Asma Abbas (KEYNOTE SPEAKER),
(Bard College at Simon’s Rock)
Unwilling Ends
Wrought between the refugee as the premonitory scribe of fascism, the scripted self-annihilations of those in decolonial struggle, the liberal rewrites of Antigone in response to such “scourges,” and histories that conscript love and suffering to inscribe “fragile” and “damaged” subjects as necessarily anti-political, this talk seeks to unpack the relations of and to time, suffering, love, and necessity that are enclosed and settled within questions and designations of vulnerability (and other modes of reflexive and introjected value and pathologies in our time). This materialist and decolonial analysis of the fetishism of vulnerabilities in our time attends to the confluence of fascism, racial capitalism, and colonialism in producing the bodies that suffer, and the ends that are ascribed to them. How must the relation between the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of vulnerability be understood in order to acknowledge the motion underneath and within the concept and/or release that which is stilled and settled in it? How can ends be un-willed in a situation where what contains also forecloses, and what else needs to be disentangled and unbound from each other in order to rethink the relation between thought, action, and politics so that a narrow, ahistorical ethics of injury and vulnerability does not conjure perfect victims that are bound to become perfect perpetrators, betraying the only promise of politics there exists right now.
Asma Abbas is Associate Professor of Politics and Philosophy, andEmily H. Fisher Faculty Fellow,at Bard College at Simon's Rock.She is also director of Hic Rosa, an art, education, and politics collective. A transdisciplinary political theorist interested in thehistory of forms of political existence, she situates her work at the intersection of politics, ethics, and aesthetics,addressing how these domains and their demands shape the tasks ofknowledge and subject production in a global postcolonial context andinform struggles for peace and justice.Her scholarship and teachingevince a cultivated practice in decolonial and materialist politics and acommitment to de-provincialising marginalized ways of thinking, being, feeling,and knowing in order to channel their emancipatory and transformativepotential. Her first book wasLiberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections in Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), andshe is currently completing her second book project titledAnother Love: A Politics of the Unrequited. Her writing has been published in severaledited volumes, and in journals such as Politics and Culture,Journal ofPolitics,Theory & Event, and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She lives in Richmond, Massachusetts and goes back home to Karachi, Pakistan whichstill furnishes most of the affective abundances that drive her vocation.
Aleksandra Andrzejewska
(Polish Academy of Sciences)
Bracha Ettinger’s Matrixal Borderspace and other psychoanalitical spaces
The presentation analyses the space that Bracha Ettinger proposes to exceed the limitations of the traditionalpsychoanalytical model, in which she finds the source of woman’s suffering. It seems that she believes in the need of introducing in psychoanalysis the feminine space, even if the task seems to be impossible without destroying the existing dogmas. The idea of space that not only accepts, but also is built around the concept of the feminine vulnerability. Although the Ettinger’s concept probably should be performed by other means than by language (maybe by dance? or by music?), I will try to analyze her gesture and the space she proposes. This concept cannot be grasped without some movement. Thus, one has to be watchful and trace all different kinds of movement that seem to be happening here. There can be found the Ettinger’s move back, the one that exceeds imagination. There is also the movement of space itself, as it seems to be dynamic and “fluid” one. Finally, there will be my own movement around the Ettinger’s ideas and sentences.
As a first step, I will analyze the psychoanalytical space that Ettinger finds insufficient. Maybe it would make it easier to think her model through on this ground, as one supplementing and/or deconstructing the former (it is just a further question which “operation” she performs). Therefore, I will start from discussing space proposed by Freud with its modifications and interpretations made by Klein and Lacan. I chose these authors because I find them sensitive for the problem of spatiality and complementary for each other. The elements they discus I use as referential points that help to grasp Ettinger’s solutions. Later I will come back to Ettinger’s critique and her modifications of, let us name it, traditional psychoanalytical theory.
