Anaheed Al-Hardan (Palestine) Fellow 11/12/13

Discipline(s): Sociology, Memory Studies, Social History
ICI-Project: Memories of Palestine: The Nakba and the Palestinian Refugees in Syria

The establishment of the state of Israel on Palestine during the Palestine War (1948-49) is referred to as the Nakba, or Catastrophe, in Arabic. The outcome of the war viz the establishment of a new nation-state was discursively constructed as a fitting epilogue to the European Jewish Holocaust. This outcome also led to the erasure of Palestine as a geo-political entity and to the destruction of Palestinian society through the expulsion of more than two-thirds of Palestinians from the newly established state. The establishment of the state of Israel/Nakba can be theorised as a multistable ontology for, inter alia, Palestinian refugees and their descendants who continue to be unable to exercise their right of return to homes in what is today the state of Israel. This research project expands upon my doctoral research on memories of the Nakba in the Palestinian refugee community in Syria. It will result in a monograph that addresses how the Nakba, as a past/ongoing event, is actively remembered by those who survived the war and those who were born in exile, within the context of the evolution of its meaning in nationalist discourses and the emergence of Nakba commemorative practices

Vita: Anaheed Al-Hardan is a sociologist with research interests in collective memory and remembrance; decolonial, feminist and indigenous epistemologies and research practices; modern Arab intellectual and political history, and imperialism and anti-imperialist social movements. She was previously a researcher on the Global Networks Project at the Institute for International Integration Studies at Trinity College, University of Dublin (2006-07) and a recipient of a Doctoral Fellowship from the Palestinian American Research Centre (2007-08). She has taught in the Department of Sociology at Trinity College, University of Dublin (2006-10), where she completed her doctoral dissertation (2011). Entitled “Remembering the Catastrophe: Uprooted Histories and the Grandchildren of the Nakba”, her dissertation explored practices of memory and remembrance of the Nakba in the Palestinian refugee community in Syria.

Brigitte Bargetz (Austria) Fellow 11/12, Visiting Fellow 10/11

Discipline(s): Political Science, Queer-Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies
ICI-Project: The return of innocence? A queer-feminist reading of the ›political difference‹

Currently, political theory, political philosophy, and art theory are encountering a lively debate on ›the political‹. Within these debates most approaches find a common ground in the differentiation between ›politics‹ and ›the political‹, often expressed as ›political difference‹. However, looking at this current resurgence of the political, it is eye-catching that these debates largely transpire without feminist insights. This is interesting because the political has been an important though contested concept within feminist theory and philosophy since its beginnings, just as its reconceptualizations. Thus, is this return of the political also a return of a ›conceptual innocence‹, what has particularly been called into question by feminist critiques? Taking up the feminist insight that concepts are never innocent in my project I will critically engage with selected theories of the ›political difference‹ exploring if, and how, these debates may be fruitful from a queer-feminist perspective.

Vita: Brigitte Bargetz studied Political Science and History at the Universities of Vienna and the Institut d'Etudes Politique Aix-en-Provence. In her PhD in Political Science at the University of Vienna she was proposing “the everyday” as an informing and useful concept for (feminist) political theory. From 2005 to 2008 she was a stipendiary at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), working in an interdisciplinary project on “Gender and the Transformations of Public and Private”. She held Visiting Fellowships at the University of Washington in Seattle (2007/08), at the IWM (Institute for Human Sciences) in Vienna (2008) and at the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin (2009). In 2009/10 she was Junior Fellow at the IFK (International Research Center for Cultural Studies) in Vienna. She is also lecturer for political and feminist theory and has taught at the Universities of Vienna and Graz.

