Keynote Speakers:
Professor Simon Critchley, The New School University (USA)
Professor Andrew Benjamin, Monash University (AUS)
Recent work in political theory has often revolved around the question of the relation between ontology and politics. For all of their differences, Derrida, Nancy, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, Laclau, Butler, Connolly, Zizek, Foucault, and Agamben (to name but a few) have sought to question the foundations of political thought, and also philosophy’s relation to the political conditions within which it originates. While politics can no longer lay claim to secure grounds, the gesture of rethinking ontology cannot be separated or abstracted from the society in which it arises. The relation between ontology and politics is consequently a crucial question for both philosophy and politics. This workshop aims to explore the intersections of politics and ontology and the resulting implications for thinking the political and the philosophical.
We invite papers addressing the following and any other related themes:
• How can we think the political in the absence of a secure or stable ontology?
• Questioning our relation to the tradition of political philosophy and the relation of the philosophical to the political.
• Is there a necessary transitivity between the ontological and the political?
• The political implications of thinking ontology as pure immanence, production, difference, becoming, or multiplicity.
• Thinking community or the self's relation to others when secure ontological foundations for such relations are in question.
Paper title and 300 word abstract should be submitted by Friday May 9th, 2008 to Paul Rekret at p.rekret@qmul.ac.uk
Graduate papers strongly encouraged.