October 22nd – 26th, 2007

The unitednationsplaza’s last seminar attempted to negotiate the possibilities of the political and the artistic in a state of a general mental and social blackout. The week was guided by a text by Thomas Keenan and involved guest presenters from different cultural fields.

Keenans’ text describes the place where the aporias of so much of contemporary politics occur as a darkened frontier – a night situation of non-knowledge and non-rule where the right to question and to pass is negotiable. Name, password, knowledge and power. In this darkness the frontier itself shifts, moves like a ghost, limitless and unnatural; political responsibility becomes an experience of a certain encounter, a crossing at that darkened border.

Kennan insists that we have to fight all the new obscurantisms that appear in this darkness and fight for the extension and radicalization of all enlightments. In that sense the seminar seeks to sound out possible paths for this radicalization by considering different traditions of knowledge, artistic means, discussion and failure.

Guest contributors:
Avery Gordon
Nanna Heidenreich
Philip Scheffner
Additional guests and a daily program will be announced shortly.

Text:
Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibilities – Abberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics, Stanford University Press, 1997

Recording:
The whole event has been recorded by Neurotransmitter // Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere