Dear Colleagues,

Please find attached a flyer for the forthcoming presentation : Unearthing the Truth : A Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Importance of the Truth in Human Lives.

The speaker is Maya Zvigi Cohen. Maya is a Psychoanalytic Counsellor working at the college's Counselling Service. Before joining Goldsmiths College she worked as a Counsellor at the Royal College of Art and at The University of Cambridge. She has a particular interest in the applications of psychoanalytic notions to psychotherapeutic work with students as well as films and dance.

All student s and staff are welcome; Thursday 23rd May 2013 6pm RHB 256.

Continuing Professional Development

• Comply with the Equality Act 2010 with regards to the Protected Characteristics of gender reassignment.
• Enhance your professional development and confidence with specific skills and knowledge pertaining to use of language.
• Tackle forms of bullying that relate to diverse gender expressions and sexual orientation.
• Ensure your school, service or organisation can deal effectively with an ever-increasing gender diverse population.
• Ensure your school, service or organisation supports the smooth transition of any trans person in your service, workforce or student body.

• The relationship between sex, gender and sexual orientation
• Key terms and language with regards to various trans identities
• What the law says
• Medical and non-medical models of trans
• Experiences of young trans people
• How we can make cultural and social interventions
• Signposting other organisations and resources

Matthieu Renault (LSE) - "A Decolonizing Alethurgy. On Confession in the Colonies: Fanon after Foucault"

Event Information

Location: 353, Richard Hoggart Building
Cost: Free
Department: Politics
Time: 22 May 2013, 17-19

http://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=6576

Contacts:

Workshop description:
Description: “What is this present which I belong to?”. This was the question asked by Foucault recalling Kant's writing on the Enlightenment. This is also the interrogation that a Foucaultian gaze on the present specific context/spaces should pose again. In Foucault's view, the practice of a history of our present is primarily conceived as a critical attitude towards the configuration of power relations given at a certain time, that is as an effective challenge of the ways in which our lives are governed. Then, the history of the present and the critique are (in turn) grounded on a genealogical posture, aiming at making all evidence unacceptable. In this way, as Foucault remarked in 1978, the critique can be conceived as “the art of the voluntary disobedience, of the reasoned indocility. Therefore, the function of the critique would be the disassujettissement in the play of what could be named a politics of truth”.

Related to the couple critique-history of our present a broad Foucaultian vocabulary has emerged: governmentality, counter-conduct, and biopolitics are only some of the Foucaultian notions closely linked to the question of our present and to the will of “not to be governed in such a way”.

The aim of this seminar will be to trace out and to “update” this range of notions, reworking them in the light of postcolonial challenges, new practices of struggle and political technologies. Thus, the aim is neither to test the viability of the Foucaultian grid in our present, nor to undertake a philological route exploring Foucault's concepts, but rather to put these notions at work in present and heterogeneous contexts. Secondly, it's through the twofold axis of space and knowledge that we will try to highlight the spaces for critique that a Foucaultian vantage point could open and make visible today. However, in the place of a coherent Foucaultian grid/approach to take on, we also claim the ‘right’ to a partial and instrumental use of Foucault's tool-box: consequently, the very concept of “use” needs to be rethought not in terms of an application of methods and concepts to our diagram of analysis but instead as a way of ‘playing with’ some of Foucault's perspectives, also pushing them up to their geographical/historical/political limits and making them resound in different spaces.

Related to that, it's the very meaning of critique which should be reframed: what does it signify today to put into practice an effective critique of the regime of knowledge and truth which shapes our conducts? If according to Foucault the first step consists in “making visible what is visible”, now perhaps we should ask whether this is enough or if the task of the critique becomes most of all the capacity to spur us to act, shaking what is given as unquestionable evidences.

Among the notions that we will tackle: Counter-conduct, Critique, Government and Governmentality, History of the present, Regime of truth, Subjectivation.