2013).

Petar Bojanić is a Principal Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and social Theory in Belgrade. Upon completing his bachelor’s ad master’s degrees at the University of Belgrade, he continued his studies of philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and defended his doctoral thesis entitled “(Last) War and the Institution of Philosophy,” at Paris Nanterre University in 2003. His main interests of study are political philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of right, philosophy of architecture and the city, social ontology, and the Jewish political tradition. Bojanić has held positions at Cornell University, University of Aberdeen, University of Belgrade, University of Macerata, the Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg. From 2011 until 2019, he was Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory of the University of Belgrade. Since 2009, he has headed the Center for Ethics, Law, and Applied Philosophy (CELAP), since 2013, the Center for Advanced Studies of Southeast Europe of the University of Rijeka (CAS SEE), and as of 2020 he is the president of the Institute for Democratic Engagement Southeast Europe (IDESE). His work has been translated into English, Italian, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Hungarian, Portuguese.

 

Moderator:

Nemanja Mitrović works as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade. His research interests are literary theory, the relationship between ethics, philosophy, and literature, and the work of Maurice Blanchot. He completed his Ph.D. study at the University of Aberdeen under the direction of Professor Christopher Fynsk (2014). In 2017, he published a reworked version of his doctoral dissertation entitled The (Im)Possibility of Literature as the Possibility of Ethics (Delere Press, Singapore). From 2018 until 2022, he worked as an Assistant Professor at the Faculty for Media and Communications Belgrade. Together with Maja Bajić, he translated the works of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Philippe Toussaint.