Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to public seminars by Cindy Zeiher.

Cindy Zeiher is senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand were she teaches critical theory. Her writings explore Freudian-Lacanian interventions and interpretations concerning contemporary questions of ontology. She is currently working on a book which interrogates Vladimir Janklevitch’s radical ‘refusal’ of politics from the perspective of Lacan’s theory of the speech-act. Cindy is co-editor of CT&T: Continental Thought and Theory and is currently training as a Lacanian psychoanalyst.

SEMINAR I

17 May 2023 at 5 p. m.

Jankélévitch’s Intuitive Knowing.

Here we consider Russian-French philosopher, musician, and composer Vladimir Jankélévitch’s deliberation of ‘knowing’ as distinctive from ‘knowledge’. Specifically, his close and serious interrogation of music frames this difference as one where knowledge is necessarily inconsistent yet preciously bound up with ‘knowing’. Such difference provides for Jankélévitch’s system of ineffable‘intuition’ as intrinsic for knowing ‘how things are’.

SEMINAR II

18 May 2023, at 5 p.m.

Refusal and Negation.

This seminar puts to work the distinction between negation and refusal. Here we turn to Freud as a reader of Jankélévitch’s stoic refusal of German culture and consider his procedure of radical exclusion as a question of idealistic ‘temperament’. This marks Jankélévitch’s transition from knowledge as ‘knowing how things are’ to a different proposition which cultivates knowing ‘how things should be’.

Reading:

Smith, C. (1957). The Philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch. Philosophy, 32(123), pp. 315-324.

SEMINAR III

23 May 2023 at 6 p. m.

The Limits of the Speech-Act: In/effable Knowing as Textual ‘Afterlife’.

We continue with Jankélévitch’s question, ‘how can we know what we think we know’ and consider the viability of his ‘ineffable intuition’ as specific to his wider philosophical project, particularly with regards to his later work on forgiveness. Here we compose a linguistic charge to intuition and discover that for Jankélévitch there is a necessary stoic property which one must grapple with to possess ‘knowing’ beyond the coherence of words: refusal.

Reading:

Jankélévitch, V. & Hobart, A. (1996). Should We Pardon Them? Critical Inquiry, 22(3), pp. 552-572.

SEMINAR IV

24 May 2023, at 6 p.m.

Enter Lacan: (Un)doing Knowing with/out Knowledge.

Lacan maintains that we always act with the knowledge (we think) we have. But what do we do with all that we don’t know (be it ignorance or stupidity)? How might not-knowing be also a knowledge procedure? How might we be in a quest to un-know? This final seminar riffs Lacan with Jankélévitch making them (un)likely conversation partners who share the similar objective of putting the ethics of speech to work.

Reading:

Jankélévitch, V. & Hobart, A. (1996). Do Not Listen to What They Say, Look at What They Do. Critical Inquiry, 22(3), pp. 549-551.
Ragland, E. (1992). The Paternal Metaphor. Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 46(180), pp. 49-92.

All the seminars will take place at Institute of philosophy ZRC SAZU’s meeting room, Novi trg 2, 3rd floor, Ljubljana.

Kindly invited!

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Photo by Gonzalo Pedroviejo Gómez on Unsplash