Benjamin Bratton. Remarks on the Hole of Representation in Computer 'Vision'. 2017

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures    2017年6月22日
http://www.egs.edu Benjamin H. Bratton, is an American theorist, sociologist and professor of visual arts, contemporary social and political theory, philosophy, and design.

Remarks on the Hole of Representation in Computer 'Vision'. Public open lecture for the for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS. Saas-Fee Switzerland June 22 2017.
His research deals with computational media and infrastructure, design research management & methodologies, classical and contemporary sociological theory, architecture and urban design issues, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies.
Bratton completed his doctoral studies in the sociology of technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara​, and was the Director of the Advanced Strategies Group at Yahoo! before expanding his cross-disciplinary research and practice in academia. He taught in the Department of Design/Media Art at UCLA from 2003-2008, and at the SCI Arc​ (Southern California Institute of Architecture)​ for a decade, and continues to teach as a member of the Visiting Faculty. While at SCI Arc, Benjamin Bratton and Hernan Diaz-Alonso co-founded the XLAB courses, which placed students in laboratory settings where they could work directly and comprehensively in robotics, scripting, biogenetics, genetic codification, and cellular systems​. Currently, in addition to his professorship at EGS, Bratton is an associate professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Dieg​o, where he also directs the Center for Design and Geopolitics, partnering with the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology​.

In addition to his formal positions, Benjamin H. Bratton is a regular visiting lecturer at numerous universities and institutions including: Columbia University, Yale University, Pratt Institute, Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of California, Art Center College of Design, Parsons The New School for Design, University of Michigan, Brown University, The University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Bauhaus- University, Moscow State University, Moscow Institute for Higher Economics, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
Bratton's current projects focus on the political geography of cloud computing, massively- granular universal addressing systems, and alternate models of ecological governance. In his most recent book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015), Bratton asks the question, "What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities?​" and in response, offers the proposition "that smart grids, cloud computing, mobile software and smart cities, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing, and other types of apparently unrelated planetary-scale computation can be viewed as forming a coherent whole—an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new geopolitical architecture.​"

Other more recent texts include the following: Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics, On Apps and Elementary Forms of Interfacial Life: Object, Image, Superimposition, Deep Address, What We Do is Secrete: On Virilio, Planetarity and Data Visualization, Geoscapes & the Google Caliphate: On Mumbai Attacks, Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apohenia and Suspicious Images/ Latent Interfaces (with Natalie Jeremijenko), iPhone City, Logistics of Habitable Circulation (introduction to the 2008 edition of Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics). As well, recent online lectures include: 2 or 3 Things I Know About The Stack, at Bartlett School of Architecture, University of London, and University of Southampton;Cloud Feudalism at Proto/E/Co/Logics 002, Rovinj, Croatia; Nanoskin at Parsons School of Design; On the Nomos of the Cloud at Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, École Normale- Superiore, Paris, and MOCA, Los Angeles; Accidental Geopolitics at The Guardian Summit, New York; Ambivalence and/or Utopia at University of Michigan and UC Irvine, and Surviving the Interface at Parsons School of Design.

Elissa Marder. The Perverse Tongue of Psychoanalysis. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures     2017年4月15日
http://www.egs.edu Elissa Marder, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas Fee, Switzerland. August 17 2016.
Elissa Marder, in addition to being a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, is Chair of the French and Italian Departments, a professor of French and comparative literature, and formally affiliated with the Departments of Philosophy and Women Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Between 2001 and 2006, she was Director of the Emory Psychoanalytic Studies Program, of which she was also a founding member. She is a member of the executive committee of SIPP&ISSP (International Society of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy) and has been an International Fellow of the London Graduate School since its inception in 2010.

Elissa Marder received her BA from Cornell University and completed her PhD at Yale University in 1989 where she studied with Paul de Man, Shoshana Felman, Barbara Johnson, Fredric Jameson, and Jacques Derrida, among others. Her primary areas of interest include nineteenth and twentieth century French, British, and American literature; literary theory; psychoanalysis; film; photography; and feminist theory. She is currently working on a book on early nineteenth century French literature, as well as a major project on Walter Benjamin. Her book Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) was published in 2001 by Stanford University Press. Her most recent book, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, and Deconstruction, was published in 2012 by Fordham University Press. She is also the author of numerous articles in journals such as Yale French Studies, La Revue des sciences humaines, Camera Obscura, Diacritics, L'Esprit créateur, and Autrement.
Professor Marder's work draws from the frameworks of both psychoanalysis and deconstruction but runs her own unique theoretical thread through the ideas, associations, and images touched upon in her writings. In her first book, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert), she argues that by explicitly placing time and temporal structures at the core of their nineteenth century literary works, Baudelaire and Flaubert implicitly provided twentieth and twenty-first century readers with a vocabulary for describing some of the "temporal disorders" that continue to haunt contemporary culture. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's derivation of the shock experience from his readings of Baudelaire's poems, Dead Time undertakes literary readings of Les Fleurs du mal and Madame Bovary to find new ways of thinking about the changing experience of lived time in modern and postmodern culture.

In The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction, Elissa Marder explores her long-standing fascination with the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. Inspired in large part by Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book, she argues that the maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, this book suggests that the mother is an inherently literary figure, whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might otherwise have remained unimaginable.
Most recently, Elissa Marder has begun work on a short book tentatively titled The Dream and the Guillotine: On Psycho-Photography and Other Fixations. Both dreams and the guillotine are related to photography. As Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, Freud describes the dream work by comparing it to photographic processes. Furthermore, as has been well documented, the machinery and functioning of the guillotine was from the outset persistently identified with photography. The rapidity of the falling blade was likened to the action of the shutter in a camera, the necessary immobilization of the body was similar in both cases, and the guillotine and photography alike seemed to capture the moment at which a living body became fixed into a dead image. Another project, tentatively entitled Poetry By Other Means: Baudelaire's Afterlife and the late Writings of Walter Benjamin, picks up on some of the questions about poetry and temporality that Marder began to explore in Dead Time and takes them in new directions.

