Born of Desertion: Singularity, Collectivity, Revolution March 20-22 at the University of Florida, Gainesville
Keynote Speakers: Michael Hardt and Kristin Ross
Where is the Left now? How do we materialize collective formations, and enact a justice in their name? How do we do this at a moment when the world market and the right-wing body politic, prodigiously engineering and rewriting the global imaginary, have appeared as the frightening answer to certain strains of a communal impulse so crucial to the Left?
Our conference seeks papers that engage with those leftist politics occluded from public discourse. Particularly, how might singularities help us rethink and formulate a collective possibility? And, along these same lines, what might a politics mean, finally, when it invokes the word "revolution"? This will not be limited to but certainly and inevitably caught up in considerations of the spatial, the temporal, production, everyday exploitation, and the state. Is it within the scope of these concerns, especially in the context of the imperial world order, that a truly radical Left can emerge?
Michael Hardt is widely acknowledged--both nationally and internationally--in the ongoing debates around globalization. The publication of Empire, which he coauthored with Antonio Negri, has contributed to this debate by suggesting new conceptions of capital, space, and subjectivity. In addition to Empire, Hardt's publications engage with issues of contemporary politics and philosophy. He is author of Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (1993) and coauthor with Antonio Negri of Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-form (1994). He is coeditor with Paolo Virno of Radical Thought in Italy (1996) and coeditor with Kathi Weeks of The Jameson Reader (2000).Hardt is an Associate Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University.
Kristin Ross engages with French social theory and cultural studies and examines how insurgent moments in history--the Paris Commune, May '68--are written and rewritten in the cultural imaginary. Key to her work are the new spatial formations and social practices that emerge from revolutionary actions. In Emergence of Social Space (1988), Ross argues that space is political, and that through space, the Commune challenges the capitalist notion of work, leisure, and identity. Her most recent book, May '68 and its Afterlives (2002), explores how normalizing discourses erase the revolutionary aspects of this event, and explain them away as an apolitical "youth movement." In addition to these books, Ross has written Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995), and she is co-editor (with Alice Kaplan) of a special issue of Yale French Studies on "everyday life" (1987). Ross is a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University.
Prospective papers may address (but are not limited to) the following:
* Anti-humanism/post-humanism in Empire. * Reification of history. * Narrative mappings of the political. * The racisms without race. * Re-thinking subjectivities through singularity. * Society of control and new forms of policing/discipline. * The aesthetics of security. * Re-writing the frontiers of the nation-state. * Antimedia and counter-empire. * Prosthetics, Clones, Cyborgs: The body and technological ontologies. * Strategies of containing revolutionary practices. * Gender and the place of work. * Global capital and imagining the apocalypse. * Pedagogies and reorganizing relations to space. * Literature and collectivity. * Insurgent spatial practices: sites for alternative production. * Professionalization and the corporate university. * Media and formulations of collectivity. * Constructions of a revolutionary identity. * Politics of zoning. * US policy, war, and terrorism.
Non-traditional or performative panels will also be considered.
One page abstracts, questions, and comments should be submitted to the Marxist Reading Group at <extinction at clas.ufl.edu>.
For info on previous conferences visit <http://www.english.ufl.edu/mrg>.
Abstracts due: February 10.