Nancy Redoubled: a politics of sense and a sense of politics

Day School – Friday January 13, 2012

10.00am-5.30 pm

Anthony Burgess Foundation, Chorlton Mill, Cambridge Street, Manchester MI 5BY, UK

Every sensory register thus bears with it both its simple nature and its tense, attentive or anxious state: seeing and looking, smelling and sniffing or scenting, tasting and savouring, touching and feeling or palpating, hearing and listening. Nancy: Listening (2002) p. 5

Jean Luc Nancy (1940- ) offers a rich and diverse group of enquiries for discussion, dissection and appropriation. The diversity of register (partage des voix) and the detailed discussion of individual art practices (evidence du film) make up a formidable call for a reassessment of the task and goals of aesthetics, and of any philosophy of art. The discussions of inoperative and confronted community, of the inheritance of Marxism and communist hope, and of the unsacrificeable disrupt common places about the form and function of political theory.

When brought to bear on each other these two lines of enquiry form no less than a major innovation in the ordering and disordering of the sub-disciplines of philosophy, and of their role in the formation and disruption of other disciplines. By opening up discussion of these thematics to further interrogation our three speakers will provide a framing for a more thoroughgoing reception of these notions, of their grounds and prospects.

Speakers:
Dr Claudia Baracchi, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Universita degli Studi Milano Bicocca, Italy
Author of Of Myth Life and War in Plato’s Republic (Bloomington Indiana 2002), and of Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007, 2011)
Dr Ignaas Devisch, Professor of Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Medicine, holding posts at Ghent University and the University College Arteveldehogeschool, Belgium.
Title: The form of politics Nancy and ‘Leformal’ democracy
Dr Rachel Jones, Senior Lecturer, University of Dundee, Scotland
Author of Irigaray: Toward a Sexuate Philosophy (Cambridge Polity 2011)
Title: Between Nancy and Cavarero: Birth Death and the Singular Limits of the Political

Organisers:
Nick Aldridge, MMU, n.aldridge@mmu.ac.uk
Joanna Hodge, MMU j.hodge@mmu.ac.uk
Henry Somers Hall, MMU, h.somers-hall@mmu.ac.uk
Dr. David Webb, University of Staffordshire, d.a.webb@staffs.ac.uk