new seminar series on cultural theory

Seminar series on CULTURAL THEORY

Organised by: Dr. Rick Dolphijn (Media and Culture Studies), Dr. Iris van der Tuin (Gender Studies)

Location: Drift 21 room 1.09, Utrecht

Time: Wednesdays 11:00 - 12:45 (you can bring your lunch)

The Cultural Theory seminar is a close-reading seminar, which focuses on texts that are valuable to the humanities as a whole and is open to scholars, students and people working outside of academia. In the sessions we do not build up knowledge, which means that you can join in whenever you like. Yet we work with themes in order to structure our thoughts a little bit. Earlier we have discussed “naturecultures”, “immanent times/ immanent spaces”, “Linguistics/ signification/ communication”, “After Finitude”, “Signs & numbers; culture & nature”, and “Rewriting Enlightenment”. We hope many of you will be interested in contributing to our discussions. The reading material can be copied at Kromme nieuwegracht 20 (cursuspostvakken; ground floor).

 

Theme seven: Writing and Rewriting the Body

This theme starts from the famous methodology or dictum of the so-called French feminists of the 1970s and 1980s: writing the sexed body. After thinking through the ways in which this methodology comes to the fore in the texts of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, and via writing race, we will look at ways in which the philosophers Deleuze, Bergson, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, and Spinoza write sexed, and raced bodies.

 

1. 17 February          Hélène Cixous, “The laugh of the medusa”

 

2. 24 February          Luce Irigaray, “This sex which is not one” and “When our lips speak together”

 

3. 3 March                Julia Kristeva, “Stabat mater”

 

4. 10 March              Arun Saldanha, “Reontologising race: The machinic geography of phenotype”

N.B.: Prof. Gloria Wekker (Gender Studies) will join this seminar session.

 

5. 17 March              Gilles Deleuze, “Twenty-seventh series of orality” and “Twenty-eighth series of sexuality” from The logic of sense

 

6. 24 March              Henri Bergson, “Introduction to metaphysics”

 

7. 31 March              Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The body in its sexual being” in Phenomenology of perception

 

8. 7 April                      Vicki Kirby, “Original science: Nature deconstructing itself”

N.B.: Prof. Kirby will join this seminar session.

 

9. 14 April                Spinoza, Ethics part II proposition 20-39