GSH
GENOA SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
4th – 9th April 2016
FIGURES OF THE o/OTHER: BROTHER, NEIGHBOUR, STRANGER, ENEMY
Organized by:
Lorenzo Chiesa
Raffaello Palumbo Mosca
Speakers / Seminar Leaders:
Sergio Benvenuto
Giorgio Cesarale
Lorenzo Chiesa
Raffaello Palumbo Mosca
Andrea Tarabbia
Davide Tarizzo
Established in 2013 and directed by Lorenzo Chiesa and Raffaello Palumbo Mosca, the Genoa School of Humanities (GSH) offers weekly series of seminars held by scholars of literature, philosophy, and other subjects, as well as by novelists, filmmakers and psychoanalysts.
In the seminars of Spring 2016 we will focus on the question of otherness from the standpoints of psychoanalysis, fiction writing, literary criticism, philosophy, and political theory.
Christianity preaches the love of the neighbour, yet ultimately reduces him to a repetition of the self. Modern democracy rests on fraternity, but all too often distorts it into inconsistent ideologies of identity, which pave the way for more or less explicit forms of racism. The battle for the emancipation of woman runs itself the risk of succumbing to a global dispositif of sameness dominated by Capital and its ruthless values. Faced with unprecedented social, economical, and political crises, we are today increasingly urged to treat any kind of otherness that challenges our fragile egos as an enemy.
This series of seminars aims at countering such a desolate scenario by thinking alternative figures of the other through topical interventions in the fields of psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, and political theory. Our basic hypothesis is that there can be no sincere appreciation of the other as another subject without acknowledging a more profound, albeit immanent, kind of Other: the linguistic/discursive nature of the animal that speaks and writes; its structural incompleteness and parallel desire for completeness.
Each character in a novel is a language construction but also a concrete figure of the other conveying a story and a singular worldview, which thus continuously tests ours as readers. Starting at least from Stavrogin in Dostoevsky’s Demons, narrative writing also often presents us with monstrous characters with which we are nonetheless asked to empathize. How should we treat them? Can the encounter with these figures of radical otherness constructively reshape our own political and ethical views, and, if so, in what ways?
A long philosophical tradition including thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, and Sartre has insisted on the theoretical and empirical nexus between alterity and politics, focusing in particular on its agonistic status. What is today the legacy of this tradition? By way of example: how does it help us to account for the ever more evident short-circuit between fraternity and terror?
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis too deems alienation in the image and speech of the other to be a basic presupposition of our sexual identification and subjectivity in general. Feelings of love and hatred follow in an entanglement that is difficult to unravel. If aggressiveness and altruism are nothing but two sides of the same coin, is it possible to discern a kernel of otherness that suspends their dialectic? In what sense can we say that woman partly embodies this Other? And also, how can such a psychoanalytical approach to the o/Other contribute to a renewal of socio-political analysis?
The GSH proposes itself as a venue where young scholars have a real possibility to deepen their knowledge, not only by attending seminars, but also by actively discussing in an informal context their own research projects with highly qualified teachers and among themselves. One of the basic ideas of the GSH is that learning is enhanced by the suspension of formalisms, hierarchies, and the principle of authority that usually define traditional academic contexts. Each day revolves around one or two presentations by an invited speaker and is enriched by roundtables, small study groups, and debates that are always attended by one or more seminar leaders. The exchange of knowledge and ideas is facilitated by the limited number of students, and by the interdisciplinary nature of the seminars.
Speakers/seminar leaders at the GSH are leading international figures in their academic and extra-academic fields. They are based both in Italy and abroad. Participants are thus exposed to different cultures, teaching methods, and disciplinary perspectives. They are also enabled to establish new research networks and acquire practical information on how to access PhD and post-doctoral programmes.
HOW TO REACH US
Seminars are held in Genoa, Via Parini 10. From Genova Brignole railway station take bus number 43 toward Nervi. Get off in Via Albaro; cross Piazza Leopardi and you reach Via Parini.
REGISTRATION FEES
6 days of seminars: €300
4 days of seminars: €200
2 days of seminars: €100
Please, pay by bank transfer to:
Spazio Musica (reason for payment: GSH)
Bank: CA.RI.GE.
