Parrhesia: School of Philosophy, Berlin

30/06/2025

Dear friends in Berlin,

Come this evening and join us in launching Gal Kirn's book "The Memory of Liberation: Studies on the People's LIberation Struggle in the (Post-)Yugoslav Context"! The memory of liberation is also about the liberation of memory and the forging of a really democratic present against the authoritarian, colonialist, genocidal realities of the so-called "West." In Gal's account, the figure of the partisan is key and Gal carefully unfolds its many -- egalitarian, feminist, ecological, artistic -- aspects.

Join us together with Bago, and Marta Popivoda for a discussion around the central points of Gal's work.

Date and time: Monday, June, 30, 19:30,
Venue: b_books
Lübbener Str. 14
10997 berlin

The event is co-organized by and Parrhesia: School of Philosophy, Berlin.
https://www.bbooks.de/montagspraxis/memory-of-liberation-studies-on-the-peoples-liberation-struggle-in-the-post--yugoslav-context

Description:

Eighty years after Yugoslavia, not Europe in general, was liberated from fascism, the question of how to return to its cultural, political and memorial emancipatory legacy presents itself with theoretical and political urgency. How to return to this legacy in a way that goes beyond a defeatist melancholia by tracing and defragmenting emancipatory impulses, solidarities, and victories of the oppressed. What role does partisan, anti-fascist and liberation(ist) research and engagement play today?

Kirn will present some central points from his most recent book on new political and artistic works that tackle the legacy of liberation in the (post)Yugoslav context. He will be joined in the discussion by art theorist Ivana Bago and filmmaker Marta Popivoda, who has also worked theoretically and practically on the utopian and unfinished dimensions of the buried and demonised project called Yugoslavia. The book launch will be moderated by Steve Corcoran and followed by a drinks reception.
The book has been published by Ljubljana University Press and is accessible in open access:
https://ebooks.uni-lj.si/ZalozbaUL/catalog/book/734.

Bios:
Gal Kirn is a cultural theorist and sociologist, who published three books on the topic of Yugoslavia, socialism and now partisan memory. He is currently working at European University of Viadrina and University of Ljubljana.

Marta Popivoda, filmmaker, artist, and researcher (Fellow at Berlin Artistic Research Programme/ Berliner Programm Künstlerische Forschung 2024/2025).

Ivana Bago is an independent scholar, curator and currently a lecturer at UDK Berlin.

Steven Corcoran is a political philosopher and the Secretary of Parrhesia: School of Philosophy, Berlin. He has editor and translated over twenty works of philosophy.
b_books, Lübbener Str. 14, 10997 Berlin, U-Bahn Schlesisches Tor

06/02/2025

23/01/2025

'How to speak to, at, and with a colossal historical event; to be able to capture its essence and meaning; to identify its actors and inner workings; and to understand its promises, desires, and hopes?'

Come and join us tomorrow at 7 pm to find out!

Zoom link for those unable to join us in person: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89420659776?pwd=CDdahlGHfoqCP4YDHjZc5RHb6ddauK.1

21/01/2025

12/01/2025

Felix Guattari's Mental Ecology: Between Freedom and Care.

Starts this Tues 14th: Enrol today. All are welcome.

Carlos Segovia, author of 'Guattari Beyond Deleuze', will guide us on a 5-week journey through the thought and life of Félix Guattari.

The version of Guattari that emerges is that of a radical psychoa**lytic practitioner and political activist whose concerns necessarily take him beyond Deleuze. His own life and thought emerges as a harbinger of many contemporary discussions and practices about care, animism, art and so on. He stands as someone who can help us to articulate a fundamentally new orientation in today's neoliberal, warmongering world.

27/12/2024

A new Parrhesia course, starts mid-Jan, details to follow.

Félix Guattari’s Mental Ecology: Between Freedom and Care

With Carlos Segovia.

This course explores the Guattari's concepts of deterritorialization & territorialization in the light of two ideas: freedom & care.

By questioning rigid conservative territories that sacrifice freedom for stability, & capitalism’s random deterritorializations, which reduce everything to exchange relations, Guattari's later writings point up the need to play rhythmically between territory & deterritorialization: caring for things which are finite & fragile, yet being free to explore the new.

Only then, he believes, can new values be created to enrich our subjectivities & existential territories.

We will also ask about the role of chaosmosis (the transition from chaos to cosmos) in relation to the care & freedom of self? Can it open up a form of care based on something more than the acknowledgment of our relational condition – of something even more essential connected tour inherent fragility, our springing from chaos, living for an instant, then dying & dissolving back into chaos?

