Gratuitous Violence & Free Will in a Nihilistic Age

The Lisbon Nietzsche Group and the Art of Living Research Group warmly invite you to attend the upcoming International Conference on Gratuitous Violence & Free Will in a Nihilistic Age (with a subsection on J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace), which shall take place at NOVA/FCSH, on September 19-20, in room Multiusos 2, ID Building (4th floor).

Not always were philosophical debates on the nature of free will related to issues of violence or imbalanced action. Massive progress in industrialization and technology, however, aligned with an increasing secularism lashing Europe from the second half of the nineteenth-century onwards, opened the way for an intellectual debate on the existence of – or even the meaningfulness, and meaningful social reliance upon – any set of a-temporal values and norms.

In the high rank of intellectual discussion in the Old Continent, that skepticism came to be called ‘nihilism’. With the benefit of historical hindsight, we may think that such a threat to shared social values would end up in bouts of extreme violence, masterfully depicted in European Fiction and soon to creep to the level of international politics.

The Organizers:

Ana Falcato, Paolo Stellino, Luís Aguiar de Sousa

PROGRAMME

September 19

9:30-10:00 Registration and Welcome

10:00-11:00 Plenary Talk: Christopher Janaway (University of Southampton), Nihilism and Negation in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

11:00-11:30 Coffee Break

11:30-13:00 Papers (Section: Historic and Philosophic Approaches to Violence and Free Will)

Luís de Sousa (New University of Lisbon), Nietzsche on Cruelty and Free Will
Jakub Nikodem (University of Warsaw), Gratuitous Violence as a Manifestation of Power: Understanding Violence with Hegel and Benjamin
Boris Lezaja (University of Erfurt), Heteronomy & Violence: Sartre’s Ontology of Violence in the Context of his Social Phenomenology

13:00-14:30 Lunch Break

14:30-15:30 Papers (Section: Violence and the State)

Nathalie Cadena (Juiz de Fora Federal University), Brasil, um ambiente de violência gratuita
Gregory Esheya (Nnamdi Azikiwe University), The Nigerian State and the Challenge of Terrorism
Gianfranco Ferraro (New University of Lisbon), A violência mafiosa como forma de vida: uma abordagem foucaultiana

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-17:30 Papers (Section: Violence and the Moving Images)

Liliana Rosa (New University of Lisbon), A violência no cinema de Michael Haneke
Isabel Sargento (New University of Lisbon), Violência Gratuita em “Fight Club” e em “Salò ou os 120 dias de Sodoma”
Paolo Stellino (New University of Lisbon), Aestheticizing Murder. Hitchcock’s Rope and the Alleged Right to Crime of Superior Individuals

17:30-18:30 Plenary Talk: Luca Lupo (University of Calabria), 'To Rub One's Boots over with Its Victims Fat' - Conscious and Unconscious Violence

September 20

9:00–10:00 Plenary Talk: Edmilson Paschoal (Paraná Federal University), Esquecimento ou amnésia? Paradoxos da memória e da justiça

10:00-11:30 Papers (Section: Violence and Fiction)

Rita Sousa Lobo (Psychologist and Psychotherapist, Lisbon), Os grupos kafkianos
Marco Piazza (Roma Tre University), Violence, Evil, and Free Will: Guimarães Rosa’s Reading of Nietzsche

Sara Teles Varela (New University of Lisbon), Bernardo Soares: entre o Tédio, o Desassossego e a Violência Gratuita 11:30 – 12:00 Coffee Break

12:00 – 13:00 Plenary Talk:: Gabriel Albiac (Complutense University of Madrid), Sujeitos sem sentido: De Mersault a Lurie

13:00-14:30 Lunch Break

14:30-16:00 Papers (Section: Violence and Fiction)

Julia Okolowicz (University of Warsaw), God as “A Simple White Butterfly”: Liberation and the Nature of Evil in Anna Maria Ortese’s “The Iguana”
Kristin Hreror (Seoul National University), Discipline, Punish, and…? Gratuitous Violence as Identity Affirmation
Ana Falcato (New University of Lisbon), An Ambiguous Barbarism: the Writer’s High-Hand in chapter 11 of Disgrace

16:00-16:30 Coffee Break

16:30-17:30 Plenary Talk: David Attwell (University of York), “‘Blind Force and Mute Suffering’: Gratuitous Violence, Representation, and Aesthetic Hazard in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Its Afterlives”.