Keynote Speakers

Abstract: Though object-oriented philosophy is often treated as one branch of speculative realism, it predates the latter by nearly a decade, and differs from other variants of speculative realism in crucial ways. In this lecture I will give as vivid a summary of the object-oriented position as possible. Most philosophies reduce objects in one of two directions: either downward to their physical or pre-individual components, or upward to their manifestations in consciousness, language, or events. The method of object-oriented philosophy is to resist paraphrasing objects in terms of either their internal components or external effects. This has surprising implications for a number of fields, including the arts and humanities.

Graham Harman is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost for Research Administration at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of ten books, most recently Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012).

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Abstract: In this talk I will discuss Walter Benjamin's radical anarchism. I argue that Benjamin's approach to anarchism happens on multiple levels. On the level of text, Benjamin defies his own authorial voice, the command that the author has over meaning and truth. Benjamin subverts this authority, for example, by often beginning his texts with an apparent--often fairly conservative seeming--set of arguments only to utterly undermine those arguments at some point (and often without foreshadowing). This has the effect of lessening the reader's ability to rely on the author for interpretation. It forces the reader onto her own devices, radically undermining standard traditions of how a text is to be interpreted. In theoretical terms, Benjamin takes aim at Carl Schmitt's claim that anarchism is impossible because to be an anarchist, in his view, is to "decide against the decision." Benjamin evades this construction by demonstrating, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, among other places, that decision is actually impossible. He shows how no decision can ever be made, thus turning the tables on Schmitt and making not anarchism, but archism impossible. In terms of action, Benjamin's anarchism offers an approach to rejecting what he calls "mythic violence" (the constructions of state power, sovereignty and law) without an answering violence. To answer violence with violence is simply to reinstate oneself or one's group back into an engagement with archism. Benjamin's understanding of how to avoid violence--and mythic forms of law--serves as a way to show how action can be engaged with without recourse to archist forms of politics. By looking at these various dimensions of Benjamin's anarchism, I wish to argue that they manage to achieve a kind of seamless web of anarchist principles and practices. In this case, one aspect of his politics will not conflict with another (so, for example, the authority of his text does not contradict the anti-authoritarianism the text conveys). He is 'anarchist all the way down,' undermining archism at every level and in every possible way.

James Martel is a professor in and the chair of the Department of Political Science at San Francisco State University. He is the author of four book: Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (2011); Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory (2011); Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (2007); and Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (2001). He is also co-editor, along with Jimmy Casas Klausen of How not to be Governed: Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left (2011).

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Elizabeth Rottenmberg (opens in a new window)

Abstract: This paper will address the "question" of the death penalty in Derrida’s The Death Penalty Seminars: the question of the death penalty, if there is one, that is, if there is "la" question de la peine de mort.  For nothing is less certain.  Not only must we speak of a proliferation of questions in both seminars, and not only must we speak of the transformation or mutation of the question of the death penalty from one seminar to the other (in The Death Penalty I, the question of the death penalty is primarily the question of the political onto-theology of sovereignty; in The Death Penalty II, it becomes the question of reason as the principle of reason).  But we must also, in the end, speak of Derrida’s question about the question (about the authority of the question or the questioning form, etc.).  Indeed, at the very end of The Death Penalty II, Derrida will point to the future of the question.  How do the possibility and the reality of the death penalty, how does the question of the death penalty force us to ask a question not only about what comes before the question but also about the future of the question, that is, about the future of reason, the principle of reason, and what is proper to man?

Elizabeth Rottenberg is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and an advanced candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.  She is the author of Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert (Stanford University Press, 2005).  She is the editor and translator of Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews (1971-2001) by Jacques Derrida (Stanford, 2001) as well as the co-editor (with Peggy Kamuf) of the two volume edition of Jacques Derrida's Psyche that appeared in English as Psyche I: Inventions of the Other (Stanford, 2007) and Psyche II: Inventions of the Other (Stanford, 2008).  She is currently completing the translation of Jacques Derrida's The Death Penalty II.

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