The Urgency of Thought (May 2014, Belgrade)
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| Prof. Gil Anidjar |
The Urgency of Thought Conference
23-25 May 2014
Belgrade, Serbia
You can watch my talk here:
[Edited: October, 28, 2014]
On this link you can read my conference paper "The Status of Thought in Early Freud". It was published in the Belgrade Journal of Media and Communications, No. 5, The Urgency of Thought I, edited by Gil Anidjar, Belgrade, 2014, p. 21-49. Originally posted on the website of the Faculty of Media and Communication's website, here.
On this link you can read my conference paper "The Status of Thought in Early Freud". It was published in the Belgrade Journal of Media and Communications, No. 5, The Urgency of Thought I, edited by Gil Anidjar, Belgrade, 2014, p. 21-49. Originally posted on the website of the Faculty of Media and Communication's website, here.
The short resume:
The Status of Thought in Early Freud
Resume
Jasna Koteska
The article argues that early Freud produced two
antithetical theses about the nature of thought. Koteska proposes that in Studies on Hysteria (1895) Freud read hysteria
as a consequence of incongruent thoughts and therefore, to tackle it, he introduced
the perspective of slowness of thought, which gave birth to psychoanalysis. The
other thesis Freud proposed almost in parallel in his largely overlooked manuscript
Project for Scientific Psychology (1895).
Herewith, in a contrast statement, Freud suggested that thinking has almost no
utilitarian value and therefore thinking should be urgently replaced by action.
However, Koteska’s article proposes that the two contrasted Freudian theories
of thinking should be thought of in terms of a principle of complementarity. Namely,
they should be viewed through the concept of transfer, known in the mid-19
century French neurology as the transference phenomena and used by Freud to
work with hysteria. Koteska also suggests that Freud was the first to extend
the concept of transfer to both thoughts and actions in his Project for Scientific Psychology, which
is the earliest psychoanalytical anticipation of mirror neurons, discovered in
the late 20th century neuroscience.
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| The Urgency of Thought |
Please, check the participants of the conference and their texts on the website of the Faculty of Media and Communication, University Singidunum, Belgrade, Serbia: here. Please read prof. Gil Anidjar's text about The Urgency of Thought conference from the website of the Faculty of Media and Communication, University Sigidunum Belgrade, Serbia. Also please visit FMC website to listen to the talks of the other participants.
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"The Urgency of Thought"
Text by Prof. Gil Anidjar, Department of Religion, Columbia University, New York.
18.6.2014
....
"The Urgency of Thought"
Text by Prof. Gil Anidjar, Department of Religion, Columbia University, New York.
18.6.2014
According to the invitation we sent out, “The
Urgency of Thought” is meant to be at once experimental, didactic, and
prospective. Is thought urgent at all? Does urgency call for thought? Are we,
within the academic sphere, positioned to think? Is this our calling? Is it at
all necessary? Our aim was to gather in Belgrade, present our current work and
engage each other in conversation in order to examine together — and teach
together — the different temporalities according to which we think, the imperatives
to which we submit, the (academic) futures we imagine or wish to abandon — the
end of the humanities — and the emergencies to which we respond. By presenting
the work we are doing at this moment, we seek an exchange across disciplines,
across topics and themes, commitments and priorities, and perhaps beyond the
multifarious objects that have imposed themselves upon us until now. Must we
think what we say, must we say what we think, about humanity, democracy,
urgency?
Repeated, banalized, and
even trivialized today, urgency calls on us without a possibility for
compromise (yet compromise takes place all the time, of course). Today, sadly,
and all too visibly, we are made to experience urgency again. In close
proximity, we are forced to acknowledge — and to mourn — yet another emergency,
the catastrophic disaster that has befallen the region. Is this a natural or a
political disaster? What can be said of a flood that destroys lives and
livelihoods at the same time as it unearths countless unexploded mines that
have been buried in the earth since the wars that tore up this very region? Who
can prioritize, much less distinguish, between forms of urgency? What uptake,
what responsibilities remain? Who shall measure the political significance —
the political urgency — that will no doubt linger?
There is perhaps no
perception of philosophical thought that is more clichéd than the fact of its
belatedness. Hegel’s owl of Minerva could hardly offer itself as a figure for
timeliness, much less as the emblem of a speedy response to the event, however
urgent. Earlier, Plato’s philosopher began his ascent long after the darkness
had settled in the cave. And Aristotle is reported to have held a view, echoed,
of all places, in the Jewish liturgy, that »the first in thought is the last in
action«. Martin Heidegger, another latecomer, famously confirmed: »we are still
not thinking«.
