CFP: GLOBALIZED CAPITAL: SUBJECTS, SPACES, AND CRITICAL RESPONSES

[Update: the deadline has been extended to January 29]

17^th Annual DePaul University Philosophy Graduate Student Conference

April 10^th & 11^th, 2010

Keynote Speaker: Bruno Bosteels, Department of Romance Studies, 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.

Submission Deadline: January 29, 2009

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