Jason Read at the TheoryLAB

Nanopolitics

JASON READ AT THE TheoryLAB

Dear All

Please find details of the next event in the seminar programme: Identity, Alterity, Monstrosity: Figures of the Multitude organised by Caroline Williams, TheoryLAB , SPIR and Filippo del Lucchese, Brunel and CIPH, Paris. We hope you will be able to join us.

Please distribute to interested colleagues.

Full details and eventbrite link via the TheoryLAB page: http://www.politics.qmul.ac.uk/theorylab/

Seminar Two: 14 May 5-7pm

Venue: Queen Mary University of London, Arts Two, 3.16

 

Jason Read

The Affective Composition of the Political: From Negative Solidarity to Collective Indignation
Jason Read is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He teaches courses in the history of political philosophy, contemporary social theory, the politics of work, philosophy of film, and philosophy of history. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY 2003) and Relations of Production: Transindividuality between Economics and Politics (Brill/Haymarket 2014/15) as well as articles on Althusser, Deleuze, Spinoza, Hegel, Negri, and The Wire.

 

Dr Caroline Williams

School of Politics & International Relations Queen Mary, University of London

327 Mile End Road

London E1 4NS

United Kingdom

Email: c.a.williams@qmul.ac.uk

Webpage: http://www.politics.qmul.ac.uk/staff/drcarolinewilliams.html

 

**END**

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The Power of the Monstrous

Monsters

THE POWER OF THE MONSTROUS

The Power of the Monstrous: a Seminar Series and an International Conference

Identity, Alterity, Monstrosity: Figures of the multitude

Seminar Series

Queen Mary, University of London

Mile End Road

London E1 4NS

Arts Two Building, room 3.16

All meetings @ 5 p.m.

MEETINGS: 

26 February

Filippo Del Lucchese (Brunel University, London and Collège international de philosophie) and Caroline Williams (Queen Mary, University of London), The Power of the Monstrous

26 March

Oliver Feltham (American University of Paris), Who is the ruling authority? Spinoza and Hobbes on power and subjectivity

Andrea Bardin (Brunel University, London),  The Early-Modern Metamorphosis of the Body Politic: Hobbes’s Anomaly

14 May

Jason Read (University of Southern Maine), The Affective Composition of the Political: From Negative Solidarity to Collective Indignatio

11 June

Dimitris Vardoulakis (University of Western Sidney), “The main political question is to identify the enemy”: Negri’s Monster.

Info and booking: http://www.politics.qmul.ac.uk/theorylab  

 

The Power of the Monstrous

International Conference

Brunel University, London

School of Social Sciences

Uxbridge UB8 3PH

Gaskell building, room 239

26-27 June 2014 @ 9.30 a.m.

SPEAKERS:

Laurent Bove (Université de Picardie, Emeritus), La monstruosité chez Camus: de l’absurde à l’histoire

Fabio Frosini (Università di Urbino), Absolute and relative perfection of the “monsters”: politics and history in Giacomo Leopardi 

Annie Ibrahim (Former programme director at the Collège international de philosophie, and Groupe d’études du matérialisme rationnel) Les monstres de Diderot, entre physiologie et politique

Arnaud Milanese (ENS, Lyon and CERPHI), The Beast and the Sovereign according to Hobbes

Vittorio Morfino (Università di Milano-Bicocca), Lucretius and Monsters: Between Bergson and Canguilhem

Mark Neocleous (BrunelUniversity, London), The Monster and the Police

Sue Ruddick (University of Toronto), Monstrous Earth

Yannis Stavrakakis (AristotleUniversity of Thessaloniki): Irrational, Extreme, Populist: The New Fear of the Masses in Debt Society

Amy Stefanovic (The School of Humanities and Communication Arts. The University of Western Sydney) The Extralegal Beast: On Hobbes and Sovereignty

Lasse Thomassen (Queen Mary, University of London) Monstrous Masses Beyond Representation: the Spanish Indignados

Andrea Torrano (Universidad Nacional de Cordoba), The Political Monster between Sovereignity and Biopolitics

 

Info and booking: http://goo.gl/vbrX6h

The seminar series and the conference are supported by:

