J.M. Bernstein, Philosophy, The New School
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
5 p.m. | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall | UC Berkeley
In an incident in Auschwitz, Jean Amery describes how, at a particular moment, he was forced to give "concrete form to my dignity by punching a human face." Bernstein's paper will interrogate the thesis, common to Amery and Frantz Fanon, that, as a consequence of the particular character of human embodiment, violent reprisal belongs to the grammar of human dignity.
J.M. Bernstein teaches philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His most recent book is Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. He is now completing a work provisionally entitled Torture and Dignity.
Part of the Why War? Seminar Series.
Thanks for posting this Billy. I was there when JM Bernstein presented. It was refreshing to witness the scholastic criticism between Prof. Butler and Prof. Bernstein. It forced me to reconsider the role of personal violence as a source of dignity reclamation in extreme moments. I wonder if this means that such moments alter Benjamin's project in "catastrophes". Will it make a difference? Do such moments actually reclaim a metaphysical space for the individual or does it subject them to something more mundane? "Fire with fire"?
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