Jeffrey Andrew Barash

University of Picardie – Jules Verne

Collective Memory, Social Imaginaries, and the Transformation of Political Mythology in the Age of the Mass Media

24 November 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

This session will take place via streaming (Zoom link here)

Abstract

Whatever structural similarities anthropologists might posit to typify and systematize the myths that have been narrated since time immemorial, I will insist in this talk on the appearance over the past decades of a novel kind of political myth adapted to a specifically modern significance and function.  How might we account for this novel function of political myth in the contemporary world?  According to my interpretation, the contemporary singularity of its meaning and function depends on mutations on a global scale in the modes of collective experience; in the ways in which experience communicated among vast groups is collectively remembered and imaginatively deployed.  This talk will investigate these mutations in collective modes of experience and remembrance, which may be traced to the remarkable influence of the mass media that, over the past century and a half, have relentlessly accelerated their communicative capacity and extended their global reach.

Gianfranco Casuso

Pontifical Catholic University of Peru

Socio-Epistemic Pathologies. The Double Dimension of Social Criticism and the Problem of Asymptomaticity

10 November 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+0)

This session will take place via streaming (Zoom link here)

Abstract

It is common to affirm – and that is what Honneth believes that Critical Theory has done since its origins – that the indicator that can give us the clue that a social situation hides pathological features is suffering – not just that of members of social groups easily identifiable as vulnerable or disadvantaged, but potentially all people to varying degrees. Be that as it may, suffering should be a kind of “symptom” of social pathology. However, and here is where the difficulties begin, immediately appealing to the individual experience of suffering does not necessarily allow us to get out of the trap, because the problem lies in that the dual pathological condition of society is so powerful that under a veil of normality it even blocks the emergence of every possible symptom. In my talk, I will try to delve into this problematic link between suffering and social pathology as developed by Honneth, both from his own Hegelian reading of a deficit of rationality, and from Adorno’s idea of a sick normality. This will be done against the background of the less worked phenomenon of social asymptomaticity.

Oliver Marchart

University of Vienna

Always Ontologize! The Political Thinking of Antagonism

3 November 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+0)

This session will take place via streaming (Zoom link here)

Abstract

Presuppositions about the nature of social being are implied by any kind of social research – sometimes openly, but most often silently. Any political interpretation, as William Connolly once argued, invokes a set of ontological assumptions about the very nature of the social bond. Social analysis, therefore, warrants interpretations, not only of particular social phenomena, but of the nature of social being in general: of being-qua-being. Every inquiry into the social world can thus be referred back, in the last instance, to a very simple question: ‘what’s going on with Being?’ (Gianni Vattimo). The wager of my presentation will be that something political is going on with Being. More than that: Being is political, and the name of the political is antagonism. It is the ineradicably antagonistic nature of social being that accounts for the disturbances and asymmetries of the social: the conflicts, the power discrepancies, the relations of subordination and oppression. A case will be made that thinking, as a collective and conflictual practice, needs to take account of antagonism at the ground of being.

Tamara Caraus

Praxis-CFUL / University of Lisbon

Marx’s Radical Cosmopolitics

27 October 2020, 18h00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+0)

Due to the current health restrictions, this session will take place entirely via Zoom Follow this link

Meeting ID: 884 7169 1230

Password: 746274

Abstract

“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country” says the Communist Manifesto, the same text which states that “The working men have no country” and ends with the famous call “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”. The ‘bourgeois cosmopolitanism’ was the object of critique in different texts authored by Marx (and Engels). Thus, Marx underlined that “political economy displays a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond, but comes out in its complete cynicism” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) and that “free competition and world trade gave birth to hypocritical cosmopolitanism and the notion of man”(German Ideology). However, Marx’s critique of ‘bourgeois cosmopolitanism’ was not formulated from a local or national perspective, but from the perspective of a  radical cosmopolitics whose main elements, as this presentation argues, could be detected in (i) the immanent critique of “bourgeois cosmopolitanism” or of globalised capitalism, (ii) in the ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’ or in the emancipatory and transformational role of Marx’s radical  critique, (iii) in the proletariat as a cosmopolitical agency from below, (iv) in the missing theory of state in Marx’s oeuvre, (v) in the stake on the transformation of consciousness and self-emancipation, and (vi) in Marx’s unavoidable  humanism. In this radical cosmopolitics, cosmopolitan and communist horizons tend to become one, and the radical cosmo-communist politics appears as the real stake of struggle against global injustice, both in Marx’s time and now.

Reading Group within the Praxis-CFUL activities

Working language: English

Convener: Tamara Caraus (tcaraus@letras.ulisboa.pt)

Argument: Currently, visibility and the fact of being visible acquire an unprecedented importance: ‘views’ on social media are becoming a source of self-esteem and self-respect for the users, the increasing number of ‘views’ acquires economic value, and the notions such as ‘economy of attention’ are being advanced to capture the new reality of economics. Apart from social media, the proliferation of reality shows display a need to be seen of ‘ordinary’ persons, as though striving to have the ‘15 minutes of fame’ (anticipated by Andy Warhol). Concomitantly, the main political stake of political actions now is to make the injustice visible. In the logic of protest movements and ‘occupations’, if we are to register and respond rightly to conditions of suffering and injustice, these conditions must be visible. The different needs of being visible generate some puzzling questions concerning ethics and politics of visibility: Is the fact of being visible a kind of ontological guarantee of person’s being?  If we inhabit a world in which visibility is shaped by structures of domination, and in which individuals’ capacities for ethical perception and judgment are often substantially compromised by the existent power, do those who are less visible have less ‘being’? Is the contemporary situation a tragicomic reversal of the Benthamic-Orwellian notion of the panopticon society in which we are (potentially) observed all the time and have no place to hide from the omnipresent gaze of the Power, since today anxiety arises from the prospect of not being seen?  Can the maxim ‘I think, therefore I am’ be replaced by “I am looked at, therefore I am?’, etc. In order to answer these questions, the proposed Reading Group aims to go back to the authors who (attempted to) identify Being with appearing (Heidegger and Arendt), examined the ‘dialectics’ of visible and invisible (Merleau-Ponty), described the need for the Other’s gaze serving as the guarantee of the subject’s being (Lacan), defined politics as re-distribution of the sensible and the visible (Ranciere) and offered a critique of the ‘pornographic age’ (Badiou).

