Coordination: Amador Fernández-Savater
Date: October 9-10
Guests: Alain Badiou, Fernando Golvano, Joaquín Rodríguez, Kebir Sabar, Maggie Schmitt, Imanol Zubero
Production: Arteleku- Gipuzkoa Foru Aldundia, UNIA arteypensamiento
Collaboration: Archipiélago
It was the dream of workers’ internationals, civil rights movements, women’s movements, the dream of Mary Wollstonecraft, of Mijail Bakunin and of Martin Luther King. But there is a vast gap between this dream and the nightmarish pictures (so representative) on our televisions of the catastrophe in New Orleans, the border fences at Ceuta and Melilla, the 7 July attacks in London and the rioting in the French banlieues. It is a gap built of poverty, second and third class citizenships, denied rights, social relegation, discrimination based on gender and skin colour, nihilism, identitary fanaticism and racism, a gap arising from the savage ethnicisation of the (precarious) social question in globalisation. And it is this vast gulf which we want to plumb, to measure and to interrogate.
During 2006, UNIA arteypensamiento, Arteleku-Territorial Government of Gipuzkoa and the Archipiélago Editorial have joined forces to foster public debate on the best way of reinventing a new emancipating universalism today, at a time when the world is supposed to be becoming increasingly “one” as a result of the global market and yet the identitary temptation is casting an ever more powerful spell. Beyond a mere rhetorical and well-meaning statement of unexercised rights and a cultural relativism that ends up relativising the values of emancipation, can we identify an “us” that is not defined in opposition to a “them”? Is it possible to devise and create a form of politics that feeds off a love of commonality, viewed not as identity and abstraction, but as multiplicity and singularity? Can we fight for new rights of universal citizenship that are not inextricably tied up with the figure of the nation-state?
The first episode on this debate took place last May in Seville. The second will take the form of a three-part conversation with philosopher Alain Badiou: 1) on the problem of universalism today; 2) on its relationship with differences and singularities; 3) and, finally, on the question of the “emancipating us”, which is critical of every pre-established us.
Programe
Monday 9 OCTOBER
11:00 - 14:00h Alain Badiou. The problem of universalism today
19:00 - 22:00h Alain Badiou. Universalism and difference
Tuesday 10 OCTOBER
11:00 - 14:00h Alain Badiou. Universalism and equality
Counterpoints: Amador Fernández-Savater, Fernando Golvano, Joaquín Rodríguez, Kebir Sabar, Maggie Schmitt, Imanol Zubero.