Bobby Benedicto (Philippines) Fellow 11/12/13

Discipline(s): Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Urban Studies
ICI-Project: Bright Lights, Gay Globality: Queer World-making in Metropolitan Manila

Bright Lights, Gay Globality is an ethnographic study of mobility, class, and gay life in 21st century Manila. Drawing on postcolonial queer studies and on critical theories of race, affect and mobility, the study traces the emergence of a “bright lights gay scene,” a culturally imaginary space produced by/for privileged Filipino gay men who are simultaneously embedded in a third world city and plugged into a virtual gay globality through teletechnomedia apparatuses. Arising out of tensions between the invincible facticity of location and the never-to-be-completed task of becoming-global, the scene is re-presented in this project as a multistable figure. It appears as an effect of the urban frictions that inspire the making of a first world in the third world, as a space produced in response to dominant heteronormative orders, and as a symptom of the structuring force of fantasy-desires for an always elusive gay modernity. By examining the world-making practices of locally privileged and globally marginal gay men through different spatial registers, the project demonstrates how the figure of the third world queer occupies contradictory positions in incommensurate diagrams of power.

Vita: Bobby Benedicto studied Politics at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and at York University in Toronto, Canada. He received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne, where he has also lectured on queer cinema, Asian cultural studies, and postcolonial feminist theory. His dissertation research on technologies of mobility and contemporary queer world-making practices in Metropolitan Manila has appeared in journals such as GLQ, The Journal of Homosexuality, and Asian Studies Review. Bobby's broader research interests include experimental ethnographic methods, "third world" architecture, and imaginative geographies. He is presently working on a project examining the queer uses of dictatorship architecture, based on the recent conversion of Marcos-era modernist structures into sites of Filipino queer performance. As a fellow at the ICI, he will be working on a book project based on his dissertation.

Zeynep Bulut (Turkey) Fellow 11/12/13

Discipline(s): Music, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Speech Science& Kinesiology
ICI-Project: Between Speech and Language: La Voix-Peau in Contemporary Music

Inspired by a particular aesthetics in contemporary music that destroys the linguistic order of verbal language and amplifies the unnoticed sounds of the human body, this project suggests a new conception of the human voice: “la voix-peau,” skin-voice. Drawing on French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu's notion of "le moi-peau," skin-ego, I analyze the human voice as the first tactile envelope, as skin. By this I mean the embodied sound, which stems from the whole body as well as the vocal folds. I examine the following questions: Can we situate the sensory and affective experiences of sound at the heart of the human voice? Can we conceive the voice as an assemblage of bodily sounds, and as a physical and phenomenal matrix of senses? Is it possible to appropriate such a designation of the voice for unsettling the discursive categories of language, speech and self? In light of these questions, skin-voice can be considered a potential space – a medium of constructive tension – that reveals the multiple facets of the self between speech and language. The aim is to investigate how our voices can communicate the self without being reduced to mediums for verbal language.

Vita: Zeynep Bulut received her Ph.D. in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices in Music, from the University of California at San Diego in June 2011. Prior to her doctoral education, she studied sociology (B.A.), opera, and visual arts (M.F.A.) in Istanbul, Turkey. Analyzing contemporary classical and experimental music, Zeynep investigates the physical and phenomenal emergence of the human voice and its role in the constitution of the self. Her research engages readings in psychoanalysis, neuropsychology, speech science and kinesiology, existential phenomenology, philosophy of mind, ordinary language and action, and performance studies. Since 2003, Zeynep has presented papers in many academic conferences in the United States, Europe, Canada and Turkey, published scholarly articles, and composed and performed voice pieces for concerts, exhibits, and theatre. Most recently, her article “Theorizing Voice in Performance: György Ligeti’s Aventures” appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Volume 48, Winter 2010.

Ben Dawson (UK) Fellow 10/11/12

Discipline(s): cultural history, literature, philosophy of science
ICI-Project: The Human Laboratory: Experimental Systems and the Emergence of Anthropolarity, 1790-1810

This research adopts the multistable figure as a potential model for the complex relationship (either of ‘unmediated exposure’ or of ‘mediated antagonism’) between two co-existing aspects of human subjectivity in modern society. Taking the dawn of bioscience in the 1790s as the crucible of a particular knowledge/power configuration that continues to determine the present, the project develops a new concept, ‘anthropolarity’, to explicate the bifurcation and instrumentalization of ‘humanity’ within the mode of epistemic production dominant in capitalist society: experimental systems. It draws on the work of Latour and Rheinberger, while developing the genealogical analyses of Foucault and Agamben, to elaborate the co-evolution of an experimentalization of knowledge and a governmentalization of power in modern society. The project combines empirical investigations of laboratory life circa 1800 with theoretical analysis of the relations between self-organizing systems (Hegel, Luhmann) and real abstraction (Sohn-Rethel). The aim is to expose a split and perhaps a tension, particularly discernible at this time, between the substance and function of the living human subject.

Vita: Ben Dawson studied English in Durham and London. He has taught Romantic poetry and critical theory at the University of London (Queen Mary’s and Birkbeck). His PhD, at the London Consortium (Birkbeck, ICA, Architectural Association, Science Museum, and Tate), interprets the trajectory of idealism from Kant to Hegel in interrelation with certain experimental practices in the emerging science of biology, and considers some of the cultural implications of Applied German Idealism. His wider interests are in the articulations between a Christian/post-Christian spirit of ‘anti-legalism’—the long tradition of campaign against dogma and institution—and the scientific and social systems characteristic of modernity. These concerns centre on the intersections of experimental, governmental, and poetic paradigms during the Romantic period.

Kit Heintzman (Canada) Fellow 10/11/12

Discipline(s): trans* theory, porn studies, critical race theory
ICI-Project: Hermeneutics of Labile Bodies: Implications of Queer and Critical Race Epistemologies

Hermeneutics of labile bodies has three central elements. The first is an epistemological investigation into queer theory’s emphasis on linguistic and optic significations. Here I will be paying particular attention to how the expansion of queer theory to incorporate issues of trans* theory, critical race theory, and crip theory under its purview have effected methological approaches from literary criticism to visual cultural studies. The second part of the project takes queer feminist pornography as a case study of how pornographers are integrating, critiquing, and reproducing queer and feminist debates of (anti-)identity politics, paying particular attention to struggles of theoretically informed feminist sexual praxis. The last part of the project starts from Otto Fenichel’s theory scopophilia (to look at is to devour), to ask what is being devoured through visual media when a pornographic text plays with the presentation of identity through fractious, bricolage, and postmodern metaphors of the self. Here I am interested in the project of having a reified anti-identity consumed via optic/linguistic media.

Vita: Kit Heintzman has just completed hir MA from Queen’s University’s School of Kinesiology and Health Studies. Hir MA thesis focused upon the invention of sadism, masochism, algolagnia, and sadomasochism as nosological categories and Germany’s contemporaneous imperialist expansion into East Africa and Southwest Africa; this work sought to interrogate late nineteenth century German national identity and the relationship between creating racialized and economic master-slave relationships abroad while trying to regulate eroticized master-slave relationships within the German metropole. Hir interests outside of history of psychiatry, sexology, and national identity include prison abolition, visual culture, postcoloniality, historic memory, revenge fantasies, biopolitics, queer theory, and feminist pornography. Ze has spent the past six years as a sex educator operating from an anti-oppressive mandate teaching in universities, colleges, high schools, half ways homes, and to anyone requesting access to the information.

Gal Kirn (Slovenia) Fellow 10/11/12

Discipline(s): Political science, cultural analysis, philosophy
ICI-Project: Memorial Multistability: The Parallax View on Transformative 'Yugoslav Art' from Post-Yugoslav Context

First year's research confronted a model of Kippbilder to the parallax view (Žižek). Thinking in a parallax way means to grasp the irreducible tension between different fields but also within the research object itself. It will focus on the theoretical procedures in works of Marx (object of capital), Benjamin (temporality) and Ranciere (politics and aestehtics). Then we proceeded to specific analysis of partisan memorial sites and partisan poetry from WWII. Against nostalgic glorification of good old times and against depicting Yugoslavia as totalitarian gloom, the analysis strives to show how different artworks articulated a much more complex political narrative and symbolic imagery of Yugoslav adventure. The second year will focus on the partisan films from WWII (counterarchive) and confront it with films on partisan that became the dominant genre film platform in Yugoslavia. We will address the question how, if at all was it possible to formalize or memorialize the Yugoslav revolution (rupture)?

Vita: Gal Kirn is finishing his dissertation in philosophy at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences (Ljubljana), where he combines the research on the contemporary French philosophy (especially on Louis Althusser) with the history of the emergence of revolutionary Yugoslavia and its tragic break-up. He collaborates with the Centre of Cultural Studies (FDV, Ljubljana) on the topic of xenofobia. He was an editor of the journal Agregat (2005-2008) and a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (2008-10), where he organized a series of international conferences on Yugoslavia and self-management urbanism, Yugoslavian black wave cinema and on Althusser. In his hometown Ljubljana he participates in the Workers’-Punks’ University, which sets up a platform of events: lectures, film seminars and reading groups. He is a correspondent editor for the international journal Historical Materialism, an editor of the book 'Postfordism and its discontents' (JvE Academie, B-Books and Mirovni Inštitut) and a co-editor of 'New public spaces. Dissensual political and artistic practices in the post-Yugoslav context' (JvE Academie and Moderna Galerija).

David Kishik Fellow 11/12/13

Discipline(s): Philosophy
ICI-Project: Sheer Life: A Theory of New York (To Imagine a Form of Life, III)

As Walter Benjamin dedicated his "Arcades Project" to Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, my next book is best described as a philosophical study of New York, capital of the twentieth century. Seen in this way, a world of elective affinities is revealed between the two cities, as the main players in Benjamin’s incomplete work experience a curious metamorphosis: the flâneur transforms into the homeless, the collector into the hoarder, Grandville into Warhol, Victor Hugo into Woody Allen, Baron Haussmann into Robert Moses, Marx into Arendt, Charles Fourier into Jane Jacobs, and the covered arcade into the bare street. But while Benjamin sees Paris as the dream from which we need to wake up, I approach New York as the reality into which we must still awake from our current state of dogmatic slumber. What may be called “The Manhattan Project” is thus an inversion of the principle behind "The Arcades Project": it seeks to pass through what has been, in order to experience the present as the dream that refers to the waking world of the past. New York, I argue, was a "landscape built of sheer life," one that still stands in perfect opposition to Auschwitz's terrain of bare life.

Vita: David Kishik studied philosophy at Haifa University in Israel (BA) and at the New School for Social Research in New York (MA, PhD). He is the author of Wittgenstein’s Form of Life (To Imagine a Form of Life, I), which appeared in 2008 with Continuum (paperback, 2012), and The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics (To Imagine a Form of Life, II), which was just published with Stanford University Press. He is also the co-translator of Agamben's Nudities and What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays.

Silvia Mazzini (Italy) Guest Fellow 10/11/12

Discipline(s): Aesthetics, theatre sciences, philosophy of history
ICI-Project: The coherence of contradictions in Pier Paolo Pasolini

Starting point of this project about Pier Paolo Pasolini is a thesis: the striking contradictions in his work must be interpreted as a distinguishing mark, and not as a flaw. Pasolini is mostly known as a film director but he was also a poet, novelist, essayist. In his films and writings, he fought against every form of absolutism. That can even be recognized in his style of argumentation, where every thesis evokes simultaneously an antithesis, without building a comforting, absolutistic and "totalitarian" synthesis. While most of Pasolini’s critics defined his work as irrational and incoherent, I intend to show how his ideas are organic and represent a kind of «multistable unity» - but without being a so called "synthesis of opposites". Therefore the goal of my project is a philosophical formulation of Pasolini's thinking, in form of an extended essay.

Vita: Silvia Mazzini studied Philosophy and Theatre Sciences in Milan. Her MA thesis in Aesthetics investigated the role of Tension in Goethe's Faust. In her PhD (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) she analyzed the points of intersection between Gianni Vattimo's weak-thought and Ernst Bloch's utopic philosophy of hope, in order to give a new interpretation of their political and aesthetic ideas. Next to her academical research (aesthetics, rhetoric, political and utopian thought, community theatre, urban space), she teaches courses at the HU Berlin and the Munich University of Applied Sciences. She is co-founder of IF, an experimental theatre project in Italy, and works as dramaturg and theater author for different theatre companies.

Beau Madison Mount (United States ) Fellow 10/11/12

Discipline(s): Philosophy
ICI-Project: Language, Perspective, Formalism: The Philosophy of Mathematics in an Interdisciplinary Context

My research project examines the structure of discourse about mathematical objects and its relation to other forms of language. The first (historical) part of the project discusses the development of metamathematics from the 1890s to the 1930s, looking at Hilbert's formalist programme, the finitism of the middle Wittgenstein, and the early reception of the classical limitative theorems (Gödel, Church, Löwenheim-Skolem); I focus particularly on the evolution of the notion of formalized languages as multiply interpretable structures. The second (philosophical) part applies these results to recent discussions of intensionality in mathematics and the individuation of mathematical objects. The third (interdisciplinary) part assesses the relevance of these insights about mathematical language for other 'exceptional cases' in the philosophy of language: poetic language, metaphor, and fictional entities.

Vita: B. Madison Mount receieved a BA in English from Duke University, a DEA in philosophy from the Université de Paris-IV, and is currently completing his PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University. His dissertation, 'Figuring Modality', discusses the role of the modal categories in F.W.J. Schelling's early metaphysics and aesthetics. In 2008-9 he was a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Princeton. His research in philosophy centres on metaphysics, philosophical and mathematical logic, the philosophy of mathematics, seventeenth-century philosophy, Plato, aesthetics, and phenomenology. In addition, he is interested in modernist and avant-garde literature and film from the 1880s to the 1970s, Classical literature and its contemporary reinterpretations, and the history and theory of law and jurisprudence in a comparative context.

Sandrine Sanos (France) Fellow 11/12, Spring 13

Discipline(s): (Cultural & Intellectual) History, Literary Theory & Literature, Cultural Studies
ICI-Project: Ambivalent Homes, Multiple Attachments: Displacement, Citizenship, and Gender in France, 1930-1965.

Displacement—that is an imposed “homelessness”—reveals the contradictions of modern politics of citizenship, especially in twentieth-century Europe where violence, war, and genocide have framed much of the history of imperial nation-states. For those who have been displaced, belonging (in a political and cultural sense) is an ambivalent process. This project asks how those who do not “quite belong” have reimagined “home” as the site of multiple and often contradictory and ambivalent attachments. Focusing on two moments—the interwar years, and the years following World War Two— this project explores how a number of female writers, authors, and memoirists who directly or indirectly experienced displacement reflected upon their ambivalent position in relation to “home”—France. How did they articulate in writing their location as “outsiders from within,” as illegitimate subjects who did not quite belong? I believe engaging ambivalence and melancholia as serious political objects allows the disruption of the illusion of singularity, stability, and linearity that inevitably infuse our imagination of citizenship and the nation as “home.”

Vita: Sandrine Sanos studied Modern History at Pembroke College, Oxford University (BA), Women’s and Gender History at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London University (MA), Historical Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (auditor), and Modern European History at Rutgers University (Ph.D.). She taught History at Earlham College and has been Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Texas A & M University - Corpus Christi since 2008. Her book The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France is forthcoming with Stanford University Press (Fall 2012). Her research interests include intellectual and cultural history, gender and sexuality, diaspora and genocide, psychoanalysis and film theory. She is currently working on two articles: on the French artist Claude Cahun, and on memory, violence, and gender in Alain Resnais' 1959 film, Hiroshima mon Amour.

Aaron Schuster (United States) Fellow 10/11/12

Discipline(s): Philosophy
ICI-Project: Is Life a Disease? Research in Patho-Philosophy

The aim of the research project is to re-examine key aspects of subjectivity (freedom, embodiment, desire, etc.) from the standpoint of mental illness, starting from the Romantic idea that the human being is a sick animal, through 19th and 20th century philosophy (Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche to Freud, Lacan and Deleuze), post-WWI literature (Mann, Svevo, Cendrars), and concluding with 21st century psychiatry and evolutionary theory. The project will treat tension as a synonym for the energy of the drives. More specifically, I am interested in how tension has been conceived by in a double manner: either as a noxious excess that must be contained or metabolized, or as a boundless, self-affirming fount of creativity and vital power. On the one hand, the human psyche is exceedingly fragile, threatened from within by the possibility of breakdown or traumatic overload. But viewed from another perspective, this constitutive mal-adaptiveness also lies at the origin of the human being’s incredible plasticity and dynamism. Multistability can be used as a conceptual figure for thinking together, without a simple unifying synthesis, these oppositional determinations.

Vita: Aaron Schuster received his BA from Amherst College (USA), where he specialized in legal theory, and MA and PhD in Philosophy from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). His doctoral dissertation, The Trouble With Pleasure: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, examined the concept of pleasure in the history of philosophy, concluding with Freud and Lacan. He was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2005-2006, and has taught at PARTS (Performing Arts Research Training Studios) in Brussels and the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. In addition to lectures and publications focusing on 20th century continental philosophy, he has written on contemporary art and culture for Cabinet, Metropolis M, Frieze, Mousse, De Witte Raaf, and others, and has collaborated as a writer with artists on a number of projects, including a performance piece with Mario Garcia Torres, an opera libretto with Loris Gréaud and Raimundas Malasauskas, a science fiction film with Alexis Destoop, and a comedy show with Nicolas Matranga. He is currently preparing a book on Deleuze and psychoanalysis (MIT Press, forthcoming 2012), and a study of the history of levitation in twentieth century thought and culture.

Volker Woltersdorff (Germany) Fellow 11/12/13

Discipline(s): Queer Theory, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Philosophy, Literature
ICI-Project: Paradoxical Pleasures and the Desire to Have it All: Toward a Queer Dialectics

Sadomasochistic desire and experience are thoroughly characterised by paradox: they deploy multistable figures that can be interpreted from either of the two possible outcomes and draw their erotic appeal from this very ambiguity. These sadomasochistic figures are best understood in their complex entirety, comprised as much of contradictory affective and sexual investments as they are of contrasting perspectives. My proposed book project links earlier fieldwork and discourse analysis of contemporary BDSM scenes to the philosophical and political question of dialectics, suggesting that the study of BDSM can contribute to a new and queerer understanding of dialectics. Unlike in many other discourses that rely on dialectics, in BDSM, the tension between contradictions is not resolved at a higher stage of consciousness—or the thrill is lost. Therefore, BDSM pushes us to conceive of another kind of complementarity that differs from the kind of “synthesis” offered by classical dialectics. This project proposes interpreting BDSM practice as a way to reenact and renegotiate the dialectics of our present neoliberal times.

Vita: Volker Woltersdorf (aka Lore Logorrhöe) studied French, German and Italian Literatures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and received a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on gay coming out narrative and practice. From 1999 to 2010 he was Research assistant at the Institute of Comparative Literature of Freie Universität Berlin and Member of the Collaborative Research Centre „Kulturen des Performativen“ within the Research Project “Precariousness of Sexual and Gendered Identities: Everyday Practice and Symbolic Forms”. His book Coming out: Die Inszenierung schwuler Identitäten zwischen Auflehnung und Anpassung appeared 2005 with Campus.