More examples could be
adduced that would not necessarily give primacy to philosophical thought, but
would surely reproduce, in one form or another, the old debate between action
and thought, between the interpretation of the world and the transformation of
the world. And consider that this debate may be understood as prolonged
displacement of the more fundamental subjection of thought — and of action — to
time. Suffice it to mention the high value placed on anticipation, or indeed on
the gift of prophecy, which may have helped usher in what Renata Salecl has
described as “the vision of an anxiety-free future society.” We might
justifiably speak here of messianic anticipation.
But belatedness — or
even the anticipatory rush toward a time to conclude, as Lacan had it —
belatedness, then, pales in relevance when confronted with the accelerations,
the new temporal modalities, with which we are increasingly confronted. The
state of emergency, which has been inflicted upon us for some time now, seems
to have made time itself “unintelligible” (as Jasna Koteska strikingly puts it)
and thought increasingly obsolete. In this unexpected version of planned
obsolescence — and niche marketing — everything is as if calculation and
probability were on an impossible race — or collision course — beyond time, or
at least, beyond the time to conclude and toward an ever-so-speedy response to
that which has not yet happened or should never happen again. Philip K. Dick’s
“Minority Report” tellingly attends to this promise of a “never again” that is
always already anticipated, a full reversal of anticipation as the absence of
thought, the non-thought of aptly named pre-cogs, or rather, as Dick describes
them, “precog idiots.” At the same time — if it is the same time — urgency is
waved as a flag (or a red herring, unless it is a drone flying), as that which
demands thought’s undivided attention while denying it the time it would
otherwise seem to need. Attention Deficit Disorder is the order — and disorder
— of the day, and Hölderlin’s famous question, Wozu Dichter, has now become
Wozu Denker: “What are thinkers for in destitute times?” In Politics of
Friendship, Jacques Derrida summarized the matter in the following terms:
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| Renata Salecl |
At a moment when our
world is delivered over to new forms of violence, new wars, new figures of
cruelty or barbarity […], at a moment when hostilities are breaking out, no
longer resembling the worst that we have ever known, the political and
historical urgency of what is befalling us should, one will say, tolerate less
patience, fewer detours and less bibliophilic discretion. Less esoteric rarity.
This is no longer the time to take one’s time, as a number of our
well-intentioned contemporaries must no doubt think — as if we had ever been
allowed to take our time in history, and as if absolute urgency were not the
law of decision, the event and responsibility, their structural law, which is
inscribed a priori in the concept. Centuries of preparatory reflection and
theoretical deliberation — the very infinity of a knowledge — would change
nothing in this urgency. It is absolutely cutting, conclusive, decisive,
heartrending; it must interrupt the time of science and conscience, to which
the instant of decision will always remain heterogeneous. It is, nevertheless,
true that we feel called upon, ‘live’, to offer answers or to assume immediate
responsibilities. It is also true that these answers and responsibilities seem
to be inscribed more naturally in the space of political philosophy. This is
true — it will always be true — and in this respect we will always be in a
state of lack. Our answers and our responsibilities will never be adequate,
never sufficiently direct. The debt is infinite. Urgent because infinite. A
priori infinite for a finite being, as soon as a duty, If there is one,
presents itself to it.
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| Rastko Mocnik |
The writers, thinkers and scholars who have
generously accepted this debt and this responsibility, agreeing to subject
themselves to the experiment that is this conference, belong to different and
divergent fields or spheres (psychoanalysis, philosophy, history, literature,
political science). They have already offered a great variety of explicit and
implicit responses to the question of urgency — and of insurgency. They have
engaged with the structural velocities and accelerated temporalities of
capitalism in its multifarious global, political, economic, and affective
dimensions (Močnik, Salecl, Lošonc, Koteska). They have alerted us to time and
to the longue durée behind the flash of increasingly mediated events from
genocide to the war on terror, by recalling the relevance of the Crusades, the
philological roots of mass extermination and the Armenian question, and the
vicissitudes of Jewish history (Koteska, Mastnak, Nichanian, Raz-Krakotzkin).
They have meditated on sexual difference and the urgency of feminist history
(Salecl, Zaharijevic), the mobility of migrants and the immobility of (female)
citizens, the historicity of social movements (Štiks, Zaharijevic, Pourgouris).
They have accounted for the intricacies of the literary imagination in the
nationalist project (Khayyat, Nichanian). They have confronted the demise of
sovereignty as well as its hidden potentials (Raz-Krakotzkin, Nichanian,
Lošonc, Mastnak). They have taught us to read and reread the ethics of
psychoanalysis (Močnik, Koteska, Salecl), and they have insisted on the
importance of local and regional thinking (Khayyat, Salecl, Raz-Krakotzkin,
Pourgouris, Mastnak).
