“Today the voyou [rogue] sometimes roams the roadways [voies] and highways [voiries] in a car [voiture], that is, when he or she is not stealing it or setting it on fire. Voyous might also, on an international scale, and this gets us right into the problematic of rogue states, be involved in drug trafficking, in parasiting, or actually subverting, as terrorists in training, the pathways of normal communication [voies], whether of airplanes, the telephone, e-mail, or the Web. In a word, of cyberspace.” —Jacques Derrida, "The Rogue That I Am"
Slought Foundation is pleased to announce that Catherine Liu will be the first recipient of the annual Slought Foundation Award for Rogue Thought. An award ceremony and public conversation will take place on Friday, December 29, 2006 from 6:30-8:00pm. A reception for the Philadelphia launch of Rrrevolutionnaire: Conversations in Theory, Vol. 1, a new collection of critical theory conversations from Slought Books, with an afterword by Catherine Liu, will take place immediately afterward. This is a "no strings attached" award in support of people, not projects. The recipient will receive a complete set of our past publications, as well as an original work of art signed by the artist from the Slought Foundation collection. Marjorie Perloff, President of the Modern Languages Association and Professor Emerita of English literature at Stanford University, will preside over the award ceremony, with Avital Ronell, Professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature at New York University, presenting the award to Catherine Liu, as well as an honorable mention to Laurence Rickels, on behalf of Slought Foundation.
A public conversation about this award and other forms of prestige and accreditation will take place immediately following the announcement of this year's recipient. Jim English, Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, will join Marjorie Perloff and Catherine Liu of the University of California, Irvine and the winner of this year's Award for Rogue Thought in a consideration of Pierre Bourdieu’s challenge “to extend economic calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular formation–which may be ‘fair words’ or smiles, handshakes or shrugs, compliments or attention, challenges or insults, honour or honours, powers or pleasures, gossip or scientific information, distinction or distinctions, etc.” The conversation will also feature remarks by Gregg Lambert of Syracuse University, and Gregory Flaxman of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The evening's proceedings will be introduced by Aaron Levy, Executive Director of Slought Foundation, and the discussion will be moderated by both Aaron Levy and Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation.
This event has been organized in conjunction with the 122nd annual convention of the Modern Languages Association (MLA), from December 27-30, 2006 in Philadelphia (http://www.mla.org/convention for more information). This year’s inaugural award will honor Catherine Liu, an academic theorist whose work is noted for exceptional creative and intellectual integrity, yet who plausibly remains a rogue practitioner working across various genres and media. The Award for Rogue Thought celebrates work that is still not altogether accepted as conventional “scholarship” or “research,” or even as art. (Here for more information)
The Award for Rogue Thought has been conceived as a critique of the too-friendly mutuality of the contemporary prize economy, exemplified by the Tate Modern’s Turner Prize and the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program. At the same time, the award also attempts to suggest the possibility of an alternative, and is founded on the belief that the vitality of the arts and humanities today—and especially tomorrow—is dependent upon the ability of cultural and intellectual communities to imagine new futures for contemporary life. Although the recipient is being celebrated for her past achievements, the award is also an investment in the recipient’s originality, insight, and potential. The recipient may be a writer, scientist, artist, social scientist, humanist, teacher, entrepreneur, or those in other fields, with or without institutional or academic affiliations.
Jim English, author of The Economy of Prestige:
“The tension between the ever more complete and intimate way that prizes have come to occupy the fields of our cultural activity, and their continuous capacity to provoke our feelings of alienation or repulsion, is a complex one, which the Award for Rogue Thought seeks to explore in a number of different ways. It involves fundamentally the question of art’s relationships to money, to politics, to the social and temporal. It involves questions of power, of what constitutes specifically cultural power, how this form of power is situated in relation to other forms, and how its particular logic and mode of operation have changed over the course of the modern period. It involves questions of cultural status or prestige. How is such prestige produced, and where does it reside? (In people? In things? In relationships between people and things?) What rules govern its circulation? It involves, indeed, questions about the very nature of our individual and collective investment in art – questions of recognition and illusion, belief, and make-belief, desire and refusal.”
Catherine Liu is a co-director of the Arts and Humanities Undergraduate Major and teaches in Comparative Literature and in Film and Media / Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has published on psychoanalytic theory, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, museums, modernity and is presently completing a polemic against cultural studies and academic populism tentatively entitled Redeeming Reason in the Age of Aquarius: Astrology, Celebrity, Conspiracy.
Marjorie Perloff is a poetry critic, Professor Emerita of English literature at Stanford University, and the current President of the Modern Languages Association (MLA). Over the course of her career, she has distinguished herself as one of the foremost American literary critics and has authored over twelve books and a few hundred essays and reviews on twentieth century poetry and poetics, both Modern and Postmodern, as well as on poetry and the visual arts. Her book, Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy, was the co-winner of the 2004 Brooks-Warren Award for Literary Criticism and received Honorable Mention for the Dedalus Foundation's annual Robert Motherwell Book Award. Perloff has received Guggenheim and NEH Senior Fellowships, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Jim English is Professor of English and Chair of the Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his MA from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Stanford, specializing in modernist and postmodernist British fiction. His more recent work focuses on the sociology of literature and especially on its institutional and transnational dimensions. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard UP) was named Best Academic Book of 2005 by New York Magazine.
Jean-Michel Rabaté, a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation, is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and has authored or edited twenty books on Modernism, Bernard, Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Lacan, Derrida, psychoanalysis and literary theory.
Avital Ronell is Professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature at New York University, where she taught an annual fall semester seminar with Jacques Derrida. She studied with Hélène Cixous in Paris, and has published widely on German and French literature and philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
Gregg Lambert is Professor and Chair of English at Syracuse University, and has written and published on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, contemporary literary theory, aesthetics, and the fate of the Humanities' disciplines in the contemporary university.
Gregory Flaxman is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The editor of Brain and the Screen, he is currently at work on two books: The Undiscovered Country: A Philosophy of the Western (with Gregg Lambert), and a treatment of the subject of lying in art and philosophy.
Aaron Levy is the founding Executive Director and a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the co-editor, with Gregg Lambert, of Rrrevolutionnaire: Conversations in Theory, Vol. 1 (Slought Books, 2006).
Laurence Rickels is a Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of a series of books including
The Vampire Lectures (1999) and his three-volume study, Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002). In addition, Rickels is both a theorist and psychotherapist, and, in the art world setting, a regular contributor to Artforum, Art + Text, and Flash Art, and an editor of ArtUS.
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