Central-European Institute of Philosophy. Presentation

Academic Conference Center Prague
Husova 4a, Prague 1

Tuesday June 28th 2016, 2 pm

Introduction by Karel Novotný, director of the Central-European Institute of Philosophy: the idea of the Institute, its historical inspiration, international activities – Erasmus Master Mundus study program on “German and French Philosophies in Europe” at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague

Presentation of the research activities of the Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences by the Department’s chair Petr Urban, the vice-director of the Central-European Institute of Philosophy. – Petr Urban will present the Department’s current shape, its main aims and research foci, its international projects and research partners. He will also mention several possibilities for young foreign researchers to spend a research stay at the Institute of Philosophy in Prague.

Lecture by Petr Kouba, the vice-chair of the Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy: Franz Kafka and minority report
Content: With the help of Deleuze and Guattari´s Kafka: toward a Minor Literature we will try to elucidate the role of stranger in Kafka´s stories and novels. To avoid psychoanalytic, theological and existential interpretations, we will emphasize the ethnological approach to social reality. This should bring us to the figure of outsider and to the specific outside that the outsider represents.

Lecture by Benjamin Kaiser, the vice-director of the Central-European Institute of Philosophy: Overwriting as artistic and political phenomenon. An analysis of Milan Kundera’s “Book of Laughter and Forgetting“
Content: This talk focusses on Milan Kundera’s novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (1979) as both an example for and a reflection on the practice of overwriting. For the book’s narrator, the practices of overwriting are to be found in the political, the private and the artistic field. Motivated trough remembrance and forgetting the characters of the book rewrite their personal and political history again and again, and on a meta level, the narrator does so as well in the practice of writing a novel itself.

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