Connal Parsley is Reader (Associate Professor) in Law and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. An interdisciplinary legal scholar, his research is grounded in critical legal studies, cultural studies, and the humanities, emphasising the need to reinvent central aspects of the legal tradition through new creative and intellectual resources. In 2022 Connal was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for his 7-year research project ‘The Future of Good Decisions: An Evolutionary Approach to Human-AI Administrative Decision-Making’. The project takes a new multi-disciplinary approach to the impasse between automated decision-making tools and the core values of the rule of law. It understands AI as a technosocial evolutionary change requiring updated normative principles to guide human-AI administrative decision-making – without clear distinctions between law and code, humans and machines, normative and technical systems. Bringing together philosophies of evolving technosocial ecologies, critical AI studies, decision and design studies, political and legal theory, legal reform, creative practice, and multi-sited ethnographic and creative ‘prefigurative’ research methods, the project aims to collaboratively re-think and re-design administrative decision-making.
Routledge Handbook of International Law and Humanities, 2021
In Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja (Eds) Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humani... more In Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja (Eds) Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (2021).
A growing movement in contemporary art takes legal forms and materials as its subject matter. In ... more A growing movement in contemporary art takes legal forms and materials as its subject matter. In this article, I argue that a key strand of this 'legal turn' should be historicised in two entwined ways. It can be seen as an extension and reformalisation of some central concerns of late twentieth-century contemporary art; namely relational and participatory aesthetics, and the dematerialisation of the art object. But the artworks considered here can also be analysed as a fragmentary site of 'juristic subjectivity' in the aftermath of legal positivism. According to Carl Schmitt, the positivisation that took hold in the nineteenth century exiled the jurist from their role in formally elaborating the substantive law created by social praxis-turning the jurist into a "mere scholar" in relation to law. In this sense, the separation of juristic thought from law is the aftermath of this destructive event. Yet the etymology of aftermath also links it to a secondary growth that re-emerges after a mowing or harvest. Similarly, the 'contract artists' analysed here evidence a 'regrowth' of juristic thought that relies precisely on its position outside of law 'properly so-called', and inside the conditions of contemporary artistic production and consumption. Analysing contract artworks by artists Adrian Piper and A Constructed World, this article suggests that they differ markedly from the contract art, usually connected to the Siegelaub-Projansky agreement, that has received the majority of academic attention. Whereas that so-called "legal moment in artistic production" prioritises the author function, the abstraction of value, and the commodification of social relations, through the above double historicization I will argue that this 'other' contract art repurposes legal forms to institute a lived experience of juristic social relations, presenting a new kind of material jurisprudence.
Interdisciplinaries: Research Process, Method, and the Body of the Law, Eds Didi Herman and Connal Parsley, 2022
In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body', I describe how I would devise a cha... more In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body', I describe how I would devise a chapter using the technique of writing through a single example--particularly, a single representation of the body. The chapter discusses some methodological aspects of this choice of method, as well as its appropriateness to the theme of 'the body' in relation to law. It addresses practical concerns like selecting an example, and the 'enabling constraint' the method offers to the writing process. Working with a single example is presented as a matter of bringing disparate materials into a 'constellation' in order to make the example 'more itself', by exploring the conditions and patterns that it makes uniquely visible. The aim of this approach would be to bring together interrelated reflections on how bodies are made meaningful through representational techniques in concrete instances and for specific purposes; the political ontology of representationalism in relation to legal thinking and methods; and scholarly work as an active, critical participant in the acculturation of techniques and ontologies, via the reflexive repurposing of elements of legal thinking.
Interdisciplinarities: Research Process, Method, and the Body of the Law, 2021
(eds Didi Herman and Connal Parsley). In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body... more (eds Didi Herman and Connal Parsley). In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body', I describe how I would devise a chapter using the technique of writing through a single example-particularly, a single representation of the body. The chapter discusses some methodological aspects of this choice of method, as well as its appropriateness to the theme of 'the body' in relation to law. It addresses practical concerns like selecting an example, and the 'enabling constraint' the method offers to the writing process. Working with a single example is presented as a matter of bringing disparate materials into a 'constellation' in order to make the example 'more itself', by exploring the conditions and patterns that it makes uniquely visible. The aim of this approach would be to bring together interrelated reflections on how bodies are made meaningful through representational techniques in concrete instances and for specific purposes; the political ontology of representationalism in relation to legal thinking and methods; and scholarly work as an active, critical participant in the acculturation of techniques and ontologies, via the reflexive repurposing of elements of legal thinking.