Aleksandra Andrzejewska, PHD student at the Graduate School of Social Research (GSSR) in Warsaw, PAN. After she had graduated from the faculty of architecture and urbanism at University of Technology in Gdańsk she wrote her master thesis in Culture, Media and Society at GSSR on artistic ways of commemoration. At the moment she is working on the psychoanalitical theory of art of Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal.
Anna Barcz
(University of Bielsko-Biala / Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Extinct Aurochs, Vulnerable and Protected Wisents, Adapted…
Despite the fact that animals’ appearance in the human society proclaims their condition as weaker than homo sapiens and in many cases devoid of meaning, I discuss animals’ vulnerability in terms of new possibilities to escape from the anthropocentric perspective.
In the paper I would like first to reflect on Polish environmental culture in regard to flag animal species (extinct aurochs and protected – in Bialowieza – wisents, called also European Bisons) and then briefly reconstruct the history of aurochs’ protection and their relation with contemporary wisents. The question that I find adequate for my presentation during the conference is connected with defining vulnerability within environmental conservation and asking about Bialowieza as a model place for historical processes conveying our concept of natural reserves.
Anna Barcz is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Bielsko-Biala, and a cooperating researcher at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Ecological Realism: From Ecocriticism to Zoocriticism (Katowice: WNS, 2016) in Polish and Animal Narratives and Culture: Vulnerable Realism (Newcastle Upon Tyne: CSP, 2017) as well as numerous essays on cultural and literary representations of animals and the environment. She has recently co-authored and co-edited a book titled Animals and Their People. Connecting East and West in Cultural Animal Studies (Brill, forthcoming). She lives in Warsaw.
James Besse & Gabriel Kates-Shaw
(Bennington College)
Love and the Event:
An Essay on Destructive Intervention
There is no better valorization of vulnerability than framing it as a precondition for love and happiness. We see great potential in re-imagining love as a disruptive subjectivization toward the “point of view of two” and away from alienated individualism. For Alain Badiou, love requires vulnerability (2012:22), especially insofar as this implies a kind of changeability changeability that, rather than being something with a negative connotation, is the property of subjectivity which allows for the most radical gestures of empathy and solidarity. Love, from this view, means subjecting oneself to the dangers and consequences of a contingent event, being vulnerable to radical shifts in perspective and selfhood. This claim that Badiou stakes out around love is a radical one, and declares subjective rupture and the possibility for it as a site of radical positivity: the very condition for not only happiness, but also revolutionary activity. The aim of this paper is threefold: (1) to stress the importance of Badiou’s philosophy of love, (2) to valorize vulnerability as an underpinning and precondition of happiness, and (3) to fight against reductionistic accounts of the human being: sexual, biological/animalist, and those pertaining to the market. The denial of the event and the person’s vulnerability to it domesticates love, and renders its revolutionary dimensions trivial. For example, the sterile idea of love without risk, or love as ordinary—love which disrupts nothing—is something to be opposed and held as a corruption of love. We use Badiou’s theory of love as a starting point to analyse how vulnerability and the event underlie certain fundamental elements of human well being, and as such are necessary to reify in any radical project. We then look, using pop culture (and specifically popular music) at ways in which love is assailed in late capitalism, specifically in the latter’s tendency to value predictability over vulnerability; in the terms of the early Badiou, the splace against the outplace. In addition to Badiou, we incorporate the ideas of Catherine Malabou, Julia Kristeva, and Jan Patočka whose work has much to say about vulnerability and the event.
Gabe Kates-Shaw is a third-year undergraduate student of philosophy and psychology at Bennington College. His interests center on post-structuralism, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxist political economy, with an eye toward incorporating key ideas from these disciplines into a revolutionary framework of mental healthcare.
James Besse is a fourth-year undergraduate at Bennington College. He is currently doing graduate work with GCAS-AMEU under Julie Reshe while finishing his undergraduate studies as an exchange student in the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. His research interests include the philosophy of language, psychoanalysis, and the cultural dimensions of neoliberalism.
