Join the Philosophy Association of UFV in welcoming their first guest speaker, Willow Verkerk — a feminist philosopher based in Vancouver — to discuss the work of philospher Jacques Derrida on The Politics of Friendship. Involving a discussion of love, death, and solidarity, Willow deals with the question of whether friendship with the dead is a possibility.
This event, while geared towards philosophy, is open to all students, faculty and alumni from UFV and other local institutions with an interest in philosophy and theory. Looking at philosophical thinkers Derrida, Nietzsche, Bataille, and Aristotle from a feminist perspective, Willow Verkerk and the Philosophy Association of UFV are excited to have you with us! food and drinks
Fri, Nov 8
2-6 pm
Abby A212
Food and drink provided.
Please RSVP if you can make it.
https://ufv.campuslabs.ca/engage/event/137239
For more information, contact Kyle Rehdner at 300119617@student.ufv.ca
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Willow Verkerk is a Philosophy Instructor at the University of British Columbia and an Associate at the Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser University. She was previously a Visiting Faculty member at the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking and a Lecturer in Modern European Philosophy at CRMEP, Kingston University. Her work has appeared in journals and essays collections such as Nietzsche-Studien, Radical Philosophy, philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, Philosophy and Literature, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy and The Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017). She is the author of Nietzsche and Friendship (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Willow will be presenting a discussion on the following:
A community for those without? Love, death and solidarity in Bataille, Nietzsche and Derrida
In On Nietzsche, Georges Bataille claims that he shares community with Friedrich Nietzsche. But, what kind of community does he share? Is it that of a friend or a lover, neither or, perhaps, both? To what extent do Bataille’s writings on communication qualify the kind of love he expresses to Nietzsche as a reader and re-writer of his texts? Born on 10 September 1897, three years before Nietzsche’s death, Bataille was one of the first to have claimed his place as Nietzsche’s posthumous friend. He was also one of the first to denounce the use of Nietzsche by the Nazis.
In the Politics of Friendship, Derrida quotes Bataille, suggesting that Bataille, like Nietzsche, is a friend of solitude, a celebrant of the free spirit, who pursues a “community of those without community.” Does this mean that Derrida recognizes Bataille as one of Nietzsche’s friends or a representation of the future philosopher that Nietzsche was searching for but could not find during his lifetime? This friend of the not yet comes to be very important for Derrida in his search to pin down a new relationship that would go beyond the “homo-fraternal and phallocentric schema.” By way of Derrida, this talk questions what Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche can reveal to us about the meaning of friendship and its relationship to death and solidarity.
11/08/2019