In Desmond Manderson (ed) (2017, Toronto UP) Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, and Critique
Two striking elements of the Bush administration's 'war on terror' were its use of torture, and t... more Two striking elements of the Bush administration's 'war on terror' were its use of torture, and the publication of related images. This chapter considers two of these images together (one from Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo Bay, in January 2002, and the other from the 'Abu Ghraib archive' made shortly after), in order to argue that the 'spectacle of the scaffold' famously identified by Michel Foucault did not disappear completely as he claimed, but was transformed. Foucault could not countenance this possibility due to a methodological aversion to representational-juridical power. But his account can nonetheless help us, I argue, to think through the fraught relationship between images of torture emanating from a liberal democratic state that disavows torture, and such a state's strategies for maintaining its governmental power.
Political torture has an intrinsic tendency to publicise itself, but 'governmental rationality' must mediate that tendency historically, which is to say, in relation to contemporary norms about the display of force and violence, as well as the material conditions through which things are made visible. As such, in this chapter I recast the spectacle of the scaffold as an ongoing politico-legal 'dynamic of display and concealment'. This dynamic, I suggest, must be negotiated and configured wherever a state acts to maintain its monopoly on violence. Turning to the two images in question, I argue that in the early 21st Century, when the state 'no longer takes responsibility for the violence bound up in its practice', Foucault's spectacle is 'exceptionalised' and split into two images. Considering their material conditions, I further argue that when read together these images manifest the two inverted halves of a necessarily unstable spectacle. One maintains the sovereign's triumphant public self-image, the other immanently produces the all-important guilty body of the criminal-enemy. Together, such images can be understood as 'exceptional' in that they rupture norms around the display of state violence, yet do so in order to maintain a 'normal' sovereign social and political order that is raced and heteronormatively sexualised. In addition to Foucault's 'micro-physics of power', then, I argue that we must also pay attention to the dimension of representation--and its materiality--in the maintenance of sovereign power, via what I call a 'micro-theatrics of power'.
Recent decisions have given legal identity to rivers such as Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand, and the... more Recent decisions have given legal identity to rivers such as Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand, and the Ganges and Yamuna in India, effectively treating them as having all the rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person. Looking at such cases, in which the enduring fiction of the legal person is extended over an increasingly wide range of referents, we are reminded that this fiction is anything but marginal – especially in the law of any jurisdiction influenced, however indirectly, by Roman jurisprudence. This paper begins from the point of view that the anthropological embedding of the juridical person ought not to be anachronistically attributed to the Roman ‘law of persons’ in which its craft originated. Rather, we suggest, the well-known Christian metaphysicalization of the juridical person as a moral entity not only adds to but also transforms and displaces that law as a juristic enterprise. What is marginalized in this sense is in fact Roman law’s discrete and self-conscious techniques of shaping the legal person. This article aims not just to highlight the familiar fate of the person under the influence of church doctrine, but also to draw a contemporary inspiration – and, more cautiously, a critical potential – from a return to a casuistic, concrete and immanent conception of the jurisprudential art of crafting the person. Rather than argue for the inclusion of excluded identities within law’s categories (thus extending such categories but doing nothing to challenge the often heteronormative construction of the identities it encompasses), this chapter asks what would it mean to return to an ‘experimental’ law of persons (or a ‘profaned’ art of fashioning the person, in Giorgio Agamben’s sense)? Might this eventually be a path by which to liberate juristic technique to new uses?
New Critical Legal Thinking (eds Matthew Stone, Illan Rua Wall and Costas Douzinas), 2012
This chapter addresses the paradoxical possibility for dissent against the legal and political or... more This chapter addresses the paradoxical possibility for dissent against the legal and political order through a particular form of political action: parody. Languages of protest and political action always risk complicity with the structures of power they aim to critique, and every subject and identity is constituted in relation to existing political power. But parodic gestures, such as those of the Tranny Cops in Australia - whose badged, uniformed, dildo-ed transgender mimicry of riot police has attracted the chagrin of the state governments – dwell differently within this complex aporia. Offering a critique whose only content is a re-performance, re-presentation, and re-inhabitation of policing’s gestural universe, the Tranny Cops’ parody at the same time takes an unmistakeable distance from the police’s methods of power, and the entailed order’s constitution and capture of life. This chapter uses the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to read the Tranny Cops’ gesture and to elaborate on what is specific about parody as a mode of political “protest”. Comparing Hannah Arendt’s conception of politics and her account of civil disobedience to Agamben’s notions of politics and parodic gesture, this chapter draws out some specifically Agambenian parameters for contemporary dissent at the limits of subject-sovereign relations. Can an entirely different relation to political power, which is almost unrecognizeable as such considering that it makes no claim to institution, be augured through parodic protest?
Join one of two intensive seminars, in small-group format, with:
Professor Alain Pottage: "An An... more Join one of two intensive seminars, in small-group format, with:
Professor Alain Pottage: "An Anthropogeology of Law" How does the "anthropocene hypothesis" engage and challenge basic premises of legal thinking?
