The Centre for Modern Thought is pleased to announce an upcoming lecture by Miguel de Beistegui, Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University, entitled “Foucault on Neoliberalism”.
The lecture will take place at 3:00 pm, June 11th in the Court Room of the University Office. All welcome!
Conference on Film and Philosophy. 16-18 July 2009. Alain Badiou is one of the keynote speakers. It is at the University of Dundee — very near Aberdeen.
“You are, are you not, a communist?”
(I just watched the Badiou interview - thanks for sharing that B. It looks like reserves of pomposity at the BBC are still at 1950’s levels.)
Relatedly I chanced upon an excellent resource with detailed notes on some of the Birkbeck conference papers. I thought these may be of interest, both for those who were there and those who weren’t. There is also a complete transcript of Alberto Toscano’s paper.
Blog with notes on papers given by Ranciere, Zizek and Michael Hardt
http://thekubrickiangaze.blogspot.com/
Toscano’s paper, entitled “Communist Power/Communist Knowledge”:
http://thekubrickiangaze.blogspot.com/2009/03/communist-powercommunist-knowledge.html
BBC HARDtalk interview by Stephen Sackur. Broadcasted a few days ago, on 24 March 2009.
Part 1
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qSSZqzfY9U
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-8KzD2U9J4
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaimHnhcp1Y
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnpMVsLw7T8
Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U5vfICJmlE
Documentary on four mathematicians. Two of them are Georg Cantor and Kurt Godel. Dramatizes their mathematics quite clearly, I think, and some of the mathematical proofs that Badiou and Hallward talk about. 90 minutes.
Introductory texts on Paul Cohen’s proof to the Undecidability of the Continuum Hypothesis. These explain a bit on his idea of the ‘generic set’ and his method of ‘forcing’. I was told that some people did not get this by email, so I post the links here:
“What is Forcing?” (the least technical text I found):
http://www.ams.org/notices/200806/tx080600692p.pdf
“Forcing for Dummies”:
http://www-math.mit.edu/~tchow/mathstuff/forcingdum
“A Beginner’s Guide to Forcing”:
http://alum.mit.edu/www/tchow/forcing.pdf
“Cheerful Introduction to Forcing and the Continuum Hypothesis”:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~easwaran/papers/forcing.pdf
Prof. Eduardo Cadava, of Princeton University, will be giving a lecture and a seminar at Aberdeen the week after next. Both events will take place in MacRobert 028 (CPD 1), from 16.00.
On the Monday the 16th, Prof. Cadava will deliver the lecture “Of Veils and Mourning: Fazal Sheikh’s Widowed Images.”
On Tuesday the 17th, he will give a seminar titled “On Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.’” Benjamin’s text is provided in full for download here, as a PDF.
Rachele passed this along to me — the announcement of a conference at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities that may be of interest to the Centre, given our seminar topic this semester (Badiou will be one of the speakers): “On the Idea of Communism”. 13th,14th and 15th March, featuring among the speakers Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui, and Slavoj Zizek.
