Anil Mundra
PhD candidate, Philosophy of Religions
Unity in Diversity: Haribhadra Sūri’s Anekânta-vāda as a Response to Religious Difference
Tuesday, March 7, 4:30pm, Swift 201
Bettina Bergo
Professor of Philosophy, University of Montreal
And God Created Woman
Tuesday, February 28, 4:30pm, Swift 201
Emmanuel Levinas wrote his « And God Created Woman » (Tractate Berakhot, 61a) between 1972 and 1973 in the shadow of “mai soixante-huit”. It follows, even stands in the shadow of his “Judaism and Revolution” (a reading of Baba Metsia 83), which appeared in 1969. The two Talmudic readings arguably share a guiding thread, although their discussions are quite different: in 1969 it is social and metaphysical alienation; in 1972, it concerns an enigmatic domain of justice situated between the universal and the particular. Thus Levinas’ clin d’oeil to Godard’s film with Bardot focuses on “a difference that does not compromise equity,” before it so much as touches on sexual difference. Perhaps predictably, we find running through the debate about God’s ‘second’ creature (viz., is the rib from which Eve is created a face, or rather a tail?), the question of alterity itself. But is this not one of those abstractions—flowing out of phenomenological formalism—that belies its lived origin in our experiences of or with actual people? Alterity and its “modalizations” would be the question that opens to that of justice in this reading, as in Levinas’ Otherwise than Being. To understand this approach I compare his Talmudic reading with Daniel Sibony’s discussion of the discovery, après coup, of Eve, Isha, by Adam, Ish.
The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinator Matthew Peterson (mjpeterson@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.
Kirsten Collins
MA candidate, Divinity School
Reconstitution and Rupture: Religion After Religion and Maurice Blanchot
Tuesday, February 21, 4:00pm, Swift 201
In Religion After Religion, Steve Wasserstrom delves into the theories of religion developed by Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henri Corbin in order to show that at the core of religion lies not the coincidentia oppositorum, the mystical union of opposites, but the far more intractable domain of history. From this perspective, the atemporal insight claimed by the History of Religion constitutes a new tradition through the authoritative claim of revealing the old. This act is inherently destructive, as Wasserstrom points out: “The problem with a gnostic history of religions is that it imposes patterns on a past that were never (demonstrably) there in order to draw lessons for a present that is not (demonstrably) here,” (242). The three Historians of Religion failed “to stay within the limits of human knowledge, not to mention human dignity,” (238). Religion after religion, from this perspective, commits the indefensible act of pulling religion into the present by claiming to have discovered its eternal nature under the auspices and authority of history.
But is “religion after religion” necessarily destructive? Two world wars, anti-colonial mobilization, and the Holocaust precipitated a sudden desacralization of the Western Canon which might as well have been the death of God for Europe’s intellectuals. While Scholem, Eliade and Corbin reconstructed absolute authority through a mystical tradition unifying history, some contemporaries in Paris theorized religion after religion as a preservation of rupture, most prominently Maurice Blanchot. In this paper I propose to examine how Blanchot’s comments on Judaism in the poetry of Edmond Jabès, within the context of his general theory of literature, imply an idea of religion after religion that ruptures authority rather than reconstituting it. Through a reading of three Blanchot’s essays––“Literature and the Right to Death,” “The Indestructible” and “The Book of Questions”––I would like to posit the idea of “religion after religion” as central to his understanding of the connection between literature and history, and thus of a particularly human relation to truth.
Refreshments will be served.
The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinator Matthew Peterson (mjpeterson@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.
Tupac Cruz
Universidad de los Andes
Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Fortune
Friday, February 24, 12:00pm, Swift 403
This study of Benjamin’s ‘theory of fortune’ focuses on what I call an ’analytics of work’: an effort to divide the genus ‘productive activity’ in two species: activities that produce commensurate results (what we call ‘work’) and activities that ‘summon fortune’ (what Benjamin calls ‘practices’). Practices are ways for an agent’s will to “abdicate in favor of the body,” and they articulate a sphere of action that eludes the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary. The study of practice allows Benjamin to determine the specific, anomalous vitality of our neglected or forgotten wantings, whose fulfillments populate the realm of fortune.
Light refreshments will be served.
The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinator Matthew Peterson (mjpeterson@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.
Russell Johnson
PhD candidate, Philosophy of Religions
Nonviolent Revolution: Gandhi and Kierkegaard on Means and Ends
Tuesday, January 24, 5:00pm, Swift 200
Gandhi famously asserted “as the means, so the end” and that the means and the end are inseparable. This idea, though taken up by Martin Luther King Jr., has been widely ignored by scholars, and few (including Gandhi) attempt to make arguments in its favor. This paper shows that Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of communication provides one way to show the connection between means and ends, and points toward a communicative approach to ethics.
The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinator Matthew Peterson (mjpeterson@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.
Mark Siderits
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Illinois State University
Non-self and “Religion”: Buddhism’s anti-essentialist challenge to the category
Tuesday, October 18, 5:00pm, Swift 201
Buddhism has been viewed as something of an outlier in the category of major religions. Among reasons given for this judgment are its atheism, its denial of immortality, and its allegedly ‘scientific’ outlook; but these do not stand up to critical scrutiny. Perhaps more significant is the anti-essentialism to be found at the core of its solution to the problem of existential suffering. An investigation of the role of non-self in the Buddhist account of liberation from suffering suggests that what we find in the Buddhist tradition is soteriology without teleology.
The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinator Matthew Peterson (mjpeterson@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.
Morten Thaning
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School
Ungovernable: Reassessing Foucault’s Ethics in Light of Agamben’s Pauline Conception of Use
Tuesday, October 11, 5:00pm, MMC Library
In the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and therefore his conception of ethics is ‘strategic’. In light of this criticism, motivated by Agamben’s Pauline conception of ‘use’, we reassess the status and function of ethics in Foucault’s late lectures. We investigate how Foucault’s approach to ethics develops from his treatment of liberal governmentality and also how its methodological foundation is developed in an interpretation of truth-telling in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Our interpretation emphasizes the ambiguous status of ethics in Foucault’s late work: On the one hand, Agamben is right that Foucault assigns an irreducible strategic function to ethics thereby connecting it intrinsically to governmentality. On the other hand, Agamben overlooks how Foucault’s interpretation of Sophocles implies a conception of governmentality which emphasizes how ethical practices cannot be captured solely in strategic terms. Foucault’s ‘anarcheological’ approach thus articulates a dimension of ethics that remains, using Agamben’s own terms, ‘ungovernable’ and therefore also genuinely creative. Even so, Foucault’s approach to ethics remains in Agamben’s perspective on the deepest level faced with an antinomy that Agamben seeks to mediate with his Pauline conception of ‘inoperativity’.
The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinator Matthew Peterson (mjpeterson@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.
Our welcome meet & greet will take place Tuesday, October 4 at 6pm at the campus pub. Let’s get to know each other and talk philosophy, religion, philosophy of religion, and life over some pitchers and sweet potato tots.