QUILTING POINTS:

We're delighted to announce that Sara Ahmed will be joining us for a special event at the University of Leeds on Friday 11th May. Further details & information on booking will be released in the new year but in the meantime, save the date!

For our fifth and final session of this semester, we will be reading a section from the second chapter of Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness (2010), entitled 'Feminist Killjoys.' A PDF is accessible here . For further reading on the figure of the   killjoy we suggest the essay 'Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)' which is available  here .  The Promise of Happiness highlights how the killjoy emerges in relation to many of the figures who populate Ahmed's arguments, responding to the conditions of other affect aliens and contesting the idea of happiness itself. As Ahmed explains 't he feminist killjoy ‘spoils’ the happiness of others; she is a spoilsport because she refuses to convene, to assemble or to meet up over happiness' (65). Our reading for this week allows us to reflect upon many of our discussions and themes from semester one, raising important considerations of happy objects, willful subjects and much more.  The figure of ...

For our fourth session, we will be discussing Sara Ahmed's concept of 'the alien' through a reading of her essay 'Happy Objects,' collected in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth's The Affect Theory Reader (2010) and republished under the same title in Ahmed's book, The Promise of Happiness (2009). A PDF is available via Google Drive  here . (Secondary reading: Ahmed's post, 'Smile!' which appeared on her blog feministkilljoys in February 2017 - accessible here ). In 'Happy Objects,' Ahmed conceptualises affects as "sticky" insofar as 'affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values and objects' (29). She considers how, in the process of being affected, different affects are transferred onto particular objects and make such objects the arbiters of particular feelings. This is to say, an object that makes one feels good affectively is affectively transformed into a goo...

For our third session, we will be reading the first chapter of Sara Ahmed's Willful Subjects (2014), entitled 'Willing Subjects.' A PDF is accessible via Google Drive here . (Secondary reading: a blog post by Sara Ahmed on feministkilljoys, entitled 'Willful Stones,' accessible here ). In 'Willing Subjects,' Ahmed is interested in fundamentally redefining "will" as not that which is behind action but, rather, 'an object of thought' and a 'mode of experience' that may or may not predicate an action (25). She construes the relationship between the potentiality of "willing" and the effects of "willing" in Lacanian terms as a split between 'the subject of enunciation and the subject of the énoncé ' whereby '[t]he will appears on both sides of the address, on the side of the subject and the object: who is willing, what is willed ' (27; original emphasis). To the extent that the willing subject is...

For our second session (Tuesday 17th October), we will be reading the first chapter of Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion  (2004), entitled 'The Contingency of Pain.' A PDF is accessible via Google Drive here . [Seconding reading: Susan Sontag's 'Photojournalism - social aspects' from Regarding the Pain of Others  (2003). A PDF is accessible via Google Drive here ]. In 'The Contingency of Pain,' Ahmed explores how bodies register pain psycho-somatically as well as through discourse. She is especially interested in how we discourse pain (i.e. by attaching pain to particular objects or by narrating the arrival of pain) in order to form our bodies as 'perceiving surface[s]' (Ahmed, 26) and instantiate our being in-the-world. In 'Photojournalism - social aspects' (2003), Sontag shares with Ahmed an interest in 'the sociality of pain' (Ahmed, 28); both are concerned with the act of witnessing. In striking semblance...

For our first session, we will be discussing the second chapter of Sara Ahmed's second monograph, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000). A PDF is accessible via Google Drive here . (Further reading: Audre Lorde's essay 'Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger*' from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches which Sara Ahmed uses as an epigraph to 'Embodying Strangers.' A PDF is accessible via Google Drive here ). In 'Embodying Strangers,' Ahmed crystallises how 'the stranger' comes into being through a visual and tactile economy. The essay deals with construction of the stranger as, following Georg Simmel, both far and near (see Simmel, 1950, p.402), as well as the significance of touch and contact in the formation of relations of strangeness. Event details: Tuesday 3rd October, 5pm-6:30pm, LHRI, Room 1. All welcome!

Quilting Points returns for a sixth year with a new focus on Sara Ahmed. We’re delighted to announce the return of Quilting Points, an interdisciplinary, critical and cultural reading group and seminar series at the University of Leeds. This year we'll be facilitating a year-long discussion on the work of Sara Ahmed, one of the most prolific and influential contemporary thinkers currently working in the UK. Examining her monographs, essays and  blog entries  we'll look at how Ahmed has shaped the fields of postcolonial studies, feminism, queer theory, ethic studies and critical race theory. As an independent scholar and writer who scrutinises the operations of power in every day life, as well as institutions like the university, Ahmed's critical and intellectual range only looks set to widen in the future. As a group, we're looking forward to discussing and reading Ahmed while her critical project is still ongoing and we welcome individuals from across the universit...

To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around if, the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition For our final session of the year, and our final session looking at Hannah Arendt, we will we be screening the 1964 interview between her and Günter Gaus, shown on  Zur Person / The Person . Then, to celebrate our year with Arendt we will do one of her favourite things - sit around a table (and eat!). During   Zur Person , Arendt discusses her relationship to philosophy, politics and her gender. Watching it gives us a rare chance to hear Arendt candidly answering questions about her political theory. Following the screening, we will walk down to award-winning Kerala restaurant,   Tharavadu , for an end of year meal. If you wish to come to the meal, please RSVP by ...