Professor Sigrid Weigel: "Towards a Political Theology of Images: Imaging the A-Visible in Science, Religion, and Politics" ‘New images’ share many aspects with pre-modern and ancient image practices that present super-natural figures or a-visible, transcendental ideas. This seminar investigates correspondences between images before and after 'art': traces and data, contemporary iconic images, the mediation of resentment, the translation of ideas, values and concepts into the visual register.
More information on the KSSCT, the seminar leaders, and full seminar descriptions and indicative reading lists can be found at https://research.kent.ac.uk/kssct
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in July, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
In 2019 the KSSCT will be accompanied by a Graduate Research Day (29 June).
See website for further details, including a FAQ section.
Abstract:
Paris, 26 June -7 July 2017
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Timothy C... more Abstract:
Paris, 26 June -7 July 2017
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by - Timothy Campbell: "Attention, Ethos, Life: Practices of the Self in the Contemporary Milieu" - Patricia J. Williams: "Seeing and Surveillance: Law, culture and notions of justice"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details, including a FAQ section
CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2016
Kent Law School
1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The Call ... more CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2016 Kent Law School 1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016.
“…there are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible frontier, bound to no crucial date or event.”
The present is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Are we living at a decisive turning point for global and European history, politics and law? Are we witnesses to a new epoch? Or perhaps we just have a bad case of “presentism”? The Critical Legal Conference 2016 will open a forum for critical reflection on precarious political situations, particularly that of Europe in a global context - an apposite theme for a critical conference at the University of Kent, ‘the UK’s European University’ and a point of origin for the CLC.
Taking a global and historicised view of contemporary Europe and its intellectual and political traditions (as well as an interrogative stance on their centrality), we anticipate that this year’s CLC will enable a creative response to some of the many problems of our collective present. The difficulty in thinking the present lies partly in its immediacy, and partly in the way in which spaces for that thinking are themselves precarious, colonised, dis-placed, degraded, recast or simply made untenable. From individuals’ housing, employment and migration experiences to the broader question about the intensification or disintegration of the European political project, are life’s very objects and experiences now peculiarly shaped by precarity?
Law forms part of the architecture of precarity, shaping both its production and governance, whether through specific rules and regulations relating to welfare provision, housing law or the structuring and regulation of financial markets; or through changing images and enactments of justice, (fragmented) genealogies, and shifting understandings of modernity. One approach within the critical legal tradition has been to expose these architectures: to show how it produces inequity, to demonstrate its contingencies, to trace its genealogies, to question law’s production of a normative order of life. In this sense it might be said that the role of critique is to render law itself precarious. What is the contemporary nature, role and position of academic work generally, in relation to political life and cultural and intellectual history? Are we post-human? Post-Europe? Post-law? Post-critique? And what about the core critical legal concerns: law, justice and ethics?
True to the tradition of the CLC, we hope participants will approach these general provocations through a rich plurality of critical and radical thematics and interdisciplinary approaches.
Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Donatella Alessandrini, Kent Law School Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island Isabell Lorey, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies Davide Tarizzo, University of Salerno
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016. The Call for Papers and Panels will be opened in March when streams are announced – and as ever there will be a general stream. *Conference registation will open via the webpage shortly: http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/*
We also invite participants to curate screenings, performances, happenings and other creative formats at the conference. Please contact us at klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk with your plans – we will do our best to facilitate them (within the bounds of possibility).
- Connal Parsley, Nick Piška and the KLS CLC Committee
Paris, 13-24 June 2016
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Samantha Frost: "Matters ... more Paris, 13-24 June 2016
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by - Samantha Frost: "Matters of perception: objects and materialities of affect" - James Martel: "How to be a bad subject: misinterpellation and the anarchisation of the soul" - Bernard Stiegler: "From German ideology to the Dialectic of nature: Reading Marx and Engels in the age of the Anthropocene"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
This is the English translation of Giorgio Agamben's 1968 essay 'L'albero del linguaggio'. Origin... more This is the English translation of Giorgio Agamben's 1968 essay 'L'albero del linguaggio'. Originally published in the journal I Problemi di Ulisse, in an issue on 'Language and Languages', the article has now been republished in Italian together with the first English translation in the first issue of the Journal of Italian Philosophy. The full contents of the issue are available online, featuring new work by Lorenzo Chiesa, Stephen Howard, Lars Cornelissen, and Andrea Bellocci, and reviews by Lucio Privitello, Sevgi Doğan and Michael Lewis:
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/italianphilosophy/current%20issue/
Routledge Handbook of International Law and Humanities, 2021
In Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja (Eds) Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humani... more In Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja (Eds) Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (2021).
