[Marxism] Fwd: Marxist conference at University of Florida

["eugene plawiuk" <eugene@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> >>
> >> 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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