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| Alpar Losonc |
But I am only pointing at a fraction of the
wide-ranging and diverse work they have all done in order to convey merely a
measure of the enthusiasm we all feel at the opportunity to have this
collective conversation here in Belgrade, a place where so many histories have
been made and unmade, slowly or quickly, at the border of empires which it
remains our task to think. Indeed, it is perhaps fitting to conclude these
remarks by venturing that we all partake of a long inheritance, an Ottoman
inheritance of sorts, and that the enduring demise of that empire, which Ivo
Andrić so strikingly described, is still with us, marking something like the
longue durée of urgency.
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| Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin |
Not that the new existence was in any way less
subject to conditions or less restricted than in Turkish times, but it was
easier and more humane, and those conditions and restrictions were now far away
and skillfully enforced, so that the individual did not feel them directly.
Therefore it seemed to everyone as if the life around him had suddenly grown
wider and clear, more varied and fuller.
The new state, with its good administrative apparatus, had succeeded in a painless manner, without brutality or commotion, to extract taxes and contributions from the local people which the Turkish authorities had extracted by crude and irrational methods or by simple plunder; and, moreover, it got as much or more, even more swiftly and surely.
The new state, with its good administrative apparatus, had succeeded in a painless manner, without brutality or commotion, to extract taxes and contributions from the local people which the Turkish authorities had extracted by crude and irrational methods or by simple plunder; and, moreover, it got as much or more, even more swiftly and surely.
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| Igor Sticks |
*
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| Adriana Zaharijevic |
Convened in Belgrade, at
the Faculty of Media and Communication, in May 2014, “The Urgency of
Thought” conference was meant to be at once experimental, didactic, and
prospective. The question guiding the participants was: “Is thought urgent at
all? Does urgency call for thought?” Relating their answer to the work they are
currently engaged in, the conference sought to foster an exchange across
disciplines, across topics and themes, commitments and priorities, and perhaps
beyond the multifarious objects that have imposed themselves until now. It was,
of course, with great concern and sorrow that the question of urgency and of
emergency imposed itself in a tragic manner just a week before the conference.
The devastating floods and the enduring threats of rising waters, and the
immense loss and suffering that ensued for the region also generated solidarity
and indeed reflection. For three days, the participants and the audience
gathered for a series of exciting presentations, intense conversation, and the
sharing of experiences, knowledge, and friendship. Collective walks in the
afternoon connected guests and hosts to Belgrade and to its history.
Speakers had arrived from Ljubljana and
Istanbul, Nicosia and Jerusalem, Skopje and New York, Novi Sad and, of course,
Belgrade. They belong to a wide variety of disciplines and share many
interests: philosophy and history, literature and criminology, law and
political thought, psychoanalysis and political economy.
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| Marinos Pourgouris |
The conference was opened by Nada Popović
Perišić, Dean of the Faculty,
who evoked the tragic situation that would remain on everybody’s mind during
the conference, at the same time as she affirmed the urgency of thought, the
need to maintain a space of reflection and freedom, a space of teaching and
collaboration. She recalled Roland Barthes’ own description of the institution
where he taught, the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, as
an inspiration for the work and environment of the Faculty for Media and
Communication.
Gil Anidjar welcomed the participants and summarized the
motivations and intellectual agenda that was behind the diverse gathering and
open agenda.
Renata Salecl attended to anxiety and to its changing
patterns, the sense of danger that, earlier figured as an outside threat (“They
Come from Outer Space”), has moved to the inside (“They Came from Within”), to
the body, and now provokes different responses, from conspiracy theories to the
fantasy of total prediction, from repression to the paradoxical proliferation
of anxieties in the realm of art and science.
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| Marc Nichanian |
Moving to political economy,
and to economic theology, Alpar Lošonc offered a reading of Agamben and
Foucault in order to propose a genealogy of neoliberalism which brings together
the theological power of invisibility and the physical power of dictatorship.
What are the relations between biopolitics and money? What transformations has
Adam Smith’s liberalism undergone that brought about our current state of
blindness?
Addressing Walter Benjamin’s
words on the “real state of emergency,” Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin asked
whether our scholarly responsibility does not entail the end of writing.
Seeking to activate resources of Jewish and Islamic mysticism (the 16th century
Safed revival), and the anti-colonial thought of Benjamin, Scholem and Arendt,
Raz-Krakotzkin seeks to rethink “the Christian ambivalence toward the Jews.”
Can one counter the current state of exception with a real state of emergency?
Can one read Nachman of Bratzlav together with Mahmoud Darwish?
On the second day of the
conference, Jasna Koteska returned to Freud and to two early
texts in their contradictory rapport to thought. Whereas the Studies on
Hysteria advocate “slow thinking” as a possible solution for the unbearable
contradictions suffered by the patients, the contemporaneous but unpublished
“Project for a Scientific Psychology” asserts the uselessness of thought. In
its complicated rapport to thought, and to action, psychoanalysis may in fact
be closer to magic.
