The Paris attacks: how does extreme violence challenge our categories of thinking?

7 December 2015 +++ This event is fully booked. A video will be made available after the event.+++
During the past fortnight acts of extreme violence in public places in Paris and Bamako have joined recent attacks in cities from  Ankara to Beirut and Baghdad. How are we to make sense of the violent events targeting civilians in the cities we inhabit and travel to?What are their effects, on societies, individuals, victims and perpetrators? How do they threaten, not only our lives, but also our habits of thought? How do our respective academic disciplines equip or fail us in the understanding of these events? How can/must  we think them anew?

Join the Institute of Advanced Studies and the European Institute for a roundtable exploring these questions from a number of disciplinary perspectives. We will discuss how history, anthropology, political theory and political science, psychoanalysis, literature etc. can help us to understand, and to what extent extreme violence is challenging our very categories of comprehension. 

With:

• Kristin Bakke, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, UCL
• Lionel Bailly, Psychoanalyst Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalysis, UCL
• Azzedine Haddour, Senior Lecturer in French, UCL
• Cécile Laborde, Professor in Political Theory, UCL 
• Ruth Mandel, Reader in Social Anthropology, UCL
• Philippe Marlière, Professor in French and European Politics, UCL

Chaired by Tamar Garb, Director of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and Professor in the History of Art, UCL

Co-hosted by UCL's Institute of Advanced Studies and the European Institute