Meetings& Readings:

Session I – 27 February 2020: Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press (translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt), Chapter 4, pp. 98 – 210.

Session II –  15 October 2020: Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Harcourt, New York and London, 1978 (volume 1 and 2 combined), Vol. 1 Chapter I “Appearances” and Chapter II “Mental Activities in a World of Appearances”, pp. 19-129.

Session III – 29 October 2020:  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Edited by Claude Lefort, translated By Alphonso L. Ngis) Northwestern University Press, 1968; Michel Henry, Seeing The Invisible.(Translated by Scott Davidson), Continuum 2009, p. 5-12.

Session IV – 12 November 2020: Jacques Lacan, “Of The Gaze As Objet Petit a” In The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan) Norton, 1981, pp. 67 – 123.

Session V – 26 November 2020: Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement (translation by Julie Rose), University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Session VI – 10 December 2020: Alain Badiou, The Pornographic Age (translated by A. J. Bartlett, J. Clemens) Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Session VII:  14 January 2021: Round-Up meeting: Is an Ethics and Politics of Visibility Possible?  Visibility versus Recognition?

Some other readings of these and other authors may be added, according to the development of the theme from the suggested titles.

Steven Gouveia

University of Minho

Altruísmo eficaz: Uma análise crítica

20 October 2020, 18h00

Update: The session will take place entirely via Zoom. Here the link

ID Meeting: 820 4735 9419

Password: 424573

Abstract

Imagine a seguinte situação: está a passear tranquilamente por Lisboa e decide apanhar o metro. Aguardando que o mesmo chegue, repara que uma senhora idosa que por ali passava tinha acabado de cair na linha do metro. Pior que isso, o metro vai chegar em um minuto. Salvar a senhora é possível, mas terá de sair do seu conforto para a salvar de ser atropelada. Dado que é não é uma pessoa moralmente repreensível, percebe que o correcto a fazer é socorrer a senhora e decide, assim, levantar-se para a auxiliar a subir para a plataforma do metro e garantir a sua segurança. E se soubesse que pode salvar muito mais pessoas do que apenas nesta situação particular, sem perder nada de moralmente significativo, mas somente alterando algumas atitudes da sua vida? Nesta palestra, iremos discutir um conjunto de ideias com a denominação de “Altruísmo Eficaz”, uma abordagem baseada no pensamento de Peter Singer, um dos intelectuais mais influentes da actualidade. Analisaremos os principiais pressupostos, as suas variadas aplicações (e.g. pobreza, ética animal, caridade) assim como as suas principias críticas e objeções, concluindo que estas parecem mais promissoras se aplicadas a uma versão “forte” do Altruísmo Eficaz, acabando por defender que uma defesa “fraca” do mesmo poderá ser pragmaticamente mais viável.

Special Series: Global Pandemic: Reflections on Side Effects #4

Reading Group Session

Leitura e discussão do texto de Martina Löw: “Summary View of the Constitution of Space”, em: The Sociology of Space. Materiality, Social Structures, and Action. London & New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, pp. 188-193.

26 May 2020, 18:00 h

Via Zoom

Special Series: Global Pandemic: Reflections on Side Effects #3

Reading Group Session

Leitura e discussão do texto de Achille Mbembe: “Introdução: O devir-negro do mundo”, em: Crítica da razão negra. 2a ed. Lisboa: Antígona, 2017, pp. 9-22.

19 May 2020, 18:00 h

Via Zoom

Special Series: Global Pandemic: Reflections on Side Effects #2

Reading Group Session

Leitura e discusão do texto de Gilles Deleuze: “Post-Scriptum sobre as sociedades de controle”, em: Conversações 1972-1990. São Paulo: Editora 34, 1992, pp. 219-226.

12 May 2020, 18:00 h

Via Zoom

Special Series: Global Pandemic: Reflections on Side Effects #1

Wécio Pinheiro Araújo

Universidade Federal da Paraíba

A crítica do valor no livro terceiro d’O Capital: Marx e a atualidade do conceito de capital fictício

5 May 2020, 18:00 h

Via Zoom

Abstract/Resumo

Esta apresentação consiste em uma leitura imanente de parte do livro terceiro d’O Capital, no
que diz respeito especificamente ao conceito de capital fictício (fiktives Kapital) e como este se
constitui a partir do sistema financeiro de crédito e daquilo que Marx denominou de negócios
fictícios (Scheingeschäften). Apresenta o conceito de virtualidade real para tentar contribuir na
compreensão do processo global de produção capitalista, e seu movimento fetichista estabelecido
como uma contradição entre conteúdo e forma na constituição das relações sociais sob a forma do
valor (Wertform) autonomizada. Relaciona a leitura imanente do livro terceiro com outros textos
marxianos e, de maneira sincrônica, problematiza como ficam as formulações de Marx no que tange
à contemporaneidade da era digital, com o propósito de demonstrar a atualidade da crítica marxiana
diante do tempo presente.