[Bilimsel Haber] "How Dangerous is the Ir-Rational" Symposium with Michael Taussig

[Gonul Pultar]

From: Sladja Blazan [sladja.blazan at rz.hu-berlin.de]


How Dangerous is the Ir-Rational, Symposium with Michael Taussig

October 30, 2009
Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin
http://www.ici-berlin.org/event/2009-10-30-how-dangerous-is-the-ir-rational/



Doomed to a constant oscillation between the realms of the unknown and 
the illusion of meaning, we advance regressing. Echoing various other 
scholars, the American philosopher William James marked “the recesses of 
feeling the darker, blinder strata of character” as the only places in 
which “we catch real fact in the making.” Yet, instead of curiously 
exploring what cannot be known, we push it further away enveloped with 
fear and anxiousness. The “darker strata” regularly produce angst, 
aversion, or awe.

In this one day symposium, acclaimed scholars and artists will shed 
“light” on what has been relegated to the sphere of unreason: magic, the 
irrational, spectrality, the daemonic. Who is afraid of the irrational? 
What is “magic philosophy” and who needs it? How much reason is 
reasonable? The symposium ends with a keynote by the distinguished 
anthropologist Michael Taussig.

Program:

Opening: Photography inspired by the concept of the irrational by
Cara Judea Alhadeff

14.00
Welcome
Christoph Holzhey (Director ICI Berlin)

14.10
Reasonable Ghosts: The Dream of Reason and Magic Philosophy in the 1790s
Sladja Blazan (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)

14.50
Non timebis a daemonio meridiano: Greek Irrational and the
Construction of Modernity
Fabio Camilletti (ICI Berlin)

15.30
Coffee Break

16.00
Artist Presentation
Visual Languages and Observable Planets
Jesse Bransford (NYU)

16.40
Beyond Cognition? Emily Dickinson, Poetry, and the Brain
Sabine Sielke (Universität Bonn)

17.20
Facing up to Magic: Fascination and Illusion in Bergman’s ANSIKTET
(The Magician/The Face, 1958)
Brigitte Weingart (Universität Bonn)

18.00
Coffee Break

18.30
Keynote
My Fear of the Rational
Michael Taussig (Columbia University)

19.30
Reception
Contact:

sladja.blazan at staff.hu-berlin.de

URL:

http://www.ici-berlin.org/event/2009-10-30-how-dangerous-is-the-ir-rational/