Author: Dave Mesing

Deadline extended: New Encounters in French and Italian Thought

~ Dave Mesing

Some readers may be interested to know that the deadline for the conference I’m helping to organize at Villanova in the spring has been extended to January 10th, 2015.

I’ve pasted the CFP with the revised date here, and the information is also available at this website: http://conferences.library.villanova.edu/gradphil/2015/schedConf/cfp

20th Annual Conference Sponsored by the Philosophy Graduate Student Union (PGSU)
March 13-14, 2015
Villanova University

New Encounters in French and Italian Thought
Keynote: Jason E. Smith

The negotiation between French and Italian activists and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century opened a field of theoretical experimentation, the effects of which pose a challenge for contemporary politics. This encounter materialized through various collectives, traversing the neat intellectual and practical boundaries of the academy. Whether through the images of intellectuals in the streets, or through radical activist groups extending from the Situationist International to Tiqqun, the laboratory of French and Italian thought poses a constellation of conceptual weapons that remain vital for any contestation with the state of things. These implements have been successful in intervening within contemporary struggles on the level of theory, practice, and the construction of history in the present.

Under the inheritance of this tradition, this conference invites submissions from the interstices and margins of recent French and Italian philosophy. Possible paper topics include feminist recapitulations of post-workerism, the theoretical legacy of biopolitics as it is taken up in Agamben and Esposito, and the ongoing challenges for theory and practice posed by social movements extending from Latin America to the Mediterranean in the wake of events such as Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation.

Other topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Post-Althusserian philosophy
  • Decolonial challenges to eurocentric thought and strategies
  • Wages for Housework and care economies
  • Realism and contemporary ontologies
  • Re-interpretations of the Gramscian legacy
  • Philosophies of life and the problem of vitalism
  • Lacanian psychoanalysis and its heritage
  • French and Italian receptions of Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx
  • Affect theory and imagination in cultural productions (e.g. film and media)
  • Collective organization and social ontologies

The Philosophy Graduate Student Union at Villanova University welcomes graduate students and junior faculty to submit any of the following to be considered for our conference: paper abstracts of 250-350 words, papers of approximately 3000 words (including co-authored work) suitable for a 20 minute presentation, or proposed panels. Authors of accepted abstracts should send completed papers by March 1, 2015.

Please send submissions, prepared for blind review, by January 10th, 2015 to vuconf2015@gmail.com.

This conference is committed to accommodating people with disabilities. Conference participants and attendees are encouraged to contact the above email address to discuss accommodations.

Call for Papers: New Encounters in French and Italian Thought

~ Dave Mesing ~ 1 Comment

Some readers might be interested in submitting something to an upcoming conference I have a hand in organizing at Villanova. Please note that we accept both abstracts and papers from both graduate students and faculty.

20th Annual Conference Sponsored by the Philosophy Graduate Student Union (PGSU)
March 13-14, 2015
Villanova University

New Encounters in French and Italian Thought
Keynote: Jason E. Smith

The negotiation between French and Italian activists and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century opened a field of theoretical experimentation, the effects of which pose a challenge for contemporary politics. This encounter materialized through various collectives, traversing the neat intellectual and practical boundaries of the academy. Whether through the images of intellectuals in the streets, or through radical activist groups extending from the Situationist International to Tiqqun, the laboratory of French and Italian thought poses a constellation of conceptual weapons that remain vital for any contestation with the state of things. These implements have been successful in intervening within contemporary struggles on the level of theory, practice, and the construction of history in the present.

Under the inheritance of this tradition, this conference invites submissions from the interstices and margins of recent French and Italian philosophy. Possible paper topics include feminist recapitulations of post-workerism, the theoretical legacy of biopolitics as it is taken up in Agamben and Esposito, and the ongoing challenges for theory and practice posed by social movements extending from Latin America to the Mediterranean in the wake of events such as Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation.

Other topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Post-Althusserian philosophy
  • Decolonial challenges to eurocentric thought and strategies
  • Wages for Housework and care economies
  • Realism and contemporary ontologies
  • Re-interpretations of the Gramscian legacy
  • Philosophies of life and the problem of vitalism
  • Lacanian psychoanalysis and its heritage
  • French and Italian receptions of Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx
  • Affect theory and imagination in cultural productions (e.g. film and media)
  • Collective organization and social ontologies

The Philosophy Graduate Student Union at Villanova University welcomes graduate students and junior faculty to submit any of the following to be considered for our conference: paper abstracts of 250-350 words, papers of approximately 3000 words (including co-authored work) suitable for a 20 minute presentation, or proposed panels. Authors of accepted abstracts should send completed papers by March 1, 2015.

Please send submissions, prepared for blind review, by December 21st, 2014 to vuconf2015@gmail.com.

This conference is committed to accommodating people with disabilities. Conference participants and attendees are encouraged to contact the above email address to discuss accommodations.

