The next Bisan Lecture webinar will take place on December 13 at 7pm Palestine time (6pm Central European Time, 12 noon US Eastern time). We will have the pleasure to welcome Prof. Etienne Balibar (Paris-Ouest University) who will speak (in English with simultaneous Arabic translation for those who wish) on “Palestine, Ukraine and other wars of extermination: the local and the global”. You can register here.
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to announce that the next Bisan Lecture webinar will take place on December 13 at 7pm Palestine time (6pm Central European Time, 12 noon US Eastern time). We will have the pleasure to welcome Prof. Etienne Balibar (Paris-Ouest University) who will speak (in English with simultaneous Arabic translation for those who wish) on
Title: Palestine, Ukraine and other wars of extermination: the local and the global
Abstract: The war in Ukraine and the war in Palestine are certainly not the only cases of “hot” wars in our present or recent past, and they are likely not to remain the only ones in a predictable future. However, they confront us immediately with equally dramatic interpellations. And, with all their differences, which cannot be neglected, tracing back in each case to a long, complex, tragic history, and referring to the circumstances of their beginning (or new beginning), they raise certain common problems. Some are essentially linked to their “local” determinations, such as the highly conflictual issues of appropriation and expropriation which govern the articulation of population and territory, and above all the moral and juridical issues of justice which arise from relations of domination, aggression, destruction, extermination. Others involve a “global” perspective, which however can be inscribed in very different analytical frames of interpretation: international law and the resolution of conflicts, imperialist and anti-imperialist strategies, nationalist policies of militarisation and cosmopolitan forces of demilitarisation. The lecture has no pretention to cover all these dimensions of the situation, not to mention offering “solutions” to bring about a “just peace” in each case. It will try and reflect on this articulation of the two levels and submit provisional lessons of the comparison for discussion. Never forgetting that – as citizens of the world with more or less direct personal ties to the peoples and places currently under destruction and massacre – our principal duty is to act, not to talk. But acting, where and when possible, also requires thinking in common.
Biographical Sketch
Etienne Balibar was born in 1942. He graduated from the Sorbonne in Paris, later took his PhD from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). He is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, and Anniversary Chair of Contemporary European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He is also a visiting professor at Columbia University in the City of New York.
He is author or co-author of Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser) (1965); Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein); Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1994); The Philosophy of Marx (Verso 1995), Spinoza and Politics (Verso 1998), Politics and the Other Scene (Verso, 2002); We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004); Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness (Verso, 2013); Violence and Civility (Columbia University Press, 2015); Citizen Subject. Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (Fordham University Press, 2017); Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (Columbia University Press, 2018).
This lecture is sponsored by the Bisan Center for Research and Development and Scientists for Palestine.
In light of the urgent need to assist the people of Gaza, who are currently experiencing immeasurable loss of life and widespread devastation, please read this humanitarian aid appeal from ANERA, forwarded to us by a friend of BLS, Dr. Sara Roy of Harvard University.
Hoping to see many of you at this webinar, we send you our best regards.
The Bisan Lecture Series Steering Committee
Next BLS webinar
Wednesday January 10, 2024, 7 pm Palestine time
Prof. John Hardy (University College London)
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Wednesday February 14, 2024, 7 pm Palestine time
Annemarie Jacir (Filmmaker)
Wednesday March 13, 2024, 7 pm Palestine time
Achille Mbembe (University of the Witwatersrand)
Wednesday April 10, 2024, 7 pm Palestine time
TBA
Wednesday May 8, 2024, 7 pm Palestine time
Prof. Khaled Fahmy (Tufts University)
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BLS Statement of purpose
In concert with Scientists for Palestine and the Bisan Center for Research and Development, and in keeping with their joint commitment to full integration of Palestine in the global community of learning, the Bisan Lecture Series sponsors discourses on subjects of cultural, scientific, and societal importance by leading research experts and public intellectuals of varied heritage and viewpoint. The interactive webinars are free and open to the public, and recordings of each will be posted soon afterward.