Agata Chełstowska
(University of Warsaw)
“A million abandoned children” and a delicate balance of vulnerability – the Polish public discourse on child support non-compliance
In 2017 a Polish magazine for women, Wysokie Obcasy, initiated a letter-writing campaign for adult children of parents who didn’t pay court-appointed child support. The aim of the campaign was to raise awareness on social consequences of child support non-compliance. The magazine’s strategy was to bring to light the experiences and palpable vulnerability of being raised without one parents’ financial contribution. In 2015 child support non-compliance was referred to for the first time as “economic abandonment”, and that is how the title of the opening article, “A million abandoned children”, was created.
In my paper I will analyze the public discourse on child support and non-compliance through the lense of vulnerability. In recent years the problem gained visibility in the media and public debate due to new research and social activism of single parents’ associations. My aim is to analyze what strategies were employed to convey the importance of child support, explain the situation of single mothers and their children and frame their vulnerability as a social problem, rather than a private failure. In particular, it is interesting how the economic vulnerability of single mothers is ambiguous in the public discourse. Single mothers speaking about child support are perceived both as vulnerable and calculated, heroic and irritating, which makes “political motherhood” problematic. How do social actors strive to achieve a positive “balance of vulnerability” while speaking on this topic? Children devoid of child support are perceived differently: their vulnerability is “better” in the public eye, as it is paired with innocence. Ultimately, choices have to be made: the state and the public decide what kinds and degrees of vulnerability deserve support in the form of government programs.
Referring to the conference questions’ the paper will strive to explore how accounts of vulnerability are linked to ambiguous negativity of victimhood (question 2) and what strategies are deployed or what conditions have to be fulfilled for vulnerability to become a site of action and solidarity (questions 4 and 6).
Agata Chełstowska is writing a PhD thesis on child-support non-compliance and is a PhD candidate at the University of Warsaw, Institute of Applied Social Sciences. She studied and taught at the University of Copenhagen and was a guest researcher at the New School for Social Research, New York. As a cultural anthropologist and a feminist researcher she authored numerous reports on the intersection of women’s issues, economy and public policy. She is inspired by feminist economics and concepts of care and vulnerability.
Ewa Drab
(University of Silesia)
The Vulnerability of Otherness in the 21st Century Fantasy Literature
Fantasy literature constitutes an epitome of otherness, both as a genre and as a space for characters who distinguish themselves, even if considered only in the imaginary framework of another world. As fantasy represents what stands in opposition to the portrayals of reality in other genres, it constitutes a context for the creation of an alternative universe determined by both the operational rules inapplicable to the extra-linguistic reality and the imaginative cultures of non-normative character. Such a world will also be conditioned by the elements deemed magical in reference to the said reality, but perceived as natural from the perspective of a fantasy universe.
The otherness, or the ensuing originality, of the described world requires from the writer to create points of reference anchoring the author's imagery in the alternative universe, which is crucial due to their absence in the extra-linguistic reality. On the one hand, the fantasy universe becomes exposed to the creative manipulations of the author, on the other hand, it remains vulnerable to the risk of dangerous unstability.
Furthermore, the perception of the otherness of the fantasy world is in parallel with the grasp of the genre as such. Because of the lack of reference points, fantasy literature becomes vulnerable to marginalization in the framework of literary studies. Paradoxically, the otherness of the genre both liberates the imagined world and limits it to a hermetic space.
The otherness also determines the characters. In numerous contemporary fantasy stories, the protagonists represent the group of outcasts and misfits or the chosen ones, unique and at the same time marginalized by the society. In Trudi Canavan's works, the principle character is a female student of magic and the only representative of the lower class at the university. Brent Weeks chooses for a protagonist a sexually-abused orphan boy who learns the trade of assassin. Finally, the hero of Joe Abercrombie's Shattered Sea trilogy is a handicapped adolescent condemned to death. Despite the unfavorable position, their vulnerability becomes their strength.
In consequence, the goal of the paper is to briefly examine the above-mentioned different facets of otherness in fantasy literature and it being a source of vulnerability.
Marlene Duprey
(University of Puerto Rico)
Vulnerable bodies: testimonies of pain and strength in victims of violence in captivity