VIOLENCE: ETHICS, POLITICS,
CULTURES, AND DISCOURSES
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CROSSING BORDERS VIOLENCE: ETHICS, POLITICS, CULTURES, AND DISCOURSES |
Several events, classes and seminars were organized around the question of how the divergent political discourses of individuality and state, and the contested concepts of morality and political ideology, are implicated in acts of violence as well as in their (literary, historical, and journalistic) representation. The following activities were undertaken under the auspices of this project:
"Violence, Law and Literature." A graduate seminar course taught by Assistant Professor Hubert Rast through the German Department and Program in Comparative Literature during the Winter 1998 term. The course included an examination of how contemporary culture has positioned the uses, functions, and representations of violence. Ethical concerns and normative discourses of justification as well as a preoccupation with the victim were abandoned in favor of a celebration of violence as the transgressionary act per se. The course included distinguished faculty guests Tzvetan Todorov and Veena Das who presented their work on violence to the seminar and also gave other presentations.
Advanced Study Center Seminar on "Violence
and Ethics." During Fall
1998, the Advanced
Study Center of the International Institute (ASC) held a seminar
focusing on the broad theme of "Violence and Ethics."
This seminar included weekly sessions on Mondays and Tuesdays,
as well as concluding two-day workshop. The Monday sessions centered
on working papers and presentations from scholars who approached
the ambiguous relations between ethics and violence from a variety
of disciplinary perspectives. The Tuesday sessions were conducted
by Renata Salecl, Researcher at the Institute of Criminology,
Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana and Slavoj Zizek, Senior
Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of
Ljubljana. These seminar sessions sought to render visible the
multiple, explicit and implicit, forms of violence that characterize
this era of global capitalism, as well as their hidden complicities.
It also focused on the weaknesses or limitations of the predominant
liberal and/or radical (feminist, deconstructionist, anti-essentialist,
etc.) attempts to fight these forms of violence. Although the
approach was interdisciplinary, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory
served as the central point of reference, providing the common
thread among different disciplines. The seminar concluded with
a two-day workshop on "Violence and Ethics" with presentations
from University of Michigan graduate students and visiting junior
scholars.
II. PARTICIPANTS AND FUNDING
This project was supported by the
Ford Foundation through
its grant to the International Institute and by the following
U-M units: Program in Comparative Literature, Department of Germanic
Languages and Literature, Department of Sociology, and Program
in Society and Medicine.
The public lecture by Slavoj Zizek was sponsored
by the Advanced Study Center; International Institute; Department
of Sociology; Department of Comparative Literature; Program of
Society and Medicine; Department of English; College of Literature,
Science, and the Arts; Rackham School of Graduate Studies; and
Law School.
Faculty Participants
Renata Salecl (Cultural Studies, Institute of Criminology,
Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana)
Slavoj Zizek (Philosophy, Institute of Social Sciences, University
of Ljubljana)
Adella Pinch (English, U-M)
George Rosenwald (Psychology, U-M)
Ronald Suny (Political Science, University of Chicago)
Hubert Rast (German, U-M)
Fernando Coronil (Anthropology, U-M)
Rei Terada (English, U-M)
James Porter (Classical Studies, U-M)
Susie Tharu (English, U-M)
Student Participants
There were total of 35 graduate students from a range of departments
enrolled in the two courses organized under the auspices of this
project.
III. RESULTS AND PROSPECTS
In the winter 1998 term, the Violence project organized two major lectures. Tvetvan Todorov, Director of Centre National de Recherches in Paris, gave a keynote lecture for the Center for European Studies on "The Memory of Violence" to an audience of over 150 people from U-M, nearby colleges and universities, and the community. Veena Das, Professor of Sociology at the University of Delhi, made two presentations for the Program in the Comparative Study of Social Transformations: a public colloquium on "Rumour and the Social Production of Hate" and a faculty seminar on "Violence and the Work of Time."
The fall 1998 term included a major lecture by Slavoj Zizek on "The Obscene Tolerance of the Superego" attended by over 120 people.
The fall 1998 ASC seminar produced a working papers series, based on presentations of the following guest lecturers:
Eric Santner,
University of Chicago: "Traumatic Revelations: Freud's Moses
and the Origins of Anti-Semitism"
Joan Copjec, State University of New York, Buffalo: "Antigone,
the Guardian of Criminal Being"
Kenneth Reinhard, University of California, Los Angeles,
and Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine:
"The Subject of Religion: Lacan and the Ten Commandments"
Cecilia Sjöholm, University of Stockholm: "The
Ate of Antigone"
Nicola Lacey, London School of Economics: "Violence,
Ethics and Law: Feminist Reflections on a Familiar Dilemma"
Henrietta Moore, London School of Economics: "Anthropology
and Initiation and Secrets and Mothers"
Juliet Flower MacCannell, University of California, Irvine:
"Perversion in Public Places"
Miran Bozovic, University of Ljubljana: "Occasionalism
and Madness"
Alenka Zupancic, Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana: "Violence
in Ethics"
Bruce Fink, Duquesne University: 'Violence in Translation"
A workshop also was conducted in fall 1998,
building on the results of the past term's accomplishments. In
particular, the workshop focused on exploring the potentials of
universalistic ethical claims and ideologies, organized around
Hegelian and Lacanian philosophies, and particular expressions
of violence in a wide range of settings in Byzantium, Russia,
South Asia, Germany, Nigeria and the U.S.
IV. CORE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN FACULTY
James Porter is Associate Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature. His areas of interest include contemporary critical theory, modern German literature, classical literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. He is co-editor of the University of Michigan book series, The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materials.
Hubert Rast is Assistant Professor of German, specializing in the emerging field of law and literature. His publications include "The Inversion of the Law: Kafka's Das Urteil, " Journal of the Kafka Society of America (December 1994); "Theatrical Politics and the Public Space" in Issues of Performance in Politics and the Arts (1997); and "Figures of Deflection: Law and Reading in MICHAEL KOHLHAAS" (in Kaiser, editor, Facing the Void. Kleist's Primal Scenes, John Hopkins Press, forthcoming). He is currently working on a book manuscript on Subversive Contextualizations: Law and Unruly Literature.
Renata Salecl, a Visiting Professor of Sociology in Fall 1998, is a Researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana. Her publications include Die Politik des Phantasmas: Nationalismus, Feminismus und Psychoanalyse (Turia und Kant, 1994); "The Crisis of Identity and the Struggle for New Hegemony in the Former Yugoslavia" (in Laclau, editor, The Making of Political Identity, Verso, 1994); and The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism (Routledge, 1994).
Slavoj Zizek,
a Visiting Professor of Sociology in Fall 1998, is Senior Researcher
at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana.
His publications include Looking Awry (MIT Press, 1991);
For They Know Not What They Do (Verso, 1991); Enjoy
Your Symptom! (Routledge, 1992); Tarrying With the Negative
(Duke University Press, 1993); and The Invisible Remainder
(Verso, 1996).
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