A growing movement in contemporary art takes legal forms and materials as its subject matter. In ... more A growing movement in contemporary art takes legal forms and materials as its subject matter. In this article, I argue that a key strand of this 'legal turn' should be historicised in two entwined ways. It can be seen as an extension and reformalisation of some central concerns of late twentieth-century contemporary art; namely relational and participatory aesthetics, and the dematerialisation of the art object. But the artworks considered here can also be analysed as a fragmentary site of 'juristic subjectivity' in the aftermath of legal positivism. According to Carl Schmitt, the positivisation that took hold in the nineteenth century exiled the jurist from their role in formally elaborating the substantive law created by social praxis-turning the jurist into a "mere scholar" in relation to law. In this sense, the separation of juristic thought from law is the aftermath of this destructive event. Yet the etymology of aftermath also links it to a secondary growth that re-emerges after a mowing or harvest. Similarly, the 'contract artists' analysed here evidence a 'regrowth' of juristic thought that relies precisely on its position outside of law 'properly so-called', and inside the conditions of contemporary artistic production and consumption. Analysing contract artworks by artists Adrian Piper and A Constructed World, this article suggests that they differ markedly from the contract art, usually connected to the Siegelaub-Projansky agreement, that has received the majority of academic attention. Whereas that so-called "legal moment in artistic production" prioritises the author function, the abstraction of value, and the commodification of social relations, through the above double historicization I will argue that this 'other' contract art repurposes legal forms to institute a lived experience of juristic social relations, presenting a new kind of material jurisprudence.
Interdisciplinaries: Research Process, Method, and the Body of the Law, Eds Didi Herman and Connal Parsley, 2022
In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body', I describe how I would devise a cha... more In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body', I describe how I would devise a chapter using the technique of writing through a single example--particularly, a single representation of the body. The chapter discusses some methodological aspects of this choice of method, as well as its appropriateness to the theme of 'the body' in relation to law. It addresses practical concerns like selecting an example, and the 'enabling constraint' the method offers to the writing process. Working with a single example is presented as a matter of bringing disparate materials into a 'constellation' in order to make the example 'more itself', by exploring the conditions and patterns that it makes uniquely visible. The aim of this approach would be to bring together interrelated reflections on how bodies are made meaningful through representational techniques in concrete instances and for specific purposes; the political ontology of representationalism in relation to legal thinking and methods; and scholarly work as an active, critical participant in the acculturation of techniques and ontologies, via the reflexive repurposing of elements of legal thinking.
Interdisciplinarities: Research Process, Method, and the Body of the Law, 2021
(eds Didi Herman and Connal Parsley). In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body... more (eds Didi Herman and Connal Parsley). In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body', I describe how I would devise a chapter using the technique of writing through a single example-particularly, a single representation of the body. The chapter discusses some methodological aspects of this choice of method, as well as its appropriateness to the theme of 'the body' in relation to law. It addresses practical concerns like selecting an example, and the 'enabling constraint' the method offers to the writing process. Working with a single example is presented as a matter of bringing disparate materials into a 'constellation' in order to make the example 'more itself', by exploring the conditions and patterns that it makes uniquely visible. The aim of this approach would be to bring together interrelated reflections on how bodies are made meaningful through representational techniques in concrete instances and for specific purposes; the political ontology of representationalism in relation to legal thinking and methods; and scholarly work as an active, critical participant in the acculturation of techniques and ontologies, via the reflexive repurposing of elements of legal thinking.
In Desmond Manderson (ed) (2017, Toronto UP) Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, and Critique
Two striking elements of the Bush administration's 'war on terror' were its use of torture, and t... more Two striking elements of the Bush administration's 'war on terror' were its use of torture, and the publication of related images. This chapter considers two of these images together (one from Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo Bay, in January 2002, and the other from the 'Abu Ghraib archive' made shortly after), in order to argue that the 'spectacle of the scaffold' famously identified by Michel Foucault did not disappear completely as he claimed, but was transformed. Foucault could not countenance this possibility due to a methodological aversion to representational-juridical power. But his account can nonetheless help us, I argue, to think through the fraught relationship between images of torture emanating from a liberal democratic state that disavows torture, and such a state's strategies for maintaining its governmental power.
Political torture has an intrinsic tendency to publicise itself, but 'governmental rationality' must mediate that tendency historically, which is to say, in relation to contemporary norms about the display of force and violence, as well as the material conditions through which things are made visible. As such, in this chapter I recast the spectacle of the scaffold as an ongoing politico-legal 'dynamic of display and concealment'. This dynamic, I suggest, must be negotiated and configured wherever a state acts to maintain its monopoly on violence. Turning to the two images in question, I argue that in the early 21st Century, when the state 'no longer takes responsibility for the violence bound up in its practice', Foucault's spectacle is 'exceptionalised' and split into two images. Considering their material conditions, I further argue that when read together these images manifest the two inverted halves of a necessarily unstable spectacle. One maintains the sovereign's triumphant public self-image, the other immanently produces the all-important guilty body of the criminal-enemy. Together, such images can be understood as 'exceptional' in that they rupture norms around the display of state violence, yet do so in order to maintain a 'normal' sovereign social and political order that is raced and heteronormatively sexualised. In addition to Foucault's 'micro-physics of power', then, I argue that we must also pay attention to the dimension of representation--and its materiality--in the maintenance of sovereign power, via what I call a 'micro-theatrics of power'.