Call for Applications – Pittsburgh Summer School in Contemporary Philosophy – Formalism and the Real: Ontology, Politics, and the Subject

~ Dave Mesing ~ 2 Comments

Readers of the blog may be interested in a philosophy symposium this summer that I have a hand in organizing. I’ve pasted the full information below the fold, but please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions. Continue reading “Call for Applications – Pittsburgh Summer School in Contemporary Philosophy – Formalism and the Real: Ontology, Politics, and the Subject” →

From R.A.P. Music to Run the Jewels: Killer Mike and the Homonymity of the Idea

~ Dave Mesing ~ 1 Comment

What follows is a first pass attempt to bring together the themes of sovereignty I have been exploring alongside Stephen Keating this semester with contemporary hip hop.

Image

What could be an anonymous homonymy that moves towards the name itself? A herald from Atlanta carries the answer. Continue reading “From R.A.P. Music to Run the Jewels: Killer Mike and the Homonymity of the Idea” →

Call For Papers: Feminism: Body, Image, Power

~ Dave Mesing

Some readers might be interested in submitting something to an upcoming conference at Villanova. Please note that we accept both abstracts and papers from both graduate students and faculty.

2014 Call for Papers -19th Annual Philosophy Conference at Villanova University Sponsored by PGSU
Feminism: Body, Image, Power
Friday, March 21 – Saturday, March 22, 2014
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Lisa Guenther (Vanderbilt)

“The personal is political,” the well-known slogan of the Women’s Liberation Movement, continues to demand that we explore the ways in which our most intimate embodied practices, experiences, and images can be the site of politics, and alternately, how politics are carried out and enacted in the desires, affects, self-consciousness, and relationships of personal and interpersonal life.  Focusing on the highly productive concepts of body, image, and power, this conference aims to engage in discussion of a number of philosophical themes, topics, and approaches that are feminist in method or that deal with the topic of feminism.  How does the body stand at the juncture of the public and the private?  How do our private and collective images conceal or reveal the intersections of imagination and representation?  How does power operate as the conjunction of identity, knowledge, and praxis?  Feminist philosophy and feminism more broadly has much to tell us about the nature of our embodiment, our imaginaries, and the power relations that structure our lived experience, and this conference welcomes papers and artwork that deal with these topics, broadly construed. While all papers addressing feminism and feminist issues, works, authors, etc. are welcome, we especially encourage papers that take on these perennial issues of feminism in a contemporary context.

Possible topics of discussion include, but are not limited to:
–       Public and private spaces of embodied experience
–       Biopolitics and new technologies
–       Reproductive rights, natality, and motherhood
–       Autonomy, dependency, and vulnerability
–       Feminism and affect theory, body image, and imagination in cultural productions (e.g. film and media)
–       Intersections of gender, class, race, sexuality, and ability
–       The relationship between critical phenomenology, feminist philosophy, and political activism
–       Reciprocity of feminist theory with queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, globalization, and environmental ethics
–       Feminism and psychoanalysis
–       Postfeminism and postmodern feminisms

The Philosophy Graduate Student Union at Villanova University welcomes individuals (including graduate students and faculty) to submit abstracts, papers, proposed panels or artist presentations to be considered for our conference. Please send submissions formatted for blind review to: conferences.library.villanova.edu/gradphil
Submission Deadline: December 15, 2013

The Use-Value of Ethics: Antonio Negri’s Hopeful Time

~ Dave Mesing

This post emerges out of a close reading I did of one of Negri’s toughest texts, “The Constitution of Time,” which is in the Time for Revolution book put out by Continuum. I’m referencing the hardback edition, which has different pagination than the paperback edition. My thanks to Adam, Anthony, and Brad for hosting the post at AUFS.

I’d suggest that Negri’s “The Constitution of Time” can be understood as part of a contemporary ethical project. I am using “ethics” here in the sense of a way of life, and it’s how I understand Negri’s usage of “the practice of theory,” such as the following statement: “When the practice of theory is directed simply towards the constitution of the transcendent, time is non-existence. Time is multiplicity. Time is a theological scandal.” (30) I think that his (uneven) attempt to chart out a materialist theory of time is more readily understandable in these terms, and I’d like to  draw out the main contours of this ethics in order to clarify his pervasive recourse to the language of hope. Given Negri’s grounding of his own project in Spinoza, this is something I’ve found a bit troubling, even though I’m willing to entertain the idea that Negri does the some kind of rewriting to terms like hope that Spinoza famously does with God. Nevertheless, reading through “The Constitution of Time” was a bit of a revelation for me in my study of Negri, and despite the fact that this text is at times even more difficult than The Savage Anomaly, I’ve found it pretty helpful for getting a sense of what he’s up to in terms of his own ethics.

The first place that Negri’s ethics can be detected is in his polemical opposition to the “re-equilibrating calculus” of Keynes and Polanyi. (41) The fundamental distinction in Negri’s text is between the empty, reversible, measuring time of capitalism, and the constitutive, composing, open time of communism. Negri suggests that the second has been made possible by the first, which for him is why the “overcoming of capitalism occurs on the basis of needs constructed by capitalism.” (26) The more that capital has expanded on a global scale, the more difficult it becomes to measure labor with time. When capital has expanded far enough, when it “invests the whole of life,” then “time is not the measure of life, but is life itself.” (35) This paradox is one way to describe real subsumption; in conquering life, capital has seemingly become victorious once and for all. There is no longer an alternative to the M-C-M’ relation. Continue reading “The Use-Value of Ethics: Antonio Negri’s Hopeful Time” →