1994 research outputs found
Sort by
Feminicide and Violence Against Women
No full textFemi(ni)cide is defined as the homicide of women and girls. This extreme form of gender-based violence is often associated with certain regions of the world, rather than being recognized as a global problem. The true dimensions of these crimes, such as the frequency of domestic offences or the particular risk level associated with separation from a partner — as well as the societal acceptance of violence against women — remain largely unknown because of a lack of in-depth analyses and because these crimes are usually not statistically recorded. In this discussion, four activists from different contexts share experiences from their work: Hannah Beeck and Aleida Luján Pinelo, with their initiative Feminizidmap, document the murders of women in Germany; Valeria España focuses on court verdicts and criminal prosecution in various South American countries; and Meena Kandasamy is an author whose work is dedicated to trauma and violence against women, especially in India. They seek to raise awareness of the complex issue of extreme violence against women and they demand greater public debate and the development of strategies in order to prevent crimes and obtain consistent criminal prosecution
‘Unbehagen in der Natur':On Thinking the End of Nature
No full textIt is as if the Earth is gradually turning into Trisolaris, a strange planet from The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin’s sci-fi masterpiece. Trisolaris has three suns which rise and set at strange and unpredictable intervals: sometimes too far away and horribly cold, sometimes far too close and destructively hot, and sometimes not seen for long periods of time. Devastating hurricanes, droughts, and floods, not to mention global warming – do they all not indicate the appearance of something for which the only appropriate term is ‘the end of nature’? (‘Nature’ is understood here in the traditional sense: a regular rhythm of seasons, the reliable background of human history, something on which one can count always to be there. Slavoj Žižek is senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist, a Marxist social analyst, and the most tireless lecturer as well as author of countless books like Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012), Heaven in Disorder (2021). Chair: Christian Schmidt Artikel Süddeutsche Zeitung (Pdf
The Vampire as Model:On the Culture of B-Genres
Get PDFSeveral years into his work at the University of California, Santa Barbara Laurence Rickels conceived a new course offering involving a shift from background to foreground. He advanced to the front of the class Freud’s passing reference (in Totem and Taboo) to the vampire as the model for the mourner’s experience of the ambivalence-enriched deceased at the outset of the mourning process. Through the switch from example in theorization to plain text of what the theory is about Rickels conceived the lecture class ‘Vampirism in German Literature and Beyond’. While maintaining the level of instruction as encounter with psychoanalysis, Rickels was taken by surprise when several years into this pedagogical experiment his class became the big curricular highlight on campus. The film Memoirs of a Vampire Professor (Laurence Rickels, 2022, 25 min) remasters documentary footage of two sessions of Rickels’s legendary vampirism class at UC Santa Barbara, and intersperses the in-class analysis with scenes and outtakes from Spout (Alex Munoz’s short film based on the screenplay by Rickels). Laurence Rickels and James Burton will discuss the film and Rickels’ ongoing reading of undeath, in particular with regard to vampirism’s interface or face-off with zombieism, and the contest between SF and fantasy B-genres. Laurence Rickels taught German and Comparative Literature and Film Studies for thirty years at the University of California, Santa Barbara and in 2011 moved for a decade to Germany, working as Professor of Art and Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe. He is the Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School. Since 1988 he has published on ‘Unmourning’ (Aberrations of Mourning, The Case of California, and Nazi Psychoanalysis), on discrete auteurs and their oeuvres (Ulrike Ottinger, Philip K. Dick, and Ian Fleming), and on B-genres (The Vampire Lectures, The Devil Notebooks, Germany: A Science Fiction, The Psycho Records, and Critique of Fantasy). James Burton is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Cultural History at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a former research fellow of the Humboldt Foundation and the ICI Berlin. He publishes in the fields of cultural theory, philosophy, media and literature, with particular interests in process philosophy, ecology and speculative fiction. He is the author of The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick (2015), and co-editor with Erich Hörl of General Ecology (2017). Recent articles include ‘Manimism: Worrying about the Relationship between Rationality and Animism‘ in New Formations no.104-5 (2021) and ‘Astronoetic Voyaging: Speculation, Media and Futurity‘ in The Future of Media (2022)
Beyond the World as Picture:Worlding and Becoming the Whole World
Get PDFIn his well-known essay, Die Zeit des Weltbildes, Heidegger describes modernity as the age in which the world has been reduced to a picture. The conceptualization of the world as picture is the fundamental basis of globalization and the geopolitical relations of power, inequality and exploitation that characterize the world-system created by late capitalism. The world as picture is also the basis of various conceptual approaches for understanding worldliness informing various disciplines in the humanities and the narrative social sciences: world history, globality (global exchange and intercourse) and environmental kinship. But what is implied by the world as picture is the excess that is excluded or obscured by the picture frame because the idea of a frame intimates at something that lies beyond the picture that is its ontological condition of possibility. This talk examines two philosophical accounts of what is beyond the world as picture: Heidegger’s idea of worlding and Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming the whole world as it is connected to their account of minor literature. It highlights the fundamental differences between these philosophies of world and the above approaches. Time permitting, I will then explore how postcolonial world literature, when read as part of the temporal process of worlding and world-creation, disrupts and shatters the world picture by participating in struggles within specific fields of forces in contemporary globalization. Such literature unsettles their readers’ sense of territorial boundaries and makes them aware of how they are constitutively implicated in the hierarchies of the contemporary world even as it resists being arrested in a geographically bounded and determinable subject-object such as a nation, a continent or a region. Pheng Cheah is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His research interests include late 18th-20th century continental philosophy and contemporary critical theory, postcolonial theory and anglophone postcolonial literatures, theories of nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization, philosophy and literature, legal philosophy, social and political thought, and feminist theory. He is the author of What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016), Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (2006), and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (2003). Followed by a discussion with Pheng Cheah (UC Berkeley), Carmen Moersch (Kunsthochschule Mainz) and Birgit Hopfener (Carleton University) Moderated by Monica Juneja (Heidelberg University
The Monastic Enclosure
Get PDFThe moral and physical enclosure of monks and nuns is central to the founding documents of Western monasticism. But even there it encountered the need for monasteries to interact with their societies, through recruits, hospitality, and the monastic economy. The increasing intensity of this tension is traced through key reforming texts, until later English visitations open up religious houses to closer scrutiny, ironically aided by inmates’ quandary over whether to conceal or reveal their secrets
