Delivered in Polish
We are pleased to invite you to a lecture given by Dr. Jan Sowa, entitled “In search of a common denominator. Is there room for universalism in the modern world?”.
Moments after the French post-structuralist philosophers proclaimed the end of man and the death of the subject (Derrida, Foucault), human causality returned unexpectedly and disturbingly in the form of the Anthropocene. It has become obvious that we are the perpetrators of a profound disruption of the ecosystem, and by our actions we are endangering not only ourselves, but also the future of human civilization and life on Earth as we know it.
It would seem logical that countering the grim consequences of our collective actions would require a collective effort on a global scale, for that alone can stop climate change. Ironically, however, the death of the subject has led not at all to the affirmation of the commons and the construction of a new universalism, but rather to an incredible proliferation of identities that complicates the construction of any common platform for global action. As if this were not enough, universalism itself has been discredited as a post-colonial legacy of Western phallogocentrism - a tool of domination used exclusively by male agents of colonial empires to discredit and erase subaltern cultural traditions. The link between universalism and the equally criticized Enlightenment makes matters even worse.
Thus, universalism appears to be both necessary and impossible. Is there a place for it in the modern world? Can we reconstruct universalism without returning to the justly discredited pattern of European colonial domination? In his lecture, Jan Sowa will try to outline potential answers to these questions, proposing to define a new universalism based on materialism and critical conceptualizations of class divisions in contemporary capitalism.
Jan Sowa is a materialist-dialectical social theorist and researcher. He studied literature, psychology and philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the University of Paris VIII in Saint-Denis, France. He holds a doctorate in sociology and a habilitation in cultural studies. He has conducted research and taught at a number of institutions in Poland, including the University of São Paulo, Jagiellonian University, Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne and the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. He was a member of the Committee on Cultural Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2015-2019) and curator of the discursive and research program of the Warsaw Biennale (2018-2019). He currently works as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Jan Sowa is the author and editor of more than a dozen books and articles, including such titles as: The Phantom Body of the King, Another Republic is Possible, Sport Doesn't Exist (together with Krzysztof Wolanski) and Perverse Decolonization? (together with Ekaterina Degot and David Riff).
The meeting is scheduled for 90 minutes, of which 60 minutes will be spent in lecture, and the rest of the time will be used for questions and discussion.