Pierre Alféri. Life Lines. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures    2017年3月16日
http://www.egs.edu Pierre Alféri, Professor of Poetry at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee Switzerland. August 8 2016.
Pierre Alféri is a French novelist, poet, and essayist currently based in Paris. In addition to being a professor of poetry at The European Graduate School / EGS, Alféri teaches at art schools in Lyon, L' École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, and in Paris, L'École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris and L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.
Alféri earned a degree in philosophy at the University of Paris and published his thesis on William of Ockham (Guillaume d'Ockham le singulier) in 1989. Two years later Alféri published another philosophical essay on questions of language and literature, Chercher une phrase (1991), although he chose not to pursue an academic career in philosophy. Rather, his interest in language and philosophy led him to poetry, in which he has become one of the leading innovative French poets working today and has since published several books of poetry, including: Les Allures naturelles (1991), Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif (1992), Kub Or (1994), Sentimentale journée (1997), La Voie des airs (2004) as well as the novels Fmn (1994) and Le cinéma des familles (1999), and Les Jumelles (2009).
In several works, Alféri experiments with language formulas and reflexive writing without falling into the trap of empty lyricism. At the same time, he does not want to abandon the idea of composing a poem with a certain distance. For Alféri, prose is not a genre, nor is it the opposite of poetry. Instead, in his writing, all categories merge and stretch to compose a form that is constantly reinvented and connected to the surrounding world, while maintaining a critical distance. Alféri's verse tends to be short and irregular, often using fast cuts and breaks, as if to signify the difficulty of achievement and the refusal to be chained up.
In one of his widely praised collections of poems, Kub Or (translated into English as Oxo by Cole Swensen), Alféri uses the concept of the bouillon cube, with each poem two-dimensionally reflecting a side of the cube. The book consists of seven poems; each poem is made up of seven lines, and each line is composed of seven syllables. Being not only a propitiatory number, a good omen, and a number of daily life, the number seven also challenges the dominant prosody in French poetry, and the use of even-numbered syllabic lines. This asymmetric meter produces cuts, surprises, and overlaps, as each poem describes an aspect of modern Paris in seven short lines. With their interest in the minutiae of modern life, these poems often focus on the media—cinema, TV, advertising—as well as the artifacts of low and high culture. Pierre Alféri takes the reader on a journey through the streets, commercial life, politics, and music of modern life, and examines to what extent the figures of the past inhabit the consciousness of the present. As a poet, he is not alienated, but always prepared to engage actively with the variety of experiences he encounters. Conversely, this engagement is expected from the reader as well—if the poems are bouillon cubes, the mind of the reader is the boiling water needed to dissolve them and fully taste modern life.

Christopher Fynsk, The Library at Home. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures    2017年3月3日
http://www.egs.edu Christopher Fynsk, Maurice Blanchot Chair, Professor of Philosophy, and Dean of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at The European Graduate School / EGS.. Saas-Fee August 9 2016.
Christopher Fynsk’s academic profile includes extensive administrative experience (he has served as chair, head of school, dean and trustee) and high academic achievement through articles, translations, and books treating topics in modern Continental philosophy and literature. He has held academic positions in North America, France, and the UK (Scotland), and has fifteen years of experience at The European Graduate School / EGS. He is best known for his writings on Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot, but has also made significant contributions in the area of philosophy of language and to questions relating to the politics of philosophy (and its institutions). He is also actively involved in the philosophy of education and currently writes on the topic of rhythm.
Christopher Fynsk received his doctorate from the Department of Romance Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1981, following a Diplôme d’Etudes Avancées in Philosophy from the University of Strasbourg. He also received an MA in English from the University of California, Irvine, in 1976, and an MA in French at Johns Hopkins University in 1979. He taught at the University of Strasbourg from 1985 to 1987, and from 1981 to 2004 he worked as professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy, co-director of the Philosophy, Literature and the Theory of Criticism Program and as chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at State University of New York at Binghamton. From 1995–1997, Chris Fynsk was the chair of the Modern Language Association, Division of Philosophical Approaches to Literature. In 2004, he moved to the University of Aberdeen to join the faculty of the School of Language and Literature, and formed the Centre for Modern Thought.
In his critical writings, which breach the barriers separating philosophy, literary theory, and art criticism, Christopher Fynsk is deeply engaged with the question of the possibility of language and how the human relation to Being is sketched out through literary and philosophical texts and art works. In Infant Figures, he follows a path to the realm of this question through a dialogical meditation on two texts, one by Maurice Blanchot and one by Jacques Lacan, which confront the limits of language in saying the death of a child. In the text, which is partitioned into three suggestively aligned parts in the manner similar to a Francis Bacon triptych, Christopher Fynsk follows an inquiry of the material limits of symbolic representation. The inquiry is called by 'the exigency of the figure', a primal exposure of the human being antecedent to speech and memory which opens it to the possibility of language. In order to risk the entry into this problematic, he finds it necessary to adopt an unconventional method which navigates 'between discursive orders' in a way which is theoretically akin to the methods of psychoanalysis.

Judith Butler. Distinctions on violence and nonviolence. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures   2017年2月20日
http://www.egs.edu Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS.
Distinctions on violence and nonviolence. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS, Saas-Fee/Switzerland, August 12 2016.
Judith Butler holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at The European Graduate School / EGS and is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a philosopher and one of the most challenging thinkers of our time. She rose to prominence in 1990 with Gender Trouble, which caused an unexpected stir as it unearthed foundational assumptions both in philosophy and in feminist theory, namely the facticity of sex. Controversial debate on the subject(s) extended far beyond academia to which Butler responded, in part, in Bodies that Matter (1993). Butler’s academic rigor is pursued through innovative and critical readings of a wide range of texts in philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature, challenging the confines of disciplinary thinking. Within, and beyond that, Judith Butler is also known for her critical voice in socio-political discourse and debate. Her qualities as a thinker are reflected in her openness to what is at stake in the present and in her passionate engagement in conversations with contemporaries in and outside academia.
In recent lectures and writings, Judith Butler embarks on new terrain. Focusing on political collectives, the coming together of people in public assembly–– the people, citizenship, and public space––Butler revives her sentiment for the performative. Expanding beyond the speech act, she offers a new perspective to her concept of the performative as it is the appearance of corporeal life that establishes performatively a field of the political and supports concerted action. It is the appearance of bodies not only being precarious, but also resistant and persistent. A first systematic approach to these lines of thought can be found in Judith Butler's recent publication, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015).

