June 2022 – Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research

Film screening of Emanuel Almborg’s Talking Hands (2016)

Thursday 16 June 2022 | Barzakh Bookshop & Café | 7pm

Talking Hands / говорящие руки, 2016, 48 min, HD (and 16mm transferred to HD). Dir. Emanuel Almborg

Talking Hands / говорящие руки, is a film about the 1960s Zagorsk school for deaf-blind children outside Moscow and its pedagogy. The school was established by Marxist philosopher Eval’d llyenkov, who, in contention with dominant Soviet ideology, began developing ideas of how human consciousness is socially constituted and emerges in relation to material culture, objects, and tools.

The screening will be followed by a discussion.

This event is organized by the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) for the 2022 Summer School, Critique and the Desire of Modernity.
For more information, please visit https://bicarlebanon.org/summerschool/

Book talk by Frank Ruda: Reading Hegel

Tuesday June 7 2022 | Barzakh Bookshop & Café | 6pm

Frank Ruda, one of the volume’s editors, is launching Reading Hegel (Polity Books) in the presence of. This event will be held in English and is open to the public.

A spirit is haunting contemporary thought – the spirit of Hegel. All the powers of academia have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spirit: Vitalists and Eschatologists, Transcendental Pragmatists and Speculative Realists, Historical Materialists and even ‘liberal Hegelians’.

Which of these groups has not been denounced as metaphysically Hegelian by its opponents? And which has not hurled back the branding reproach of Hegelian metaphysics in its turn? Progressives, liberals and reactionaries alike receive this condemnation.

In light of this situation, it is high time that true Hegelians should openly admit their allegiance and, without obfuscation, express the importance and validity of Hegelianism to the contemporary intellectual scene.

To this end, a small group of Hegelians of different nationalities have assembled to sketch the following book – a book which addresses a number of pressing issues that a contemporary reading of Hegel allows a new perspective on: our relation to the future, our relation to nature and our relation to the absolute.

Dr. Frank Ruda is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. He is the author of Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Nebraska University Press 2015); For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Northwestern University Press 2015) and Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Continuum 2011).

Lecture by Frank Ruda: On the concept of prehistory, if it is one?

Monday June 6 2022 | 2pm

Capitalism seems to have changed everything. It established a fundamentally new form of organising social relations and from its conception nothing – and perhaps not even nothing – remained the same. These are assumptions that have been often attributed to Marx (and Marxists), even by Marxists. Yet Marx explicitly identified capitalist political economy as a prehistoric formation. This puts pressure on the concept of prehistory, if it is one. This talk will attempt to deal with this pressure by returning to Marx.