The next session -- organized together with Eyal Sivan -- on Friday-Saturday Dec 5th-6th is titled 'Writing and History',
The two day seminar will be dealing with two interrelated issues that we face as most members [still...] prepare for their upgrades: one seemingly practical – the problems of writing/organizing our theses, and the other about the place of history in the different works. From Shumon’s attempt to write a PhD as a fiction book through Sivan’s historiographical intervention in the ‘common archive’ to Anselm histories of the Soul, these issues arose recently in our discussions.

So, our guest, arriving from Paris, is the French editor/writer/medical doctor Eric Hazan (see some biographical details below). Also participating/contributing are Tom Penn – a historian and commissioning editor at Verso and Adrian Rifkin who is a professor at Goldsmiths’ and one of the founders of the new Art Writing Programme. Irit apologizes for not being able to attend this session...

Beyond a more “speculative” theoretical content of the seminar Eric, Adrian and Tom will also aim to address / respond to some methodological and practical issues relating to writing. For this reason it would be great if each member prepared a presentations of 10-15 minutes relating to issues/problems one has encountered while writing, and about the structure of upgrade text. More on this in TIMETABLE.

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This is what the New Left Review has had on Eric a few issues back:
Amid the intellectual murkiness of the European scene, a few bright flames are burning: as witness the work of Eric Hazan. Founder-director of Editions La Fabrique, since 1998 he has published a steady stream of radical and imaginative works, notably translations of dissident Israeli and Palestinian writings. Over the last six years he has produced four books of his own, among them L’Invention de Paris (2002), Chronique de la guerre civile (2004) and Changement de Propriétaire: La guerre civile continue (2007)—extracts from which are reproduced below. Hazan was born in Paris in 1936, and trained as a medical student. Briefly a young Communist militant, he broke with the Party in 1956—not over Hungary, but Algeria: a pcf that disavowed its Arab comrades, and expelled militants arrested for supporting the fln, was no longer the Party of the Resistance. Hazan joined a trickle of doctors in counter-flow to the mass exodus of French professionals from Algeria in 1962, working as village medic. In 1970 he helped form the Franco-Palestinian Medical Association and served as a volunteer doctor in a refugee camp outside Beirut. The shift to publishing came in 1983, when he took over his father’s art house, Editions Hazan; forced into a deal with Hachette 15 years later, he broke free to set up La Fabrique. A rare figure in France to speak out in trenchant terms—‘a duty as a Jew’—against the overwhelming official consensus on the Middle East, Hazan has eloquently analyzed the ways in which traditional French antisemitism, inadmissable after the collaboration with Nazism, has been ‘delegated’ to the descendants of the colonized, while traditional French racism has found new expression in attacking the latter for a media-inflated judeophobia. In his work, the metaphor of a ‘world civil war’, its frontlines everywhere, also takes concrete form in the state coercion of the banlieue, the slums, the imperial warzones. His writings assemble collages—fragments of time, scenes from the street—in an attempt to recompose the totality which the operations of the liberal-democratic media work to disperse. Hazan has described his programme as putting Rancière’s notion of ‘the equality of anyone with anyone’ into practice. The views of a singular internationalist, informed by a broad historical culture.

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TIMETABLE
Friday 5th December / Goldsmiths, main building, room RHB312
1030- lunch —
Eric Hazan: “how should we write today?”
Eric will talk about writing and politics, “publisher activism” from his perspective as a publisher using several texts [that we should read in advance]...

Karl Marx: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm
Read chapter I. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

Chapter 2 from Jacques Rancière, DISAGREEMENT (La Mésentente, 1995).
here: http://roundtable.kein.org/node/1072

And several other texts that his house: La Fabrique has commissioned and edited.

A good intro to Eric thought could also be found here:
Roads to Renegacy, Alain Badiou Interview by Eric Hazan
http://roundtable.kein.org/node/1071

Lunch-end of day
10-15 minutes [depending on how many we’ll be] presentations by each member. I think it would be good to keep the discussion as close as possible to issues/problems you have encountered during writing. Eric, Tom and Adrian are excellent editors and could help discuss issues of format, structure and narrative. I think that the discussion should lead to the use of history in your work – what conception of-, relation to- history drive your thesis.

Dinner:
Like others, I cant really take Lahore Kebab anymore – so I suggest that on the way back north we’ll stop at M&S to buy some basics we can have together at Sivan’s.

Saturday 6th December/ at FAT ltd / courtesy of Sam Jacobs.
Unit 2, 49-59 Old Street, EC1, t. 0207 251 6735
Bring your own brunch

1100am:
Shumon Basar – Histories of the Near Present/ Excerpts from a fiction in progress
Shumon is working on a book that is heroically and simultaneously fiction and architectural critique. But I think we could still identify the “fictional” characters... We also wants this to be his PhD... Can we help?

“The presentation deals with the question: in what way is the world constantly re-making itself in the 21st century, as its political, economic and —therefore — cultural fulcrum moves away from the West to the East. The current economic crisis has been labeled by some a ‘crisis of global capitalism’. But, perhaps, maybe it is more a symptom of the unfolding ‘crisis of the West’? Also, where reality renders itself a rendered version of fiction, is fiction the last legitimate way through which to understand the real? This is the problem I pose myself as a critic working today where Pamela Anderson is hired as an architect and George W Bush is labeled a 'Bolshevik' by fellow Republicans. Fiction happens to be the province of politics in our ‘times of terror’: as Donald Rumsfelds revealed in 2003, ‘there are unknown unknowns’—a statement as beautifully exacting as that of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, but a hundred-thousand times more deadly when practiced. If 'The World is Not Enough', then multiply it! Start again! Like monads (Leibniz) or spheres (Sloterdijk) or atoms (Houellebecq). How many is too many? How few is too few? How soon is now?”

No pre-reading required.

later:
Reading session with Adrian Rifkin 'What did Benjamin\s Angel of History see?' adrian says "Rather than write around this question I want to propose some images to fill this empty vision, all of which are ourselves being seen in history, looked at and made into historical ruin. I will lead with some clips from Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s Parsifal, 1982, to think about how what the Angel sees is us. I will think about our interiority and architecture as one of its phantasms." This is based on a collective reading session of “On the Concept of History” – Walter Benjamin’s 1940 classic blend of materialism, romanticism and messianic theology -- designed against fascism in politics and positivism in historiography. Although, for most, this must feel like a well known text, we will try to use it to picks and elaborate strands of ideas/images that are relevant to our session.
Find here: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
please read ahead of the session.