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Project Website: http://slought.org/content/11344/
Slought Foundation, in conjunction with the 122nd annual convention of the Modern Languages Association (MLA), is pleased to announce a special reception and book launch celebrating the release of Rrrevolutionnaire: Conversations in Theory, Vol. 1, a new publication from Slought Books. This event will take place on Friday, December 29, 2006 from 8:00-9:00pm at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Branka Arsic, Eduardo Cadava, Avital Ronell, and other contributors to the publication will be present for the reception; contributors Jean-Michel Rabaté and Catherine Liu, and editors Gregg Lambert and Aaron Levy, will provide brief remarks.
The reception immediately follows the inaugural "Slought Foundation Award for Rogue Thought" award ceremony from 6:30-8:00pm. This year’s inaugural award will honor Catherine Liu, an academic theorist whose work is featured in the Rrrevolutionnaire publication and is noted for exceptional creative and intellectual integrity, yet who plausibly remains a rogue practitioner working across various genres and media. (Here for more information)
Rrrevolutionnaire: Conversations in Theory, Vol. 1, based on the "Conversations in Theory" event series at Slought Foundation, responds to those who would quickly dismiss "Theory" as a sterile form of inquiry unable to produce change. This new publication presents dynamic conversations about violence, mourning, and revolution in contemporary art and life. Each of the contributors to this volume consider the relationship between theoretical practice and cultural and historical transformation to explore the ways theory is itself revolutionary. The "Rrrevolutionnaire" publication has also been conceived as an installation or curatorial intervention, such that the conversations have not been merely transcribed, but transformed with the intent of raising questions about how knowledge is situated and how certain forms of authority are archived and reproduced. The result is a unique and timely book that will interest a broad selection of readers concerned with literary theory, cinema studies, contemporary art and the historic avant-gardes.
"Rrrevolutionnaire: Conversations in Theory, Vol. 1" is edited by Gregg Lambert and Aaron Levy, with contributions by distinguished theorists and cultural critics including Branka Arsic, Eduardo Cadava, Rebecca Comay, Gregg Flaxman, Gregg Lambert, Thomas Y. Levin, Catherine Liu, Dorothea Olkowski, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Avital Ronell, Keith Sanborn, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Anthony Vidler. The volume includes photographs by Argentinean artist Julio Grinblatt documenting the physical space in which these conversations were staged.
For more information about this publication, or to purchase:
 
What Slought has done is something civic-minded with theory—if that sounds terribly pedestrian, it is, in the most literal sense of the term. Its location does promise something to the flâneur of Walnut St., the curious person just out for a walk. Rather than wander a campus with map in hand looking for such and such a building, the potential audience member of Slought might have wandered in from off the street. This aleatory encounter with something anachronistic like a “society” or “academy” or a cult takes place in a white cube space meant for the display of contemporary art. Theory has proven disappointing not because it has not necessarily led to great social, political or cultural change, but because it seems to have been fully institutionalized. If some of us felt called into academia because of theory’s
auratic power, it turned out that our jobs were—well, jobs, and not callings. But there is still the possibility that something happens within this way of thinking and talking that is both expansive and explosive when it addresses the instability and the historicity of the institutions in which it finds itself precariously at home.
This volume, then, represents an extraordinary record of an extraordinary achievement—the production of a space in which theorists/critics dilated or thought out loud before a “public.” The “author” of this achievement is collective—Slought cultivated a public and permitted academics, theorists, and critics to speak before an attentive, but unpredictable group of interlocutors. The public intellectual has become a highly sought-after creature: and as desirable and elusive as the golden hind. Various parties are blamed for the lack of public figures who can speak with intellectual authority—it’s the fault of the callow and crass media, it’s the fault of insular and self-serving academics. Slought gave intellectuals a public that was not exclusively a professional or institutional audience—that is to say, one disciplined by enforced collegiality or the threat of “evaluation and assessment.” What does Slought promise to academics and theory-heads, but a way out of the echo chamber of the usual modes of exchange, the usual performances of academic credentialism, competence, and mastery.
-- From Catherine Liu’s afterword “Auditions for the Future”
"In asking after the nature of the event that Theory often seeks to address, “the event” does not necessarily refer to a series of external transformations that Theory has concerned itself with in an exclusive, almost obsessive fashion, as
the horizon of its own relation to history. In speaking incessantly of the event, perhaps Theory has been speaking of itself all along: of the inherent limit of its own powers to speak about something that has not yet taken place, of a future date that will make all the calendars obsolete and will cause them to be rewritten anew. And yet, the event in question is perhaps not so grandiose or “world-historical,” but rather refers to “a conversation in theory.” It refers to a series of conversations that took place on various dates, were recorded, and archived, and now take place again in a new form and before a new set of listeners, participants, and readers. We would like to think that, in this manner, we are following Jean-Michel Rabaté’s image of Theory initiating processes without worrying where they will end.
-- From the introduction by Gregg Lambert and Aaron Levy
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This program is made possible in part through the generous sponsorship or support of the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Department of English at Syracuse University, and the Department of English and Program in Comparative Literature and Theory at the University of Pennsylvania
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