CFP – EXTENDED DEADLINE – NEW RADICAL SUBJECTIVITIES: RETHINKING AGENCY FOR
THE 21ST CENTURY
Extended Deadline – Friday 13th June
The University of Nottingham, UK
Friday, September 19th, 2008
Keynote Speaker – Professor Peter Hallward (Middlesex University)
This one day conference for postgraduate students and early career
researchers explores recent articulations of subjectivity and political
agency in critical theory and cultural studies. The continued ascent of
neo-liberalism and economic globalisation, along with postmodern and
poststructuralist theorising around subjectivity, potentially sets a
dangerously de-politicised subject against the expanding forces and
inequalities of contemporary capitalism.
Over the last twenty-five years, theoretical writings on the left have
stressed the need to locate subject positions beyond the reductionism of an
orthodox Marxism, and the disabling extremes of liberal anti-essentialism.
Concepts which continue to posit some form of subjective agency have
attempted to respond to the human issues at stake in contemporary political
formations without compromising a theoretical commitment to a discursively
produced subject. From Gayatri Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ and Laclau
and Mouffe’s ‘radical democracy’ to more recent articulations such as Hardt
and Negri’s ‘multitude’ and the Lacanian and post-Lacanian thought of Slavoj
Žižek and Alain Badiou, these writers all stress the continuing importance
of leftist theories of the subject that can provide a theoretical antidote
to the excesses of relativist pluralism and identity politics.
Such thinkers as Fredric Jameson and Susan Buck-Morss therefore stress the
importance of posing agency at a trans-individual and collective level.
These positions emphasise the importance of opposition and agonism in any
radical politics, rather than consensual or ‘third way’ liberalism.
Collective identities therefore continue to offer a crucial grounding for
Leftist (re)considerations of subjectivity as a necessary form of agency for
radical change, even if these groupings prove to be only ever strategic or
temporary.
We invite papers from researchers working in critical theory, cultural
studies, literature, film, the visual arts, history, politics and the social
sciences which explore, but are not limited to, the following questions:
o Is the subject still the locus for a radical left politics?
o What forms of radical or oppositional agency are now emerging?
o What roles can class, gender and ethnicity play for new subjectivities?
o Does the left need to go beyond opposition and resistance towards the
construction of new ‘subjective’ political spaces?
o What aesthetic or cultural forms are currently engaging with and creating
new subjective or collective agencies?
o What contributions can Lacanian and post-Lacanian thought make to
contemporary political subjectivity?
o Are theories of subjectivity currently responding adequately to
developments in a globalized resistance, such as the anti-globalization
movement, the resurgence of the left in Latin America, and religious
fundamentalisms?
o Do changes in social production initiated by economic and cultural
globalization offer a new potential for collective emancipation, or are they
only ever complicit with a hegemonic global capitalism?
o Do digital technologies offer new ways for rethinking agency?
o What is the role of Utopia in new political formations?
Abstracts of 200-250 words should be submitted by e-mail as a Word
attachment to [log in to unmask] by 13th June 2008 and
should include name, affiliation, e-mail address, title of paper and 4
keywords.
Peter Hallward is the author of Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the
Singular and the Specific (Manchester, 2001), Badiou: A Subject to Truth
(Minnesota, 2003), Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation
(Verso, 2006), and most recently, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and
the Politics of Containment (Verso, 2007).
New Radical Subjectivities Organisational Collective,
The Centre for Critical Theory,
Department of Cultural Studies,
The University of Nottingham,
University Park,
NOTTINGHAM NG7 2RD, UK.
Email: [log in to unmask]
Visit the website at
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cultural-studies/research/conf_new_radical_subjectivities.php
|