Recent decisions have given legal identity to rivers such as Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand, and the... more Recent decisions have given legal identity to rivers such as Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand, and the Ganges and Yamuna in India, effectively treating them as having all the rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person. Looking at such cases, in which the enduring fiction of the legal person is extended over an increasingly wide range of referents, we are reminded that this fiction is anything but marginal – especially in the law of any jurisdiction influenced, however indirectly, by Roman jurisprudence. This paper begins from the point of view that the anthropological embedding of the juridical person ought not to be anachronistically attributed to the Roman ‘law of persons’ in which its craft originated. Rather, we suggest, the well-known Christian metaphysicalization of the juridical person as a moral entity not only adds to but also transforms and displaces that law as a juristic enterprise. What is marginalized in this sense is in fact Roman law’s discrete and self-conscious techniques of shaping the legal person. This article aims not just to highlight the familiar fate of the person under the influence of church doctrine, but also to draw a contemporary inspiration – and, more cautiously, a critical potential – from a return to a casuistic, concrete and immanent conception of the jurisprudential art of crafting the person. Rather than argue for the inclusion of excluded identities within law’s categories (thus extending such categories but doing nothing to challenge the often heteronormative construction of the identities it encompasses), this chapter asks what would it mean to return to an ‘experimental’ law of persons (or a ‘profaned’ art of fashioning the person, in Giorgio Agamben’s sense)? Might this eventually be a path by which to liberate juristic technique to new uses?
New Critical Legal Thinking (eds Matthew Stone, Illan Rua Wall and Costas Douzinas), 2012
This chapter addresses the paradoxical possibility for dissent against the legal and political or... more This chapter addresses the paradoxical possibility for dissent against the legal and political order through a particular form of political action: parody. Languages of protest and political action always risk complicity with the structures of power they aim to critique, and every subject and identity is constituted in relation to existing political power. But parodic gestures, such as those of the Tranny Cops in Australia - whose badged, uniformed, dildo-ed transgender mimicry of riot police has attracted the chagrin of the state governments – dwell differently within this complex aporia. Offering a critique whose only content is a re-performance, re-presentation, and re-inhabitation of policing’s gestural universe, the Tranny Cops’ parody at the same time takes an unmistakeable distance from the police’s methods of power, and the entailed order’s constitution and capture of life. This chapter uses the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to read the Tranny Cops’ gesture and to elaborate on what is specific about parody as a mode of political “protest”. Comparing Hannah Arendt’s conception of politics and her account of civil disobedience to Agamben’s notions of politics and parodic gesture, this chapter draws out some specifically Agambenian parameters for contemporary dissent at the limits of subject-sovereign relations. Can an entirely different relation to political power, which is almost unrecognizeable as such considering that it makes no claim to institution, be augured through parodic protest?
Join one of two intensive seminars, in small-group format, with:
Professor Alain Pottage: "An An... more Join one of two intensive seminars, in small-group format, with:
Professor Alain Pottage: "An Anthropogeology of Law" How does the "anthropocene hypothesis" engage and challenge basic premises of legal thinking?
Professor Sigrid Weigel: "Towards a Political Theology of Images: Imaging the A-Visible in Science, Religion, and Politics" ‘New images’ share many aspects with pre-modern and ancient image practices that present super-natural figures or a-visible, transcendental ideas. This seminar investigates correspondences between images before and after 'art': traces and data, contemporary iconic images, the mediation of resentment, the translation of ideas, values and concepts into the visual register.
More information on the KSSCT, the seminar leaders, and full seminar descriptions and indicative reading lists can be found at https://research.kent.ac.uk/kssct
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in July, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
In 2019 the KSSCT will be accompanied by a Graduate Research Day (29 June).
See website for further details, including a FAQ section.
Abstract:
Paris, 26 June -7 July 2017
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Timothy C... more Abstract:
Paris, 26 June -7 July 2017
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by - Timothy Campbell: "Attention, Ethos, Life: Practices of the Self in the Contemporary Milieu" - Patricia J. Williams: "Seeing and Surveillance: Law, culture and notions of justice"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details, including a FAQ section
CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2016
Kent Law School
1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The Call ... more CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2016 Kent Law School 1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016.
“…there are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible frontier, bound to no crucial date or event.”
The present is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Are we living at a decisive turning point for global and European history, politics and law? Are we witnesses to a new epoch? Or perhaps we just have a bad case of “presentism”? The Critical Legal Conference 2016 will open a forum for critical reflection on precarious political situations, particularly that of Europe in a global context - an apposite theme for a critical conference at the University of Kent, ‘the UK’s European University’ and a point of origin for the CLC.