IBAN: IT72 M061 7501 44800000 0260 880
Payments should be received no later than March 15, 2016
PROGRAMME OF SEMINARS:
10:00
Welcome and introduction to the Spring 2016 seminar series (Raffaello Palumbo Mosca & Lorenzo Chiesa)
10:30
“Storie di anime sbagliate” (Andrea Tarabbia) [seminar in Italian]
12:00
Q&A / Discussion
15:00
Roundtable on Andrea Tarabbia’s seminar and the question of alterity in fiction writing (chair: Raffaello Palumbo Mosca)
17:00
Drinks and nibbles
Tuesday 5 April:
10:30
“The Other in contemporary literature. New Perspectives“ (Raffaello Palumbo Mosca) [seminar in English]
12:00
Q&A / Discussion
15:00
“Fraternity/Terror: Hegel, Sartre, Žižek” (Giorgio Cesarale) [seminar in English]
16:30
Q&A / Discussion
17:00
Roundtable on Raffaello Palumbo Mosca’s and Giorgio Cesarale’s seminars (chair: Lorenzo Chiesa)
Wednesday 6 April:
10:30
“Aggressiveness I: From the Mirror-Stage to Geopolitics” (Lorenzo Chiesa) [seminar in English]
12:00
Q&A /Discussion
15:00
Roundtable on Lorenzo Chiesa’s seminar (chair: Davide Tarizzo)
Thursday 7 April:
10:30
“Who do you think you are? Lacan, Politics, Antagonism” (Davide Tarizzo) [seminar in English]
12:00
Q&A / Discussion
15:00
Roundtable on Davide Tarizzo’s seminar (chair: Lorenzo Chiesa)
Friday 8 April:
10:30
“Other than brother-neighbour-stranger-enemy” (Sergio Benvenuto) [seminar in English]
12:00
Q&A / Discussion
15:00
Roundtable on Sergio Benvenuto’s seminar (chair: Raffaello Palumbo Mosca)
Saturday 9 April:
10:30
“Aggressiveness II: Ambivalence, Jealousy, Destruction” (Lorenzo Chiesa) [seminar in English]
12:00
Q&A / Discussion
15:00
Roundtable: “Which o/Other? Psychoanalysis between the Clinical and the Political”
17:00
Drinks and nibbles
SPRING 2016 SPEAKERS/SEMINAR LEADERS:
Sergio Benvenuto is a psychoanalyst and a philosopher. He is Researcher in social psychology at the Istituto di Scienze Cognitive of the CNR in Rome and Professor Emeritus in Psychoanalysis at the International Institute of Depth Psychology in Kiev. He founded and directs the European Journal of Psychoanalysis (established in 1995). He taught at several universities, including Siena, Mexico City, Kiev, and Moscow, and collaborates with numerous international journals. His many books and articles have been translated into different languages. Among his recent publications: Accidia (Il Mulino, 2008), La gelosia (Il Mulino, 2011), Lo jettatore (Mimesis, 2011), Lacan, oggi (Mimesis, 2014), and La psicoanalisi e il reale (Orthotes, 2015).
Giorgio Cesarale, is Associate Professor at the Università Ca’ Foscari of Venice, where he teaches political philosophy. He serves as a member of the editorial board of Micromega and as a corresponding editor for Historical Materialism. His major publications include: La mediazione che sparisce. La società civile in Hegel (Carocci, Rome 2009); Hegel nella filosofia pratico-politica anglosassone dal secondo dopoguerra ai giorni nostri (Mimesis, Milan 2011); Filosofia e capitalismo. Hegel, Marx e le teorie contemporanee (Manifestolibri, Rome 2012). He edited Giovanni Arrighi’s Capitalismo e dis(ordine) mondiale (Manifestolibri, Rome 2010).
Lorenzo Chiesa is Director of the GSH and holds visiting positions at the European University at St Petersburg and the Freud Museum of the same city. He was previously Professor of Modern European Thought at the University of Kent, where he founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. He also taught at the University of New Mexico, the Istituto di Scienze Umane of Naples, and the Institute of Philosophy of Ljubljana. He published books on Lacan (Subjectivity and Otherness, MIT Press, 2007; Lacan and Philosophy, Re.press, 2014) and on biopolitical thought (The Italian Difference, Re.press, 2009 – with Alberto Toscano; Italian Thought Today, Routledge, 2014). He has edited and translated books of Agamben and Virno into English and of Žižek into Italian. His new books on Lacan, The Not-Two, and on freedom, The Virtual Point of Freedom, are forthcoming in 2016 with MIT Press and Northwestern UP.
Raffaello Palumbo Mosca is Director of the GSH and a literary critic. He holds a PhD with honors in Romance Languages from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Italian literature from the University of Turin. He has taught Italian literature in the US (University of Chicago) and the UK (University of Kent). He is the author of a number of essays on modern and contemporary European literature and on the history of literary criticism published in renowned American and European journals (“Lettere Italiane”, “Modern Language Notes”, “Raison Publique”, “Nuovi argomenti”, “Studi Novecenteschi”, and others). His book L’invenzione del vero. Romanzi ibridi e discorso etico nell’Italia contemporanea won the International Tarquinia-Cardarelli prize in 2014. He is also a reviewer for Books In Italy and an author for the publishing house Zanichelli.
Andrea Tarabbia is a writer and teaches storytelling at the Scuola Holden. He graduated in foreign literatures at the University of Milan and holds a PhD in literary theory from the University of Bergamo, where he also worked as a researcher in comparative literature. He is the author of the following novels: La calligrafia come arte della guerra (Transeuropa, 2010), Marialuce (Zona, 2011), Il demone a Beslan (Mondadori, 2011), La ventinovesima ora (Mondadori, 2013), and Il giardino delle mosche (Ponte alle grazie, 2015). His other publications include the edition and translation of Michail Bulgakov’s Diavoleide (Voland, 2012), the essays La patria non esiste (Il Saggiatore, 2011) and Il cimitero degli anarchici (Franco Angeli, 2012), and the reportage La buona morte (Manni, 2014).
Davide Tarizzo teaches moral philosophy at the University of Salerno. He has written extensively on psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), French theory, political theory, and biopolitics. His major publications include: Il desiderio dell’interpretazione: Lacan e la questione dell’essere (1998) (English translation forthcoming with Bloomsbury); Introduzione a Lacan (2003); Il pensiero libero. La filosofia francese dopo lo strutturalismo (2003); Giochi di potere. Sulla paranoia politica (2007); La vita, un’invenzione recente (2010) (English translation forthcoming with Minnesota UP). He also curated the revised Italian edition of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (2013). He is completing two new books. The first, entitled The Missing People. Freud, Lacan, and the Enigma of Modern Politics, focuses on psychoanalysis and political theory. The second, provisionally entitled The Biopolitical Turn: Theory and Practice of Pure Life, aims at promoting a new approach to biopolitical studies.
MORE INFORMATION:
info@gsh-education.com
Raffaello Palumbo Mosca
Lorenzo Chiesa
[Giulio Paolini, Giovane che guarda Lorenzo Lotto (gm).]