Collège International de Philosophie, Paris

TheoryLAB, London

School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London

School of Social Sciences, BrunelUniversity, London

CERPHI: Institut d’histoire de la pensée classique, Lyon

 

**END**

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Identity, Alterity, Monstrosity: Figures of the Multitude

Monsters

IDENTITY, ALTERITY, MONSTROSITY: FIGURES OF THE MULTITUDE

Identity, Alterity, Monstrosity: Figures of the Multitude (I)

The process of construction of identity, both individual and collective, and the genesis of political subjectivity, are largely grounded on concurrent ideological mechanisms that define otherness: subjectivity, alterity and identity are the complex outcomes of one intellectual and cultural process, historically produced by the encounter with the Other, whether real or imagined.

Notwithstanding the effort in conceptualising this encounter in the global and multicultural context of contemporary societies, its historical genealogy is often underestimated: a genealogy that is rooted in the theoretical definition of the concepts of normality, abnormality, and monstrosity. Developed in the early modern age, these concepts have produced and keep producing their cultural, social, and political effects.

The main objective of this seminar is to reconstruct the genealogy of the modern problem of identity, subjectivity, and otherness through an historical analysis of the idea of monstrosity within scientific, philosophical, and literary discourses of early modernity.

During the first semester of this seminar we will focus on the radical alterity represented since the 17th century by the theoretical figure of the multitude. Hobbes, for example, develops the idea of the Leviathan’s sovereign body through the homogeneous unity of the people. By definition, the people is opposed to the conflictual multiplicity of the multitude in the state of nature. In contrast, Spinoza grounds the idea of a free State on the multitude’s conatus – its drive to actualize its own nature – and its right of resistance against the sovereign. This right is irreducible and monstrous, thus introducing the natural dimension into the State rather than excluding it from society.

While Hobbes confined the multitude to the edges of the political map, with Spinoza it takes centre-stage, becoming the beating and conflictual heart of political life. Starting with the indirect dialogue between these two authors, we will focus this year on radical and monstrous alterity – the sense of otherness and how that is defined – in early modern and contemporary thought.

Organised by Filippo Del Lucchese (Brunel University, London and Collège International de Philosophie) and Caroline Williams (Queen Mary, University of London). For more information, contact:
Filippo Dellucchese <Filippo.Dellucchese@brunel. ac.uk>
Caroline Williams <c.a.williams@qmul.ac.uk>

Location: QMUL, ARTS TWO (room TPC) 5:00pm
Dates: 26th February, 26th March, 14th May, 11th June

**END**

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

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Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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Brunel Social and Political Thought Research Group Seminar Series – 2013/2014

Teaching Marx

BRUNEL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT RESEARCH GROUP SEMINAR SERIES – 2013/2014

Re/Dis/Order

Following successful seminar series and international conferences in the last years, the Brunel Social and Political Thought research group will organise another seminar series in 2013/14: ‘Re/Dis/Order’. This seminar series aims to explore the different ways in which the constitution, transformation and negation of political order have been understood by some of the key theorists of modern political thought, from the early modern period to contemporary social and political theory. Seminars are open to all.

Term 1

Wednesday 30th October 2013, 4:00pm, Gaskell Building Room 239

State and Capital

Andrea Bardin (Brunel University) ‘Mechanising the Organic: Hobbes and the Epistemological Revolution in Civil Science’

Matthijs Krul (Brunel University) ‘Neoliberal Visions of Order: Theories of the State in the New Institutional Economic History’

Wednesday 13th November 2013, 1:00pm, Gaskell Building Room 239

Fabio Raimondi (University of Salerno) ‘Althusser, Machiavelli and the Problem of Political Power’

Wednesday 27th November 2013, 1:00pm, Gaskell Building Room 239

Sara R. Farris (Goldsmiths, University of London) ‘From the Jewish Question to the Muslim Question’

Wednesday 11th December 2013, 1:00pm, Gaskell Building Room 239

Fillippo del Lucchese (Brunel University) ‘Machiavelli and Constituent Power’

Term 2

Wednesday 8th January 2014, 1:00pm, Gaskell Building Room 239

Peter D. Thomas (Brunel University) ‘“We Good Subalterns”: Gramsci’s Theory of Political Modernity’