Avital Ronell. Arendt's acceptance of the Lessing Prize. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures   2017年2月7日
http://www.egs.edu Avital Ronell, Jacques Derrida Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas Fee, Switzerland August 10 2016.
Her research and theoretical contributions extend across the fields of literary studies, philosophy, feminist theory, technology and media, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, ethics, and performance art.
Born in Prague to Israeli diplomats, Ronell emigrated to New York in 1956. She completed a Bachelor of Arts at Middlebury College, and then went on to study with Jacob Taubes and Hans-Georg Gadamer at the Hermeneutics Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin. Ronell returned to the United States and continued her studies at Princeton University, where, under the supervision of Stanley Corngold and with a thesis entitled The Figure of Poetry: Self-reflection in Goethe, Hölderlin, and Kafka, she received a PhD in Germanic languages and literature, in 1979. After completing her doctorate, Avital Ronell moved to Paris in order to study directly with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. After her years of study in Paris, she assumed a number of professorships at various universities in the United States, including the University of Virginia, the University of California, Riverside, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1995, she returned to New York to assume her post at New York University. Avital Ronell has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards and fellowships, including: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellowship (1981–1983), American Cultures Fellowship (1991), Research Fellow Award (1993), and the University of California’s President’s Fellowship (1995–1996). Further, she has served as chair of the Division of Philosophy and Literature and chair of the Division of Comparative Literature at the Modern Language Association, from 1993 to 1996.

In 2009, the Centre Pompidou invited her to hold a series of conference performances with artists and philosophers such as Pierre Alferi, Werner Herzog, Judith Butler, Laurence Rickels, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Suzanne Doppelt, among others. The project went under the title: Selon… Avital Ronell (According to… Avital Ronell).
In October 2015, Ronell was presented with the prestigious insignia of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture.
As one of the first English translators of Jacques Derrida’s work, Avital Ronell is widely credited as one of the primary figures introducing his work to English speaking audiences—and American academia more specifically. While Derrida is certainly the over-whelming influence on Ronell’s work, she is in constant dialogue with a number of philosophers and theorists, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, or Maurice Blanchot, to name but a few. While her work is often considered as deconstructive, Derridean, Heideggerian, post-feminist, post-structuralist, or psychoanalytic, Ronell’s thinking and writing works beyond these labels remaining utterly singular and thoroughly transgressive.
Among Avital Ronell’s significant works are: Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986), Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992), Stupidity (2001), The Test Drive (2005), The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (ed. Diane Davis, 2007), Fighting Theory (with Anne Dufourmantelle, trans. Catherine Porter, 2010), Schriften zur Literatur: Essays von Goethe bis Kafka (trans. Marc Blankenburg, 2012), and Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (2012).
http://egs.edu/faculty/avital-ronell

Wendy Brown. In the account of Neoliberalism. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures    2017年1月25日
http://www.egs.edu Wendy Brown, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee Switzerland. August 13 2016.
Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley. Her research interests include the history of political and social theory, Continental philosophy, and critical theory, together with the examination of contemporary capitalism. In her research into the problems that plague contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism, she employs theoretical works of Michel Foucault, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Frankfurt school.
In 1983, Wendy Brown received her doctoral degree from Princetown University. She subsequently taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and also at Williams College. Since 1999, she has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (2005) consists of seven articles which were all written for some particular occasion. Brown emphasises this trait of her book and claims that “such occasions mimic, in certain ways, the experience of the political realm: one is challenged to think here, now, about a problem that is set and framed by someone else, and to do so before a particular audience or in dialogue with others not of one’s own choosing.” Every essay in this book begins with a particular problem: what is the relationship between love, loyalty, and dissent in contemporary American political life?; how did neoliberal rationality become a form of governmentality?; what are the main problems of women’s studies programs?, etc. According to Brown, the aim of these essays is not to produce definitive answers to the given questions but “to critically interrogate the framing and naming practices, challenge the dogmas (including those of the Left and of feminism), and discern the constitutive powers shaping the problem at hand.”
In Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006), Wendy Brown subverts the usual and widely accepted conception that tolerance is one of the most remarkable achievements of the modern Western world. She argues that tolerance cannot be perceived as a complete opposite to violence, but that can also be used to justify violence. In order to substantiate this thesis, Brown associates tolerance with figures like George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Samuel Huntington, Susan Okin, Michael Ignatieff, Bernard Lewis, and Seyla Benhabib and claims that “tolerance as a political practice is always conferred by the dominant, it is always a certain expression of domination even as it offers protection or incorporation to the less powerful.”
Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010) examines the revival of wall-building in the contemporary world. She shows that the function of these walls is ultimately problematic because they cannot stop crimes, migration, or smuggling, cannot play a defensive role in the case of a war like they did in the past, and they cannot do anything against potential terrorist attacks. However, even if they cannot stop all these threats, walls still have an important symbolic function which Brown explores in her book.
Her most recent work Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) uses Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics to analyze the hollowing and evisceration of democracy under neoliberal rationality. Brown describes neoliberalism as a furtive attack on the very foundation of democracy. She treats “neoliberalism as a governing rationality through which everything is “economized” and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm. Importantly, this is not merely a matter of extending commodification and monetization everywhere, as in the old Marxist depiction of capital’s transformation of everyday life. Neoliberalism construes even non-wealth generating spheres—such as learning, dating, or exercising—in market terms, submits them to market metrics, and governs them with market techniques and practices. Above all, it casts people as human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value.” To be saved, democracy again needs to become not only the object of theoretical rethinking but also of political struggle.

Simon Critchley. Working Class Ballet. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures    2017年1月16日
http://www.egs.edu Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas Fee, Switzerland August 20 2016.
Simon Critchley is a scholar of continental philosophy and phenomenology, with particular emphasis on Emmanuel Levinas. Much of Critchley’s work examines the crucial relationship between the ethical and political within philosophy. His thinking traverses a variety of genres complimenting his interests in music, humour, and tragedy.
The prolific writer has published and edited twentyeight books to date, many on the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Martin Heidegger, and Wallace Stevens. Critchley’s works include, among others, Re-Reading Levinas (1991), Deconstructive Subjectivities (1996), Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001), On Humour (2002), On the Human Condition (2005) with Dominique Janicaud and Eileen Brennan, On Heidegger’s Being and Time (2008) with Reiner Schürmann, the slim German volume Der Katechismus des Bürgers (2008, The Catechism of the Citizen, 2009), and Impossible Objects (2011).
Critchley was born in Hertfordshire, England. He obtained his BA from the University of Essex in 1985 and his MA in philosophy with a thesis on Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Carnap from the University of Nice in 1987. In 1988, he received his PhD from the University of Essex with a dissertation on the ethics of deconstruction in the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Simon Critchley then went on to teach at his alma mater in Essex, first as a lecturer in philosophy, then as a reader, and finally, in 1999, as a professor. In 2004, he became a professor at The New School in New York. In addition, Critchley was chosen as a scholar by the prestigious Getty Research Institute and has been a visiting professor in institutions such as the University of Oslo, Cardozo Law School, Tilburg University, and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

Terry Smith. The Contemporary Condition. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures    2017年1月11日
http://www.egs.edu Terry Smith, Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas Fee, Switzerland. August 23 2016.
Terry Smith is an Australian art historian, critic, and theoretician. He is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh. His main research interests are contemporary art and its position in wider institutional and social contexts together with the examination of the notion of “contemporaneity” that enables him to provide an answer to the question: “what comes after modernism and postmodernism?”
Smith completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne (1967) and earned his MA at the University of Sydney (1976). The title of his MA thesis was American Abstract Expressionism: Ethical Attitudes and Moral Function. He obtained his doctoral degree in 1986, and his dissertation (full title: Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America) was published in 1993 by the University of Chicago Press. In 2009, this book won the Georgia O’Keeff Museum Prize for the best book on Modern American Art published in the past 25 years. In 1976, Smith was appointed a lecturer at Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney and remained there until 2001. Presently, he serves as a board member of both the Andy Warhol Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Australia was on the margin of the art world and major international movements and Smith wanted both to introduce them and to make them relevant for the Australian audience. In 1970, he founded (together with Paul McGillick) a new journal of art criticism entitled Other Voices. The aim was “to offer an alternative platform for serious writing about the newest art.” The leading article in the first issue of this journal was Terry Smith’s “Color-Form Painting: Sydney 1965–1970.”
Smith did not want to write only scholarly articles, and he also wrote art criticism for The Nation Review and for The Australian, which was, at the time, owned by Rupert Murdoch. He was sacked by the owner of the newspaper after he published a supportive review of an artist who criticized Australian involvement in the Vietnam war and a series of increasingly political art columns. Smith drew the attention of the art world to himself when he published an essay “The Provincial Problem” (1974) in the international magazine Artforum. In this essay, he compares Jackson Pollock and an Australian artist Sydney Nolan, who is practically unknown outside Australia. He argues that art can be understood as “the question of consequence, a battle for appropriate acknowledgment, which a provincial artist will always lose unless you revise the history and entire narrative.”
During his career, Smith has written extensively about Australian art. His most important contributions in this area include chapters on the modern and the postmodern in Australian Painting 1788-2000 (2001) and Transformations in Australian Art, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation; vol. 2. The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (2002).
Another preoccupation in the work of Terry Smith is the notion of “contemporaneity” together with the status of art in our society. In What Is Contemporary Art? (2009), Smith argues that three forms of contemporary art currently exist: 1. art reflecting the after-effects of modernism, which can be classified either as a return to mainstream modernism (Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter) or as something that Smith describes as retro-sensationalism (Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami); 2. the art of the transnational turn: since Euro-centric or EuroAmerican-centric are no longer dominant, various influences from around the world create a movement within contemporary art that is characterized by its lack of homogeneity; 3. the art of a younger generation that investigates mediation and the possibility of ethics “through small scale and participatory art making.” Other important works of Terry Smith that explore features, significance, and the position of art in the contemporary world are Contemporary Art: World Currents (2011), a wide-ranging textbook, and two books on curating. In Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012), Smith attempts to explore what is distinctive about curatorial thought. Talking Contemporary Curating (2015), takes this further, through conversations with leading international curators, art historians, and theorists, including Zdenka Badovinac, Claire Bishop, Zoe Butt, Germano Celant, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Okwui Enwezor, Boris Groys, Jens Hoffmann, Mami Kataoka, Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Mari Carmen Ramírez.