To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind For our penultimate session we will be discussing Arendt's final and lesser-known work, The Life of the Mind . The Life of the Mind is a challenging text in which Arendt seeks to redefine three mental activities: thinking, willing and judging. Although she doesn't quite manage to explicate the relationship between mental activities and action, The Life of the Mind provides a foundation for later theorists who have (including Julia Kristeva). It also offers important insights into the relationship between the individual mind and reality, answering back to Kant and Hegel. We will be focusing on a section of the book that achieves all of the above...

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade. Hannah Arendt, 'Civil Disobedience' The refugee who can take only her experience with her when all else has been lost [...] is the model of a resisting and resistant subjectivity. Lyndsey Stonebridge, ' The Inner emigration: on the run with Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud ' We are delighted to announce that our next session will be led by a special guest, Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge , and will focus on Arendt's essays 'Civil Disobedience' and 'Humanity in Dark Times'. Lyndsey is renowned for her work on human rights, Hannah Arendt and, more recently, law. She has published extensively on Arendt and the status of the refugee, and recently appeared on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time . With Lyndsey, we will discuss the themes of civil disobedience and the law, m...

When we talk about lying […] let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear. –––Arendt, 'Lying in Politics' The ultimate aim was neither power nor profit […] The goal now was the image itself. ––– I bid. In what promises to be an excruciatingly topical session, we'll be reading Arendt's 'Lying in Politics' next week, with Derrida's 'History of the Lie' as secondary material. Arendt's essay responds to the 'Pentagon Papers' , the U.S. Department of Defence's report on their involvement in the Vietnam and Korean Wars. These papers were leaked by T he New York Times amidst the furore of the Watergate scandal; they exposed 'the extravagant lengths to which the commitment to nontruthfulness in politics went on at the highest levels of government' (Arendt, 4). The response we find in 'Lying in Po...

Before drawing up the constitution of a new body politic, we shall have to create – –not merely discover – –a new foundation for human community as such. – – –Hannah Arendt, concluding remarks to The Origins of Totalitarianism For our next session we will be joined by Patrick Hayden, Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at St Andrews, who will  present his paper "The Heart of Politics: Amor Mundi and Human Plurality" .  Prof. Hayden has published widely on Arendt, including: a monograph,  Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory (2010), an edited collection,  Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts (2014), and numerous articles and chapters, the most recent of which explores Arendt, refugees, and world-making. Hayden's other publications include  Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought: Between Despair and Hope (2016) and the co-authored  Recognition and Global Politics: Critical Encounters between State a...

 E ven if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the … achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed … The “victorious” Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defence to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities. — Hannah   Arendt, 'To Save the Jewish Homeland' In this session we will explore excerpts from Arendt's so-called 'Jewish writings'. Starting with her incendiary essays from the early 1940s, we will trace her development of ideas about the struggle for Jewish emancipation, culminating in the prophetic 'To Save the Jewish Homeland'. These writings bring out some of the questions of political violence and revolution that we have examined in previous sessions. They also document Arendt's views regarding Jewish nationalism as well as the Israel and Palestine conflict (which, by the time of 'To Save the Jewish ...

No one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs. — Hannah Arendt,   On Violence Arendt’s dismissal of African histories, literatures, and languages as nonexistent subjects is troubling. [...] She presents Blacks as trapped in a dream world of escapism and suffering from irrational rage, while desribing a "potentially" violent backlash from the white community as perfectly rational. And as with her analysis of the violence of imperialism/colonialism and the violence of decolonisation, Arendt is far less condemning ofthe oppressors' offensive violence than she is of the defensive violence of the oppressed. —Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question Hannah Arendt's On Violence (1970)   is a short but multifaceted text. Pitched as a direct response to the events and debates of the 1960s, Arendt's reflections set out to critique the  escalating civil right...

'In a constellation that poses the threat of total annihilation through war against the hope for emancipation of all mankind through revolution [...] no cause is left but the most ancient of all [...] the cause of freedom versus tyranny.’ Hannah Arendt, On Revolution In our next session we'll be grappling with "The Meaning of Revolution". We'll explore Arendt's challenge to  the Marxist idealisation of the French Revolution, and her argument that we should take inspiration from America instead. Here, Arendt brings her conceptions of freedom and political action to bear, and proposes revolutionary constitutionalism as the means for emancipation. Is this the answer to the question, 'what happens the day after the revolution'?  Where? LHRI, Seminar room 1 When? Thursday, 2nd Feburary, 5-7pm Primary reading: "The Meaning of Revolution", from On Revolution . PDF here .

In the Jewish tradition there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough, which we know as Ahabath Israel : "Love of the Jewish people..." In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German Left, I find little trace of this. [...] Would there not have been a place [in Eichmann in Jerusalem ] for what I can only describe with that modest German word  – " Herzenstakt "? – – – Gershom Scholem, Letter to Hannah Arendt, June 23 1963 At stake in Arendt’s tactlessness [...] is a crucial, although often unacknowledged strand in her thought as a whole, namely the issue of the relation between politics and feeling.  – – – Simon Swift, 'Hannah Arendt's Tactlessness' Our first session of 2017 will be run by guest speaker Simon Swift, director of the Northern Theory School and Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Geneva . Simon has published extensively on Hannah Arendt - from articles such as  ...