Gannit Ankori (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
‘Visual Epistemology' - the Study of Art as a Quest for Knowledge

In keeping with the workshop format, this talk will offer tentative and self-reflective thoughts about the work of art as a unique depository of "knowledge". Emphasis will be placed on the visual articulation of the ambiguous and the 'unsayable' and the ways in which such nonverbal elements may offer alternative modes of knowing. Based on specific test cases, the discussion will oscillate between praxis and theory; between the concrete and the metaphoric; between time and space; and between sight and insight.  

Derek Attridge (University of York)
Knowing Works of Art

Can works of art be said to 'know' or to 'think'? A number of recent critics and theorists have personified texts or paintings in this way, but it is not clear what it is that motivates the trope, nor what it is about specific works that tempts commentators into such personifications. How comfortable should we be with the ascription of consciousness and knowledge to the formal constructions of art? What is the difference between the frequent claims that works of art ‘challenge’ or ‘resist’ or ‘perform’ or ‘enact’ (and one could add many more active verbs) and these more unsettling claims that they ‘think’ or ‘know’? Are works that could be said to stage knowing or thinking doing something different from works that think or know? How does the experience of ‘knowingness’ in a work of art relate to the viewer’s or reader’s knowledge of the work? Is knowledge a relevant category in discussing art?

Leo Bersani (University of California, Berkeley)
Epistemological Passion: Psychoanalysis, Plato, Godard

Foucault spoke of a "Cartesian moment" in the history of Western subjectivity, a "moment" when knowledge was given priority over "spirituality" or "care of the self" in the subject's "path to truth." I will use this as a point of departure for a study of the shifting emphases given to the relation between knowledge and being in Socrates' Phaedrus, the psychoanalytic dialogue, and Godard's film, Passion. The nature of that relation may be crucial in determining the possibility of our inventing what Foucault called "new relational modes," an invention on which significant political reconfigurations ultimately depend.

Steven Connor (Birkbeck College, London)
A Short Stirring to Meekness

The second chapter of the Cloud of Unknowing (BM MS. Harl. 674), a work which urges at length the advantages for the Christian soul of love over knowledge, is called ‘A schort stering to meeknes and to the werk of this book’. I will use it as a way to stir my own stumps, to some thoughts about the kind of intellectual meekness that might be available to us today. Assuming such meekness to be possible at all, I will also try to think about the difficulty of what our anonymous fourteenth-century author called the ‘keping of meeknes’. How (why?) might a work that aimed to hatch and inhabit a kind of unknowing – the sort of thing I have been caught calling cultural phenomenology, for instance – keep going within a culture (the academic culture of ‘theory’ in excelsis), that so esteems strategy, methodology, risk-avoidance, guaranteed outcomes, failsafe self-possession, and all the pennypinching prosperity of knowing what you are up to?

Saurabh Dube (El Colegio de Mexico)
Scandalous Subjects: Antinomies and Enchantments of Modernity

This presentation addresses issues of “Inside Knowledge” by focusing on the scandals and subjects of modernity – scandals and subjects that require understanding and not dismissal. In approaching such scandalous subjects – of the West, the nation, and the postcolonial, for example – at stake are procedures of questioning and affirmation that I call a history without warranty. Here are to be found protocols that explore the ways in which social worlds and their scholarly understandings come together and fall apart, each casting doubt on the other, seeking not scholarly scandal but productive crises – all turning on a doing of subjects that does not fear an undoing of disciplines. These tasks would be undertaken in the talk through a discussion first of the enchantments and then of the subjects of modernity, each understood as image and practice, representation and process. Together, all of this would allow for the raising of a few critical questions concerning dominant knowledge(s) and alternative ones.

Bruce Holsinger (University of Virginia)
Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror

The lecture will address the role of neomedievalism in contemporary politics and political rhetoric. While international-relations theorists promote neomedievalism as a model for understanding emergent modes of global sovereignty, neoconservatives exploit its conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends. The talk will include a careful parsing of the Bush administration's torture memos, which enlist neomedievalism's model of feudal sovereignty on behalf of the abrogation of human rights.