يسرّ بيكار، معهد بيروت للتحليل النقدي والبحوث، أن يدعو المنظِّمات/ين السياسيات/ين، العمال، والطلبة للمشاركة بالاستبحار في خيالنا السياسي الجمعي من خلال حوار مفتوح حول التنظيم النضالي، مآزق التحرر السياسي، وأزمات اليسار. سنستضيف المتحدث غابريال توبينامبا الذي سيتناول الأزمات التي يتخبط بها اليسار البرازيلي والمشاكل الذاتية مع التنظيم السياسي
ستحدث المناقشة يوم السادس من أيار/مايو، عند الساعة الخامسة مساءً في مانشن بيروت، زقاق البلاط
غابريال توبينامبا فيلسوف ومحلل نفسي يعمل من ريو دي جانيرو. يشغل منصب رئيس الاستراتيجية الاجتماعية في معهد ألاميدا، كما أنه عضو في المجموعة البحثية فرع الممارسة النظرية. صدر له ”رغبة التحليل النفسي“، و ”هيغل، لاكان، جيجك“، كما شارك في كتابة: عمارة الحواف: اليُسُر في أزمنة التطريف
Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) is delighted to invite leftist organizers, workers and students to participate in expanding our collective political imagination through an open dialogue around the question of militant organization, impasses of political emancipation and the crises of the left(s). As our guest speaker, Gabriel Tupinambá will address the crises of the Brazilian left and the subjective problems that arise in political organization.
The discussion will take place on May 6th at 5:00 PM in Mansion Beirut, Zuqaq Al-Blat.
Gabriel Tupinambá is a philosopher and psychoanalyst working from Rio de Janeiro. He is the Head of Social Strategy at the Alameda institute (www.alameda.institute) and a member of the research collective Subset for Theoretical Practice (www.theoreticalpractice.com). He is the author of The Desire of Psychoanalysis (NUP, 2021), and co-author of the book An Architecture of Edges: The Lefts in Times of World Peripheralization (Autonomia Literária, 2022) and Hegel, Lacan, Žižek (Altropos Press, 2013).
Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research Summer School June 2023 June 19-30, Beirut Is There a Revolutionary Subject?
Is the absence of revolution due to the absence of a revolutionary subject? Or to the belief that revolution requires a subject? The critique of the subject–Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian– is the cornerstone of the Nietzschean and Heideggerian critiques of modernity (and of their reactionary politics). It was subsequently given an emancipatory cast not only by Nietzschean thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze but also by Marxists like Adorno, for whom the primacy of the subject forms the crux of the logic of domination. From this vantage, Lukacs’ theory of the revolutionary subject, which centers the proletariat as self-conscious commodity, is supposedly tainted not just by residual Hegelianism but by a logic of domination culminating in Stalinism. Yet perhaps the time has come to re-appraise Lukacs’ theory, given that no alternative of comparable power has come to replace it.
Psychoanalysis, for its part, develops a more nuanced critique of the subject. Where poststructuralism reduces the subject to an effect of impersonal forces–substantializing the unconscious–psychoanalysis conceives it as an irreparable tear in the fabric of being. The subject is the gap manifesting the unconscious as ‘not-fully-being’. In this regard, psychoanalysis renovates the Hegelian concept of the subject as self-relating negativity. Subjective destitution, as conceived by Lacan, is only possible via the discourse of psychoanalysis, which paves the way for a transformative act. But the destitution of the subject in contemporary critical discourse continues to be conceived in poststructuralist terms. This destitution marks the shift from the conception of revolution as total explosion to the claim that what is revolutionary is the explosion (or implosion) of totality. Disintegration and fragmentation become the new indices of social subversion. The political valence of this shift has been much debated: subversion of liberalism or liberal subversion? Both remain politically equivocal: the disintegration of totality is affirmed by fascist reactionaries as well as utopian anarchists.
History also seems to confirm the destitution of the revolutionary subject. The European working class’s post-war accommodation with capitalism (not to mention its embrace of fascism in the 1930s) casts doubt on attempts to invest it with revolutionary agency. In the fifty years since the end of the post-war boom (1973), capital’s renewed onslaught against labor has not reconsolidated the working class into a revolutionary subject. Thus communists have reaffirmed the distinction between proletariat and working class to challenge the latter’s revolutionary credentials together with the assumption that revolution requires a unitary subject. This includes not only Althusserians, for whom history is a process without a subject, but also those who propose that self-negation, rather than self-affirmation, is the motor of proletarian struggle against capital. In a related but distinct vein, Alain Badiou makes the theory of the subject central to communism while decoupling revolutionary subjectivation from the appropriation of production. Lastly, Adorno’s critique of the principle of subjectivity seeks to preserve the singularity of individual experience as a site of resistance to capitalist totality. The question is whether such singularity can be encompassed by class struggle and reconnected to collective solidarity. In all these instances, the concepts of capital, labor, totality, revolution, and subject are variously articulated with very different political consequences.
Moreover, how do the objective and subjective dimensions of race, gender, and sexuality connect with those of class? If proletarianization is an ongoing process that consists of homogenizing and commodifying subjective experience, what are the concrete mechanisms through which it occurs? The list might include capitalist ecologies, the privatization and individualization of symptoms by the therapy and wellness industries, as well as the ongoing co-optation of all potential sites of radical enunciation by the discourses of neo-liberal capitalism. How might a revolutionary subject withstand this slow emptying out of social experience? Can it be sustained against such mechanisms? What kind of militancy is required and what can psychoanalysis actually offer to militant subjects in this regard? Can psychoanalysis help resist this process of psychic hollowing? Could it help reconstruct a theory of the revolutionary subject?
This summer school will investigate the different registers and political valences of the critique of the subject and try to gauge its consequences for the understanding of revolution. Is the destitution of the subject revolutionary? Or does it ultimately dissolve revolution as idea and political practice?
Course I – Dr. Nadia Bou Ali Subjective Destitution
Psychoanalysis has one main promise for politics and it is surely not a joyful one: the experience of subjective destitution is one possible way to counter the generalized systemic enjoyment that prevails in late capitalism. What is subjective destitution really? How can it be explained if it is not experienced? The seminar will discuss this in the context of Lacan’s theory of four discourses (Seminar XVII) and ask is the discourse of the analyst a discourse of subjective destitution? If so, what is the actual use of this politically?
Dr. Nadia Bou Ali is Associate Professor and Chair of the Civilization Sequence Program at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Hall of Mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic (Edinburgh University Press 2020).
Course II – Dr. Ray Brassier Theories of the Communist Subject
This course will consider whether the critique of Marxist programmatism and the perspective of communisation developed by Theorie Communiste (TC) dissolves or renews the question of the revolutionary subject. We will examine the theoretical presuppositions and political implications of the fundamental question guiding all of TC’s analyses, namely: “How can the proletariat, acting strictly as a class, be the class that abolishes class?” We will compare TC’s analysis to that of theorists who offer positive accounts of the communist subject, such as Lukacs and Badiou, as well as to theorists who consign the category of the subject to capital, such as Postone.
Dr. Ray Brassier is Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut. He is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave 2007).
Course III – Dr. Sami Khatib The Specter of Universalism: Concepts, Politics, Ideologies
This course starts from Vivek Chibber’s insight that in global capitalism at least two universalisms are at work: (1) the “universalizing drive of capital,” which stands against (2) the “universal interest of the subaltern classes to defend their wellbeing against capital’s domination” (Chibber, 2013). Against culturalist framings of universalism as a trope and idea limited to “western” Enlightenment thought, this course explores conceptual and political legacies of universalisms ‘from below’. Against conventional logic, universalism is not the (oppressive) flipside of particularism. As certain strands of anticolonial Marxism have shown, a dialectical-materialist concept of universality cannot rely on a choice between pre-established opposites. Rather, universality as dialectical concept and universalism as emancipatory politics call for a third term, be it a political subject, an absent cause, a lack, a surplus, a remainder, a singular embodiment, irreducible to abstract particularities and their culturalist, liberal or fascist ideologies.
Dr. Sami Khatib is a substitute professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG). His publications include a co-editorship of the volume “Critique: The Stakes of Form” (Zürich, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2020) and authorship of the book “Teleologie ohne Endzweck: Walter Benjamins Ent-stellung des Messianischen” [“Teleology without End.” Walter Benjamin’s Dislocation of the Messianic], (Marburg: Tectum, 2013).
Course IV – Dr. Ghalya Saadawi The Founding Violence of Law and Liberal Legalism’s Plea for the Law
The founding violence of Law is covered over as the law. Law is split. This seminar will begin drawing out relations between founding repression (Freud, Marcuse etc.) and the founding violence of the Law (Žižek, Lacan, Dean etc.) to subsequently consider, from a contemporary perspective, the appeals of what some have broadly called liberal legalism (to law, to rights, to standpoint, to human rights, to identity, and so on). This legalism seems to sideline immanent or left critique (including that of critical legal theory), represses liberation from the law that constructs its claims, and misreads the law (and superego)’s injunctions to both obey and enjoy. We try to read this alongside the once historical contention that liberating the drives was sufficient for liberation itself, misunderstanding the drives’ doubleness as both instinct and congealed forms of the social. Falling into the fiction of Law’s founding violence, and misreading itself as split, legalism thereby cannot consider the historical conditions of its emergence and splitness, and thus an emancipatory horizon beyond it. Is liberal legalism that antinomic to the work of critique? The seminar begins to explore the contradictions of founding violence and demand for the law, with the question of critique and emancipation.
Dr. Ghalya Saadawi is senior lecturer at the Centre for Research Architecture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London, and theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute, ArtEZ University. Recent articles include “Critical Incision: Hypochondria, Autotheory, and the Health-Illness Dialectic” in PhiloSOPHIA (2022), and “Vapid Virtues, Real Stakes: Diagnosis for Left Art Protocols” in Between the Material and the Possible Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art, edited by Bassam El Baroni (2022).
Course V – Dr. Angela Harutyunyan Time and Revolution: Historicity after “the End of History”
The course investigates the historical and conceptual conditions of possibility for a temporality hegemonic in our contemporary times, namely presentism. As a quality of historical time presentism is marked by the omnipresence of the present, without a sense of a historical past, or futurity. The course diagnoses this ideologically inflicted condition as constituted in the wake of the failure of twentieth-century revolutionary projects. It moves from the neoliberal present where time stands still in the order of deadlines, fiscal “futures,” exploitation of nature and the looming planetary ecological catastrophe, to the historical experiences of revolutionary transformations and their theorization in critical theory. We will read selections from Fred Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic (2000), Francois Hartog’s Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experience of Time (2003), Henri Lefevre’s Dialectical Materialism (1938) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror (1947), amongst other texts.
Dr. Angela Harutyunyan is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at the American University of Beirut. She is editor of ARTMargins (MIT Press) and the author of The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the ‘Painterly Real,’ 1987–2004 (Manchester University Press 2017). She has co-founded the Johannissyan Institute for Research in the Humanities in Yerevan and BICAR in Beirut. Her book After Revolution:Historical Presentism and the Political Eclipse of Postmodernity co-authored with Eric Goodfield is forthcoming with Leuven University Press.
Application and Deadline:
CV/Resumé + 500 words statement of interest + 150 words statement about funding to be submitted by March 15, 2023
$500 students with institutional funding; $300 self-funded students; Free to local students. Payment for funded and non-local students to be made upon successful application.
About BICAR
Established in 2015, the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) aims to promote critical thought and analysis with a special focus on studying manifestations of modernity in Lebanon and the Middle East. As a public research and educational institute, BICAR seeks to cultivate a space for rigorous research, debate, and dialogue. It intends to foster cultures of critique capable of understanding Lebanese modernity in relation to processes of modernization that are part of a global dynamic. BICAR has two fundamental commitments: to disseminate pedagogical and research oriented projects in Arabic and English to a wide audience in Beirut, Lebanon, and beyond; and to foster the relationship between intellectual inquiry, social reality, and social change. BICAR’s founding members are Dr. Nadia Bou Ali, Dr. Ray Brassier, Mr. Rohit Goel, Dr. Angela Harutyunyan, Dr. Sami Khatib, and Dr. Ghalya Saadawi.
The Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) will host its first summer school in Lebanon this June. The summer school is open to international and local students. It is intended as a pedagogical intervention at a catastrophic moment in Lebanon’s history. With economic collapse, severe shortages of fuel, electricity, and medicine, and over 80% of the Lebanese population living below the poverty line, the current capitalist crisis demands the development of adequate tools for understanding our historical present in ways that can also affect conditions of transformation. We at BICAR think that Lebanon is the future past of the failures of global neoliberalism, a place that can instruct us on the dismal future to come if the social, political, and economic contradictions of the present are left to their own historical trajectory. In order to concretely grasp the conditions of the present, we propose a patient return to the past and will be offering an intensive course program on classical and contemporary critical social theory and aesthetics. The school will consist of an introductory keynote lecture followed by four core courses offered over eight sessions.
Keynote Lecture
On the concept of prehistory, if it is one? By Dr. Frank Ruda
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.
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).
Course I
The Idea of Critical Theory By Dr. Ray Brassier
This course will track the development of the idea of critical theory from its original radical inception, focusing on its two fundamental components: the Marxian analysis of the commodity and the Freudian analysis of repression. We will conclude by considering the ‘critical pessimism’ to which critical theory’s founding figures, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, allegedly succumbed in their final years.
Dr. Ray Brassier is Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut. He is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave 2007).
Course II
On Negativity By Dr. Sami Khatib
This seminar explores negativity as concept, figure and affect. In Western thought, ‘negative’ thinking can be traced back to pessimism, skepticism, nihilism and dystopianism. For Hegel, however, negativity is the restless movement and dialectical driving force of cultural formation and education (Bildung). The seminar asks how global sites of class struggle and coloniality can be theorized as sites of negativity.
Dr. Sami Khatib is a substitute professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG). His publications include a co-editorship of the volume “Critique: The Stakes of Form” (Zürich, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2020) and authorship of the book “Teleologie ohne Endzweck: Walter Benjamins Ent-stellung des Messianischen” [“Teleology without End.” Walter Benjamin’s Dislocation of the Messianic], (Marburg: Tectum, 2013).
Course III
Marxist Aesthetics By Dr. Angela Harutyunyan, with Natasha Gasparian
While Marx and Engels never systematically wrote on aesthetics, throughout the twentieth century multiple attempts were made to construct systematic aesthetics based upon their writings. This course investigates such attempts both within Soviet Marxism and Western Marxism in the 1930s and 1960s as mirroring one another, albeit from different political systems and historical circumstances.
Dr. Angela Harutyunyan is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory and Head of the Art History Program at the American University of Beirut. She is editor of ARTMargins (MIT Press) and the author of The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the ‘Painterly Real,’ 1987–2004 (Manchester University Press 2017).
Natasha Gasparian is an art historian and curator who works on modern and contemporary art in the Arabic-speaking world. She is the author of Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess: The Changing of Horses (Anthem Press, 2020). Currently, she is the curatorial assistant to Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath for the 16th edition of the Lyon Biennale.
Course IV
Anxiety and Authority: The Critical Use of Psychoanalysis By Dr. Nadia Bou Ali, with Mohamad Tal
Modernity is an age of neurosis, in which anxiety emerges as an affect linked to the demand for collective political solutions. If our present historical moment is characterized as an ‘age of anxiety’ overridden with depression, suicide, and paralysis, can we rethink anxiety without resorting to quick tranquilizing resolutions of the sort proposed by authoritarian figures like Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, and Modi? The appeal of such figures invites us to reconsider the basis of what authority is and ought to be using psychoanalysis to diagnose its nature in relation to anxiety.
Dr. Nadia Bou Ali is Associate Professor and Chair of the Civilization Sequence Program at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Hall of Mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic (Edinburgh University Press 2020); and co-editor (with Rohit Goel) of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, and Politics (Bloomsbury Academic 2018).
Application and Deadline:
CV/Resumé + 500 words statement of interest + 150 words statement about funding to be submitted by March 29, 2022
$500 students with institutional funding; $300 self-funded students; Free to local students. Payment for funded and non-local students to be made upon successful application.
About BICAR
Established in 2015, the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) aims to promote critical thought and analysis with a special focus on studying manifestations of modernity in Lebanon and the Middle East. As a public research and educational institute, BICAR seeks to cultivate a space for rigorous research, debate, and dialogue. It intends to foster cultures of critique capable of understanding Lebanese modernity in relation to processes of modernization that are part of a global dynamic. BICAR has two fundamental commitments: to disseminate pedagogical and research oriented projects in Arabic and English to a wide audience in Beirut, Lebanon, and beyond; and to foster the relationship between intellectual inquiry, social reality, and social change. BICAR’s founding members are Dr. Nadia Bou Ali, Dr. Ray Brassier, Mr. Rohit Goel, Dr. Angela Harutyunyan, Dr. Sami Khatib, and Dr. Ghalya Saadawi.
Alenka Zupančič: What is Sex? Wednesday February 19th 7pm
Alenka Zupančič approaches the question of “What is sex?” from the perspective of asking what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious.
Alenka Zupančič, a Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher, teaches at the European Graduate School and is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and the Arts.
Samo Tomšič: The Labour of Enjoyment. Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy Thursday February 20th 7pm
Samo Tomšic critiques the use of psychoanalysis to discuss political economy, focusing specifically on the concept of “libidinal economy,” the intersection between desire and capitalism most famously proposed by Jean-François Lyotard. Contrasting Marxist and Freudian thought with the philosophies of Aristotle and Adam Smith, Tomšic suggests that in the age of modernity, political and economic theory should reflect the driving force of alienation rather than narcissism.
Samo Tomšič obtained his PhD in philosophy and is currently research assistant in the interdisciplinary cluster “Image Knowledge Gestaltung” at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
February 20 – 21, 2020 American University of Beirut, ACC Auditorium 1 – 2
Over a century ago, Freud surmised that the transformations of modernity, the age of neurosis par excellence, pave the way for the “psychological misery of the masses.” In the mid-twentieth century, Lacan reassessed this characterization by asking: What is the Other, if there really is an Other? How do signifiers structure a social link? How is the relation between subjectivity and otherness structured around desire, anxiety, and fantasy? It may be that modernity is not just the result of the retreat of the discourse of the master; yet it is only in modernity that the crisis in symbolic identification tout court comes to be analysed as a crisis of phallic representation, or perhaps more accurately, as the exposure of the inherent instability of the master signifier itself. The master has taken on different forms that cannot be reduced to a single formula: it is at once many, not-One, and not-All. All identification revolves around a lack; a constitutive lack structured around the question: What does the Other want of me? But psychoanalysis reveals the inconsistency of the Other.
The Other in modernity is propped up by regimes of enjoyment or libidinal modes of interpretation that are at work in constituting social reality. This shift appears to canalise anxiety: what do we do when the lack lacks, when incompleteness and excess are two sides of the same coin?
With the concept of “extimacy”, psychoanalysis proposes that unassimilable otherness is not something outside us but resides deep within us and makes us what we are. Psychoanalysis has always been political because its basic premise is that symptoms are never simply personal but rather expressions of the extimate link between the individual and the social. This conference investigates the concept of extimacy as a site in which the link between psychoanalysis and politics can be explored.
Participants: Nadia Bou Ali Silvio Carneiro Alejandro Cerda Rueda Mladen Dolar Carlos Gómez Camarena Amanda Holmes Anna Jovanovic Sami Khatib Alexi Kukuljevic Vladimir Safatle Surti Singh Samo Tomšič Goran Vranešević Andreja Zevnik Alenka Zupančič
This conference is organized with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the “Extimacies: Critical Theory from the Global South” early-career scholars program and Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Critical Theory (PACT).
الطائفية علاقة
سياسية قد حددت في القرن الماضي الأفق السياسي في لبنان و بلدان أخرى محيطة، إن
كان من خلال التحليل الأكاديمي لهذه الظاهرة أو من خلال ممارسة الدولة لسلطتها من
خلال هذه العلاقة. فالطائفية و هاجس الحرب الأهلية الطائفية منذ التسعينيات هو
السبب المانع لأي تحرك سياسي شعبي يسعى لتغيير الواقع. والطائفية ليست ظاهرة خصوصية
مرتبطة بالمجتمع اللبناني فقط، فهي تُطرح كتفسير لواقع تناقضي و طبقي لبنية
إجتماعية رأسمالية. تُقدم لنا ريما ماجد مقاربتها السوسيولوجية للطائفية من أجل
فهم ارتباطها بالبنية الطبقية في لبنان و شكل السلطة فيه.
ريما ماجد
دكتورة في العلوم الاجتماعية في الجامعة الأميركية في بيروت و عضو مؤسس لتجمع
مهنيين و مهنيات.
المحاضرة جزء من سلسلة النيوليبرالية، الطائفية، والشعوبية
في ضوء الأحداث
التاريخية الجارية حاليًا في لبنان، تعقد بيكار سلسلة من المحادثات تهدف إلى تحليل
المؤثرات الاجتماعية والسياسية في الوقت الحاضر. الهدف هو فهم البنية السياسية
والطبقية اللبنانية من أجل التغلب عليها. ما يجري في لبنان يمكن فهمه كجزء من تمرد
شعبوي عالمي ضد التقشف النيوليبرالي. يمكن أن يتم الاستيلاء على هذه الانتفاضة
بسهولة من قبل استبداد رجعي يدمج القومية الوطنية بسياسة الهويات (ترامب، بريكست،
لوبان، البديل من أجل ألمانيا، بولسونارو، دورتي، إلخ). لكن الشعوبية يمكنها أيضًا
أن تولّد سياسة تفضح سطحية الاختلافات عند قياسها على خلفية الصراع الطبقي. كيف
نفهم هذه الصيرورة في لبنان حيث منطق الهويات قد أخفى المسألة الطبقية ؟ كيف نُدرك
التشكل البروليتاري الغير تقليدي في
مواجهة النيوليبرالية؟ كيف تتشكل أجندة شيوعية في هذه اللحظة بالذات؟
الجمعة ١٣ كانون الأول | ٤:٠٠ بعد الظهر | مقهى مزيان، الحمرا
ما هي الوجهة السياسية للحزب في اللحظة الراهنة في لبنان؟ ھل تتماثل مع سیاسة الیسار الشعبوي الذي یظھر في أوروبا وأمیركا اللاتینیة أم تختلف عنها؟ كیف یربط بین الواقع اللبناني ودینامیكیات الرأسمالیة على صعید عالمي؟
المحاضرة من تنظيم بيكار كجزء من سلسلة نقاشات عن النيوليبرالية، الطائفية، والشعوبية
في ضوء الأحداث التاريخية الجارية حاليًا في لبنان، تعقد بيكار سلسلة من المحادثات تهدف إلى تحليل المؤثرات الاجتماعية والسياسية في الوقت الحاضر. الهدف هو فهم البنية السياسية والطبقية اللبنانية من أجل التغلب عليها. ما يجري في لبنان يمكن فهمه كجزء من تمرد شعبوي عالمي ضد التقشف النيوليبرالي. يمكن أن يتم الاستيلاء على هذه الانتفاضة بسهولة من قبل استبداد رجعي يدمج القومية الوطنية بسياسة الهويات (ترامب، بريكست، لوبان، البديل من أجل ألمانيا، بولسونارو، دورتي، إلخ). لكن الشعوبية يمكنها أيضًا أن تولّد سياسة تفضح سطحية الاختلافات عند قياسها على خلفية الصراع الطبقي. كيف نفهم هذه الصيرورة في لبنان حيث منطق الهويات قد أخفى المسألة الطبقية؟ كيف نُدرك التشكل البروليتاري الغير تقليدي في مواجهة النيوليبرالية؟ كيف تتشكل أجندة شيوعية في هذه اللحظة بالذات؟
الجمعة ٢٩ تشرين الثاني ٢٠١٩ |٤:٣٠ بعد الظهر | مقهى مزيان، الحمرا الدعوة عامة
يقدم الصحافي الاقتصادي محمد زبيب في هذه الحوار مداخلة عن المديونية العامة والخاصة كآلية من آليات إعادة توزيع الدخل والثورة في لبنان خلال العقود الماضية.
النقاش جزء من سلسلة مناقشات «بيكار» عن النيوليبرالية، الطائفية، والشعوبية. في ضوء الأحداث التاريخية الجارية حاليًا في لبنان، تعقد «بيكار» سلسلة من المحادثات تهدف إلى تحليل المؤثرات الاجتماعية والسياسية في الوقت الحاضر. الهدف هو فهم البنية السياسية والطبقية اللبنانية من أجل التغلب عليها، ولأن ما يجري هنا يمكن فهمه كجزء من تمرد شعبوي عالمي ضد السياسات الاقتصادية النيوليبرالية.
الدعوة عامة المداخلة ٤٥ دقيقة تليها ساعة من النقاش
Please scroll down for English. (The discussion will be held in Arabic with English translation)
مناقشات بيكار النيوليبرالية، الطائفية، والشعوبية
على ضوء الأحداث التاريخية الجارية حاليًا في لبنان، تعقد بيكار سلسلة من المحادثات تهدف إلى تحليل المؤثرات الاجتماعية والسياسية في الوقت الحاضر. الهدف هو فهم البنية السياسية والطبقية اللبنانية من أجل التغلب عليها. ما يجري في لبنان يمكن فهمه كجزء من تمرد شعبوي عالمي ضد التقشف النيوليبرالي. يمكن أن يتم الاستيلاء على هذه الانتفاضة بسهولة من قبل استبداد رجعي يدمج القومية الوطنية بسياسة الهويات (ترامب، بريكست، لوبان، البديل من أجل ألمانيا، بولسونارو، دورتي، إلخ). لكن الشعوبية يمكنها أيضًا أن تولّد سياسة تفضح سطحية الاختلافات عند قياسها على خلفية الصراع الطبقي. كيف نفهم هذه الصيرورة في لبنان حيث منطق الهويات قد أخفى المسألة الطبقية؟ كيف نُدرك التشكل البروليتاري غير التقليدي في مواجهة النيوليبرالية؟ كيف تتشكل أجندة شيوعية في هذه اللحظة بالذات؟
حول الحدث الثوري دون ذات ثورية (حوار مع علي شلق، أستاذ مشارك في الاقتصاد التطبيقي (الجامعة الأمريكية في بيروت
الجمعة، ٨ تشرين الثاني، الساعة ٤-٦ بعد الظهر مزيان
في مقالته الأخيرة “ثورة في البراري النيوليبرالية” (بيروت اليوم، ٢٦ أكتوبر٢٠٠٩) http://beirut-today.com/2019/10/26/revolution-neoliberal-wilderness يطرح علي شلق أن عقوداً من التحولات النيوليبرالية في لبنان أنتجت تدمير “المصفوفة المجتمعية” وخلق ” مستهلكين مذرّرين” . يقترح المؤلف أن مجال الاستهلاك قد كلّف هؤلاء المواطنين المذرّرين بإعادة إنتاج رأس المال الوهمي وحرمهم من مجال الإنتاج الذي اتسمت به الرأسمالية الصناعية. وهذا بدوره أدى إلى تدمير “البروليتاريا” كذات سياسية، وبالتالي أيضًا تدميرها كذات ثورية. وهكذا، فإن الحدث الثوري في لبنان، في خضم ” البراري النيوليبرالية” محروم من الذات الثورية.
تدعو بيكار علي شلق لمناقشة هذه النقاط الأساسية في مقالته: ما إذا كانت العودة إلى الإنتاج الوطني واستعادة القوى المنتجة هي خيار في اقتصاد نيوليبرالي منفصل ومعولَم؛ ما إذا كان ينبغي البحث عن ذوات الثورة في المفهوم التقليدي للبروليتاريا كقوة منتجة، وأخيراً، كيف يمكننا صياغة تحليل جماعي لأزمة الرأسمالية في لبنان على أنها متشابكة مع العمليات الأوسع لأزمات الرأسمالية المتأخرة.
حصل الدكتور شلق على بكالوريوس في الزراعة من الجامعة الأمريكية في بيروت عام ٢٠٠٠، وحصل على درجة الماجستير في التنمية الزراعية الاستوائية من جامعة ريدينج، المملكة المتحدة، في عام ٢٠٠١. تابع دراسته وحصل على درجة الدكتوراه في الاقتصاد التطبيقي في إمبيريال كوليدج لندن، واي كامبوس، المملكة المتحدة، في عام ٢٠٠٨. عمل الدكتور شلق في الاستشارات في المملكة المتحدة بين عامي ٢٠٠٦ و ٢٠٠٩، حيث شارك على نطاق واسع في الاقتصاد وأبحاث العملاء التي أجريت لمجموعة متنوعة من شركات المياه ومياه الصرف الصحي و مزودي المرافق والبنية التحتية في المملكة المتحدة وأوروبا. انضم الدكتور شلق إلى كلية العلوم الزراعية والغذائية في الجامعة الأميركية في بيروت كعضو في هيئة التعليم في عام ٢٠٠٩، وهو حاليًا أستاذ مشارك في الاقتصاد التطبيقي. تتركّز اهتماماته البحثية الرئيسية في مجالات الاقتصاد الزراعي والغذائي، وأبحاث المستهلكين والعملاء، واقتصاديات النقل، والسياسة الصحية، وتحليل اختيار التطبيق. لا يزال يشارك في استشارات اقتصادية مستقلة لعملاء محليين ودوليين من القطاعات الخاصة والعامة والتطوعية. لقد أسفرت الأبحاث والاستشارات التي أجراها الدكتور شلق عن العديد من المنشورات في المجلات التخصصية.
BICAR Debates Neoliberalism, Sectarianism, and Populism
In light of the historical events currently unfolding in Lebanon, BICAR is convening a series of talks that aim to analyze the social and political forces at work in the present. The goal is to assess the resilience of Lebanese political and class formation with an eye to their overcoming. What is happening in Lebanon can be understood as part of a worldwide populist revolt against neoliberal austerity. This revolt can all too easily be appropriated by a reactionary authoritarianism fusing nationalism with identity politics (Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, AfD, Bolsonaro, Duerte, etc.). But populism can also generate a politics that exposes the superficiality of differences when measured against the background of class antagonism. How might this unfold in a Lebanese context where the logic of identity has largely blotted out the issue of class? Can we think proletarianization against neo-liberalism? How might we formulate a communist agenda in this particular moment?
On the Revolutionary Event without Revolutionary Subjects Conversation with Ali Challak, Associate Professor of Applied Economics (AUB)
Friday, November 8, 4-6pm Mezyan
In his recent article “Revolution in Neoliberal Wilderness” (Beirut Today, October 26, 2019) (http://beirut-today.com/2019/10/26/revolution-neoliberal-wilderness) Ali Challak claims that decades of neoliberal transformations in Lebanon have resulted in the destruction of “the societal matrix” and created “atomized consumers”. The sphere of consumption, the author claims, has assigned these atomized citizens to the reproduction of fictitious capital and has deprived them of the sphere of production that had characterized industrial capitalism. This in turn, has brought about the destruction of the “proletariat” as a political subject, and hence, also a revolutionary subject. Thus, the revolutionary event in Lebanon, in the midst of “neoliberal wilderness” is deprived of the revolutionary subject.
BICAR has invited Ali Challak to debate these essential points in his article: whether a return to national production and restoration of productive forces is an option in a disembedded and globalized neoliberal economy; whether the subjects of the revolution should be sought in the traditional conception of the proletariat as productive forces and finally, how we can collectively formulate an analysis of the crisis of capitalism in Lebanon as entangled with broader processes of the crises of late capitalism.
Dr. Chalak has earned his B.Sc. degree in Agriculture from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2000, and completed his M.Sc. in Tropical Agricultural Development at the University of Reading, UK, in 2001. He then went on to complete a Ph.D. in Applied Economics at Imperial College London, Wye Campus, UK, in 2008. Dr. Chalak worked in consulting in the UK between 2006 and 2009, where he was involved extensively in economics and customer research conducted for a variety of water and wastewater companies and other utility and infrastructure providers in the UK and Europe. Dr. Chalak joined the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at AUB as faculty member in 2009, and is currently Associate Professor of Applied Economics. His main research interests lie in the areas of agricultural and food economics, consumer and customer research, transportation economics, health policy and applied choice analysis. He remains actively engaged in independent economics consulting for both local and international clients from the private, public and voluntary sectors. Dr. Chalak’s research and consulting have yielded several publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Conversation with Nadia Bou Ali (Bicar-Beirut/AUB, LEB), Damir Arsenijević (Literary and Cultural Theorist/ University of Tuzla, B&H), Rohit Goel (Bicar-Bombay/Institute for Critical Analysis, Art, and Design, Bombay, IN) In English with Arabic translation
What can psychoanalysis offer to the analysis of civil war? Is there an alternative to the clinic of mourning in such context? And if so, what would the dismantling of the clinic of mourning look like? This panel discussion brings together two contexts, that of Bosnia and Lebanon, in order to consider the questions of civil war and its so-called post-war temporality.
The scandal of civil war: a psychoanalytic approach? is the third conversation of a joint event series on Critical Thought organized by Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR), Goethe-Institut Libanon and Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation – Beirut office
Previous to the public event at Goethe-Institut Libanon, there will be a closed workshop on the 19th of June from 4-7 pm on the topic taking place at Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation – Beirut Office. If you wish to participate in the closed workshop, please register to the following email extimaciesmellon@aub.edu.lb
Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research 