Daniel Birnbaum. The Work of Hilma af Klint. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures    2016年12月31日
http://www.egs.edu Daniel Birnbaum, Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee/Switzerland. 05 Aug 2016.
Daniel Birnbaum is a Swedish art critic, theoretician, curator, and the director of the Museum of Modern Art (Moderna Museet) in Stockholm.
From 1989 until 1997, Birnbaum worked as an art critic in the Swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Expressen, but also as an independent curator. In 1998, he obtained his doctoral degree from Stockholm University with a thesis on Edmund Husserl (The Hospitality of Presence: Problem of Otherness in Husserl’s Phenomenology). Since 1998, Birnbaum has also been a contributing editor of the international art magazine Artforum (New York), and has also written numerous articles for magazines like Parkett and Frieze. He has also worked as a director of IASPIS (The Swedish Arts Grants Committee's International Programme for Visual Artists). In 2001, Birnbaum became Rector at Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. During his time at this fine arts academy, he also presided over Portikus, Städelschule’s exhibition site which is also recognized as one of the leading places for contemporary art in Germany.
While he taught in Frankfurt am Main, Birnbaum continued his curatorial work. He was a co-curator of the international section at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the director of the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). Birnbaum also worked as co-curator of the first and second Moscow Biennales of Contemporary Art (2005 and 2007). Since 2001, he is a member of the board of Manifesta in Amsterdam. In November 2010, Daniel Birnbaum became the director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Birnbaum’s essay Chronology (2005) tries to explore different artworks with the help of Deleuzian concept of immanence. He writes about the works of artists such as Stan Douglaths, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Tacita Dean, Darren Almond, Tobias Rehberger, Pierre Huyghe, and Philippe Parreno in order to pose (and subsequently answer) the following questions: “Is it the intentionality described by phenomenology and the ambiguous flesh of the active viewer who enters the work of art and fully explores its most extreme possibilities that determine the limits of possible subjectivation? Or is it the work itself that defines the parameters of new potential forms of subjectivity, perhaps involving modes of awareness that dodge the framework of phenomenology?”
The book Under Pressure: Pictures, Subjects, and the New Spirit of Capitalism that Birnbaum co-edited with Isabelle Graw gathers the contributions from the same-titled conferences at Institut für Kunstkritik at the Städelschule (2006 and 2007). The aim of these conferences was to discuss the value system resulting from the “New Spirit Of Capitalism.” According to Birnbaum and Graw, writers like Paolo Virno, Luc Boltanski, and W.J.T. Mitchell have developed new conceptual tools that are useful for the analysis of the present condition. Therefore, these conferences sought to take up the potential application of the new conceptual tools formulated by Virno, Boltanski and Mitchell. However, another goal was to describe and confront the external pressures and constraints that play a large role in the production of artworks. The book edited by Birnbaum and Graw gathers dilemmas and answers of the various conference participants (e.g. Luc Boltanski, Sabeth Buchmann, Tim Griffin, W.J.T. Mitchell, Sighard Neckel, Martin Saar, and Paolo Virno).

Together with Heike Belzer, Birnbaum edited the book Teaching Art: Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main (2007). This is both a book and a document about Städelschule and its daily life and educational goals. Wolfgang Tillmans’s contribution consists of a series of photographs that depicted life in this school, and all texts present in this book were written by people who either worked at the school as faculty members or held workshops and seminars at this vibrant place.

Casey Reas. Studio Work. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures    2016年12月26日
http://www.egs.edu Casey Reas, Professor of Art and Digital Design at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. July 04 2016.
Casey Reas, is a Los Angeles-based artist and programmer who, as he describes himself, “writes software to explore conditional systems as art. Through defining emergent networks and layered instructions, he has defined a unique area of visual experience that builds upon concrete art, conceptual art, experimental animation, and drawing. While dynamic, generative software remains his core medium, work in variable media including prints, objects, installations, and performances materialize from his visual systems.” [1]
Reas holds a Bachelor of Science in Design from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati (1996), as well as a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001). An associate professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea between 2001–03, Casey was appointed professor at the Department of Design Media Arts at University of California, Los Angeles, in 2003.

Next to private and public collections (among them: the Centre Georges Pompidou), Reas’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Europe, the United States, and Asia. Recent solo exhibitions include “Yes No” (Pasadena City College, 2014); “ULTRACONCENTRATED” (bitforms gallery, New York, 2013); “CENTURY” (Gallery [DAM]Berlin, 2012); and “Process” (BCA Center, Burlington, 2012). Among his numerous group exhibitions are, more recently, “//the ART_of_DATA” (Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014, curated by Steven Sacks); “ArchiLab” (FRAC Centre, Orléans, France, 2013/14); “A New Sculpturalism” (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2013; collaboration with P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S and North Sails); “AI Plus” (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2013; curated by Hui-Ching Hsieh HSIEH); and “Microwave International Media Art Festival” (Hong Kong, 2012).

Among his recent commissions are “Fragrant World” (in collaboration with Aranda\Lasch, Nick Gould, and Yoshi Sodeoka), live visual media and sculptures for the Yeasayer's 2012 tour, commissioned by The Creators Project; “Signals” (in collaboration with Ben Fry), a mural for building 76 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2011); “Chronograph” (in collaboration with Tal Rosner), a software mural for the Frank Gehry-designed home of the New World Symphony in Miami (2011); and “Whitney Museum Gala 2010,” a software installation for the Annual Gala by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In 2001, together with data visualization expert and artist Ben Fry, Reas invented and launched “Processing,” which he describes as an “open source programming language and environment for the visual arts,” [2] and subsequently co-authored Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (MIT Press, 2007/2014). With the second edition having been significantly updated and revised, both editions provide “a comprehensive reference and text for Processing (www.processing.org), an open-source programming language that can be used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and anyone who wants to program images, animation, and interactivity.” [3]
[1] http://reas.com/information
[2] http://reas.com/information
[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/proces...

Metahaven. Propaganda. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures    2016年12月17日
http://www.egs.edu Metahaven, Professors of Digital Design at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas Fee/Switzerland 06.20.2016.
Metahaven—Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden —an Amsterdam-based “studio for design, research, and art”, whose “work—both commissioned and self-directed—reflects political and social issues in collaboratively produced graphic design objects,” [1] was founded by graphic designers and writers Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden in 2007; Gon Zifroni was a partner between 2007–10. A “strategic graphic design agency,” as they put it in an interview with Rhizome, they “make anything between a conference, a publication, an interview, a product, a visual identity, a policy document, or a set of floating appearances on the Internet. We are not only interested in the development of hypothetical image, but also in its realization.” [2]
Vinca Kruk studied at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, graduating with a BA in graphic design in 2003. Following this, Kruk worked a researcher at the Design Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht until 2005, where she also served as an advising researcher from 2006–07.
Kruk has held various academic positions; a tutor for graphic design at KABK Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, The Hague (2007), and for editorial design at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts (2007–present), she had been appointed mentor at the IM Master Program at the Design Academy Eindhoven (2010) as well as Senior Lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2011–2012).
[1] http://www.metahaven.net/Site/Metahav...
[2] Giampaolo Bianconi, “An interview with Metahaven”, Feb 20th, 2013, available at http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/feb... (last accessed August 27, 2015)

