>The nascent Center for the Humanities and Public Sphere, the
>Department of English, and the Marxist Reading Group presents:
>
>
>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 [log in to unmask]
>
>For info on previous conferences visit www.english.ufl.edu/mrg.
>
>Abstracts due: February 10.
>
>---