Pens Not Property: Edward Said on Forms of Life

This talk begins from the question of property in Edward Said's last interview. It then asks: What is the role of property within Sylvia Wynter's reading of "the horizon of humanity" in Jacques Derrida? Ultimately this talk considers Said and Wynter together in offering an inquiry into the forms of life we have inherited and live within today.

Benjamin P. Davis is an Assistant Professor of Africana and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University and a Fellow at the Center on Modernity in Transition. He is the author of Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins, which reads the mystic Simone Weil as an illuminating political theorist, and Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics, which presents the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant as a vital voice for the practice of human rights today.

His third book, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt, defends the concepts of “the human” and “humanity” against a critical backdrop in theory today.

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai