Winter Programme

ECOLOGY, LOVE AND POLITICS

January - March, 2025, Parrhesia, Berlin

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Payment may be made by credit card (via Paypal), Paypal, or offline Bank Transfer.

Courses

Each course runs 2 hours per week for 5 weeks

Talks

Book Launches

Description

In this course, we will begin exploring the well-known Guattarian concepts of deterritorialization and territorialization in the light of two ideas: freedom and care. By questioning rigid conservative territories where freedom is sacrificed for stability, and capitalism’s random deterritorializations where things are exchanged on the same plane of equivalence, in his later writings – which contain his less well-known but most original thought, independent from Deleuze’s – Guattari puts forward the need to play rhythmically between territory and deterritorialization: caring for those things which are finite and fragile, and yet being free to explore the new. It is only in this way, he believes, that new values can be created to enrich our subjectivities and existential territories. Additionally, throughout the course we will also ask questions such as: What is the role of chaosmosis (the transition from chaos to cosmos) in relation to the care and freedom just mentioned? Can it open up a form of care based on something more than the acknowledgment of our relational condition – something, that is, even more essential, linked to the realization that we are inherently fragile because we spring from chaos, live for an instant and then die and dissolve back into chaos? Furthermore, can chaosmic thinking help us interact with reality in previously unimagined ways? Persuaded that it can, the later Guattari conferred increasing relevance on art, for artists, like children and lovers, and schizophrenics (in their own, if often painful, ways), feel the need to invent the world anew every day. Accordingly, he spoke of a new aesthetic paradigm; and to this expression he appended the term ethical to emphasize that, while being open-ended, any creative existential activity must also be responsible. Therefore, in parallel with freedom and care, the aesthetic and the ethical stand as the two key components of what Guattari called mental ecology, which he deemed as crucial as environmental ecology and whose own incorporeal species (love, friendship, solidarity, music, cinema, thought…) are menaced today by neoliberalism and authoritarianism alike (just as many biological species also are). The course will focus on these and other related matters and will include a practical workshop in which all participants will have a chance to play with this idea of a mental ecology after their own vital experiences.

Session 1: Life as rhythm, life as chaosmosis

Session 2: Freedom and care in a reciprocal perspective

Session 3: Towards a mental ecology

Session 4: Reimagining subjectivity

Session 5: Playing with Guattari’s cartographies

Carlos A. Segovia is an independent philosopher (born in London and currently based in Berlin) working on meta-conceptuality, contingency and worlding. His publications include Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide (with Sofya Shaikut; Brill, 2023), Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), and Félix Guattari and the Ancients: Theatrical Dialogues in Early Philosophy (with Gary Genosko; forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2025). He has been associate professor of philosophy at St Louis University Missouri (Madrid Campus), visiting professor at the University of Aarhus and the Free University of Brussels, and guest lecturer at the European Research Council, the Collège International de Philosophie, the École Normale Supérieure, the École Lacanienne de Psychanalyse, University College London, the European University at St Petersburg, Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Waseda University in Tokyo and the University of Lilongwe. Now in Berlin, he is designing an experimental, educational and research project on the production of new universes of value against the backdrop of today’s environmental challenges and shifting mental ecologies.

Description

Ask a contemporary philosopher who St Paul is to them and the answer will tell you a great deal about the philosopher in question. Recent philosophical works on the Pauline Epistles show us the almost inexhaustible potential of these writings. If Paul is our contemporary, each philosopher’s take on Paul – and we will stick mostly to recent publications on his letters (by Badiou, Zizek, Agamben…) – simultaneously says something about the approach to a contemporary philosophy. Curiously enough, each of the thinkers, while disagreeing with his religiosity, grasps the logic of Paul’s thought and situates its significance differently.

After his famous conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul spent his days tirelessly carving out a new ‘life’ that bespoke new values in a radical sense. This other life, he was convinced, entailed an otherness that necessarily conflicted with the given socio-political order. The ways of living of his age he refers to as a sort of death: the true or real life would thus necessitate breaking with these ways, , and seek to transform their symptoms and crises. It would require an otherness that necessarily leads to another world – not in the hereafter, as we will contend pace Nietzsche, but in the here and now.

The aim of the course will be to grasp how certain philosophers situate the radical Paul as relevant for today (i.e. as our contemporary) and thus how they provide us with vectors of orientation that aim at transforming this world. 

Description

1. A Missing Bond Between Journalism and Philosophy

In the first class, we will problematise the nexus between philosophy and journalism as kindred forms of research that pursue the dissemination of truth and knowledge. Keeping in mind new journalism (synthesising journalistic and literary techniques since the 1970’s) and the longstanding bond between philosophy and literature (say, at least since Plato’s Dialogues), we will then foreground a significant methodological gap: why journalists and philosophers today have neither hybrid education nor influential avenues nor funding to share?

2. Fearless Speech as an Educational Milestone

In the second class, we will take a look at Michel Foucault’s final pedagogical cycle, Fearless Speech/Parrhesia/Courage of Truth (1983/4), in relation to the foundations and limits of contemporary neo-liberal education. Indeed, how do popular media platforms, in the U.S. or Western Europe, and figures like Elon Musk, manage to thrive on celebrating “free speech” while drowning in partisan “post-truth” rhetorics?

3. Fearless Speech in the Context of Rampant Populism/Servitude

In the next three classes, we will overview the findings of a special issue of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy (in press) dedicated to the problems raised above. First, we will consider a foundational paper “Free Speech, Fearless Speech, and the Problem of Parrhesia” by John M Carvalho, who attended Foucault’s seminars at Berkeley in 1983. Our next paper is by Christopher Schwartz, “All this Fearless Speaking is Really Fearful Screaming,” which – like Carvalho’s – considers ethical and social conditions, including context-sensitivity and friendship, as well as the mediums through which the acts of parrhesia become realisable and, possibly, effective.

4. Chronicles of Courage of Truth

Next, we will review two papers that show how and at what cost parrhesiastic voices find their way to the audience. In “Transparency of War Photography,” a very gifted analytic aesthetician Michel-Antoine Xhignesse gropes his way through official propaganda to ascertain the subject, object, and telos of military photojournalism. In the second part, we will watch a few snippets from Citizenfour (2014) by Laura Poitras, considered in an essay “Documentary and Parrhesia” by Stefanie Baumann. This award-winning investigative documentary shows how humans, despite the differences in our lifestyles, can work together to expose self-serving lies and whitewashing, even if it requires putting one's own safety at risk. Things will continue warming up in this class.

5. Collective and Shamanic Parrhesia

Moving away from the Eurocentric axes, which nonetheless limit everybody, our final class considers two hybrid research essays, dovetailing philosophical precision and depth with an investigative edge. Is it conceivable that non-material ancestral beings can communicate fearlessly

with those who have the skills to understand them? In “Wasp Spirits vs. White Climate Epidemic,” polymath Joshua M. Hall telescopes all lenses upon Davi Kopenawa, the Yanomani diplomat, elder, and shaman, who can dance with spirits and sees our world running on fumes owing to spiritual amnesia. Next door, written in Mashhad, Majid Heidari’s analytic reportage explores two forms of political parrhesia in Iran's recent history. The author poses a simple question: “how autocratic states respond to acts of parrhesia”? When truthfulness and social conscience are of little value, how can we tell that an act of fearless speech has touched a nerve?

Description

TBA

Talk 1 

Joulia Strauss: My Life As A Counter-Rhythmical Interruption Cat

The term ‘counter-rhythmical’, invented by Friedrich Hölderlin, describes art’s role as an agent of rupture in an order, an interruption that also allows us to enter the world of solidarity, kindness, and empathy. Against a socio-political order that separates, divides, classifies, and excludes, Strauss’s work endeavours precisely to create counter-rhythms, or moments of Oneness that in-separate. She does so using a wide range of media, a mix of indigenous cultures, and by gathering people and doing collective actions. Her talk will present a procession of these examples of Oneness, which she understands as the creation of times and spaces for living the good life, in a Greek sense of the word.

This procession will start with her ongoing durational art work, Avtonomi Akadimia (http://avtonomi-akadimia.net), a self-organized, grassroots university she founded and organizes in Athens and elsewhere. She will then present rarely seen documentation of the ‘movement of movements’ that emerged in 2012 to get cultural institutions to transform radically so that they can be used for reloveutionary purposes: occupations of museums such as the Pergamonmuseum, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, and of the director's offices of the Berlin Biennale 7.

Also, specifically for Parrhesia, she will revisit her early interactive 3D sculptures, which deploy pre-Socratic mathematical structures, once part of a unity of knowledge, into synthetic sculptures she calls ‘Cat Notation’. Taking up the a-disciplinary effects of Berlin Media Theory, Cat Notation is a musical structure that can be said to carry the ‘DNA’ of ancient Greece prior to the invention of the state as a dispositif of exclusion and borderization.

Joulia Strauss (http://joulia-strauss.net) is an artist, activist and multimedia sculptor. She was born in the Soviet Union as Mari, one of Europe’s last indigenous cultures with a shamanic tradition, and lives and works in Athens and Berlin. Her sculptures, paintings, performances, drawings and video works have been seen in solo and group exhibitions at the Pergamon Museum and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, at Tate Modern, as well as at the Tirana Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Athens Biennale, the Kyiv Biennial, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and documenta14, among others. She is the editor of Krytyka Polityczna Athens and (with Friedrich Kittler, Peter Berz, and Peter Weibel) of Götter und Schriften rund ums Mittelmeer (Wilhelm Fink, Brill, 2017). She is a member of Parrhesia: School of Philosophy, Berlin. Strauss has recently completed a film, Transindigenous Assembly (https://vimeo.com/888629382). She practices and teaches Qi Gong and Việt Võ Đạo Kung Fu.

Talk 2 

Elad Lapidot

Anti-Anti-Semitism: Current Debates

My talk will reflect on the current function of the discourse concerning the fight against anti-Semitism, which I call “anti-anti-Semitism”, as a guiding principle in shaping state policies and the deployment of state power and state violence. I draw on a range of current declarations, statements, and policy documents, such as the German federal parliament’s new draft resolution Nie wieder ist jetzt: Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland schützen, bewahren und stärken (Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany), as well as on various existing definition of anti-Semitism, such as the IHRA and the JDA. The talk engages with debates concerning the meaning and problems of the contemporary political function of anti-anti-Semitism from various points of view, not least with respect to the declared goal of preventing anti-Semitism.

Elad Lapidot is Professor for Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. Holding a PhD in philosophy from the Paris Sorbonne university, he has taught philosophy, Jewish thought and Talmud at many universities, such as the University of Bern, Switzerland, and the Humboldt Universität and Freie Univeristät in Berlin. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. His publications include: State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2025); Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming 2025); Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), the Hebrew translation with Introduction and Commentary (with R. Bar) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020); Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire: La logique de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010).