Samuel Weber in Helsinki 13–17 December 2011
http://figuresoftouch.com/?p=278
Samuel Weber, one of the leading American thinkers across the disciplines of literary theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis will visit Helsinki in December 2011, invited by the Figures of Touch research project.
Weber will give three open lectures at Aalto/Taik. Additionally, he will be one of the main speakers at the Hölderlin Research Day on 17 December at Teak, which is also an open event. In the frame of Weber’s visit, Figures of Touch research project organizes in cooperation with the Media Aesthetics research group also a closed text seminar with Weber. Invited participants will be informed about the programme and readings in advance.
Weber’s open lectures at Taik focus on the topic of singlarity in regard to media, politics and poetics. The references he will take up include, among others, Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”, Carl Schmitt’s thesis of “redemptive killing” and “911″. He will also discuss the relation of money, time, credit and credibility as well as the crisis of “sovereign debt” that is currently upon us. A further theme will be the significance of anxiety for psychoanalysis, but also for politics and culture more generally.
Samuel Weber’s open lectures
Aalto / Taik
Hämeentie 153 C, Helsinki
8th floor, lecture hall
10–12am
Tuesday 13 Dec: “Aesthetics, Media and Terror—Clouds”
Thursday 15 Dec: “Money is Time”
Friday 16 Dec: “On the Singularity of Poetic Knowledge”
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Samuel Weber is the Paul de Man Chair at the European Graduate School (EGS) and the Avalon Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. Earlier he has also been a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Director of the Northwestern University’s Paris Program in Critical Theory. He has played a major role in introducing and commenting the thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan in the United States. His work is not limited to the academic context. In numerous occasions he has engaged himself in debates that touch upon decisive questions of our time. He has also served as a dramaturge to German opera houses and theaters in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, and Ludwigsburg during the 1980s.