Recent townsend items

Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject

Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Relligion

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Relligion

Critical Views: Essays on the Humanities and the Arts

Mon, 4 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Critical Views: Essays on the Humanities and the Arts

Art and Aesthetics after Adorno

Mon, 6 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century. It is coupled with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be. But the cultural horizon of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, and much has happened since then both in theory and in practice. Adorno’s powerful vision of aesthetics calls for reconsideration in this light. Must his work be defended, updated, resisted, or simply left behind? This volume gathers new essays by leading philosophers, critics, and theorists writing in the wake of Adorno in order to address these questions. They hold in common a deep respect for the power of Adorno’s aesthetic critique and a concern for the future of aesthetic theory in response...

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In this volume, four leading thinkers of our times confront the paradoxes and dilemmas attending the supposed stand-off between Islam and liberal democratic values. Taking the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammad as a point of departure, Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood inquire into the evaluative frameworks at stake in understanding the conflicts between blasphemy and free speech, between religious taboos and freedoms of thought and expression, and between secular and religious world views. Is the language of the law an adequate mechanism for the adjudication of such conflicts? What other modes of discourse are available for the navigation of such differences in multicultural and multi-religious societies? What is the role of critique in such an enterprise? These are among the pressing questions this volume addresses.

Nietzsche’s Negative Ecologies

Wed, 9 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Malcolm Bull offers a detailed analysis of nihilism in Nietzsche's works. Along with accompanying commentaries by Cascardi and Clark, he explores the significance of Nietzscheís views given the fact that a wide range of readers have come to embrace his ideas as new orthodoxy. There seem to be no anti-Nietzscheans today, but Bull demonstrates that this wide embrace of Nietzsche runs counter to the very meaning of nihilism as Nietzsche understood it.

Grounds for Remembering

Fri, 25 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

"Grounds for Remembering" contains the transcribed proceedings of a symposium on mourning, memory and the meaning of monuments in the modern period. The symposium was organized by the Townsend Center to celebrate the residency of architect and sculptor Maya Lin on the Berkeley campus, and to engage Ms. Lin, as well as faculty from Architecture, History, and English, in a consideration of how human communities seek through built form both to compensate for loss and to understand their history.

Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Civil Rights Memorial, draws on her own experience, particularly her work in designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in discussing the artistic and technical issues of building a major national monument. She describes the context within which she originally created the design and the political issues that surrounded her involvement in its construction.

Historian Thomas Laqueur looks to predecessors of the Vietnam...

Cannabis, Forgetting and the Botany of Desire

Fri, 26 Dec 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Pollan is a faculty member of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley; a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine; and past executive editor for Harper's magazine. Pollan’s first book, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education (1991), and his more recent, The Botany of Desire (2001), are among his many works that examine the intersections between science and culture. In them we see a remarkable power to discern the intertwining ecological, political, and moral valences of problems that are at once contemporary and deeply rooted in Western history and culture. We also see in his books and articles important questions about writing: to whom are we as committed researchers trying to speak, and how can we be both deeply serious about ideas and courses, and yet clear, and even engaging, at the same time?

Migrations: The Work of Sebastiao Salgado

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Shock, bemusement, sorrow, anger-these are some of the looks on the faces in the photographs in Sebastiao Salgado's Migrations. A resident of Paris for the last thirty years, Sebastiao Salgado moves around the world from Bombay to Chimborazo. In conjunction with the universal aspects of the exhibit called Migrations in the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley, the Avenali Lecture asks of a project including forty countries on five continents: in what ways does the Earth on whose basic unity Sebastiao Salgado so forcefully insists interface with the "terra" which in Portuguese also means one's native land?

Carnal Knowledge

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Wendy Doniger explores how the concepts of carnal knowledge and carnal ignorance–the result of sexual betrayal, infidelity, and lies about sexual identity–are expressed in the Hebrew Bible, ancient Sanskrit literature, Shakespeare, and contemporary Hollywood film. In particular, she investigates the tension between carnal knowledge and carnal ignorance as it is expressed in the mythology of the bedtrick (that is, sex with someone who pretends to be someone else).

Sounding Lines: The Art of Translating Poetry

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Sounding Lines captures a vibrant exchange between Nobel poet Seamus Heaney, author of a new translation of Beowulf, and Robert Hass, Poet Laureate and translator of Czeslaw Milosz. In this meandering conversation.