Wednesday 29th January 2014, 1:00pm, Gaskell Building Room 210

Banu Bargu (SOAS) ‘Sovereignty as Erasure’

Wednesday 5th February 2014, 1:00pm, Gaskell Building Room 239

Nathaniel Boyd (Brunel University) ‘Organising the Body Politic: Hegel’s Corporate Theory of State’

Wednesday 19th February 2014, 1:00pm, Gaskell Building Room 239

Jamie Pitman (BrunelUniversity) ‘Castor and Pollux? The Marx-Engels Relationship’

Ebubekir Dursun (Brunel University) ‘“Stubborn, Insociable, Froward, Intractable”: the History of the Excluded in Hobbes’s Leviathan’

Wednesday 5th March 2014, 1:00pm, Gaskell Building Room 239

John Roberts (Brunel University) ‘Beyond Flows, Fluids and Networks: Social Theory and the Fetishism of the Global Informational Economy’

Wednesday 26th March 2014, 1:00pm, Gaskell Building Room 239

Mark Neocleous (Brunel University)

Book Launch: ‘War Power, Police Power’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2014)

All seminars take place at Brunel University. Directions to the campus can be found here:
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/about/campus/directions

For further information, please contact:

Peter Thomas at PeterD.Thomas@brunel.ac.uk

Visit the Brunel SPT Research Group webpages:

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/modern-political-thought-violence-and-revolution-ma
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/sss/politics/research-groups-and-centres/social-and-political-thought
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brunel-University-Modern-Political-Thought/205393026150272?sk=wall

 

Other Brunel SPT Activities in 2013/14

Film Screening Series
(Organised in Collaboration with the Isambard Centre for Historical Research)

Paths of Shame: WWI in Cinema

1st October: S. Kubrick, Paths of Glory (1957)

15th October: R. Bernard, Wooden Crosses (1932)

29th October: J. Losey, King and Country (1964)

12th November: J. Renoir, La Grande Illusion (1939)

26th November: F. Rosi, Many Wars Ago (1970)

10th December: D. Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

All screenings in Gaskell Building Room 239 @ 5:30pm

Organised by Alison Carrol and Filippo del Lucchese

For more information, contact:
Alison Carrol <Alison.Carrol@brunel.ac.uk>
Filippo Dellucchese <Filippo.Dellucchese@brunel.ac.uk>

 

Identity, Alterity, Monstrosity: Figures of the Multitude (I)

The process of construction of identity, both individual and collective, and the genesis of political subjectivity, are largely grounded on concurrent ideological mechanisms that define otherness: subjectivity, alterity and identity are the complex outcomes of one intellectual and cultural process, historically produced by the encounter with the Other, whether real or imagined.
Notwithstanding the effort in conceptualising this encounter in the global and multicultural context of contemporary societies, its historical genealogy is often underestimated: a genealogy that is rooted in the theoretical definition of the concepts of normality, abnormality, and monstrosity. Developed in the early modern age, these concepts have produced and keep producing their cultural, social, and political effects.
The main objective of this seminar is to reconstruct the genealogy of the modern problem of identity, subjectivity, and otherness through an historical analysis of the idea of monstrosity within scientific, philosophical, and literary discourses of early modernity.
During the first semester of this seminar we will focus on the radical alterity represented since the 17th century by the theoretical figure of the multitude. Hobbes, for example, develops the idea of the Leviathan’s sovereign body through the homogeneous unity of the people. By definition, the people is opposed to the conflictual multiplicity of the multitude in the state of nature. In contrast, Spinoza grounds the idea of a free State on the multitude’s conatus – its drive to actualize its own nature – and its right of resistance against the sovereign. This right is irreducible and monstrous, thus introducing the natural dimension into the State rather than excluding it from society.
While Hobbes confined the multitude to the edges of the political map, with Spinoza it takes centre-stage, becoming the beating and conflictual heart of political life. Starting with the indirect dialogue between these two authors, we will focus this year on radical and monstrous alterity – the sense of otherness and how that is defined – in early modern and contemporary thought.

