The Spacetime of Critical Matters

• 04.06. (Tuesday), 7 pm, C40.256, Public Lecture
• 05.06. (Wednesday) 12-2 pm, C40.255, Workshop

In resonance with Derrida’s doubling of “ends” in his 1968 essay “The Ends of Man”, this collaborative talk will think about the ends of critique. Building on our most recent Terra Critica publication The Ends of Critique (2022) – crossing the coming to an end of certain critical dispositions with the refusal to give up on critique as a key commitment for work in the Humanities – our talk will address ideas of temporality and time (Thiele) and spatial distance or proximity (Kaiser) which often uncritically underly and drive practices of critique. How do modes of critique transform, if (with Sylvia Wynter) the linearity and sequentiality of critical pursuits of change were challenged? And how do practices of critique morph, if (with Gayatri Spivak) critical intimacy were valued over distance? If one were to consider another spacetime, how does critique come to matter?

Birgit Mara Kaiser is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Transcultural Aesthetics at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. 

Kathrin Thiele is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. 

Together they are founding coordinators of Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities (www.terracritica.net) and editors of New Critical Humanities, a book series with Rowman & Littlefield. In the context of Terra Critica, they co-edited Symptoms of the Planetary Condition (2017, with M. Bunz) and The Ends of Critique (2022, with T. O’Leary). More information: www.terracritica.net.

For the workshop please register by May 29, 2024: kdk@leuphana.de

Hosted by the DFG Research Training Group “Cultures of Critique” and the Center for Critical Studies (CCS), Leuphana University Lüneburg