Re: AUT: Fwd: Marxist conference at University of Florida

[David McInerney <borderlands@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Warren Montag is both a friend of mine and a very good speaker and
writer in the sense of presenting his material in a clear and engaging
manner.
For anyone who's interested in the whole 'Marx and Spinoza' literature
and is close enough to Florida for it to be economically viable I'd
recommend going along.  I don't know Neocleous's work but thanks Martin
for bringing it to my attention as I'm very interested in reading what
he has to say about Burke and monstrosity in the context of the class
struggles of the late 18th century.
David


On 18/11/2004, at 5:45 AM, martin hardie wrote:

> i went to this confreence in 2002 and itwas great. not sure if i can
> get there
> next yera but it is recomended and a good crowd of people
>
> Martin
>
>
> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
>
> Subject: Marxist conference at University of Florida
> Date: Wednesday 17 November 2004 18:35
> From: Derek Merrill <ds5m2000@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: martin hardie <hardie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ....................................
>
> CALL FOR PAPERS
>
> Grave ReMarx: The Accumulating Dead
> The University of Florida?s Marxist Reading Group
> Seventh Annual Conference
>
> Keynote speakers: Warren Montag and Mark Neocleous
> March 24-26, 2005 at the University of Florida
>
>
> How has Marx's promise of a spectre haunting Europe
> been explained away, ridiculed, or destroyed, and at
> the same time how does Marx  himself haunt our
> thinking and rethinking of the present world? Rather
> than a revolutionary class haunting the world, today
> the left lingers on an always familiar political
> ground and appears stagnant by its own struggles,
> failures, and deaths. This conference seeks papers
> that either explore the ways in which the spirit of
> revolution has been kept alive through its critique of
> the monstrous side of capitalism, or interrogate
> circumstances in which that same spirit has itself
> assumed a monstrous or ghostly face.
>
> This conference acknowledges that capitalism
> constantly threatens life and tends to reproduce it as
> monstrous. Indeed, in the global context, daily life
> becomes a desperately lived struggle as capital
> continues to undermine, deform, and destroy all forms
> of life. The presence of the monstrous in capital
> permits a discussion of the destructive forces of
> capitalism, and the attempts of the left to resist and
> rise above such destruction on all fronts, such as
> economics, politics, and social/spatial relations. We
> implicitly ask how narratives of the monstrous conjure
> the spirit of marxism, Marx, and the revolutionary
> struggle.
>
> Mark Neocleous is  the author of the most thorough
> Marxian critique of the concept of (the) police, as
> well as of key books on Fascism and the nature of the
> state  and its administrative apparatus. Neocleous'
> recent work explores the deep  roots of Western
> conservative thought, with especial reference to the
> work of Edmund Burke. Targeting the poor and the
> working class in its formative period, Burke's
> metaphors on the monster nurtured--and still
> nurture--capitalism's imaginary and fears.
> Furthermore, conservative  tropes such as Burke's
> paved the way for a truly monstrous treatment of the
> working poor by both capital and the state based on
> widespread appeals  to security.  Neocleous'
> filigreed discussion of conservative narratives expose
> hermeneutics, literature,  and narratives in general
> as a  decisive political territory of class  struggle.
> Dr. Neocleous is a Senior  Lecturer at Brunel
> University and a member of the editorial collective of
> the journal Radical Philosophy. He is the author of
> Imagining the State ( 2003); The Fabrication of Social
> Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (2000);
> Fascism (1997); and Administering Civil Society:
> Towards a Theory of State Power (1996).
>
> Warren Montag?s work moves between the political
> thought of philosophers from the seventeenth and
> eighteenth-centuries and the critical theorists of our
> own era. Both Spinoza and Althusser have figured
> particularly in his writing, as has the question of
> philosophy?s relation to literature. Besides a
> forthcoming book on Althusser, he has written Bodies,
> Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries as well
> as The Unthinkable Swift: the Spontaneous Philosophy
> of a Church of England Man. Professor Montag?s
> editorial credits include The New Spinoza, In a
> Materialist Way: Selected Essays by Pierre Macherey,
> and Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere. His essays
> have appeared in such notable volumes as Ghostly
> Demarcations (ed. Michael Sprinker), a collection of
> responses to Jacques Derrida?s Specters of Marx. He is
> professor of eighteenth-century British and European
> literature in the Department of English and
> Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College.
>
>
> Prospective papers may address (but are not limited
> to) the following:
> The police and the monster (or policing monstrosity)
> Dead utopias
> Apocalypse and survivors
> Spaces of interaction between living and dead
> Philosophy and death
> Ghosting identities?selves vanishing, bodies remaining
> Haunted by Melancholy? How should the left deal with
> the "weight of  the dead"?
> Problems of Order: Order is the classical conservative
> trope. Yet, does not the Left's sheer rejection of the
> subject relate to the recurrence of  defeat and
> divisiveness? How should order be conceived from a
> leftist perspective?
> Literary representations of the dead
> Specters of capital
> Monstrous classes
> Spirits armed and unarmed
> Fascism & the aesthetics and politics of death
> Labor and the living dead
> Monster as biopolitics
> The weight of the dead
> Terror and monstrosity
> Administering monstrosity
> Categorizing life: Monster, barbarian, swarm,
> multitude
> Repression/Consumerism as a way of channeling anxiety
> What is not yet comes as repetition (announces itself
> as a specter)
> Does the future come already dead?
> Reification and death
> Commodity fetishism and the monstrous
> Memories and mourning
> Ghostly remainders
> Death and defeat
> Marx and the living dead
> Subjective and political consequences of alternative
> ways of representing the dead: Ghost, Saint, Domestic
> Voices from the past/voices of ancestors
> Ghostly mediations
> How can we have a vision/taste of the future without
> being haunted or possessed?
> Police noir
>
> Non-traditional or performative panels will also be
> considered.
> One-page abstracts, questions, and comments should be
> submitted to the Marxist Reading Group at
> extinction@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Abstracts due: January 15th, 2005.
> For more information about our group, conferences, and
> keynote speakers go to www.english.ufl.edu/mrg
>
>
>
>
>
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David McInerney
borderlands e-journal
www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au



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