GradCAM in association with Verso present an evening with Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster

national | arts and media | event notice Tuesday March 06, 2012 11:08 by GradCAM - The Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Dublin edia.connole at gradcam dot ie

The Faith of the Faithless/ The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis

This a free public event, however, spaces are limited, and booking is strongly recommended. Please send an email to edia.connole@gradcam.ie to reserve your place.

Simon Critchley/Jamieson Webster @ Dublin Unitarian Church March 29th

Somehow, the secular age seems to have been replaced by a new era, where political action flows directly from metaphysical conflict, and philosopher Simon Critchley asks how we might respond to this change. Should we defend a version of secularism, quietly accept the slide into a form of theism—or is there another way? From the paradox of politics and religion in Rousseau to the return to St. Paul in Taubes, Agamben and Badiou, via explorations of politics and original sin in the work of Schmitt and John Gray, Critchley examines whether there can be a faith of the faithless, a belief for unbelievers.

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, and a part-time professor of philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. His many books include Very Little… Almost Nothing; Infinitely Demanding; Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity; and The Book of Dead Philosophers.

Jamieson Webster argues that the life and death of psychoanalysis hinges on the question of desire itself, and attempts to bring this question back to the center of psychoanalytic thought and practice. Blurring the line between the personal and the theoretical, and in conversation with the works of Lacan, Adorno, and Badiou, Webster offers a novel interpretation of the philosophical and psychoanalytic meaning of desire and explores how, through the difficult work of transference and reading, one can live out the life of desire that tests the limits of what it means to be human.

Jamieson Webster, PhD, is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She teaches at Eugene Lang College and New York University. Her work focuses on clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis with an interdisciplinary focus on feminine sexuality, philosophy, and aesthetics.