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Prof. Redfield proposed to the audience an experiment in reading Plato's Symposium backward, beginning with the speech of Alcibiades. He attempted to answer the question: why is Alcibiades so important in 4th century Socratic literature, and so problematic? James Redfield (Ph.D. The University of Chicago, 1961) is the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor in Classics and the Committee on Social Thought, and Affiliate of the Program on the Ancient Mediterranean World, University of Chicago. He has held teaching appointments at Dartmouth College, Barnard College and at the Stanford Humanities Center, among others, and has been the recipient of research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (University of Chicago Press, 1975), a volume that has been translated into French, Spanish and modern Greek, of The Locrian Maidens; Love and Death in Greek Italy (Princeton University Press, 2004), and has written numerous scholarly articles on Greek society and culture, Homer, Plato, and the topic of education. Prof. Redfield was awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1965 and 1987, and the Medal of the Prime Minister of Italy in 1997. Read more on his profile page. The event will take place at: ECLA of Bard Main Auditorium Platanenstr. 98a Berlin - Pankow (map here) Admission free

Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy, Through the Vanishing Point) has identified Edgar's description of a precipitous view to the blind Gloucester in Shakespeare's King Lear as a verbal manifestation of "the anguish of the third dimension," framed in the terms of painter's perspective. In Cymbeline, the grieving Imogen imagines the departure of her exiled husband as an agonizing recession toward a vanishing point. Here and elsewhere, Shakespeare proves an exceptional interpreter of the phenomenology of perspective, specifically of the affect bound up with the experience of looking in perspectival images. For Shakespeare, the subject-object relationship posited by perspective—where rational commensurability is embedded within an intuitive infinity—and its attenuation of vision become a privileged metaphor for a grief that exceeds all bounds. Thus, in his last works, Shakespeare offers a uniquely sensitive reading of the visual culture of his time, most notably of its phenomenological dimension, its address to the embodied subject of perspectival vision. Geoff Lehman joined the faculty at ECLA as a fellow in 2006, and became a member of the permanent faculty in 2008. He received his PhD in Art History from Columbia University, with a dissertation on the relationship between perspective and Renaissance landscape painting. His research interests include the theory and history of perspective, art and viewer response, the relationship between painting and music in the Renaissance, and the origins and development of landscape painting in Europe. The lecture is part of a series in which ECLA of Bard faculty members present their research to the public.

Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

At a crucial point in Seminar XX, Lacan acknowledges with frustration that the promulgation of the God hypothesis – namely, 'As long as somebody will say something, the God hypothesis will persist', or also, 'It is impossible to say anything without immediately making Him subsist in the form of the Other' – might easily lead those who follow him into assuming he is a believer: 'Naturally, you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God!'. Throughout his oeuvre, Lacan has persistently attempted, with the utmost urgency, to dispel this misunderstanding concerning the relation between psychoanalysis and religion. In a few words, the inevitability of the existence of the God hypothesis for each and every speaking being does not necessarily entail the belief in a divine essence, quite on the contrary. What interests Prof. Chiesa the most in such context is that, throughout his many conferences and seminar lessons on Christianity, Lacan invariably locates the harshest of battles between religion and psychoanalysis in the field of love. It seems that this is where Freudianism can defend itself more vigorously, and maybe counter-attack. Lorenzo Chiesa is, since 2006, Professor of Modern European Thought at the University of Kent, where he also heads the Italian Department of the School of European Culture and Languages. He was educated at the United World College Lester B. Pearson College, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada (full scholarship of the Italian government) and at the University of Trieste, where he graduated cum laude in the History of Contemporary Philosophy. In 2004, he obtained a PhD in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick, where he was a fully-funded Postgraduate Researcher and a member of the editorial board of the journal Pli. Following this, he spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher in the Theory Department of the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, The Netherlands (grant awarded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science), and lectured on Psychoanalytic Studies at Brunel University. His research interests are in the area of contemporary French thought; contemporary Italian thought and culture; Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis; Marxist theory. He is one of the initiators of the 'Materialism and Dialectics' collective.

Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

Alexis de Tocqueville is best known as the author of "Democracy in America." Published in 1835 and 1840 his comprehensive study of the American polity is among the most incisive and influential accounts of modern society, and an impassioned defense of liberal democracy. An iconic figure of XIX century liberalism, Tocqueville is also one of its most controversial representatives: during his over decade-long political career, he championed France's colonization of Algeria and is considered, alongside J.S. Mill, as an architect of XIX century colonialism. This paper tries to grapple with the apparent dissonance between Tocqueville the theorist and the statesman, the liberal democrat and the colonialist. Showcasing the continuities and tensions between Tocqueville's analytical works and his practical politics, it seeks to raise larger questions about the relationship between modern liberalism and the colonial empires of the past two centuries. Ewa Atanassow has received a PhD from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. Her research and teaching interests focus on questions of nationhood and democratic citizenship, and more broadly on the intersection of ethics and psychology in the liberal tradition of political thought, with emphasis on Tocqueville. She is the co-editor of Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. This lecture is part of a series in which ECLA of Bard faculty members present their research to the public.

Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

A volume of essays on Hitchcock's film Vertigo, edited by ECLA of Bard faculty member Katalin Makkai, has recently been published by Routledge. The volume is the latest in Routledge's Philosophers on Film series. Authored by scholars in philosophy and in film studies, the essays offer new interpretations of the film Vertigo contextualized against the rich literature that it has spurred since its release in 1958, as well as some of Hitchcock's other films. Along the way, Vertigo is brought into conversation with Plato, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, the films and writing of Chris Marker, psychoanalysis, Laura Mulvey's influential theorization of "the male gaze," and contemporary philosophy of love. Read more about the volume here (Amazon) or here (Routledge).

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

The article "High-Profile Plagiarism Prompts Soul-Searching in German Universities," published on February 25, discusses the recent case of Germany's minister of research and education, Annette Schavan, who stepped down from her function after facing accusations of plagiarism regarding her doctorate at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. This situation prompted the journalist Paul Hockenos to debate the meaning of academic titles in Germany, especially in connection to politics. As one of the professionals interviewed for the article, Thomas Rommel considers that in the German context, the academic title is associated not only with expertise, but also with qualities like the determination and willpower of the respective individual. In 2011, Thomas Rommel edited a book on the subject of plagiarism. Plagiate - Gefahr für die Wissenschaft? Eine internationale Bestandsaufnahme [Plagiarism - a threat to the science? An international survey], published by LIT Publishing House in Münster, examines plagiarism and its consequences from various perspectives, as well as the way science should deal with such intellectual property thefts.

Meta: Type(s): Featured | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

The workshop brought together faculty members from Bard's Annandale campus, the Human Rights Program and Gagarin Center for Human Rights at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, the Human Rights Program at al-Quds/Bard, the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, the International Human Rights Exchange at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, as well as from the Central European University in Budapest and the European Humanities University in Vilnius. Over the three days, participants discussed their approaches to teaching human rights, at times under difficult or dangerous conditions. Faculty members presented their current research and discussed their own civic engagement—ranging from work monitoring norm emergence in the UN around freedom of expression issues and ensuring the implementation of constitutional rights in Kyrgyzstan to research on the reality of economic rights in Zimbabwe, the question of how corporations can be held responsible for human rights violations, the shape of grassroots activism in Nepal, and the role of photojournalism in advocacy campaigns. Breakout groups focused on practical aspects of a human rights curriculum, as well as on professional and volunteer opportunities for students. Concrete outcomes of the workshop include the development of a virtual platform linking events and research activities at the different network institutions and an on-line syllabus database to serve as a resource for the development of new courses. Other workshop highlights included a discussion with Anselm Franke, Head of the Visual Arts Department at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and a guided tour of the Topografie of Terror led by Sebastian Gerhardt, Co-Director of the Stiftung Haus der Demokratie und Menschenrechte (House of Democracy and Human Rights Foundation). The workshop was sponsored by Bard's Center for Civic Engagement and was coordinated by Kerry Bystrom, Bard Faculty Representative to ECLA of Bard & Associate Professor of English and Human Rights, Bard College, and Professor Thomas Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard Annandale.

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |