Progressive Geographies

Baudelaire and Philosophy: A Conference sponsored by the British Society of Aesthetics

5-6 June 2019, Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London and the Institut Français

CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline for submissions: 21 March 2019

INVITED SPEAKERS

Isabelle Alfandary (Paris 3/CIPh)

Jennifer Bajorek (Hampshire)

Patrick ffrench (King’s College London)

Elissa Marder (Emory)

Adrian Rifkin (Goldsmiths)

Richard Rand (Paris)

Charles Baudelaire is a pivotal reference for debates on modernity, criticism and poetics, though in the domains of philosophy and critical theory his work is often approached solely through the prism of contemporary commentary. Baudelaire’s own engagement with the philosophical – for instance in his pairing of Joseph de Maistre and Edgar Allan Poe as critics of the metaphysics of “progress” – has also been insufficiently mined. Yet Baudelaire has been key for thinking about the transformations of the very conditions of aesthetic experience since the 19th century; his writings on the dandy and the poetic significance of intoxication, as well as his work as a critic of fine art and music, have arguably expanded notions of what counts as aesthetic experience, opening it up beyond questions of taste, value, or didactic ends. For Nietzsche, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lukács, Benjamin, Lacan and others, Baudelaire reimagined the poet and the poetic as inseparable from their relations to the social, psychological, material and sexual and, as such, as figures through which such relations may be reevaluated. After Baudelaire, the urban and the technological are no longer mere themes but the very element in which aesthetic experience and poetic production take shape; after Baudelaire, the poem assumes the form of a crucible for new and altered states of “experience.” This had led to Baudelaire often being made synonymous with the notion of modernity, and in particular with the idea that novelty becomes a (or even the) key category for aesthetic experience and artistic production from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Taking Baudelaire’s own references to philosophy seriously, this conference will also explore the complexity of the relation between the received understanding of Baudelaire as a prophet of modernity and his opposition to any idea of progress that would reduce poetic beauty to a vehicle for social and moral development.

The conference will alternate between delving into specific poetic and critical texts by Baudelaire and tackling some of the key interpretations and uses of his work within philosophy and critical theory, from Georges Bataille to Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin to Jacques Rancière. The conference aims to do justice to the richness, complexity and ambiguity of Baudelaire’s critical and poetic writing, to explore his relation to philosophy and the philosophical, and to interrogate his place as a synonym for a certain conception of modernity.

Selected papers will be published as an edited collection or special journal issue.

PAPERS

Proposals for 20 minute papers are invited in all areas pertaining to Baudelaire’s relation to philosophical aesthetics and related areas (e.g. ethics and political philosophy, metaphysics, theology, philosophy of mind, critical theory). Please send abstracts of not more than 250 words together with a brief (50-100 word) biographical statement including affiliation, status (student or not) and contact details to: j.ng [at] gold.ac.uk and a.toscano [at] gold.ac.uk. Please also direct any questions to these addresses.

CONFERENCE ORGANISERS

Julia Ng and Alberto Toscano, CPCT, Goldsmiths, University of London

Atsuko Watanabe, Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination – Palgrave 2019

This book is the first attempt to comprehensively introduce Japanese geopolitics. Europe’s role in disseminating knowledge globally to shape the world according to its standards is an unchallenged premise in world politics. In this story, Japan is regarded as an enthusiastic importer of the knowledge. The book challenges this ground by examining how European geopolitics, the theory of the modern state, traveled to Japan in the first half of the last century, and demonstrates that the same theory can invoke diverged imaginations of the world by examining a range of historical, political, and literary texts. Focusing on the transformation of power, knowledge, and subjectivity in time and space, Watanabe provides a detailed account to reconsider the formation of contemporary world order of the modern territorial states.

The journal Antipode is 50. The editors have put together an e-book of ‘Keywords in Radical Geography‘, free to download.

After Capital by Couze Venn – book discussion, Goldsmiths, 25 March 2019, 6pm

Update 12 March 2019: I’ve just been told the event has been cancelled.

Panel discussion on this ground-break new work and its political implications with presentations form Jeremy Gilbert, Shela Sheikh and Paul Gilroy; and quick responses from Mike Featherstone, Will Davis, Lisa Blackman and Tiziana Terranova (on video).

6 to 7.30 pm, Monday 25th March with drinks reception afterwards LG01, Professor Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths

The present crisis of capitalism has a history. A history of the private accumulation of wealth through property regimes that allows increasing commodification and the privatisation of resources: from land to knowledge and even to life itself. Understanding that history may allow us to imagine alternatives after Capital that are no longer private but common. After Capital explores this history, showing how the economy is linked to environmental damage, climate change, resource depletion, and to massive inequality. It takes the reader from liberalism to neoliberalism, from climate change to the Anthropocene, and shows how this history is inextricably the history of colonialism. It is a rich and detailed narrative of capitalism over the last 200 years, that explains its texture and its neoliberal endgame.

Couze Venn is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths and Associate Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg. He is also a managing editor of Theory, Culture & Society, and one of the editors of Body & Society. His current research concerns the search for postcapitalist alternatives to neoliberal capitalism in the context of converging crises affecting economies, climate, essential resources, the quality of the environment, and growing inequalities. In the 1970s he was a founding member of the journal Ideology & Consciousness, whose project was the critique of positivist psychological sciences and to disseminate the work of Michel Foucault and ‘French Theory’ generally as part of establishing alternative approaches for theorising subjectivity and for analysing power.