Organised by Filippo Del Lucchese (BrunelUniversity, London and Collège International de Philosophie) and Caroline Williams (Queen Mary, University of London). For more information, contact:

Filippo Dellucchese <Filippo.Dellucchese@brunel.ac.uk>
Caroline Williams <c.a.williams@qmul.ac.uk>

Location: QMUL, ARTS TWO (room TPC) 5:00pm

Dates: 26th February, 26th March, 14th May, 11th June

 

First Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/brunel-social-and-political-thought-research-group-seminar-series-2013-14-re-dis-order.-starts-30-october

 

**END**

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Ontology and Politics

 

The Island

ONTOLOGY AND POLITICS

 

MANCHESTER WORKSHOPS IN POLITICAL THEORY 2011: August 31st – September 2nd 2011

Call for Papers: Ontology and Politics Workshop

Convenors: Paul Rekret (Queen Mary), Simon Choat (Kingston), Clayton Chin (Queen Mary)

Despite its pervasiveness, the question of the relation between ontology and politics continues to be a crucial one for Continental philosophy.  While the place and status of the question of being in the realm of the political has occupied much of social theory in the past twenty or thirty years, we remain no closer to drawing any common ground on these themes.

Post-structuralist or post-foundational political thought has insisted on the inherent contingency of any political ontology and has, from this notion, sought to draw out a framework for an emancipatory politics grounded in the concepts of difference and otherness. However, such a stance finds itself increasingly challenged today. On the one hand, thinkers such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere call for the need to think a politics grounded in a conception of universality rather than alterity, while on the other hand, so-called speculative realism more fundamentally challenges the very notion of ontology as it has been conceived by the majority of Continental thinkers in recent decades.  This panel aims to explore the intersections of politics and ontology and the resulting implications for thinking both the political and the philosophical.

We invite papers addressing the following and any other related themes:
-Is there a place for reflection on ontology in the theorisation and study of politics?
-Is there a necessary transitivity between the ontological and the political?  How should this relation be conceived?
-Is there a necessarily leftist or emancipatory ontology?
-Should the politics which has generally been thought to follow from post-foundational or post-structuralist ontologies be re-evaluated in light of recent critiques?
-Does a new and different relation between ontology and politics follow from recent speculative materialist ontologies?

If you would like to present a paper at this workshop, please submit an abstract of 300-500 words (or a full paper) to p.rekret@qmul.ac.uk or S.Choat@kingston.ac.uk by 15 June 2011.

For more information on the conference see: http://manceptworkshops.wordpress.com/

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Educational Spaces of Alterity

Critical Pedagogy

EDUCATIONAL SPACES OF ALTERITY

CALL FOR PAPERS

Educational Spaces of Alterity
University of Nottingham, Tuesday 26th April 2010

Nottingham Critical Pedagogy invites contributions for a day of workshops considering spaces (both inside and outside the academy) that may help challenge the dominance of neoliberal logics, alienated practices and Eurocentric hegemony in contemporary educational practice, and in so doing contribute to radical social change. We are pleased to announce that John Holloway will be hosting a keynote workshop at the event.

We hope to welcome contributions from a variety of disciplines and from inside and outside the academy. These can be in any format, but we especially encourage those that break from traditional conference paper models: workshops, artistic engagements, poster presentations and performances would all be welcomed. We welcome suggestions for entire workshop sessions (90 minutes), or single contributions, which we will group into workshops.

Our event partners Spaces of Alterity: a conference hosted by the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media on Wed 27th-Thurs 28th April, with keynote addresses by China Miéville and Alberto Toscano. Both events are designed to work on their own, but participants are more than welcome to attend both should they wish, and we will be co-curating an Annexinema film night with Spaces of Alterity (details tbc) to show short films which touch upon the themes of the two events.

A non-exhaustive list of themes you may wish to consider is offered over the page. Please do not feel these are mutually exclusive:

Critical Education and ‘The Crisis’

• How can critical education respond to the crisis in higher education and wider societal crises?
• Do these crises close down or create spaces of hope for critical education?
• Defending the university? Transforming the university? Abandoning the university?

 

Education and the Affective

• Emotional epistemologies and pedagogies.
• The role of hope in critical education.
• ‘Radical love’.

