Fall 2017

6/13 | REVOLT: FOUCAULT IN IRAN

Exactly one year ago, thousands of people erected an ephemeral wall of post-its throughout the burrow-like hallways of 14th Street Subway station. Hundreds of thousands of colorful messages were written, put up, memorialized, photographed, touched, read, and cried upon --right before falling down the floor, only to be replaced with new post-its. They conveyed a little bit of fear, a little bit of hope, and, above all, things that we should remember before they become normalized: messages about gender and race equality, about police brutality, about values we hold dear that suddenly became endangered. The post-its have no theory, they have no space, they are part of the bodies of those who wrote it while they were walking through those dark passageways. Remembering, writing, being in contact with those reminders --this is also one of the modalities of uprising. As part of the 13/13 project on Uprising, these pictures want to convey that ephemeral moment: they are, also, fragmentary reminders of something that cannot be lost for history.

5/13 | SATYAGRAHA

4/13 | #BLACKLIVESMATTER

3/13 | UPRISING

For Uprising 2/13, the CCCCT is curating a festival of Mao that will culminate in the second seminar on October 5th at 6:15pm with Claire Fontaine, Claudia Pozzana, and Alessandro Russo, moderated by Bernard E. Harcourt, Jeremy Kessler, and Jesús Velasco. A Reader's Companion to the readings for the seminar is available, as are all the readings. We will be focusing the discussion on Mao's thought and writings about insurgency and the Cultural Revolution, as well as his influence and legacy on the 1960s and 70s, and contemporary uptakes of his thought today. The purpose of this seminar series is to explore various modalities of uprising, disobedience, inservitude, revolt, or other forms of political contestation. Instead of including them all under the name of “revolution”—a term that has become conceptually and historically fraught—the seminar will consider how specific experiences and discourses articulate new forms of upheaval or reformulate well-known ones. By focusing on this conceptual, historical and political problematic, we intend to shine a light on experiences and manifestations that take place at the local and at the global level, as well as at the subjective and the collective level. The idea is to articulate how critical political practice is expressed and understood today.

1/13 | THE MODERN CONCEPT OF REVOLUTION