We are excited to announce the visit of Patrice Maniglier as a part of our “May 68 Week Celebration”.
Patrice Maniglier is Maître de Conférences at the Philosophy Department of Paris Nanterre University (Paris, France). A former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), he was a Lecturer at the University of Essex (UK) before joining Nanterre. He defends both a historical reinterpretation and a contemporary reactivation of structuralism in social science (esp. linguistics and anthropology, with Saussure and Lévi-Strauss) as well as in philosophy. He defends the idea that the Saussurian concept of ‘the sign’ defines not an instrument of communication but a particular mode of being, which requires a strong metaphysical elaboration. He has written on Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, Latour. He is the author of La Vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme (Paris : Léo Scheer, 2006), Le Vocabulaire de Lévi-Strauss (Paris : Ellipses, 2002), Matrix Machine Philosophique (Paris : Ellipses, 2003), Foucault va au cinéma (Paris : Bayard, 2011). He has edited Le Moment philosophique des années soixante en France (Paris : PUF, 2011) and is one of the co-editors of the series « MétaphysiqueS » (Presses Universitaires de France). Most of his publications can be found at https://u-paris10.academia.edu/PatriceManiglier
Professor Maniglier will be teaching a mini-seminar entitled “Structuralism and its Discontents: A Suspended Legacy”
Structuralism is, for the memory we have of the intellectual movements of the past century, a bit like the kettle in Freud's joke: it is said firstly to have never existed, secondly to have been all wrong, and thirdly to tell us frightening things about us that we'd better forget. After the fad of "poststructuralism", "speculative realism" as well as new versions of "pragmatism" both define themselves by its rejection and try to convince us that there is nothing to look at in there. The seminar will encourage, in contradistinction, a closer inquiry about what "structuralism" was all about by getting back to Saussure's and Lévi-Strauss's texts, emphasizing their philosophical and even metaphysical implications, which shed a useful light on contemporary problems in philosophy and more general in theory.
Please rsvp at jeanne.etelain@nyu.edu. The seminar is open to faculty members and graduate students. Suggested texts will be made available.
Patrice Maniglier will also give a public lecture at la Maison Française on May 1st at 7pm entitled “Mai 68 in Theory”. More information can be found here: http://as.nyu.edu/maisonfrancaise/events/2018/may-68-in-theory.html
Hope to see you there!
Co-sponsored by the Departments of Comparative Literature; French Literature, Thought, and Culture; Media, Culture, and Communication; the Institute of French Studies; and the Graduate School of Arts and Science