PARIS, JUNE 14-15, 2018
École Normale Supérieure
MARGINS OF EUROPE
Borders Now
A CONFERENCE ORGANIZED BY PHILOSOPHY IN A TIME OF CRISIS
in association with:
ÉCOLE NORMALE SUPÉRIORE
THE UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
ACTUALITÉ CRITIQUE
INSTITUT FRANÇAIS
Faced with an increasing number of terrorist attacks, unprecedented waves of immigrants and refugees in search
of survival, or a better life, and the most severe economic crisis since 1929, Europe, which had done much to bring about peace and prosperity, build bridges between nations and cultures in the last fifty years, has reverted to putting up fences and walls, and to introducing or reinforcing mechanisms of social and economic exclusion. It is increasingly confronted with social tensions and political divisions that are a matter of deep concern. National-populisms are on the rise.
On 24 June 2016, and after a debate that focused almost exclusively on immigration, the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU, sending shock waves throughout the continent, and across the world. Is this the beginning of the end of Europe? Is it a test of its resilience? Or is it an opportunity to rethink its raison d’être, its identity, and its future? “Margins – of Europe” calls upon philosophers and philosophically minded scholars to engage with the European project through a series of key and critical issues.
Rationale
Rather than approach Europe as an Idea and in general terms, this conference will attempt to think through some of the key problems and challenges it faces – challenges and problems that, all too often, are used as evidence of its failure, and reasons to reject the very idea of a European project and responsibility. We want to approach those challenges, and the question of responsibility, by focusing on what happens at the margins of Europe, that is, in this space that is neither inside nor outside, or both inside and outside.
To begin with, we understand margins in a spatial, geographical sense, as indicating the borders and limits of Europe, as delimiting its territory and defining its sovereignty, as demarcating the national from the foreign, the “we” from the “them,” in an effort to understand what, today, is meant by security and territorial integrity, but also war, terror, and terrorism. Do borders today simply demarcate territories, or degrees of territoriality? Are they simply geographical, or geo-political, and do they simply require to be controlled where they demarcate sovereign spaces? Or do they cut across nation-states, and keep shifting, according to a new logic of ubiquity, and new security threats, which in turn transform our sense and experience of territory, sovereignty, and citizenship?
But we also understand margins in a socio-political and economic sense: we want to ask about those who, within Europe,
are systematically marginalised, dispossessed and excluded, and feel denigrated – those who live at the limit of the economic, imaginary and symbolic mechanisms of integration of the nation, at the limit of life itself. We plan to focus not on the citizen, but on the foreigner and the migrant; not on the national assembly, but on the refugee camp;
not on the worker, but on the unemployed, the poor, and the homeless; not on the agora, but on the street. In short, we plan to ask who we are, and what we could be, by examining those forms of social and political life that are damaged, those spectral forms of life that occupy a precarious position between life and (social as well as physical) death. Whilst included in the mechanism of power, they are excluded from the socio-symbolic formation of subjectivity; and in an age of security, their life is radically insecure. At once included and excluded, intolerable and ubiquitous, they haunt Europe and question its very existence.
Speakers
MIGUEL DE BEISTEGUI
GUILLAUME LE BLANC
JOSEPH COHEN
THOMAS NAIL
AMEDEO POLICANTE
JUDITH REVEL
JELICA ŠUMIČ RIHA
MARTINA TAZZIOLI
FRÉDÉRIC WORMS
SANTIAGO ZABALA
RAPHAËL ZAGURLY-ORLY
Programme
Thursday, 14th of June, 2018
ENS, Salle Dussane, 45 rue d’Ulm
9.30 – FRÉDÉRIC WORMS AND MIGUEL DE BEISTEGUI
Welcome and Opening Address
10.00 - JUDITH REVEL
Vieilles frontières, nouvelles temporalités politiques
11.00 - COFFEE BREAK
11.15 - JOSEPH COHEN and RAPHAËL ZAGURLY-ORLY
Aux marges de l’Europe - Le nihilisme.
12.15 - SANTIAGO ZABALA
Being Thrust into the Absence of Emergency: Art for Framed Democracies
13.15 - LUNCH
Bistro Mauzac, 7 Rue de l'Abbé de l'Épée, 75005 Paris, France
14.45-15.45 - MARTINA TAZZIOLI
"Keeping on the move without letting pass": unruly mobility and data circuits at the borders of Europe
*
EVENING AT THE ENTREPÔT
18:30-20:00
Miguel de Beistegui in conversation with artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, and documentary film maker Samuel Bollendorff, whose film La Nuit tombe sur l'Europe will be screened at regular intervals
21:30
JULIEN ALLOUF
Musical performance by Julien Allouf / poem by Nâzim Hikmet.
**
FILM SCREENINGS
18:00 / Salle 1: Exodus: Our Journey to Europe by James Bluemel (2016)
Salle 2: Refuge by Matthew K. Firmo (2016)
Salle 3: Welcome by Philippe Lioret (2009)
20:00 / Salle 1: Le Havre by Aki Karismäki (2011)
Salle 2: Bienvenus by Rune Denstad Langlo (2016)
Salle 3: Fuocoammare by Gianfranco Rosi (2016)
22:00 / Salle 1: Frost by Sharunas Bartas (2018)
Salle 2: L’héroïque lande – La frontière brûle by Elisabeth Perceval and Nicolas Klotz (2016)
Salle 3: Boza by Wallid Fellah (2017)
Friday, 15th of June, 2018
Salle Jaurès, 29 rue d’Ulm [entrance also from 14 rue Lhomond]
10.30 - THOMAS NAIL
Moving Borders
11.30 - AMEDEO POLICANTE
Marginal Lives
12:30 - LUNCH
Bistro Mauzac, 7 Rue de l'Abbé de l'Épée, 75005 Paris, France
14.00 - JELICA RIHA
Europe’s Dream Land and Its Frontier
15.00 - COFFEE BREAK
15.30-17.00 - CLOSING ROUND TABLE
in association with the "Réseau actualité critique européenne"
Intervenants : Przemysław Bursztyka, Institut de Philosophie, Université de Varsovie; Georges Faraklas, Université Panteion, Athènes; Ondrej Svec, Université Charles, Prague.
Répondants : D. Combe (Littérature, Directeur des relations internationales de l’ENS); F. Debié (Géographie et territoires, ENS, Parlement européen); M. Potte-Bonneville (Institut français); B. Wilfert (Historien, Département de sciences sociales, ENS); Frédéric Worms (Directeur du Centre international d’étude de la philosophie française contemporaine, ENS).
*
EVENING AT THE ENTREPÔT
18:30-20:00
Film-makers Claire Denis and Laurent Cantet in conversation with Frédéric Worms
22:00
BREIDJING AU TCHAD
A film by Claire Denis
***
FILM SCREENINGS
18:00/ Salle 1: La Pirogue by Moussa Tourè (2012)
Salle 2: Human Flow by Ai Wei Wei (2016)
Salle 3: L’Ordre des choses by Andrea Segre (2017)
20:00/ Salle 1: It’s a Free World by Ken Loach (2007)
Salle 2: Burj El Barajneh au Liban by Agnès Merlet (2014)
Salle 3: Kawergosk en Irak by Pierre Scheller (2016)
22:00/ Salle 1: De l’autre côté de l’espoir by Aki Kaurismäki (2017)
Salle 2: Calais et Grande-Synthe en France by Yoland Mereu
Salle 3: Breidjing au Tchad by Claire Denis (2014)
