ALL WELCOME AT THE CIDRAL LECTURE THIS TUESDAY!
Tuesday 27th November
5-7pm in John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre
Dr Michael Mack (University of Durham)
Revisiting the Two Cultures Debate: Affect, Economics and Science
Where
postmodern art and culture remain aloof or cool, contemporary society
seems to have fallen prey to various anxieties and panics which grow out
of an growing sense of crisis,
of instability and uncertainty. The recent financial crises and their
implications for increasing levels of anxiety in everyday life have lead
to a change in the structure of feeling.
As part of this change in the structure of feeling, we are becoming
increasingly aware of the precarious foundations of life. Judith Butler
has turned her attention to what it means to live precariously. Part of
this recent preoccupation with the precarious
is a re-discovery of care rather than postmodern indifference and
aloofness. Lauren Berlant—a leading thinker of contemporary affect
theory—has thus argued for a new aesthetics that does justice to what
she calls the crisis ordinariness which characterizes
life in the early twentieth century. Against this background, this talk
establishes the economic and cultural break of contemporary society
with the optimistic belief in economic and scientific improvements which
has characterized not only modern but also
postmodern theory.
Dr. Michael Mack is reader in the Department of English Studies in the
University of Durham. His research focuses on the mind-body divide,
questions of stereotyping and exclusion (and integrative diversity) in
literature, philosophy and medicine. Dr. Mack has
taught at the University of Chicago, the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, the University of Calgary, Syracuse University, the
University of Sydney and the University of Nottingham. He has published
three books: "Anthropology as Memory. Elias Canetti and Franz
Baermann Steiner's Responses to the Shoah" (2001); "German Idealism and
the Jew. The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish
Responses" (2003), which was shortlisted for the prestigious Koret
Jewish Book Award 2004 and has been produced as an audio
book (2009); and "Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: the hidden
Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud" (2010).
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