Pervert's Guide to Ideology

Cultural theorist superstar Slavoj Žižek re-teams with director Sophie Fiennes (The Pervert's Guide to Cinema) for another wildly entertaining romp through the crossroads of cinema and philosophy. With infectious zeal and a voracious appetite for popular culture, Žižek literally goes inside some truly epochal movies, all the better to explore and expose how they reinforce prevailing ideologies. As the ideology that undergirds our cinematic fantasies is revealed, striking associations emerge: What hidden Catholic teachings lurk at the heart of The Sound of Music? What are the fascist political dimensions of Jaws? Taxi Driver, Zabriskie Point, The Searchers, The Dark Knight, John Carpenter's They Live ("one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left"), Titanic, Kinder Eggs, verité news footage, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and propaganda epics from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia all inform Žižek's stimulating, provocative and often hilarious psychoanalytic-cinematic rant.

The Stuart Hall Project (John Akomfrah), 2013

I met John Akomfrah once. I was leaving a screening of "7 Songs for Malcolm X" early at the Museum of Visual Culture in Umeå Sweden in 2007 (parental duties called). He was sitting in the foyer while the film was screening. I approached him and thanked him for his work, (Handsworth Songs is a work of genius), and he said he was now working on a biopic of Fela Kuti. As far as I know he has not finished it. I hope he does one day.

The Stuart Hall Project is a 2013 British film written and directed by John Akomfrah centred on cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who is regarded as one of the founding figures of the New Left and a key architect of Cultural Studies in Britain. The film uses a montage of documentary footage together with Hall's own words and thoughts to produce what Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called "an absorbing account", awarding it four stars and stating that it has "an idealism and high seriousness that people might not immediately associate with the subject Hall pioneered".

Sight and Sound magazine's Ashley Clark described it as "a strongly personal work" that "unfolds simultaneously as a tribute to a heroic figure, a study of the emergence of the New Left and its attendant political ideas, and a summation, in thematic and technical terms, of the key characteristics of Akomfrah’s body of work thus far (intertextuality, archival manipulation, a focus on postcolonial and diasporic discourse in Britain)."

Paul Gilroy’s 2015 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture – “Offshore Humanism”

Prof. Gilroy delivered the lecture in Exeter in September. He is Professor of American and English Literature at King’s College London, having previously been Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics (2005-2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999-2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths (1995-1999).

Prof. Gilroy’s research interests include postcolonial studies, particularly with regard to London, postimperial melancholia, and the emplotment of English victimage; the cultural politics of European decolonisation; African American intellectual and cultural history, literature and philosophy; the formation and reproduction of national identity, especially with regard to race and “identity”; and the literary and theoretical significance of port cities and pelagics. He has also published on art, music and social theory.

His many publications include “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Unwin Hyman, 1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, 1993), After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Routledge, 2004) and Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (2010, Harvard University Press).

The Antipode Foundation and Antipode‘s publisher Wiley sponsor sessions at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG). These annual international conferences are widely seen as vital venues for the exchange of cutting-edge ideas, and we invite presenters who represent both the political commitment and intellectual integrity that characterise a radical journal of geography.

Claire Colebrook - We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene

The proposed conception of the Anthropocene epoch marks is radical a shift in species awareness as Darwinian evolution was for the nineteenth-century. If the notion of the human species' emergence in time requires new forms of narrative, imaginative and ethical articulation, then the intensifying sense of the species' end makes a similar claim for rethinking 'our' processes of self-presentation and self-preservation.

One of the dominant motifs of the anthropocene is climate change, which (as Bruno Latour has argued) closes down the modern conception of the infinite universe, drawing us back once again to the parochial, limited and exhausted earth. It might be worth redefining all those hyper-modern proclamations of a post-human and post-racial future as hypo-modern, as refusals of the species' bounded temporality. Nowhere is this more evident than in the seemingly modern fascination with sexual difference. It is the possibility of transcending sexual difference — of arriving at indifference — that has always been harbored as the human species' end.

Rosi Braidotti: The Posthuman Predicament: Affect, Power and Ethics.

Keynote from the 4th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies July 1st, 2013 at the University of Groningen.

