“A Century with Levinas – My ‘place in the sun’: Levinas Today”

In 2006 we celebrated the centenary of Emmanuel Levinas’ birth. To mark this occasion, the European Philosophy Research Group (EPRG) at the University of Queensland hosted an international conference entitled “My ‘place in the sun’: Levinas Today”, contributing to a series of world-wide events designed to commemorate Levinas’ work.

Invited speakers:
David L. Clark: Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and Associate Member of the Health Studies Program, McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.
Ghassan Hage: Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, The University of Sydney, Australia.
Deborah Bird Rose: Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Research and Environmental Studies, Institute of Advanced Studies, The Australian National University, Australia.

Friday 30 June 2006

8.00 – 8.30
Registration and coffee

9.00 – 9.30
Welcome and Introduction

9.30 – 11.00
Professor David L. Clark, “Towards a Prehistory of the Postanimal: Levinas, Kant and the Regard of Brutes”

11.00 – 11.30
Morning Tea

11.30 – 1.00
Dr. Deborah Bird Rose, “Ruined Faces: The shattering of ethics”

1.00 – 2.00
Lunch

2.00 – 4.00
Panel: “exceeding the idea of the other in me”: the good life, suffering and animal rights

4.00 – 4.30
Afternoon Tea

4.30 – 6.30
Panel: “But we are in the world”: psychotherapy, maternity and the virtual (inter)face

7.00 – 9.00
Cocktail Party

Saturday 1 July 2006

9.30 – 10.15
Breakfast/Morning Tea

10.15 – 10.30
Welcome and Introduction

10.30 – 12.30
Panel: “spaces belonging to the other man”: indigeneity, negotiation and avoidance

12.30 – 1.30
Lunch

1.30 – 3.30
Panel: “the whole of humanity, in the eyes that look at me”: asylum, detention and genocide

3.30 – 4.00
Afternoon Tea

4.00 – 6.00
Associate Professor Ghassan Hage: “The faith of the other: reflections on the radical alterity of seriously religious Muslims”

Born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1906 to Jewish parents, Levinas initially studied at Strasbourg, and then later at Freiburg where he encountered the phenomenological thought of both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927) was to have a lasting influence on his thought, though in a rather creative fashion. He was, along with others such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, responsible for bringing phenomenological themes to prominence in the French philosophical world where he worked until 1995. Levinas’ work ultimately challenged Heidegger’s philosophy, and indeed the Western tradition as he saw it, for neglecting the fundamentally ethical dimension of human being. Today, his work on ethics as first philosophy and our ethical responsibility for the other remains an incisive critique of Western ways of being. Levinas reminds us that traditional ontology reduces the all important ethical relation with the other to a theoretical or cognitive relation to self. His notion of the “face to face” encounter seeks to undo this by foregrounding ethics as first philosophy. Simply put, we come into being in and through our relation with the other.

As the title of this conference suggests, we plan an engagement with Levinas’ work that is grounded in contemporary ethical issues, inviting contributions from critical scholars working both within and without the borders of philosophy as it is traditionally defined. Professor David L. Clark (McMaster University), Associate Professor Ghassan Hage (University of Sydney) and Dr. Deborah Bird Rose (The Australian National University) will be among the invited speakers.

Professor David L. Clark: “Towards a Prehistory of the Postanimal: Levinas, Kant, and the Regard of Brutes”. David L. Clark is Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and Associate Member of the Health Studies Program at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, where he teaches courses in critical theory, Continental philosophy, and the discourses of HIV/AIDS. He has twice been Visiting Professor at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, and was Halls-Bascom Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003. He has published work on a wide range of subjects, from the question of addiction in Heidegger and Schelling, to philosophical concepts of animality, to the surgical separation of conjoined twins. Recent publications include: Bodies and Pleasures in Late Kant (forthcoming, Stanford University Press); “Bereft: Schelling’s Haunt, Derrida’s Memory,” South Atlantic Quarterly (forthcoming); “‘Waving, Not Drowning:’ On the Lives of Theory,” Studies in Romanticism (2005); “On Being ‘the Last Kantian in Nazi Germany:’ Dwelling with Animals after Levinas,” Post-Modernism and the Ethical Subject, ed. Barbara Gabriel and Suzan Ilcan (2004); “Hegel, Eating: Schelling and the Carnivorous Virility of Philosophy,” Cultures of Taste / Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (2004); Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, co-edited with Stephen M. Barber (2002).

Ghassan Hage: “The faith of the other: reflections on the radical alterity of seriously religious Muslims”. Ghassan Hage is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at University of Sydney, where he has taught since 1994. He has been visiting professor and associate researcher at Pierre Bourdieu’s Centre de Sociologie Européenne at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is an associate researcher at the Centre de Recherche sur l'Immigration, L'Ethnicité et la Citoyenneté at the Université du Quebec à Montreal, and is also an associate researcher at the Centre for Behavioural Research at the American University of Beirut. He is the winner of the 2004 NSW Premier’s literary prize and award (Community Relations) and has been recently awarded an Australian Research Council grant to investigate Lebanese Muslim emotions surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Recent publications include: the books, White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (1998, 2000 and 2003 Japanese edition) and Against Paranoid Nationalism: searching for hope in a shrinking society (2003); the edited collection, Arab-Australians Today: Citizenship and Belonging (2002); and the papers, ‘The Real, the Potential and the Political’ (2005), ‘Truth and Reality in Warring Societies’ (2005), ‘A not so multi-sited ethnography of a not so imagined community’ (2005), ‘ Migration and the transformation of masculine sexuality: the case of a rural Lebanese migrant’ (2005/6), ‘What would you die for?’ (with Roger Scruton and Ken Worpole, 2004), ‘Migration, Hope and the Making of Subjectivity in Transnational Capitalism’ (in conversation with Dimitris Papadopoulos, 2004).

Deborah Bird Rose: “Ruined Faces: The shattering of ethics”. Dr. Deborah Rose is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Research and Environmental Studies, Institute of Advanced Studies, at The Australian National University, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. She writes widely in the fields of anthropology, history, philosophy, and religious studies. She is the author of prize-winning books, and her recent book Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (UNSW Press, 2004) was short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Awards Gleebooks Prize. She has worked with Aboriginal people in their claims to land, and in other decolonising contexts. Her work in both scholarly and practical arenas is focused on the convergence of social and ecological justice in cross-cultural domains.

There will be no parallel sessions. The conference consists of two days of shared dialogue, with generous time devoted to discussion. Our hope is to provide the depth and intimacy required to engage ethically with Levinas’ work today. Ideally, we will publish the outcome of the conference (both papers and discussion) in an edited publication.

We have chosen the Brisbane Powerhouse as the venue for the conference. It is a dynamic contemporary cultural site, positioned alongside the Brisbane River, directly connected to New Farm Park, and easily accessible (by Citycat ferry, bus, car or bike) from the city centre.

For those with children, it is exciting to note that the Powerhouse will also be host to a number of children’s activities as part of the Powerkidz Festival (26 June – 9 July 2006). Details soon to be released on the Powerhouse web site.

For further information contact levinas@uq.edu.au.

Conference Convenors:
Dr. Michelle Boulous Walker
Dr. Angela Hirst
Tel: +61-7-3365 2616
Email: levinas@uq.edu.au

The EPRG is a group of scholars working in modern and contemporary European philosophy between CHED and the School of HPRC at The University of Queensland, Brisbane Australia.