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International Colloquium ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Maria Margaroni “I am convinced that this new millennium, which seems so eager for religion, is in reality eager for the sacred. By this I mean the desire to think (not in the sense of calculating but of questioning) that distinguishes human beings from other species and thus, a contrario, brings them closer to them.” This talk has largely developed out of the growing sense of helplessness and frustration a lot of us (global citizens in a terror-haunted world) are experiencing in the face of what feels like an impasse between ethics and politics; i.e. between, on the one hand, a universalist humanitarian discourse that sacralizes life and, on the other hand, a politico-economic system that reduces it to (and abandons it in) (all) its bareness. In my view, the current impasse seems to be the product of a crisis traced in the modern concept and practices of mediation. Drawing on the work of Etienne Balibar, Bruno Latour and Gillian Rose, I want to understand this crisis in the following contexts: a) the proliferation of conflicting demands for recognition, as manifested in contemporary identity politics; b) the privileging of absolute, incommensurable difference and the “turn to ethics” we have witnessed in the Humanities in the past twenty years; c) the growing suspicion towards some of the most fundamental concepts of Western political theory and the emptying of the space of power; d) a Cyberspace utopianism of limitless freedom, authenticity and immediacy; e) the withdrawal of the political behind the (its) spectacle and f) the loss of the critical function of imagination (qua ability to represent but also as the power to transcend and nihilate dominant reality). As I will suggest, the advantage of reconfiguring these sites of crisis with the help of Julia Kristeva lies in her persistent (though not uncritical) commitment to the long dialectical tradition (from Hegel to Sartre) that not only opposes thought to any form of dualism but, more importantly, has systematically defined the event of thinking in terms of the ‘historical, loveful violence’ that characterizes any mediating process (Rose 241). It is because thought in Kristeva is the life-enhancing encounter between the circle of communal knowledge (con-science) and the diagonal of the secret, irony and tenderness, the pathos of the negative and the ethos of sublimation that a passage, an enabling economy of relations can open up between the suffering of the immanent (flesh or bare life), the transcendence of the face and the community held together by the sharing of the sign. Works Cited .
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