Activities 2007

• Mike Davis gave a talk and launched his new book 'Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb' on Friday 23rd February in Room B01 Clore Management Centre at 4.30pm.
  
  
• Slavoj Zizek gave a lecture 'The Uses and Misuses of Violence' on Monday 26th February  in Room B34 Malet Street at 2.30pm. This lecture is free and open to all.
  
  
• In Defence of Lost Causes: Slavoj Zizek Masterclass  19th, 20th, 21st & 22nd  March 2007The Emancipatory Core of Christianity – against the predominant versions of “post-secularism,” from New Age spirituality to the postmodern “deconstructionist” ethics.The Hegelian 'Absolute Knowing' – against the predominant philosophy of finitude, as well as vulgar scientific materialismHeidegger's Political Engagement in 1933 – against the cliché of intellectuals seduced by the “authentic” touch of violent spectacles and outbursts, in love with ruthless exercise of power which supplements their wimpy existence – the long line from Plato and Rousseau to Heidegger, not to mention the standard list of the dupes of Stalinism (Brecht, Sartre…).Revolutionary Violence – not only against the depoliticized ethics of human rights, but also against the “postmodern” radical politics of local resistances.
  
  
• Materialism Today - 2 day conference. Slavoj Zizek.June 22nd & 23rd 2007
  
  
• Jerome Rothenberg  - 'The Life of the Avant-Garde:From Romanticism to the Present' -  a talk followed by a poetry reading and conversation with the founder of ethnopoetics.Thursday 4th October 2007
  
  
• Luisa Passerini - "Europe and Love in the 1930s and 1940s: A couple of European Jews on the continent and in exile"  Professor of Cultural History at the University of Torino and External Professor at the European University Institute, Florence. Friday 19th October  2007   Council Room  Birkbeck Main Building, Malet St. London WC1
  
  
• Slavoj Zizek - 'Kouchner in Lampedusa, or the Two Faces of Humanitarianism'
  On September 16, Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister and humanitarian, announced that "we (the world) should prepare for the war with Iran". On September 20, a crew of Tunisian fishermen went to court in Lampedusa, Italy, for saving a group of African refugees from certain death. It is crucial to read the two events together: the "we" who should prepare for humanitarian war is the same "we" who enjoins us to let the helpless refugees drown. Tuesday 23rd October 
  
  
• Talking Books - 'Rebellion & Resistance: On the The Slave Ship and Beyond'  This is the human history of what the great African-American scholar-activist W.E.B. DuBois called the "most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history" - "the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West.  They descended into Hell."  Speakers: Marcus Rediker author of  'The Slave Ship: A Human History ", Selma James and Kólá Abímbólá. Monday 5th November 
  
  
• Etienne Balibar  -  "From Cosmopolitanism to Cosmopolitics" Professorial Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 10 Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine (USA). Tuesday 6th November
  
  
• Toril Moi  -  "Rethinking Literary History: Idealism, Realism and Modernism from 1870 to 1914"   Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University.Building on the argument in Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, this talk will suggest that we will solve a number of nagging problems in literary history if  we think of the period from 1870 to 1914 in European  literature as a period of crisis, that is to say, as a period in which the old paradigm ( idealism)  is slowly giving way to the new  (modernism). I will also suggest that we should distinguish between early modernism, high modernism and late modernism, and show that realism is not modernism's other. Wednesday 21st November 2007  3.30 - 5pm  Room 152  Birkbeck Main Building, Malet St.
  
  
• Talking Books - 'Garibaldi. Invention of a Hero' by Lucy Riall (Birkbeck)  Yale University PressAnother in our occasional series, Talking Books, in which the panel will focus on the rise of the press and the creation of modern celebrity; the political uses of nationalism and nationalist mythology and how successful this new book deconstructs and analyses the biographies of 'Great Men'. Speakers:  Stephen Gundle,  Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Daniel Pick, Professor of History at Birkbeck,  Alberto Banti, Professor of History at the University of Pisa, Catherine Brice, Professor of Contemporary History, Paris XII Val-de-Marne Thursday 22nd November  6pm - 7.30pm  Room 406