New Radical Subjectivities: Re-thinking Agency for the 21st Century
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
newradicalsubjectivities@gmail.com by 30th May 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).
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New Radical Subjectivities Organisational Collective
Alexander Dunst, Caroline Edwards and Matthew Mead
The Centre for Critical Theory
Department of Cultural Studies
The University of Nottingham, UK.