Hubertus von Amelunxen & Adel Abdessemed. Réponds, sable!. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures     2016年12月9日
http://www.egs.edu Hubertus von Amelunxen & Adel Abdessemed, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas Fee/Switzerland. June 15th 2016.
Adel Abdessemed is a French-Algerian artist. He embraces a wide variety of media, and his work includes installations, videos, photography, sculptures, drawings, and books. His oeuvre is characterised by brutal imagery that attempts to depict the inherent violence of the contemporary world. His works often deal with the themes of war, violence, and religion.
Abdessemed was born in Constantine, Algeria where he attended the Fine Arts School in Batna and the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1992, while he was still a student, a military coup occurred in his country; more than 100,000 people lost their lives in the subsequent violence. This is why Abdessemed says: “The violence that I talk about, I experienced it very directly. To this day, the wounds stay open, and the questions remain unanswered: the arson attacks, the mass rapes, the unpunished murders.” After the director of his school, Ahmed Assalah, and his son were murdered on the school premises, Adel Abdessemed emigrated to France and enrolled the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. At this school, his work drew the attention of the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. In 2000, he obtained a residency at PS1 in New York, and he witnessed the terrorist attacks on the USA in 2001. After the end of his residency, he moved to a Berlin for a short time and then to Paris just before the street riots of 2005. All these events feature prominently in his works.

Hubertus von Amelunxen is a theorist, curator, and artist. He holds the Walter Benjamin Chair at The European Graduate School / EGS, where he teaches Media Philosophy and Cultural Studies. He was born on December 29, 1958, in a town called Bad Hindelang in Bavaria, Germany. He studied Romance Languages and Literature (French, Spanish), German, and Art History in Marburg (Philipps-Universität) and Paris (École Normale Supérieure), and finished his PhD at the University of Mannheim with a thesis on nineteenth century French literature (Allegory and Photography). Professor von Amelunxen was a Founding Director and Professor at the International School for New Media in Lübeck (Germany). Additionally, he is a Senior Visiting Curator for Photography and New Media at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal (Canada).
Hubertus von Amelunxen has curated many international exhibitions since 1989, among them "Photography after Photography" (which toured in Europe and the USA in 1995 and 1996), "Les lieux du Non-Lieu", Munich (1997); "Le territoire en deuil", Arles (1998); "Tomorrow For Ever – Photographie als Ruine", Krems, Duisburg (1999/2000).
In both his writing and his curatorial practice, Hubertus von Amelunxen invites us to reconsider the medium and the concept of photography in the face of current technological changes, both its artistic translation and its social utilisation. He formulates the conflict between the first photograph, or the first technically generated image, and the 'new media' as a starting point for this redefinition. According to him, the digitization of the photographic image opened up new possibilities for montage and manipulation. At the same time, this also opened a space to create the analogy between the computer screen and psychic space: in it, the residues of daily perception are collected and linked by the individual, the shocks of the everyday are absorbed into the medium, and their repetition on screen can be seen as a process of continual analytical transference work. On another level, this new procedure makes it possible to atomise and fragment patterns of identity. According to Hubertus von Amelunxen, the digital imaging techniques have literally turned off the photographic model of representation. With this altered ontology of the photographic image, he notices the limitations of the language we use to analyze photographs. We are still naming something that actually no longer exists, and von Amelunxen underlines the necessity for a new grammar, a new syntax, and a new logic of elements within mutating historical circumstances.

Jean-Luc Nancy. The Techno-Economical-Machinery. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures     2016年12月4日
http://www.egs.edu Jean-Luc Nancy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas Fee, July 1st. 2016.
Jean-Luc Nancy graduated with a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne (Paris) in 1962, where he worked with Georges Canguilhem. During his time at the Sorbonne, he also worked with Paul Ricoeur, who supervised his MA thesis on Hegel’s philosophy of religion. He briefly taught in Colmar before becoming an assistant at the Institut de philosophie at the University of Strasbourg in 1968. In 1973, he completed his doctoral dissertation on Kant’s analogical discourse under the supervision of Paul Ricoeur. In the same year, Nancy became maître-assistant (later maître de conférences) at the Université des Sciences Humaines in Strasbourg, where he remained a professor until his retirement in 2002. He has been a guest professor at numerous universities, among them the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Nancy’s research is very diverse and his work challenges the modern idea of systematicity. While he has written on numerous major European thinkers such as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, etc., he has also responded to many key twentieth-century French contemporaries, such as Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. The philosopher’s most important topics include: the question of community, the nature of the political, German Romanticism, psychoanalysis, literature, technology, and hermeneutics.
Jean-Luc Nancy began publishing his work in the 1970s. Two of his earliest books, Le titre de la lettre: Une lecture de Lacan (1972; The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan) and L’absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand (1978; The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism), were co-written with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Le titre de la lettre is a close reading of Jacques Lacan’s essay “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud.” According to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, the Lacanian discourse remains metaphysical because meaning is understood as the origin of the play of signifiers.
In 1980, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe organised a Cérisy-Colloquium on Derrida’s work, Les fins de l’homme (The Ends of Man). This conference also constituted the beginning of an in-depth exploration of the notion of the political and a beginning for posing the question about the interconnections between deconstruction and politics. In the same year, they also formed the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique. Two books, Rejouer le politique (1981) and Le retrait du politique (1983), were results of the Centre’s work (most of its important papers were translated into English in 1997 as Retreating the Political). While the Centre was closed in 1984, Nancy continued to investigate the questions of community and politics.
The result of this investigation became La communauté désoeuvrée (1986; The Inoperative Community), an examination of the idea of community. In this well-known work, "Nancy shows that [community] is neither a project of fusion nor production. Rather, he argues, community can be defined through the political nature of its resistance against immanent power."
In 1987, Jean-Luc Nancy became docteur d'état in Toulouse, with recognition from the jury (among the jury members were Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida). His supervisor was Gérard Granel. Nancy's dissertation was published as L'expérience de la liberté (1988; The Experience of Freedom), a study focusing on the notion of freedom in Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. It also marks Nancy’s return to a critical engagement with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and especially with the notion of Mitsein or “being-with.”
The most important work from this period of Nancy’s career is Être singulier pluriel (1996; Being Singular Plural), which continues to explore some of the crucial themes presented in L'expérience de la liberté and which, in addition to the same-titled essay, Être singulier pluriel, consists of five shorter essays. The key argument of the book is again that our being is always “being-with” and that our existence is always already co-existence. Together with the exploration of this central concern, Nancy engages other important topics, among them national sovereignty, war and technology, and identity politics.