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| Emrah Efe Khayyat |
Efe Khayyat proposed that we rethink the concept of “world
literature” — and the truth of fiction — by turning to two vectors, two
attitudes found in Don Quixote, the first modern novel: “turning Turk” and
“crusading with the pen.” Literature is a battlefield. It makes inroads —
artificial paths akin to the Suez Canal — into the terrain of our imagination,
and traces a trajectory that links the converted Messiah, Sabbatai Tsvi, the
fantastic spies of John Buchan’s Greenmantle, and Ahmet Hamdi Tampinar’s lost
dervish mantle.
Greek literature, and the poignant question it
raises with regard to “the ethnic,” the making and the unmaking of the nation,
provided Marinos Pourgouris with a point of departure, and of arrival too. As it imagines the
nation and / or its territory, literature establishes the ground and center of
the collective imagination, yet it also escapes and resists, embracing at once
a colonial and anti-colonial consciousness. Is literature urgent? Is the nation
still needed? Is its critique required?
A concern with the future
resonated through all the presentations. Marc Nichanian raised the
question of sovereignty in his reading of Georges Bataille and asked: “who
comes after the sovereign?” Formulated in Benjaminian terms, is there an end
to, an exit from, history? What does it have to do with the anthropology of the
sacred which Agamben reproaches Bataille for? The “revolution of the subject”
which made a subjected being into a sovereign also brought about the end of
sovereignty, the end of testimony, the Catastrophe. Bataille’s “inner
experience” points to the survivor as the failure of testimony: the sovereign
cannot be his own witness.
On the third and last day, Rastko Močnik illustrated
the failures of theories of ideology (Lukacs, Gramsci) and argued for a
materialist account of ideology, a theory of ideological interpellation.
Drawing on Aristotle’s logic as a rhetorical resource and on Althusser’s
account of ideological state apparatuses, Moćnick presented a series of example
in which public speech draws on unspoken ideological fillers, “floating
ideological mediations,” an understanding of which provides for a more robust
critique of the current state of affairs.
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| Tomaz Mastnak |
Tomaž Mastnak brought together
two of his current concerns, namely, Nazism (and its resurgence) and the
environment (and its disappearance). Mastnak seeks to revive the role of the
thinker as a “guardian of language,” focused on preservation, on a certain
skepticism toward the rhetoric of change. He proposes that we attend to
patterns of “geomorphic domination” that have now become the norm (“the new normal”),
bringing about ever new forms of devastation and new forms of denial (or
“states of imperception”). This in turn fosters a “politics of chaos” that,
destructive of the state imagined in the 18th century, must not be thought
along apocalyptic lines but as more pernicious — and familiar — programs of
violence and indeed of total domination. The neoliberal agenda recently
promoted by John Kerry (deregulated GMOs, end of labor protection, unprotected
environment) is indicative of these alarming developments and requires an
urgent rethinking of the state.
For Adriana
Zaharijević, the floods — and the
failures of the state — raised the question of citizenship. The visibility and
invisibility of citizens, the space of belonging and the space of mourning,
indeed, the possibilities of agency and action in times of disaster are revealing
of a certain truth, “the truth of floods” to which feminist thought and
activism may give us access. What becomes visible are possibilities of
identification and forms of actions, affirmed or denied, fostering a visible
identity among, and confining heroism to, male citizens. The state and the
media regulate and constraint. Even in their failure they confirm a certain,
narrow and recurring, image of the body politic, the truth of citizenship.
***
Additional info. Also, please check the press release about the conference - here. (In Serbian):
Fakultet za medije i komunikacije od 23. do 25. maja 2014. godine organizuje Međunarodni naučni skup The Urgency of Thought na kome će učestvovati neki od najznačajnijih mislilaca današnjice: Tomaž Mastnak, Rastko Močnik, Renata Salecl, Amnon Raz-Krakockin, Emrah Efe Čakmak, Mark Ničanian, Alpar Lošonc, Jasna Koteska, Marinos Porguris, Adriana Zaharijević i Igor Štiks.
Učesnici skupa će kroz predstavljanje svog naučnog rada i kroz razmenu mišljenja zajednički preispivati različite temporalnosti na osnovu kojih razmišljamo, imperative kojima se podvrgavamo, akademske i ne-akademske budućnosti koje zamišljamo. Cilj skupa je da istovremeno bude eksperimentalan, poučan i okrenut ka budućnosti, tako da ponudi moguće teorijske smernice ka najurgentnijim mestima promišljanja današnjice.
Međunarodni naučni skup "The Urgency of Thought" otvorila je dekanka Fakulteta za medije i komunikacije prof. dr Nada Popović Perišić i profesor Gil Anidžar 23. maja u 10 časova u Konferencijskoj sali beogradskog hotela "Jump Inn". Više informacija o Međunarodnom skupu možete pogledati na blogu: http://uot.fmk.singidunum.ac.rs/
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