Niki Clements (Rice University): Foucault’s Christianities

Posted on February 19, 2018 by mjpeterson

Niki Clements

Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Assistant Professor of Religion, Rice University

Foucault’s Christianities

Wednesday, February 28, 4:30pm, Swift 208

Niki Clements works at the disciplinary intersection between the history of Christian practice, philosophy of religion, and religious ethics. She specializes in Christian asceticism and mysticism in late antiquity, highlighting its resources for thinking through contemporary ethical formation and conceptions of the self. She is currently completing the first comprehensive treatment of the ethical thought of John Cassian (c.360-c.435), a late antique Catholic architect of Latin monasticism doctrinally marginalized for his optimistic views on human agency. Engaging Michel Foucault’s late work on ethics-which sees Cassian as a crucial inaugurator of modern disciplinary subjectivity-she critiques the conceptual limitations that Foucault’s philosophical categories impose on his reading of Cassian, late antique Christianity, and the study of religion. She also pursues a transdisciplinary approach with cognitive neuroscience to argue that ethical formation integrates consciousness, embodiment, and affectivity. She is the volume editor for Mental Religion: The Brain, Cognition, and Culture, as part of the forthcoming Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks.

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.

Noreen Khawaja (Yale University): “Philosophy, Theory, History”

Posted on March 15, 2017 by mjpeterson

Noreen Khawaja

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Yale University

Philosophy, Theory, History

Wednesday, April 5, 4:30, Swift Common Room

Noreen Khawaja specializes in 19th and 20th century European intellectual history, and particularly on the shifting status of religious ideas in late modern Western philosophy and culture. Her research examines the collapse of metaphysics both historically and philosophically. She looks at this issue in relation to secularity, the retrieval of theological traditions, and the rise of critical discourses on religion. Her book on existentialism, The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2016. A newer project looks at the emergence of authenticity as a cultural and aesthetic ideal from the early Surrealists to the present day.

Bettina Bergo (University of Montreal): “And God Created Woman”

Posted on February 15, 2017 by mjpeterson

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.

Tupac Cruz (Universidad de los Andes): “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Fortune”

Posted on February 4, 2017 by mjpeterson

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.

Mark Siderits (Illinois State University): “Non-self and ‘Religion’: Buddhism’s anti-essentialist challenge to the category”

Posted on February 4, 2017 by mjpeterson

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.

Morten Thaning (Copenhagen Business School): “Ungovernable: Reassessing Foucault’s ethics in light of Agamben’s Pauline conception of use”

Posted on February 4, 2017 by mjpeterson

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’.