Benjamin H. Bratton. The Question of 'Sensing'. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures     2016年11月21日
http://www.egs.edu Benjamin H. Bratton, is an American theorist, sociologist and professor of visual arts, contemporary social and political theory, philosophy, and design. Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS.
The Question of 'Sensing'. Public open lecture for the for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS. Saas-Fee Switzerland and Valetta/Malta. June 30 2016.
Benjamin Bratton's research deals with computational media and infrastructure, design research management & methodologies, classical and contemporary sociological theory, architecture and urban design issues, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies.
Bratton completed his doctoral studies in the sociology of technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara​, and was the Director of the Advanced Strategies Group at Yahoo! before expanding his cross-disciplinary research and practice in academia. He taught in the Department of Design/Media Art at UCLA from 2003-2008, and at the SCI Arc​ (Southern California Institute of Architecture)​ for a decade, and continues to teach as a member of the Visiting Faculty. While at SCI Arc, Benjamin Bratton and Hernan Diaz-Alonso co-founded the XLAB courses, which placed students in laboratory settings where they could work directly and comprehensively in robotics, scripting, biogenetics, genetic codification, and cellular systems​. Currently, in addition to his professorship at EGS, Bratton is an associate professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Dieg​o, where he also directs the Center for Design and Geopolitics, partnering with the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology​.
In addition to his formal positions, Benjamin H. Bratton is a regular visiting lecturer at numerous universities and institutions including: Columbia University, Yale University, Pratt Institute, Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of California, Art Center College of Design, Parsons The New School for Design, University of Michigan, Brown University, The University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Bauhaus- University, Moscow State University, Moscow Institute for Higher Economics, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
Bratton's current projects focus on the political geography of cloud computing, massively- granular universal addressing systems, and alternate models of ecological governance. In his most recent book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015), Bratton asks the question, "What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities?​" and in response, offers the proposition "that smart grids, cloud computing, mobile software and smart cities, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing, and other types of apparently unrelated planetary-scale computation can be viewed as forming a coherent whole—an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new geopolitical architecture.​"
Other more recent texts include the following: Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics, On Apps and Elementary Forms of Interfacial Life: Object, Image, Superimposition, Deep Address, What We Do is Secrete: On Virilio, Planetarity and Data Visualization, Geoscapes & the Google Caliphate: On Mumbai Attacks, Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia and Suspicious Images/ Latent Interfaces (with Natalie Jeremijenko), iPhone City, Logistics of Habitable Circulation (introduction to the 2008 edition of Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics). As well, recent online lectures include: 2 or 3 Things I Know About The Stack, at Bartlett School of Architecture, University of London, and University of Southampton;Cloud Feudalism at Proto/E/Co/Logics 002, Rovinj, Croatia; Nanoskin at Parsons School of Design; On the Nomos of the Cloud at Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, École Normale- Superiore, Paris, and MOCA, Los Angeles; Accidental Geopolitics at The Guardian Summit, New York; Ambivalence and/or Utopia at University of Michigan and UC Irvine, and Surviving the Interface at Parsons School of Design.

Alfredo Jaar. Art today. How to? 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures   2016年10月2日
http://www.egs.edu Alfredo Jaar, Chilean artist, architect, and filmmaker who presently lives and works in New York. Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS. Saas-Fee Switzerland and Valetta/Malta. March 31 2016.
Alfredo Jaar's oeuvre is unquestionably politically motivated, often exploring the very notions of politics, ethics, and representation, and complex issues such as genocide, political corruption, humanitarian crises, and the relationship between geography, power, and exploitation. Alfredo Jaar is a devoted educator, and has made approximately sixty public interventions in his career. For him, there is a strong connection between art and thinking: “I strongly believe that artists are thinkers, as opposed to object makers. My working process is 99% thinking and 1% making. That thinking process is at the core of what I do and this process is always triggered by a specific site or issue. In my career, I have been incapable of creating a single work of art out of nothing. That is why I am not a studio artist: I define myself as a project artist. I try to propose, with my projects, a creative model that responds to the particulars of a given situation. That model can then be projected into the world. I believe that this is what artists do: with each project we propose a new conception of the world; and that new conception is a new way of looking at the world. That is why I believe that we create models of thinking the world.”

Philippe Beck. Poetry, between Hegel and Schiller. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures 2016年11月11日
http://www.egs.edu Philippe Beck, Professor of Poetry at The European Graduate School / EGS. Valetta/Malta. March 24 2016.
Philippe Beck is a contemporary French poet, writer, and philosopher. He is Professor of Poetry at The European Graduate School / EGS and Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at l’Université de Nantes. Interested in the nature of the poetic experience, for Beck, the poetic today lies not only between scientific experience and common sense experience but allows for their communicability. His work traverses poetry, poétologie, prose, and philosophy, as evidenced in his intellectual biography Beck l’impersonage, from 2006, and his latest work, Contre un Boileau, un art poétique, published this year. He has published sixteen books of poetry and was awarded the Grand Prix de Poésie (Grand Poetry Prize) from the French Academy in 2015 in recognition of his poetic oeuvre.

Beck began his advanced studies in literature and philosophy at L’École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud in 1985. He went on to complete his doctoral studies at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales under the supervision of Jacques Derrida, receiving his doctorate degree with honors in 1994 with his dissertation entitled Histoire et imagination (History and Imagination).
Beck’s poetry is highly influenced by his philosophical education. Following Derrida’s particular way of writing, many of Beck’s poetic works are conceived as comments on other texts. Often “metatextual” and “intertextual,” Beck’s poetry functions as a kind of palimpsest. They are, as well, often self-reflexive, as in the case of Garde-manche hypocrite (Hypocritical Oversleeve), his first book of poetry published in 1996, and Garde-manche deux (Oversleeve Two), a revised version of the former published in 2003. In Chants populaires (Folk Songs), from 2007, Beck reinvents seventy-two fairytales originally written by the Brothers Grimm. However, he does not simply paraphrase or retell these stories, but rather, in poetic form, offers interpretations and commentaries with the aid of psychoanalysis, sociology, and philosophy.

