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A public conversation with Rebecca Comay, Eduardo Cadava and Jean-Michel Rabaté
Slought is pleased to announce a public conversation with Rebecca Comay, Eduardo Cadava and Jean-Michel Rabaté on Thursday, November 4, 2004 from 6:30-8:00pm. With the advent today of Christian evangelical fundamentalism in America, and Muslim fundamentalism abroad, this timely event, following the November 2, 2004 Presidential election in America, re-examines the idea of philosophy, revolution, and the reign of terror around 1800 in France.
This discussion, which will begin by examining the relation of philosophers such as Kant and Hegel to the French Revolution, will address general questions such as: What is the relation of revolution to terror? Can one have revolution without violence? What is the relationship of revolution to religion and to utopia? What sort of actions are considered terroristic today? As a result of the relativity surrounding contemporary accusations of terroristic behavior (e.g. during the recent Presidential election campaign), when is a terrorist not a terrorist? The discussion takes as its starting point the so-called "conservative revolution" in America, joining Christian fundamentalism and the state, as opposed to the frequent association of revolution in contemporary times with a tradition of leftist thought ranging from Marx to Negri.
"The regicide is the symbolic inauguration of political modernity: the instantaneous and total transfer of absolute sovereignty from king to people. The fall of the blade marks the sublime instant separating and thereby fusing before and after, ancien régime and revolutionary republic: Le roi est mort--vive la patrie. This sacrificial logic was ceremoniously enacted on January 21, 1793 in an event marked, at least according to all the narratives, by sacred pomp and ceremony. It was formalized at the king's trial when Robespierre invokes the "baptismal" quality of the execution. "The king must die because the nation must live": an infinite investment in the sacral body of the king must be generated by the staging of the latter's infinite divestment. The regeneration of the people is nothing other than the restoration of a nation's body to itself through the expropriation of the expropriator. [...] And from such a baptism flow all the contradictions of modernity: the inaugural self-betrayal of democracy in ever-more-inventive forms of terror."
-- Rebecca Comay, Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror
Rebecca Comay teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Program in Literary Studies at the University of Toronto. She has published widely on continental philosophy, literature, and contemporary art and she is currently writing two books: Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the Possibility of Memory, and Benjamin's Losses: Between Melancholia and Fetishism. Currently a Visiting Fellow in German and Humanities at Princeton University (Fall 2004), she is teaching a graduate seminar on "Philosophy and Revolution around 1800."
Eduardo Cadava teaches in the English Department at Princeton University. His publications include Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (1997), Emerson and the Climates of History (1997), Who Comes After the Subject? (co-edited with Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy; 1991), Cities Without Citizens (co-edited with Aaron Levy; 2004), and And Justice for all? The Claims of Human Rights (co-edited with Ian Balfour). He is currently finishing a collection of essays on the ethics and politics of mourning entitled Of Mourning.
"Human rights have become one of the most pressing and intractable matters of political life, and perhaps even of life as such. We might even say that there could be no life without human rights, without, at the very least, the right to live. [...] If Benjamin were alive today, he might remind us that there is no document of humanitarianism that is not at the same time a document of inhumanity, inequality, and violence, and that the human rights activist should therefore dissociate himself or herself from it as much as possible. If the projects and discourses of human rights do not wish to throw this counsel to the wind, they will have to define themselves continuously against the inhumanity, inequality, and violence that threaten them from within as well as from without."
-- Eduardo Cadava and Ian Balfour, The Claims of Human Rights: An Introduction