Force and Interest Seminar Series: Events and Their Names

Join Paul Patton for a workshop on his paper, "Events and their names: colonization, the hermeneutical sublime and the absolute future". The paper will be made available to all participants who confirm with Oliver Feltham (ofelthamaup.edu).

 

"Deleuze’s concept of the event, which distinguishes the incorporeal dimension of events from their corporeal dimension, partially coincides with that of Derrida, who also reminds us that corporeal dimension of events is not confined to their linguistic description but also includes their forms representation in a variety of visual and electronic media. I explore this dual character of events with reference to the event of colonization and contemporary efforts in Australia and elsewhere to ‘counteractualise’ the nature of this event.

 

One of the dimensions of this task is that it requires parties on both sides of the colonial relationship to imagine a different future. I will comment on the different forms that this might take with reference to Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, which describes the remarkable effort of a Crow Native American leader to imagine a future for his people after the collapse of their way of life. Events of this magnitude require us to imagine the unimaginable. They involve an experience of what we can call, with reference to Kant and Derrida, the hermeneutical sublime. To imagine a radically different future, to engage in what Lear calls radical hope, is to be committed to the possibility of redescribing or renaming events such as colonization."

 

Paul Patton is Scientia Professor of Philosophy at The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Deleuze and the Political (Routledge, 2000), Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford, 2010). He is editor of Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Blackwell 1996), and co-editor (with John Protevi), of Between Deleuze and Derrida, (Continuum, 2003), (with Simone Bignall) Deleuze and the Postcolonial (Edinburgh 2010) and (with Sean Bowden and Simone Bignall) Deleuze and Pragmatism, (Routledge 2015). He has published widely on aspects of French poststructuralism and contemporary political philosophy.