 

Community Education

• Skillshare workshops.
• Social movements/community politics.
• Challenging the borders between HE and community.
• The role of non-traditional educational spaces (art galleries, social centres, etc).

 

Border Thinking and Hybridity

• The importance of identity and difference for critical education.
• Challenging hegemonic and Eurocentric perspectives.
• How can we introduce the subaltern into the classroom?

 

Reflections on Practice

• Experiences of critical education.
• What can we learn from past experiences, experiments and struggle?

 

Art, Music and Critical Education

• The role of art and music in critical education.
• Resonances between critical education and contemporary theory and practice in art and music.
• Problems of assessment in critical and artistic education: or is assessment the problem?

 

Please send abstracts and information on the format you wish your presentation to take to nottinghamcriticalpedagogy@gmail.com no later than Tuesday 8th February. These should be no more than 300 words, but may contain links to further reading regarding your chosen method of presentation.

Registration is free for Educational Spaces of Alterity but there are fees for Spaces of Alterity: attendance for one day is £25/£35; for both days it’s £45/55 (cheaper price for students and unwaged).

We have a limited amount of money to help cover the travel and accommodation costs of participants who would not otherwise be able to attend, or to help with fees for those who wish to stay for Spaces of Alterity. Details will be announced once abstracts have been received. Food and drink will be provided for all.

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Globalized Capital: Subjects, Spaces, and Critical Responses

Global Capitalism

GLOBALIZED CAPITAL: SUBJECTS, SPACES, AND CRITICAL RESPONSES

Call for Papers

17th Annual DePaul University
Philosophy Graduate Student Conference

EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 29, 2010

Globalized Capital: Subjects, Spaces, and Critical Responses
April 9th & 10th, 2010

Keynote Speaker: Bruno Bosteels
Department of Romance Languages, Cornell University

Questioning capitalism is no easy enterprise. Discourses interrogating capitalism have mirrored the trajectory of capitalism itself, proliferating in a variety of directions and spawning new conceptual and historical problems with each new decade of confrontation. This conference aims to open up a space of convergence and dialogue for disparate trajectories of critical reflection and practical response. Its title aims to emphasize not only capitalism’s global character—its relentless expansion beyond various geographical, cultural, and political “limits”—but at the same time its particularized and often discontinuous local effects—the subjects, practices, and increasingly micro-managed spaces it carves out en route.

We would like to solicit papers dealing with a broad range of topics including, but not limited to:

* Legacies and Boundaries of Expansion: Inside, outside, and beyond the capitalist Nation-State

* Alterity, subalternity, and critiques from the margins.

* Postcolonialism, decolonization, and anti-colonial resistance.

* The metropolis and the collapse of the city/countryside dialectic. Historical and conceptual origins of capitalist economic thought

* Collectivities and Communes in Resistance: Communism

* From parties to groups, from crowds to constituent power

* Capitalism and Internationalism

* Partisanship and/or universalism

* Spaces of work and labors of thought: “immaterial labor,” intellectual culture, and the marketplace of ideas

* Subjects, Selfhood and Culture: Entrepreneurialist cultures of selfhood

* Consumerist ethics and the conscience market

* Neo-archaisms: the role of tradition and faith under capitalism

* Counter-conducts, indocility, and strategies for “de-individualizing” and “decapitalizing” the self

* Images, Representations, and Symbols: Ideology and “ideology critique”

* Narratives and mythologies of capitalism in cinema, art, architecture, and literature

* The semiotics of capital

* Power and Neoliberal Governmentality: Biopower and biopolitical economy

* Marxist critique in a paradigm of perpetual crisis management

* “Total Governance”: from managerial rationalities to the management of life itself

* Counter-insurgency, preventative war, and the securitization of liberty.

Authors should email their submissions to depaulgraduatestudents@gmail.com  
Papers should not exceed 3000 words and should contain a short abstract. As all papers are subject to anonymous review, papers should not include your name or any other identifying marks. Your paper title and personal information (name, institutional affiliation, and phone contact) should be included in the body of the email. For further information and updates on the conference, if you have any questions or problems regarding submissions, or in the event that you do not receive a confirmation email, please contact Neal Miller at zzerohourr@gmail.com

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