Over Lent and Easter terms 2017 the VHI will host a research group seminar and reading group under the title ‘Forms of Life, Forms of Discourse’. The group will read and discuss a selection of contemporary texts that reflect critically on the conditions of late-modern life and/or propose ways of living that respond to the challenges of late-modern life.
The seminar builds on last year's reading group that looked at recent critical/political interpretations of St Paul by continental philosophers, and the first reading will return to one of the authors we read in that group, Stanislas Breton. The other authors to be discussed will be Brian Stock, Michel Foucault, and Peter Sloterdijk. The group is led and organised by Boris Gunjevic, Simon Ravenscroft, and Philip McCosker, and is made up of faculty members and researchers from various university departments, primarily Divinity and English.
SCHEDULE
Lent Term
1) Introductory session: Forms of life, forms of discourse – how are they related?
Led by Revd Dr Boris Gunjevic – no reading required
2) The foolishness of the cross as a form of life and form of discourse
Reading selections from Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross
Easter Term
3) Ascetic and aesthetic reading as a form of life and form of discourse
Reading selections from Brian Stock, Ethics Through Literature: Ascetic and Aesthetic Reading in Western Culture
4) Technologies of the self and subjectivation as a form of life in Foucault
Reading selections from Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject
5) Anthropotechnics or how (not) to change your life
Reading selections from Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Attendance is by invitation
@VonHugel
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