Taking a global and historicised view of contemporary Europe and its intellectual and political traditions (as well as an interrogative stance on their centrality), we anticipate that this year’s CLC will enable a creative response to some of the many problems of our collective present. The difficulty in thinking the present lies partly in its immediacy, and partly in the way in which spaces for that thinking are themselves precarious, colonised, dis-placed, degraded, recast or simply made untenable. From individuals’ housing, employment and migration experiences to the broader question about the intensification or disintegration of the European political project, are life’s very objects and experiences now peculiarly shaped by precarity?
Law forms part of the architecture of precarity, shaping both its production and governance, whether through specific rules and regulations relating to welfare provision, housing law or the structuring and regulation of financial markets; or through changing images and enactments of justice, (fragmented) genealogies, and shifting understandings of modernity. One approach within the critical legal tradition has been to expose these architectures: to show how it produces inequity, to demonstrate its contingencies, to trace its genealogies, to question law’s production of a normative order of life. In this sense it might be said that the role of critique is to render law itself precarious. What is the contemporary nature, role and position of academic work generally, in relation to political life and cultural and intellectual history? Are we post-human? Post-Europe? Post-law? Post-critique? And what about the core critical legal concerns: law, justice and ethics?
True to the tradition of the CLC, we hope participants will approach these general provocations through a rich plurality of critical and radical thematics and interdisciplinary approaches.
Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Donatella Alessandrini, Kent Law School Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island Isabell Lorey, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies Davide Tarizzo, University of Salerno
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016. The Call for Papers and Panels will be opened in March when streams are announced – and as ever there will be a general stream. *Conference registation will open via the webpage shortly: http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/*
We also invite participants to curate screenings, performances, happenings and other creative formats at the conference. Please contact us at klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk with your plans – we will do our best to facilitate them (within the bounds of possibility).
- Connal Parsley, Nick Piška and the KLS CLC Committee
Paris, 13-24 June 2016
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Samantha Frost: "Matters ... more Paris, 13-24 June 2016
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by - Samantha Frost: "Matters of perception: objects and materialities of affect" - James Martel: "How to be a bad subject: misinterpellation and the anarchisation of the soul" - Bernard Stiegler: "From German ideology to the Dialectic of nature: Reading Marx and Engels in the age of the Anthropocene"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
This is the English translation of Giorgio Agamben's 1968 essay 'L'albero del linguaggio'. Origin... more This is the English translation of Giorgio Agamben's 1968 essay 'L'albero del linguaggio'. Originally published in the journal I Problemi di Ulisse, in an issue on 'Language and Languages', the article has now been republished in Italian together with the first English translation in the first issue of the Journal of Italian Philosophy. The full contents of the issue are available online, featuring new work by Lorenzo Chiesa, Stephen Howard, Lars Cornelissen, and Andrea Bellocci, and reviews by Lucio Privitello, Sevgi Doğan and Michael Lewis:
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/italianphilosophy/current%20issue/
The notion of the “impolitical” developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of... more The notion of the “impolitical” developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of modernity’s political categories, which have become incapable of giving voice to any genuinely radical perspective. The impolitical is not the opposite of the political but rather its outer limit: the border from which we might glimpse a trajectory away from all forms of political theology and the depoliticizing tendencies of a completed modernity.
The book’s reconstruction of the impolitical lineage—which is anything but uniform—begins with the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution to Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power; from Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots to Georges Bataille’s Sovereignty to Ernst Junger’s An der Zeitmauer.
The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories.
What is it that is ruined, what is it that is destroyed in us, each time we become an image? It i... more What is it that is ruined, what is it that is destroyed in us, each time we become an image? It is our ruin that awakens after our death, living no longer as a man; without humanity. In being loved we give up our most human guise: we let it die little by little, until nothing remains but its corpse. More precisely, its image. For this reason, it is only insofar as we are loved--as images--that we are completely individual. Only in love is a life made truly singular, taking leave of its common nature. An individual's most authentic substance exists, in fact, only as an image. This is why no-one will ever be able to love a people, a race, a community. If what is loved is, demonically, this absolute haecceity without species, then love love liberates us from every resemblance. Without love, every life again becomes generic, resuming obvious, universal characteristics, losing its demonic nature and becoming human.
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Political torture has an intrinsic tendency to publicise itself, but 'governmental rationality' must mediate that tendency historically, which is to say, in relation to contemporary norms about the display of force and violence, as well as the material conditions through which things are made visible. As such, in this chapter I recast the spectacle of the scaffold as an ongoing politico-legal 'dynamic of display and concealment'. This dynamic, I suggest, must be negotiated and configured wherever a state acts to maintain its monopoly on violence. Turning to the two images in question, I argue that in the early 21st Century, when the state 'no longer takes responsibility for the violence bound up in its practice', Foucault's spectacle is 'exceptionalised' and split into two images. Considering their material conditions, I further argue that when read together these images manifest the two inverted halves of a necessarily unstable spectacle. One maintains the sovereign's triumphant public self-image, the other immanently produces the all-important guilty body of the criminal-enemy. Together, such images can be understood as 'exceptional' in that they rupture norms around the display of state violence, yet do so in order to maintain a 'normal' sovereign social and political order that is raced and heteronormatively sexualised. In addition to Foucault's 'micro-physics of power', then, I argue that we must also pay attention to the dimension of representation--and its materiality--in the maintenance of sovereign power, via what I call a 'micro-theatrics of power'.
