2023 Ereignis Summer School

Included in the 2023 Ereignis Summer School:

• A 9-hour academic seminar – equivalent to a semester-long (12 week) university module – with Prof. Andrew Tyler Jorn, an internationally acclaimed philosopher of Being, psycho-analysis, and disability theory;
• A 9-hour academic seminar with Prof. Christopher Norris, author of many books on critical theory, deconstruction, truth and meaning;
• Workshops tailored to improve your academic writing and presentation skills. The workshops are hosted by Dr. Adam Staley Groves, an experienced academic tutor with wide international experience, and the award-winning Palestinian/Lebanese/American film-maker and academic, Prof. Sharif Abdunnur;
• Evening events, including informal talks with international academics;
• Free attendance at the 2023 Ereignis Conference;
• A dedicated forum for online discussion, open outside seminars;
• Course diploma.

The summer school will take place at Hotel Antares in scenic Gdynia, beautifully located on the Baltic sea with short rides to beaches, forests, and restaurants. We offer good, inexpensive child-care solutions to those who want to bring families!

See you there!

In our seminar we will revisit the project of an ‘existential psychoanalysis’ adumbrated by Sartre at the end of Being and Nothingness. After reviewing what is at stake in this project and how elements of it are taken up in Lacan’s work, we will consider to what extent certain fundamental concepts of existential philosophy have been overlooked or under-deployed by Lacan’s (primarily Hegelian) followers. Specifically, we will attempt to displace the primordial ‘cut’ of subjectivity from language to temporality (symbolic to temporal castration), with an eye to supplementing the psychoanalytic critique of the libidinal economy of capitalism, which in crucial respects remains inadequate without it.

This course will focus on the ways that deconstructive readings of texts and situations engage with politically salient issues of truth, reason, and critique. We will be discussing texts by (among others) Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Noam Chomsky, Walter Benjamin, T.W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Alain Badiou. There will also be occasional reference to pertinent work in the ‘other’, i.e., analytic or chiefly Anglophone tradition of philosophical thought from Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell to Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty. The issues will be treated very much in the context of present-day debates about our so-called ‘post-truth’ era and the harms caused to political and civic life by a facile acceptance of (broadly speaking) postmodernist ideas. Special emphasis will be laid on the need to distinguish deconstruction very clearly from postmodernism, and to see where Derrida engages – critically but closely – with various aspects of Enlightenment, especially Kantian thought.

This stand-alone research and writing module continues and elaborates on the themes and topic introduced in Adam’s online writing-for-research course module, specially designed for advanced graduate students and early-career scholars. Participants get to share ideas and drafts, discuss research techniques and writing skills, and, under supervision, hone their academic craft.

A practice-oriented workshop with exercises and hand-on activities designed to raise the game for researchers who speak and present their work to specialist and lay audiences.