Thursday, November 17: Italy Made! Passions & Projects
2011 is the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy. To be Italian is not easy. We are torn between the legacy of the Roman and Christian Empire, the long-lasting fragmentation of provinces and city-states, the memory of fascism, the European vocation, and the fabric of a civil society that has always been religiously and culturally complex, especially in its vital Jewish component.
We are always negotiating our interrupted history and our paradoxically divisive national project. Such an unconventional, unfinished identity requires more than celebration and self-praise. Our conference will dedicate its first session to the emotions which are always crucial in the building of a nation, particularly our nation: in political theory, in literature, in the theatre, and the opera. We will question the passions that made Italy and make the Italians — those that are still missing and those that are, alas, overwhelming.
- co-organized by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, SUM and NISA
- all events to be held at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura of Los Angeles
Friday, November 18: The Renaissance of the Passions: Ancients and Moderns
The cognitive and social sciences are rediscovering the emotions, as a component of deliberation and agency. We act because we are moved. This does not come as a surprise to readers of classical texts. The Ancients could not think of decision-making processes, especially in political circumstances, without including the passions among their causes. Early modern philosophers thought so as well. Passions are actions. Passions are reasons. From Homer to Aristotle, and again for Niccolò Machiavelli or Thomas Hobbes, human characters enact their most intense feelings in words. Feeling is thinking, often aloud. This occurs not only when eros is involved, but when power, authority, and recognition are at stake. The experience of social relations is felt as either gratifying or humiliating, either exhilarating or mortifying. Egalitarian democracy too, by redistributing power, reconfigures its emotional experience. Politics is the place where the pleasures and pains derived from recognition, authority, and power find their ultimate expression: patriotic love, anger, or outrage. This series of panels will address classical theories in philosophy, tragedy, or literature, and their reception in early-modern culture. It will focus on the cognitive nature of emotions and passions, and their effectiveness for action and deliberation.
- a UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/ Ahmanson Conference
- all events to be held on the UCLA campus
Saturday, November 19: The Emotional Turn and the Social Sciences
Emotions are part and parcel of our actions, our deliberations, our interrelations with others. Our reasoning is often passionate; our feelings are themselves actions immediately consequential for others. Saturday’s panels will be trans-disciplinary and will offer a critical update on a paradigm shift that is affecting all disciplines: the emotional turn. A new generation of qualitative researchers have been installed in sociology departments in virtually all major research universities. Themes of emotions feature in their work, whether their data are collected ethnographically through participant observation or examined on videotaped recordings. Increasingly as well, qualitative studies of emotions are connecting with neuroscience research on the embodiment of perception. The purpose of Saturday’s discussions will be to assess how different theories, languages and practices — which belong to the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities — shape this common object of inquiry: the emotions. Are we all converging toward a shared understanding of their nature? Do we accept, first of all, the increasingly predominant cognitive approach?
- all events to be held at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura of Los Angeles
