Essay Discussion: On the Emergence of Pigeon Towers
Surti Singh and Robin Weiss discuss their essays on the anchoring principles of play and ignorance from "On the emergence of Pigeon Towers" (CILAS, 2018) at CILAS in Darb el-Labbana, Fall 2017. The discussion was audio-recorded; Teun Dekker and I-Kai Jeng joined via Skype from the Netherlands and Taiwan.
Speakers
Surti Singh
Surti Singh is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo. She specializes in 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and Feminism. Her recent work explores issues in aesthetics from the vantage point of early critical theory; theories of the image and the imaginary within the framework of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and social theory; and feminist approaches to subjectivity. Her work has appeared in The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory: New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno (Rowman and Littlefield: 2015), New Forms of Revolt: Essays on Kristeva’s Intimate Politics (SUNY: 2017), and is forthcoming in Subjectivity and the Political (Routledge: 2017).
Robin Weiss
Robin Weiss received her Ph.D. from DePaul University, and taught most recently at Mount Allison University in Canada. She specializes in ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, and in Roman Stoicism in particular, where it relates to the connection between thought and action. She has written on how the Stoics understood practical, as opposed to theoretical, intelligence, and also how it was understood by their predecessor, Aristotle. Her interests extend to the differing ways in which this connection has been taken up by subsequent thinkers, who have variously described it—in the traditions of Continental Philosophy and American Pragmatism—as the connection between knowing and doing, truth and subjectivity, theory and praxis.
