Lecture

Lecture: Kirill Medvedev–“It’s No Good” 4/17, 4:15 p.m.

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Kirill Medvedev

 “It’s no Good” 

April 17th at 4:15 PM in Fisk 210 

A reading by the poet and activist from Moscow and his translator, Keith Gessen

 Kirill Medvedev is a poet and socialist activist from Moscow. He is the founder of the Free Marxist Press and the author, most recently, of It’s No Good: Poems/Essays/Actions. He has opted out of the literary world by refusing to copyright his works; the copyright page of It’s No Good reads “Copyright denied by Kirill Medvedev, 2012,” and the Moscow (NLO) edition of his works is titled “Without Permission of the Author.” Kirill is also the lead singer of Arkady Kots, a protest rock band.

“He comes across as a shambling holy fool, an unkempt mix of Roberto Benigni and Gary Shteyngart.  He throws complicated moral thunder. . . . Medvedev’s unrhymed, come-as-you-are poems (he is a translator of Charles Bukowski) reject romanticism of any sort.”  — Dwight Garner, The New York Times.

Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 and Kirill Medvedev’s translator; he has also translated Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Vladimir Sorokin. He writes about Russia for the New Yorker and the London Review of Books.

Sponsored by the Russian Department.  For further information, contact dpozzetti@wesleyan.edu

CHUM Monday Night Lecture Series: Prof. Dara Orenstein — Tonight 6 p.m.

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MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | EMPLACING THE LOCAL

 

DARA ORENSTEIN
Mellon Post Doc, Wesleyan University
To the list of locations visited during this spring’s lecture series—the virtual, the literary, the archipelagic, the theatrical, the archeological—this talk adds the littoral, in the shape of “customs territory.” Customs territory is the juridical terrain on which commodities are deemed onshore rather than offshore. It is an arcane, bureaucratic term that surfaces in the global public sphere only at border crossings, in the fine print of questionnaires certifying tariffs paid on American cars, Cuban cigars and French wines. Yet arguably it is the very foundation of the nation-state, the concrete abstraction that articulates the multitude of places into the sovereign space of the national market. This talk traces the contours of customs territory by focusing on a spatial form that suspends it, the free zone. The first half diagrams the U.S. zone system (the largest and longest-running in the world), and the second half uses an example of people imported into a quasi-free zone—Jewish refugees shipped to the United States in 1944—to raise the question of how the concept of customs territory conditions the grounds of citizenship.

MONDAY, MARCH 4  |  6 P.M.  |  RUSSELL HOUSE

 

  

CHUM Lecture — Feb. 4, 6 p.m.

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 MONDAY NIGHT
LECTURE SERIES

Monday, February 4
6 p.m.
Russell House

  FRANK ANKERSMITUniversity of Groningen

In the past, three answers were regularly provided concerning the relationship between history and the sciences: 1) the scientist deals with the universal and the historian with the unique, 2) the scientist deals with nature and the historian with a culture that is permeated by ethical norms, and 3) the scientist “explains” the world whereas the historian relies on “empathic understanding.” In recent times, however, few philosophers of history have addressed this problem, which is to say the issue is simply no longer on the agenda.

I wish to approach this old question from a new perspective, namely that of logic. To put my argument in a nutshell, if one distinguishes between traditional Aristotelian logic and modern formal logic, room is left for what one might call “representationalist logic” sharing elements of both while not being reducible to either. It is my contention that historical representation obeys the rules of representationalist logic. This means the end of all attempts to rely on epistemology (logical-positivist, hermeneutical, or whatever) for an understanding of historical writing because the nature of the relationship between logic (or mathematics) and the world is a metaphysical and not an epistemological problem. The roots of this representationalist logic can be found in Leibniz’s metaphysics but further insights into its nature can be found in the controversies in the first decade of the previous century between philosophers such as Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer, on the one hand, and Frege and Russell, on the other.

In Theory Lecture by Prof. Lucy Guenova — “Introducing Immanuel Kant,” Wed., Jan. 30 at 4:15 p.m.

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The Certificate Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory would like to invite you to this semester’s “In Theory” lecture series. You can find the complete schedule here: http://www.wesleyan.edu/theory/InTheoryLectureSeries.pdf

Lucy Guenova will present the first lecture, Introducing Immanuel Kant, this Wednesday, January 30, at 4:15 in Downey House 113.

 

International Microfinance with Shivani Siroya ’04 and InVenture — 12/4, 5 p.m.

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International Microfinance

Revolutionizing the financial services sector by creating greater transparency and access

Shivani Siroya ’04, CEO and founder of InVenture, unleashes the potential of developing entrepreneurs to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty by leveraging mobile technology to create credit scores for unbanked individuals around the world.

WHEN: Tuesday, December 4, 5pm      WHERE: Allbritton 311

Networking reception to follow

 To register contact bstraker@wesleyan.edu

 The Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship   www.wesleyan.edu/patricelli