Slavoj Žižek. The great challenge of The Left. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures    2016年11月7日
Slavoj Žižek. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS, Saas-Fee/Switzerland and Valetta/Malta. 2016.

Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a Slovenian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Aside from these appointments, Žižek tirelessly gives lectures around the globe and is often described as “the Elvis of cultural theory”. Although, more seriously, as British critical theorist Terry Eagleton confers, Žižek is the “most formidably brilliant” theorist to have emerged from Europe in decades. Many, in fact, now consider Žižek to be “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.”
He grew up in in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which at the time was part of the former Yugoslavia. The regime’s more permissive, albeit “pernicious,” policies allowed for Žižek’s exposure to Western theory and culture, in particular film, English detective novels, German Idealism, French structuralism, and Jacques Lacan. Studying at the University of Ljubljana, he completed his master's degree in philosophy in 1975 with a thesis on French structuralism and his Doctoral degree in philosophy in 1981 with a dissertation on German Idealism. He then went to Paris, along with Mladen Dolar, to study Lacan under Jacques Alain-Miller (Lacan’s son-in-law and disciple). During this time in Paris, from 1981–85, Žižek completed another dissertation on the work of Hegel, Marx, and Kripke through a Lacanian lens. After his return to Slovenia, he became more politically active writing for , a weekly newspaper, co-founding the Slovenian Liberal Demorcratic Party, and running for one of four seats that comprised the collective Slovenian presidency (Žižek came in fifth).
Žižek rose to prominence in 1989 following his first book published in English, . Since then he has written countless books, in fact, perhaps the only thing more numerous than the talks he tirelessly gives across the globe are the books on which those interviews stand. For the last twenty-five years Žižek has been writing predominantly in English, and to a far lesser extent in his native Slovenian, for obvious reasons. His books of the last decades include: (1991), (1993), (1997), (1999), (2006), (2001), (1996), (1992), (1991), (2015), (2003), (2002), (2010), (1994), (2002), (2009), (2009), (2007), (2012), (2007), (2001), (2008), (2000), and (2012). Along with these and many other books, he has also co-authored a number of books with Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Eric Santner, John Millbank, Ernesto Laclau, Boris Gunjević, and Agon Hamza, among others. Further, he is the editor of a number of consequential series, including Wo Es War by Verso, SIC by Duke University Press, and Short Circuits by MIT Press.

Avital Ronell. Dissecting the paraconcept of the complaint. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures   2016年11月4日
http://www.egs.edu Avital Ronell, Jacques Derrida Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Valetta/Malta. March 27 2016.
Avital Ronell is the Jacques Derrida Chair and professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, as well as University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and English at New York University.
Her research and theoretical contributions extend across the fields of literary studies, philosophy, feminist theory, technology and media, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, ethics, and performance art.

As one of the first English translators of Jacques Derrida’s work, Avital Ronell is widely credited as one of the primary figures introducing his work to English speaking audiences—and American academia more specifically. While Derrida is certainly the over-whelming influence on Ronell’s work, she is in constant dialogue with a number of philosophers and theorists, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, or Maurice Blanchot, to name but a few. While her work is often considered as deconstructive, Derridean, Heideggerian, post-feminist, post-structuralist, or psychoanalytic, Ronell’s thinking and writing works beyond these labels remaining utterly singular and thoroughly transgressive.
Among Avital Ronell’s significant works are: Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986), Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992), Stupidity (2001), The Test Drive (2005), The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (ed. Diane Davis, 2007), Fighting Theory (with Anne Dufourmantelle, trans. Catherine Porter, 2010), Schriften zur Literatur: Essays von Goethe bis Kafka (trans. Marc Blankenburg, 2012), and Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (2012).

Victor Burgin. The field of Representation. Malta March 28 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures   2016年10月28日
http://www.egs.edu Victor Burgin, Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS. Valetta/Malta. March 28 2016.
Victor Burgin is a British artist, cultural theorist and photographer. He studied Painting and Philosophy at The Royal College of Art, London (1962-1965) and Painting, Sculpture and Philosophy at Yale University, New Haven (1965-1967). He taught photography at Nottingham Trent University (1967-1973) and then at the Polytechnic of Central London (1973-1988). Burgin was a Professor of Art History and Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1988-2000) and currently holds the Emeritus Millard Chair of Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College, University of London.
Victor Burgin’s artistic work and his theoretical writings are often concerned with spatial and temporal relationships and with a tension between real (exterior) space and psychological (interior) space. Burgin claims: “To have an interest in the relation between real exterior space and psychological space is quite simply to be interested in the image. The ‘image’ is neither a material entity nor simply an optical event, an imprint of light on the retina, it is also a complex psychological process. It is in this sense that the image is defined as essentially ‘virtual’ in the phenomenological perspective that Deleuze derived from Henri Bergson. The ‘image-for-commerce’ is something that can be propped on an easel beside an auctioneer, something that can sit easily on the cover of a magazine, something that lends itself to becoming logo or brand. But the image is a different thing outside the circulation of commodities, outside the order of the spectacle – which is to say, outside of modern Western history. For example, in the Western tradition there are things – objects, ‘images’, whatever – and then there is the space between them, which is empty. In a certain Japanese tradition the space between – ma – is as tangible as any material thing and is as charged with sense. This is the place and the substance of the ‘image’ as I understand the term.”
In his works, Burgin also attempts to provide an answer to the question: how do memory and fantasy shape and distort real objects and actual space? This is why he also explores the relationship between words and images; a relationship that, according to Burgin, produces a “virtual” or “psychological” image. His work is influenced by many different theorists and philosophers, but the most important ones are Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Andrè Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Roland Barthes.