On 13 April at 6 pm, Eric Cazdyn (University of Toronto) will give a lecture at the Institute of Philosophy and the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU.
The lecture, dedicated to Fredric Jameson, will take place in the Atrium ZRC, Novi trg 2, Ljubljana.
Prior to the lecture, a preliminary presentation will be given of the Slovenian translation of Jameson’s lectures Years of Theory, forthcoming in June this year in the Philosophica moderna series. In this book, Jameson offers a wide-ranging and historically differentiated account of the development of modern French thought, tracing its key transformations from Sartre and existentialism through structuralism and post-structuralism to contemporary theoretical currents. The lectures do not merely provide a chronological overview, but also attempt a conceptual understanding of the internal dynamics of these shifts, consistently situating them within broader political and historical developments while examining their impact on the wider fields of the humanities and social sciences.
The Blindspot Machine: The Jameson Iteration
What is a blindspot? What might it teach us about how we look, how we think, how we desire, and how change occurs in the world? Cazdyn argues that the dominant ideology of the blindspot today (from culture to politics) as something missing, as something to be disclosed or concealed, is the deadliest weapon used by those in power. To develop this critique, Cazdyn has built what he calls a “Blindspot Machine”—a multi-camera optics system that, instead of exposing blindspots (the violent desire of state power), produces a new theory and practice of the blindspot itself. In this iteration of the Blindspot Machine project, Cazdyn will highlight how the work of Fredric Jameson informs and inspires the key problematics of the blindspot. Clips from a film that Cazdyn made with Jameson (not long before his death), will be screened as part of the lecture.
Eric Cazdyn is Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Toronto (Centre for Comparative Literature and Department of East Asian Studies), where he teaches courses on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, film, and architecture. He is the author of The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness (2012), After Globalization (with Imre Szeman, 2011), The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (2002), and Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (with Marcus Boon and Timothy Morton, 2015), and the editor of Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi (2010) and Disastrous Consequences (2007).
Photo by Kostas Dimopoulos