Seminar 35 // 4, 5, 6 October 2012 // London

Thursday 4th October

Venue: Prokofiev Room, Library Building. (for those without Library cards, we will meet at the entrance at 11)

11.00 – 1.00

Discussion of C/K business, plans for the coming year, dates for upgrades.

1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

3.00 - 5.00

Presentation Irit Rogoff

Looking at different deployments of the concept of ‘Justice’ in John Rawls, Armatya Sen and Jacques Derrida. Justice circulates as a set of aspirations and as a set of critical tools. We will look at how some of these discussions have played out and try and speculate what might be in this discussion for ourselves and our various creative practices. As I have been so late with the program, the texts below are mostly for context, the one text you could read through, is the Derrida opening text for the edited volume by Drusilla Cornell “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice”

Friday 5th October

Venue: Prokofiev Room, Library Building, 11.00-5.00

11.00-1.00

Discussion on upgrade , below Jean-Paul’s very precise take on the literature review that is to accompany the upgrade chapter. Literature Review A Literature Review is a critical and evaluative account of what has been published (or exhibited) on a chosen research topic. Its purpose is to situate your own research in a field of enquiry (perhaps defining this field), and to show how, and where, the arguments and findings of others leave scope for your own research. It must not be simply a précis of each source: you should summarize and analyse the literature always in direct relation to your prospective research, and in such a way as to show that you do indeed have an original thesis. In line with the College, the Department of Visual Cultures has no set format for a Literature Review. However, it expects it to be a minimum of 5,000 words and comprise a review of key ideas and of primary and secondary sources.

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-5.00

Presentation and discussion Stefan Nowotny

Stefan will approach the notion of justice through a reading of Walter Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence'. If the task of a critique of violence is, as Benjamin put it in the first sentence of his essay, as 'that of expounding its relations to law and justice', then we might also be able to conceive of justice as a virtuality (maybe even a practical virtue) of rendering law itself criticizable - and this precisely because, unlike the latter, it can never be posited or imposed. Texts include: Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence

8.00 Dinner at Irit’s

Saturday, 6th October  

Venue: INIVA, 1 Rivington Place London, Greater London EC2A 3BA

12.00 - 4.00

Presentation Leire Vergara

I have decided to narrow my context of study to Africa, specially to the colonies that Spain maintained after the collapse of its imperialist presence in Latin America (the last ones to be lost were Cuba and Philippines in 1898).Spanish African colonialism is quite clumsy and not as powerful as the ones developed by other European potencies, but I think it is quite much under-studied and very interesting regarding many issues, some quite specific related to Spanish history (e.g. Civil War), others more general related to the geopolitical order of the world at the time. In fact, for the fist chapter I would like to concentrate my research in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco and Western Sahara, because I think it is a good a idea to start being site-specific, and also because it can work really well with this concept/body of work around the concept of "touching". Well, this is what I would like to present to the group next seminar. To accompany this presentation, I would like to pass to the group the chapter number 6: "Nothing to Do in Sight: There is no the sense of touch" within "On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy". (Standford, University Press, 2005).

Readings:
Leire Vergara
"Touching" in The Sense of The World by Jean-Luc Nancy (1997, University of Minnesota Press), Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett.  

Leire Vergara, Nothing to do in Sight

Stefan Nowotny
"Critique of Violence", Walter Benjamin  

Irit Rogoff
"The idea of Justice", Amartya Sen
Review on 'The idea of Justice', The economist

Drucilla Cornell, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice