13/05/2015, by CLAS

Internationally-renowned cultural theorist Luce Irigaray to speak at Nottingham Conference on Living and Speaking Together

The Conference

Luce Irigaray introduces the concepts behind the conference she is co-organising with CLAS head of school Judith Still:

Many imagine that building a world culture requires us to use a conceptual and abstract universal language which would be capable of dominating the complexity of the world as it is today. Certainly, this corresponds to the way of reasoning of our past Western tradition. However, the danger in which our planet, the plant and animal kingdoms, but also humanity itself, now find themselves ought to encourage us to reflect on the limitations of our tradition, and the fact that we should elaborate another and different culture, which returns to what I term ‘our natural belonging’, and consider how to cultivate this. In order to avoid the total annihilation of the world, we have to return, I argue, and begin again with, the real universal that life is, and not a universal that corresponds to a constructed model appropriate to only one culture. This requires us to discover another way of living and speaking together – with regard to the real differences between us – including differences in language.

The conference takes place on June 20-21 at Jubilee Campus. You can register to attend the conference here.

Luce Irigaray’s Postgraduate Seminars 2015

Luce Irigaray’s latest book, Building a New World, co-edited with the philosopher Michael Marder, also speaking at this conference, is coming out in June 2015. It deals with constructing interrelations between sexes and generations, between countries, cultures and traditions and brings together texts from the seminars she taught in Britain annually between 2006-2012. She will be running her postgraduate seminars here in CLAS on June 22-26. You can find out how to attend the seminars here.

Posted in French and Francophone Studies