Professor Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and grew up in Australia, where she received a First-Class Honours degree from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize. Braidotti then moved on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981. She has taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands since 1988, when she was appointed as the founding professor in women's studies. In 1995 she became the founding Director of the Netherlands research school of Women's Studies, a position she held till 2005. Braidotti is a pioneer in European Women's Studies: she founded the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic Network for Women's Studies ATHENA, which she directed till 2005. She was a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College in 2005-6; a Jean Monnet professor at the European University Institute in Florence in 2002-3 and a fellow in the school of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1994. Braidotti is currently Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities.

Braidotti’s publications have consistently been placed in continental philosophy, at the intersection with social and political theory, cultural politics, gender, feminist theory and ethnicity studies. The core of her interdisciplinary work consists of four interconnected monographs on the constitution of contemporary subjectivity, with special emphasis on the concept of difference within the history of European philosophy and political theory. Braidotti’s philosophical project investigates how to think difference positively, which means moving beyond the dialectics that both opposes it and thus links it by negation to the notion of sameness. This is evidenced in the philosophical agenda set in her first book Patterns of Dissonance: An Essay on Women in Contemporary French Philosophy , 1991, which gets developed further in the trilogy that follows: Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory , 1994; Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming , 2002; and Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics , 2006.

Throughout her work, Braidotti asserts and demonstrates the importance of combining theoretical concerns with a serious commitment to producing socially and politically relevant scholarship that contributes to making a difference in the world. Braidotti's output also included several edited volumes. Her work has been translated in a total of 19 languages and all the main books in at least three languages other than English.

Influenced by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and especially "French feminist" thinker Luce Irigaray, Braidotti has brought postmodern feminism into the Information Age with her considerations of cyberspace, prosthesis, and the materiality of difference. Braidotti also considers how ideas of gender difference can affect our sense of the human/animal and human/machine divides. Braidotti has also pioneered European perspectives in feminist philosophy and practice and has been influential on third-wave as well as post-secular feminisms.

On 3 March 2005, Braidotti was honored with a Royal Knighthood from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands; in August 2006 she received the University Medal from the University of Lodz in Poland and she was awarded an Honorary Degree in Philosophy from Helsinki University in May 2007. In 2009, she was elected Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Internet: http://www.rosibraidotti.com/

Braidotti: Nomadic Feminist Theory In A Global Era

Braidotti: Nomadic Feminist Theory In A Global Era from bkm on Vimeo.

This lecture addresses the so-called ‘post-human’ turn in contemporary feminist theory in the light of three main considerations: firstly the shifting perception and understanding of ‘the human’ in the Life sciences; secondly the effects of globalization as a system that functions by instilling the process of ‘timeless time’ and perverse, multiple time-lines. Thirdly, the impact of wars and conflicts in contemporary governmentality and the new forms of discrimination they engender on a planetary scale. Last but not least this talk examines the implications of this historical context for progressive, affirmative politics in general and gender issues in particular.

Rosi Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and grew up in Australia, where she received a First-Class Honours degree from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize. Braidotti then moved on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981. She has taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands since 1988, when she was appointed as the founding professor in women’s studies. In 1995 she became the founding Director of the Netherlands research school of Women’s Studies, a position she held till 2005. Braidotti is a pioneer in European Women’s Studies: she founded the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic Network for Women’s Studies ATHENA, which she directed till 2005. She was a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College in 2005-6; a Jean Monnet professor at the European University Institute in Florence in 2002-3 and a fellow in the school of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1994. Braidotti is currently Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities.

Stelarc - Meat, Metal and Code: The Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera

Stelarc is a Performance Artist and holds the Chair in Performance Art at the School of Arts, Brunel University, London. Stelarc speaks on mixed and augmented realities and our biological bodies at the Screen Media seminar: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2251/

Abstract: We are increasingly expected to perform in Mixed and Augmented Realities. We are no longer merely biological bodies but increasingly accelerated by our machines and enhanced by our instruments. And we have to manage data in virtual systems. We have become extended operational systems, performing beyond the boundaries of our skin and beyond the local space we inhabit. As well as Circulating Flesh it is now an age of Fractal and Phantom Flesh.