Farewell to 35 years of the Paris Program in Critical Theory enabled, led, taught, directed by Sam Weber

Sam Weber, the renowned philosopher, thinker, educator, and critic has closed his longstanding Paris Program in Critical Theory. A program that enabled students from across the globe to undertake research and study with him in Paris, it was unique in scope and intention. Each semester, Sam would choose a reading– we had 'Cinema 1: The Movement-image', by Gilles Deleuze–and we would closely and slowly read the text together. Debates started, conversations extended, PhD students from different countries, disciplines, backgrounds, and capacities (in both philosophy and French language) collected together in Sam's apartment in Paris for a morning each week to learn. These convivial but unstructured classes–we were hardly following a weekly 'to do list', there were no end of term assignments–were rich forums for young and creative minds. I would head from these classes into the BnF (national library) archives, to explore film history. Others would head off to other archives to pursue other topics. And each week we would reconvene, happily exploring ideas, books, thoughts in a welcoming intellectual space. 

I won a scholarship for 2 years, so feel particularly thankful for the exposure to philosophy, as well as 'what was on in Paris' that these gatherings facilitated. I attended classes by Derrida, workshops by Ginzburg, went to public lectures, galleries, and events. And each week, Sam was there, ready to launch into another debate, ready to hear our thoughts. I try to model Sam's patience and constructive leadership in my own teaching. I use his method of reading- deeply reading- a text to ground me in critical ideas, and I continue to work in an interdisciplinary way, with no fear or shame of saying: can you please xplain that further? Do you have a reference I might look at?

Thank you Sam. Thank you, also, conference participants and colleagues, new friends who now populate my thinking and writing.   And bonus: we attended both the Maison Henreich Heine, Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, as well as the École Normal Supérieure for the conference, which ran well into the early evening each day, and which concluded (of course) with a heartfelt, spontaneous, and emotional ovation.