Old Age as Lifestyle in an Active Society

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Stephen Katz examines contemporary commercially produced images of aging and associated seniors-oriented marketing strategies, suggesting that, as such images circulate and acquire representational validity, they obscure our view of the material realities of living, aging and dying. He argues that a radical "seniors culture" might go beyond the disciplining bounds of consumer practices and ideals–not to defy aging, but to defy the popular emphasis on agelessness, positivity and activity, and to cultivate an alternative politics of representation, "living in time, rather than against it.

The Novel in Africa

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

The Novel in Africa is the text of November 1998’s Una’s Lecture, delivered by South African novelist J.M. Coetzee. While a Coetzee text, one critic notes, "typically produces irritation or discomfort," The Novel in Africa produces surprise as well: the lecture is embedded in a fiction, and functions as both a lecture and a segment in a short story.

On Politics and Literature: Two Lectures by Kenzaburo Oe

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Japanese writer and Nobel laureate Kenzaburô Ôe delivered the first in a series of lectures established at the Center for Japanese Studies to honor political theorist Masao Maruyama. In his Maruyama Lecture, "The Language of Masao Maruyama," he focuses on the problem of political responsibility in the modern world, taking Maruyama’s major work as his point of departure. In a second (unrelated) lecture, "From the Beginning to the Present, and Facing the End: The Case of One Japanese Writer," Kenzaburô Ôe offers an account of his own development as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction.

Berlin in Autumn: The Philosopher in Old Age

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Isaiah Berlin’s biographer, noted writer and broadcaster Michael Ignatieff, speculates about the relationship between philosophy and aging, and asks what philosophy had to do with Berlin’s equanimity in old age. All of Berlin’s thinking, Ignatieff writes, associated serenity with belonging, and belonging with self-knowledge: "If he was serene in old age it was because he knew who he was and where he belonged." Robert Alter, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Michael André Bernstein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, respond to Ignatieff, assessing the role of philosophical reflection at any stage in a life trajectory.

Traditions of Conversion: Descartes and His Demon

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Traditions of Conversion historicizes and texturizes Descartes' conversion with a vibrant inquiry into early modern European conversion narratives. In the end, Grafton effectively troubles Descartes' self-portrait as the embodiment of disembodied reason with an examination of Descartes' autobiographical notes, which record that the foundations of his new philosophy lay not in reason but in a dream.

Seeing the Difference: Conversations on Death and Dying

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Seeing the Difference brings together the texts of a two-day institute on death and dying, aimed at facilitating an interdisciplinary conversation between artists, humanists, and medical practitioners. It explores the techne of dying, representations of death, and what one might call an ethics of dying. The project proceeds from a doubled sense of "difference": a view of death as separation or "difference," and an acknowledgement that the various disciplines also view death "differently," developing languages that are too often particular to their own fields.

Dying bridges a no man's land where the unfathomed and the unknowable confront the scientific and the humanistic imaginations. While death may be the vanishing point of medical knowledge and representation, it is also a point of mediation. Neither doctors nor humanists, nor artists nor policy makers, can provide answers where death is concerned; any inquiry into its cultural, scientific, and perhaps even spiritual...

Knowledge Work, Literary History, and the Future of Literary Studies

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

As part of the Townsend Center's 1997-98 "Futures" program, Alan Liu conducts a full-scale inquiry into the prospects for literary knowledge in an information age driven by digital technology, management systems and corporate economics. His respondents, Miryam Sas, Albert Ascoli, and Sharon Marcus, Professors of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages, Italian Literature, and English, respectively, enrich the dialogue by posing questions to Liu and by pointing beyond him to other ways of envisioning questions of literary studies.

Complex Histories, Contested Memories: Some Reflections on Remembering Difficult Pasts

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Eva Hoffman considers the current preoccupation with memory - as opposed to its referents (history, experience) - and particularly with memory of the Holocaust. She proposes that the intense absorption with memory has largely emerged from the "second generation," i.e., from those for whom the Holocaust (or other disturbing pasts) has been a crucially formative event, yet one which they themselves did not experience.

"Anything Goes": The Work of Art and the Historical Future

Wed, 20 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

We have reached the end of the history of art, says Arthur Danto. Contemporary arts exist laterally in such a myriad of forms and theories that one can no longer give art's progression a narrative format. Danto's essay, and the discussions that follow it, explores the ramifications of this position. While modernism sought after what art itself is, what it is in its essence, and thus opened up diverse forms of exploration, this alone cannot explain how we got to the state of art as it is now, that of "anything goes." Danto informs us that this "end" of art should not leave us depressed or alarmed, but rather exhilarated, as a "liberation of art beyond history" opens up new possibilities of creation already being implemented in the diverse applications of contemporary artists.

Image and Text: A Dialogue with Robert Pinsky and Michael Mazur