Program for the Seminar Held by Luce Irigaray

The Global Center for Advanced Studies

Director Creston Davis

12-16 September 2016, 10:00 am to 12:30 am

    (Centre Sèvres, 38, rue de Sèvres, 75OO6, Paris)

 

Too often we consider that reaching a world culture could happen through acquiring new knowledge and an a priori tolerance about other traditions. However, this entails at least a double mistake. First, the life of humanity is henceforth in danger, not only this of our planet and of the biodiversity of other living beings. Second, it is not the acquisition of knowledge and an abstract will to relate to others that can render us capable of „governing the world”, as Nietzsche would say, but a transformation of our way of being and behaving. Thus I will try to approach some conditions which can unable us to deal with the task of guaranteeing a future for our planet and all the human and not human living beings which live on it:

• How can we save our energy resources and undertake to cultivate them in a more suitable way?
• How can we imagine the genesis of a new human being after the Nietzschean criticism of Platonism, and given the present evolution of the world?
• What language can contribute to our living, talking and sharing together?
• What legacy about love our Western tradition passed on to us, and how can we transform our manner of conceiving and incarnating love?

Each of these themes will be treated in a talk followed by a discussion with the participants in the seminar.

Proposal of reading for preparing the seminar:

Meeting 1

• The book Through Vegetal Being (CUP, 2016) especially the part written by Luce Irigaray
• „A chance to live” (in Sexes and Genealogies)
• „Remembering humanity” (in Building a New World)
• „Between myth and history: The tragedy of Antigone” ( in In the Beginning, She Was)
• and the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles

Meeting 2

• „Sexual difference as universal” (in I Love to You)
• „Ethical gestures toward the other” (in Building a New World)
• „Afterword” (in Sharing the World)

Meeting 3

• „Toward a sharing of speech” (in Luce Irigaray: Key Writings)
• „How to meet in difference” (in Luce Irigaray: Teaching I)
• and at least some chapters of Elements of General Linguistic, by Ferdinand de Saussure

Meeting 4

• „Beyond all judgment, you are” (in Luce Irigaray, Key Writings)
• The Way of Love (chapter 4)
• „Perhaps cultivating touch can still save us” (in Building a New World)
• and The Symposium of Platon

Meeting 5

Discussion from written questions in relation to the 4 talks.

To register for this seminar, please visit The Global Center for Advanced Studies page and  be in touch with Luce Irigaray at <towardthinking@gmail.com> or via this website.

If you are a researcher working with Luce Irigaray, please be in touch with her on this website  for information about the cost for attending.