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2005
CFP
The
7th Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group
"Grave
ReMarx: The Accumulating Dead"
Featuring: Warren Montag and Marc Neocleous
March
24-26 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 |