Professor Alain Pottage: "An Anthropogeology of Law"
How does the "anthropocene hypothesis" engage and challenge basic premises of legal thinking?
Professor Sigrid Weigel: "Towards a Political Theology of Images: Imaging the A-Visible in Science, Religion, and Politics"
‘New images’ share many aspects with pre-modern and ancient image practices that present super-natural figures or a-visible, transcendental ideas. This seminar investigates correspondences between images before and after 'art': traces and data, contemporary iconic images, the mediation of resentment, the translation of ideas, values and concepts into the visual register.
More information on the KSSCT, the seminar leaders, and full seminar descriptions and indicative reading lists can be found at https://research.kent.ac.uk/kssct
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in July, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
In 2019 the KSSCT will be accompanied by a Graduate Research Day (29 June).
See website for further details, including a FAQ section.
We hope to see you in Paris this summer!
Paris, 26 June -7 July 2017
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Timothy Campbell: "Attention, Ethos, Life: Practices of the Self in the Contemporary Milieu"
- Patricia J. Williams: "Seeing and Surveillance: Law, culture and notions of justice"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details, including a FAQ section
We hope to see you in Paris this summer!
Kent Law School
1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016.
“…there are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible frontier,
bound to no crucial date or event.”
The present is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Are we living at a decisive turning point for global and European history, politics and law? Are we witnesses to a new epoch? Or perhaps we just have a bad case of “presentism”? The Critical Legal Conference 2016 will open a forum for critical reflection on precarious political situations, particularly that of Europe in a global context - an apposite theme for a critical conference at the University of Kent, ‘the UK’s European University’ and a point of origin for the CLC.
Taking a global and historicised view of contemporary Europe and its intellectual and political traditions (as well as an interrogative stance on their centrality), we anticipate that this year’s CLC will enable a creative response to some of the many problems of our collective present. The difficulty in thinking the present lies partly in its immediacy, and partly in the way in which spaces for that thinking are themselves precarious, colonised, dis-placed, degraded, recast or simply made untenable. From individuals’ housing, employment and migration experiences to the broader question about the intensification or disintegration of the European political project, are life’s very objects and experiences now peculiarly shaped by precarity?
Law forms part of the architecture of precarity, shaping both its production and governance, whether through specific rules and regulations relating to welfare provision, housing law or the structuring and regulation of financial markets; or through changing images and enactments of justice, (fragmented) genealogies, and shifting understandings of modernity. One approach within the critical legal tradition has been to expose these architectures: to show how it produces inequity, to demonstrate its contingencies, to trace its genealogies, to question law’s production of a normative order of life. In this sense it might be said that the role of critique is to render law itself precarious. What is the contemporary nature, role and position of academic work generally, in relation to political life and cultural and intellectual history? Are we post-human? Post-Europe? Post-law? Post-critique? And what about the core critical legal concerns: law, justice and ethics?
True to the tradition of the CLC, we hope participants will approach these general provocations through a rich plurality of critical and radical thematics and interdisciplinary approaches.
Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Donatella Alessandrini, Kent Law School
Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island
Isabell Lorey, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
Davide Tarizzo, University of Salerno
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016. The Call for Papers and Panels will be opened in March when streams are announced – and as ever there will be a general stream. *Conference registation will open via the webpage shortly: http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/*
We also invite participants to curate screenings, performances, happenings and other creative formats at the conference. Please contact us at klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk with your plans – we will do our best to facilitate them (within the bounds of possibility).
- Connal Parsley, Nick Piška and the KLS CLC Committee
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Samantha Frost: "Matters of perception: objects and materialities of affect"
- James Martel: "How to be a bad subject: misinterpellation and the anarchisation of the soul"
- Bernard Stiegler: "From German ideology to the Dialectic of nature: Reading Marx and Engels in the age of the Anthropocene"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details.
We hope to see you in Paris in June!
