morale provisoire discussion #5. Lorenzo Chiesa: The Partisan's Morale Provisoire

 

 

14 December 10

 

 

7 pm

In this lecture, Lorenzo Chiesa intends to outline the way in which the subjective figure of the partisan makes it possible to think a zone of indetermination between provisional morality and radical politics. Through the partisan, at moments when fidelity to a revolutionary event is suspended and the subject is reduced to just one resistant ‘point' of choice, the quest for the universalism of indeterminacy-that is, equality-is preserved in the political few, if not the one. The universalism of the partisan could be regarded as a humanism of impossibility, which is not a humanism of finitude.

Lorenzo Chiesa is Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory at the University of Kent (UK) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana. He is the author of Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (MIT Press, 2007), The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (Re.press, 2009, ed. with A. Toscano), and published extensively on contemporary French and Italian thought. He translated Slavoj Žižek's The Ticklish Subject into Italian and recently completed the English translation of Giorgio Agamben's Il regno e la gloria.
Following the lecture, there will be a talk with Lorenzo Chiesa, Frank Ruda and Jan Völker. The event will be held in English. Admission is free.

morale provisoire discussion series
Descartes gives the example of the travelers who got lost in the woods. In order not to remain in the same spot or lose their bearings they need a "morale par provision" to guide their steps. A "morale provisoire" is a determined attempt to follow a direction, it approaches thinking in terms of guiding principles for the practice.

The series morale provisoire is set against the libertarians, liberals, sophists and social chauvinists of our times and intends to bring together guiding interventions for theory and practice. The series aims at a new courage of thinking which approves of the impossible, the infinite, the same and the illegitimate.
The discussion series morale provisoire at KW Institute for Contemporary Art accompanies and supplements a book series of the same title published by Merve Verlag and edited by Frank Ruda and Jan Völker. In conjunction with the publishing house and the editors the discussion series dedicates itself to regularly bringing together orientations in terms of science, politics, art and love in order to assess how these are committed to the field of philosophy.
Project management KW Institute for Contemporary Art: Anke Schleper