Also, can chaosmic thinking help us interact with reality in ways previously unimagined?

The later Guattari was convinced it could & conferred increasing relevance on art. For artists, as children and lovers, & also schizophrenics, feel the need to invent the world anew everyday.

Guattari thus spoke of a new aesthetic paradigm. He insisted on the ethical nature of this paradigm: as open-ended, creative existential activity must also be responsible. In parallel with freedom & care, the aesthetic & the ethical stand as two key components of what Guattari calls 'mental ecology' (ME).

ME is as crucial as 'environmental ecology', yet Guattari saw that its own incorporeal species (love, friendship, solidarity, music, cinema, & thought) were menaced by neoliberalism & authoritarianism (as biological species are tpp).

The course focuses on these & related matters, & includes a practical workshop in which all participants will be able to play with this idea of a ME after their own vital experiences.

09/12/2024

Art as Disruptive Connector

Leon Brenner’s theory of the dermic drive extends psychoa**lytic theories of the drive: a**l, scopic, oral, invocatory - and now ‘dermic’. The dermic drive, Leon makes clear, is crucial to boundary formations of the self.

Disruptive: Joulia Strauss suggested a disruption via this portrait of Jacques Lacan (as theory dictator) from 2001, in which the skin on Lacan himself figures the inflexion point of a möbius strip: it is both inside and outside, like Leon’s dermic drive.

Connector: For an exhibition at the Museum of Freud’s Dreams in Saint Petersburg in 2003, Joulia and Philipp von Hilger collaborated on the Diskursa**lysemaschine (discourse a**lysis machine). Joulia created a digital möbius strip (seen here as documentation), which the spectator’s eyes could wander along, that included a series of images of psychoa**lytic luminaries. As part of this installation, Philipp’s tracking machine could detect the ‘preferred’ images on which the eyes fell – performing a sort of capture of one’s psychoa**lytic unconscious – and, the image enlarging, key theoretical precepts of the thinker in question got played back. In this 2024 rendering, Leon Brenner also figures as a potential point of the psychoa**lytic lineage.

……

Education: Lacan has been compared to Mao. One sought to subtract thought from the authority of the university discourse, the other from that of state politics. But the movements that felt validated by basing themselves on the authority of these singular names (Lacan, Mao) also failed to move beyond them. Given the crisis of state education that has allowed our current era of remilitarization, we must subtract thought anew. But to what extent does our reliance on such singular authority solve the problems of university discourse? Can we subtract from the universitization of discourse without relying on a singular authority?

04/12/2024

Tonight we continue with our philosophy and psychoa**lysis series! Leon Brenner will share his thoughts on love from a psychoa**lytic standpoint.
All are welcome! Join us physically or virtually via Zoom.

01/12/2024

Art as Disruptive Connector
In this concluding segement to the book launch of Being Human by Fazil Moradi, Joulia Strauss opened the first episode of a Parrhesia series called art as disruptive connector. This segment aims to show art engaging with each of the topics presented as Parrhesia in its own way.
Art shows its power as disruptive, in this case of false oppositions. And it shows its power as a connector: with other forms of disruptive thinking -- anthropology and philosophy.
A Connector --
First, after a song by Ranav and Deep from the EAU collective, which uses material of a Napalese song that the artists found at the Humboldt archive, Joulia was able to spontaneously connect, with a song from her own tribe, the Maris, which she also found at the Humboldt Archive, recorded on a wax cyclinder. The song's lyrics are about "My soul is burning, what shall I do? I am missing home). The song was recorded from a Mari taken captive during WWI.
Disruptive - art can also work to disrupt the false dicotomies of Empire, - this is what Joulia shows with her "two-faced" statue, one side of which presents Leyla Zana, the other Abdullah Öcalan - both Kurdish resistance fighters. The European Union heralded the first as the good victim, the other as the bad terrorist. The falsity of the opposition is shown by the statue as a two-facedness of the European attitude toward the Kurds, and the insistance of "human rights" in this instance as an instrument of imperial power projection.
The "neo-classical" bust was first exhibited at the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, in 2007. The press reaction in Germany and in Turkey predictably had recourse to the same false dicotomies that the work criticizes, missing this chance at a more in-depth debate.
The next instantiation of the series "art as disruptive connector" will be at Leon Brenner's talk next Wednesday. Join us to find what it is that "psychoa**lysts know about love" -- especially relevant for the age of the tinderization of everything.
Parrhesia will feature an "artist talk" with Joulia Strauss in late January 2025.
**lysis