MA/PhD Session Schedule
2023

April 3 - 5 (Valletta, Malta)
June 22 - July 25 (Saas-Fee, Switzerland)
October 1 - 16
Date

Seminar 1

Seminar 2

Apr
3-5

Christopher Fynsk (online), Avital Ronell (online), and Nemanja Mitrović (in-person)

"This Strange Institution": Graduate Study at EGS/PACT
We borrow a portion of an interview title from Jacques Derrida (“This Strange Institution Called Literature”) to name an effort to address the special conditions of study in the PACT Division of the European Graduate School.  This course can be considered an “introduction to graduate study,” but we want to underscore that we seek to focus on the meaning and practice of such study in a program that explores unconditionally what cross-disciplinary thought, informed by philosophy and art, can bring to urgent issues of our time. The in-person course is organized by Dr. Nemanja Mitrovic in Malta, with the online participation of Professors Christopher Fynsk (April 3 and 5) and Avital Ronell (April 4).  Some students will know Prof. Ronell’s famous description of what PhD thesis writing requires; she will bring her unique understanding of a “research-led” life to this seminar.  Professor Fynsk will take up the inspiring contributions of authors such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Granel regarding the task of thought as he addresses the special ambitions of the EGS/PACT, which undertakes a form of “teaching-led research.”

This seminar will have two sessions per day.

Session 1: 2:30 – 4:30 pm Paris time/8:30 am – 10:30 am New York time.

Session 2: 5:30 – 7:30 pm Paris time/11:30 am – 1:30 pm New York time.

Date

Seminar 1

Seminar 2

Jun
23-28

Alenka Zupančič

The Silence of Desire

Slavoj Žižek & Frank Ruda

Desire and its concept have a very interesting fate in psychoanalysis. Understood as an emblematic figure of desire, hysteria belongs to the birth of psychoanalysis, one could say it is one of its conditions. Lacan also made it the inevitable first step in any analytic process – the beginning of analysis entails the “hysterization of discourse.” Desire also appears as a central concept in the seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, after which it somehow seems to lose its central place. Not only did other concepts such as drive and enjoyment, jouissance, become more prominent, but there were also important critical evaluations of the logic and paradoxes of desire that revealed its possible limits, including its political limits. After last year’s seminar was dedicated to the concept and phenomenon of disavowal, which includes the disavowal of desire, it is time to re-examine the question of desire in its radical and often controversial dimension. And to perhaps revive not only its ethical but also its political dimension. The seminar will address various facets of desire, including some of the most radical and powerful ones, as we can observe, for example, in Afro-pessimism. It will raise anew the question of the emancipatory power of desire and insist on desire as an objective indication of a fundamental “imbalance of being.” It will also not shy away from opening up and dwelling on the figure of the hysteric. Theoretical analyses and works will be combined with examples from contemporary emancipatory struggles, as well as from art and literature.

Jun
29-30

Masterclass with Sergei Loznitsa and Rati Oneli

Jul
1-6

Stefano Harney, Fumi Okiji, and Fred Moten(online guest)

Subjunctive Sociology

Achille Mbembe

This seminar will look at the subjunctive component in black life, the as if, in its social, ritual and aesthetic manifestations. We will build on the work of Fumi on ìtàn-òrò-oríkì, and more broadly on African/black life ‘a logical exorbitance that fails to trigger a crisis.’  We will also draw from Dubois concept of sociology, Laura Harris’s notion of the subjunctive, and Cedric Robinson’s ontological totality.  We will ask with Fumi: why can thought as it has been historically constituted not think ‘the lack of insistence, the spread of possibility that is black social life?’  What is it about administered thought that can only seek to redeem African/black reason?  And ‘is it not this ability to walk in multiple worlds that unites black study?’

Jul
7-8

Break Days

Jul
9-14

Maurizio Ferraris & Petar Bojanić

War and Peace: From Institution of War to Webfare

Catherine Malabou

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, part 2

The last battle fought in the United States (during its Civil War) is that of Palmito Ranch in May 1865. The last battle fought in Europe is that of Berlin in May 1945. We used to think that total war was a specialty of the last century and that wars of attrition occurred only in marginal areas. However, the current war has the characteristics of a total war, and it is taking place near the heart of Europe. Philosophers have often contrastingly assessed reasons for this war (for example, Bojanić and Ferraris have different views on this matter). While it is painfully clear that war cannot be erased from the world stage, the reasons that cause it to erupt can be reduced. In this seminar, we will examine conceptual frameworks and protocols related to the institution of war. Namely, ethics and reasons for war, usage of force, justification, and the end of violence. We will also attempt to understand the development of technology (often perceived as something that enhances new forms of war and efficient killing) as an opportunity for ending enmities. In order to show this, we will use the concept of Webfare, which ensures an equitable distribution of the enormous wealth humanity produces on the Web, leaving aside the paranoia of surveillance capitalism and creating a foundation more worthy of the name homo sapiens.

Continuing our reading from last year, we will study the sections Reason, Spirit, Religion and Absolute Knowing.

Jul
15-16

Break Days

Jul
17-22

Lars Iyer

From Chaos to Order and Back Again: What is Creative in Creative Writing?

Avital Ronell

Autobiographical Crash Sites: The Drama of Internal Alterity and Political Compromise

What is the relationship between chaos and order in artistic creation? In what way can creative writing be said to be creative, and what are the stakes of such creativity? This course concerns fundamental ideas in creative writing, and is intended for both practitioners and theorists interested in exploring what creative writing might be from a philosophical and theological perspective. No background in either philosophy or theology is assumed; although we will be dealing with difficult ideas, the emphasis is on the creative use that can be made of them.

We shall examine a wide range of texts that confront a history of self in a compromised world where the very premises of selfhood must be constantly discarded and reinvented, part of a shattering linked to difficult growth spurts, politically stunted. Readings span from Rousseau and Goethe to James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Kafka, Chantal Akerman, Werner Herzog and Sandy Stone, whose pathbreaking Post-Transsexual Manifesto provides some of the theoretical groundwork for establishing a hermeneutics of Bildung and transition, a recast of autobiographical theories and crucial psychoanalytic checkpoints. The failure of self-appropriation is a theme driven by Nietzsche in a number of morphs dependent on the often repressed inclusion of “the woman in Nietzsche.” Participants will be encouraged to work on their own projects that use this course as a jumping-off point for theoretical engagements with the frustrated development of self and history in an era of incessant traumatization.

Jul
23

Christopher Fynsk (workshop)

Jul
24

Nemanja Mitrović – Derrida with(out) Literature (workshop)

Jul
25

Departure Day

Seminar 1: 2:30 – 4:30 pm Paris time/8:30 am – 10:30 am New York time.

Seminar 2: 5:30 – 7:30 pm Paris time/11:30 am – 1:30 pm New York time.

Workshops: session 1 from 3 – 4:30 pm/Paris time and session 2 from 5:30 pm until 7 pm Paris time.

Date

Seminar 1

Seminar 2

Oct
1

Orientation Session

Oct
2-7

Peter Klepec

Isabelle Alfandary

Oct
8-9

Workshop

Oct
10-15

Elie During

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Oct
16

Departure Day

Seminar 1: 2:30 – 4:30 pm Paris time/8:30 am – 10:30 am New York time.

Seminar 2: 5:30 – 7:30 pm Paris time/11:30 am – 1:30 pm New York time.