The Center for Contemporary European Philosophy cordially invites you for a talk by John Drabinski (Amherst):

Dialectics, Alterity, Race
The talk will engage a strange trio: Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin. With this trio, the talk will explore how the experience of radical otherness – the Jew in France, the colonized in colonial space, and blackness in an anti-black racist world – both renders dialectic impossible and requires a kind of non-Adorno sense of negative dialectics. The aim is to draw out a tension in Levinas’ work around the question of singularity, advancing the claim that his passage through the sensible leaves traces of history and memory which supplement the language of singularity, alterity, and the Other. Fanon’s early work on language and dialectics help demonstrate this, namely, how coming to subjectivity in language is already caught in the repressive logic of racial colonialism. From Baldwin, the talk will draw insights into what a formation of subjectivity out of a non-dialectical, yet also dialectical, relation of racial antagonism looks like – a formation and relation that is about the production of otherness, as well as transcendence of the world as totality and mere politics.

Room: E 2.51, Radboud University Nijmegen
Registration is not required but much appreciated through c.bax@ftr.ru.nl