On behalf of the Orient-Institut Beirut, the Center for Critical Humanities for the Liberal Arts (CHLA) of the American University of Beirut, and DIVAN – das Arabische Kulturhaus, we cordially invite you to the lecture

"Why are we moving in the opposite direction of perpetual peace?"

Speaker:

Dr. Oxana Timofeeva (Institute for Global Reconstitution, Berlin)

Discussants:

Prof. Dr. Jens Hanssen (Director, OIB)
Dr. Sami Khatib (Senior Research Associate, OIB)
 

Abstract

In his famous essay "Toward Perpetual Peace," Kant outlined a project for a future international political community, the idea of which was to put an end to the warfare as a destructive element of social life, once for all, and on the global scale. Today, when we are obviously moving in the opposite direction from Kant’s regulative idea of the perpetual peace, we can reconsider the general conditions of its possibility.

Bio

Oxana Timofeeva is a Senior Associate at the Institute of Global Reconstitution (IGRec, Berlin), a member of the artistic collective "Chto Delat" ("What is to be done"), and the author of the books Solar Politics (Polity 2022), How to Love a Homeland (Kayfa ta, 2020), History of Animals (Bloomsbury 2018), This is not That (in Russian, 2022), Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (in Russian, 2009), and other writings. Her new book Freud’s Beasty Boys (Matthes & Setz, Berlin; Polity) is forthcoming in 2025.

Date and place:
September 5, 2024, 5pm CET,  at Der DIVAN – das Arabische Kulturhaus, Schützallee 27-29, 14169 Berlin

This lecture is part of the lecture series (Ringvorlesung) “Kant and the Non-European: Critique, Justice and Freedom.”
The lecture can be attended on site in Berlin as well as online and in Beirut on AUB campus (details below).

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/2704787223?pwd=d0xTZytJWWpsU0FsbEhTZTRzZ1FRQT09&omn=96828771882
Meeting ID: 270 478 7223
Passcode: v2E1b9

If you plan to attend the streaming of the lecture in Beirut at the Center for Critical Humanities for the Liberal Arts (CHLA) of the American University of Beirut, please register by Monday, Sept 2, at Chla@dont-want-spam.aub.edu.lb to be able to access the campus. The streaming event takes place in Nicely 415 from 5:30-8:00pm (local time).

Lecture Series (Ringvorlesung) “Kant and the Non-European: Critique, Justice and Freedom”

On the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Königsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB) and the Center for Critical Humanities for the Liberal Arts (CHLA) of the American University of Beirut are organizing a series of lectures and panel discussions on key Kantian concepts, their legacies and circulations. The lecture series is scheduled for the entire academic year 2024-2025, on site in Beirut, Berlin, Cairo, and online.

Kant is widely considered to be the key figure of modern continental philosophy, giving rise to the notion of subjectivity and departing from a medieval worldview of non-scientific metaphysics based on theology. Kant’s famous “Copernican turn” and his claim on objective validity of subjective cognition still inform the philosophical discourse of the 21st century. Kant coined the concept of critique and made it the key term of his critical philosophy, conceiving critique as a positive activity of inquiry and reasoning.

We are interested in more recent accounts of Kant’s limited, i.e. Eurocentric, notion of universality and how historical and epistemic limitations of his age are ingrained in his notions of anthropology, history and teleological progress. At the same time, we discuss the radical potentials of some of his key concepts (e.g. sensus communis, public use of reason, aim of nature, radical evil), which resist their full historicization within the context of Enlightenment thought and early German Idealism.

Overall, this series of lectures and panels also attempts to bring the Kantian legacy of continental philosophy in conversation with modern Arabic intellectual history. Of particular interest is the Nahda, the period and project of cultural effervescence from the beginning of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. Depending on one’s interpretation, it represents the beginning of a still "unfinished" Arab drive for enlightenment and emancipation, or it marks the colonial end of an independent cultural development. Either way, the Nahda represents a kind of Archimedean point for Arab modernity on which truth claims about the Arab past and future have been balanced ever since.