-
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/italianphilosophy/current%20issue/
Political torture has an intrinsic tendency to publicise itself, but 'governmental rationality' must mediate that tendency historically, which is to say, in relation to contemporary norms about the display of force and violence, as well as the material conditions through which things are made visible. As such, in this chapter I recast the spectacle of the scaffold as an ongoing politico-legal 'dynamic of display and concealment'. This dynamic, I suggest, must be negotiated and configured wherever a state acts to maintain its monopoly on violence. Turning to the two images in question, I argue that in the early 21st Century, when the state 'no longer takes responsibility for the violence bound up in its practice', Foucault's spectacle is 'exceptionalised' and split into two images. Considering their material conditions, I further argue that when read together these images manifest the two inverted halves of a necessarily unstable spectacle. One maintains the sovereign's triumphant public self-image, the other immanently produces the all-important guilty body of the criminal-enemy. Together, such images can be understood as 'exceptional' in that they rupture norms around the display of state violence, yet do so in order to maintain a 'normal' sovereign social and political order that is raced and heteronormatively sexualised. In addition to Foucault's 'micro-physics of power', then, I argue that we must also pay attention to the dimension of representation--and its materiality--in the maintenance of sovereign power, via what I call a 'micro-theatrics of power'.
Professor Alain Pottage: "An Anthropogeology of Law"
How does the "anthropocene hypothesis" engage and challenge basic premises of legal thinking?
Professor Sigrid Weigel: "Towards a Political Theology of Images: Imaging the A-Visible in Science, Religion, and Politics"
‘New images’ share many aspects with pre-modern and ancient image practices that present super-natural figures or a-visible, transcendental ideas. This seminar investigates correspondences between images before and after 'art': traces and data, contemporary iconic images, the mediation of resentment, the translation of ideas, values and concepts into the visual register.
More information on the KSSCT, the seminar leaders, and full seminar descriptions and indicative reading lists can be found at https://research.kent.ac.uk/kssct
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in July, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
In 2019 the KSSCT will be accompanied by a Graduate Research Day (29 June).
See website for further details, including a FAQ section.
We hope to see you in Paris this summer!
Paris, 26 June -7 July 2017
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Timothy Campbell: "Attention, Ethos, Life: Practices of the Self in the Contemporary Milieu"
- Patricia J. Williams: "Seeing and Surveillance: Law, culture and notions of justice"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details, including a FAQ section
We hope to see you in Paris this summer!
Kent Law School
1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016.
“…there are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible frontier,
bound to no crucial date or event.”
The present is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Are we living at a decisive turning point for global and European history, politics and law? Are we witnesses to a new epoch? Or perhaps we just have a bad case of “presentism”? The Critical Legal Conference 2016 will open a forum for critical reflection on precarious political situations, particularly that of Europe in a global context - an apposite theme for a critical conference at the University of Kent, ‘the UK’s European University’ and a point of origin for the CLC.
Taking a global and historicised view of contemporary Europe and its intellectual and political traditions (as well as an interrogative stance on their centrality), we anticipate that this year’s CLC will enable a creative response to some of the many problems of our collective present. The difficulty in thinking the present lies partly in its immediacy, and partly in the way in which spaces for that thinking are themselves precarious, colonised, dis-placed, degraded, recast or simply made untenable. From individuals’ housing, employment and migration experiences to the broader question about the intensification or disintegration of the European political project, are life’s very objects and experiences now peculiarly shaped by precarity?
Law forms part of the architecture of precarity, shaping both its production and governance, whether through specific rules and regulations relating to welfare provision, housing law or the structuring and regulation of financial markets; or through changing images and enactments of justice, (fragmented) genealogies, and shifting understandings of modernity. One approach within the critical legal tradition has been to expose these architectures: to show how it produces inequity, to demonstrate its contingencies, to trace its genealogies, to question law’s production of a normative order of life. In this sense it might be said that the role of critique is to render law itself precarious. What is the contemporary nature, role and position of academic work generally, in relation to political life and cultural and intellectual history? Are we post-human? Post-Europe? Post-law? Post-critique? And what about the core critical legal concerns: law, justice and ethics?
True to the tradition of the CLC, we hope participants will approach these general provocations through a rich plurality of critical and radical thematics and interdisciplinary approaches.
Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Donatella Alessandrini, Kent Law School
Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island
Isabell Lorey, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
Davide Tarizzo, University of Salerno
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016. The Call for Papers and Panels will be opened in March when streams are announced – and as ever there will be a general stream. *Conference registation will open via the webpage shortly: http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/*
We also invite participants to curate screenings, performances, happenings and other creative formats at the conference. Please contact us at klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk with your plans – we will do our best to facilitate them (within the bounds of possibility).
- Connal Parsley, Nick Piška and the KLS CLC Committee
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Samantha Frost: "Matters of perception: objects and materialities of affect"
- James Martel: "How to be a bad subject: misinterpellation and the anarchisation of the soul"
- Bernard Stiegler: "From German ideology to the Dialectic of nature: Reading Marx and Engels in the age of the Anthropocene"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details.
We hope to see you in Paris in June!
-
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/italianphilosophy/current%20issue/
The book’s reconstruction of the impolitical lineage—which is anything but uniform—begins with the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution to Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power; from Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots to Georges Bataille’s Sovereignty to Ernst Junger’s An der Zeitmauer.
The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories.