[Foucault-L] CFP: Ontology and Politics

*MANCHESTER Workshops in Political Theory 2011 - August 31st - September
2nd, 2011

Call for Papers - Ontology and Politics Workshop

Convenors: Paul Rekret (Queen Mary), Simon Choat (Kingston)

*

Despite its pervasiveness, the question of the relation between ontology and
politics continues to be a crucial one for Continental philosophy. While
the place and status of the question of being in the realm of the political
has occupied much of social theory in the past twenty or thirty years, we
remain no closer to drawing any common ground on these themes.
Post-structuralist or post-foundational political thought has insisted on
the inherent contingency of any political ontology and has, from this
notion, sought to draw out a framework for an emancipatory politics grounded
in the concepts of difference and otherness. However, such a stance finds
itself increasingly challenged today. On the one hand, thinkers such as
Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere call for the need to think a
politicsgrounded in a conception of universality rather than alterity,
while on the
other hand, so-called speculative realism more fundamentally challenges the
very notion of ontology as it has been conceived by the majority of
Continental thinkers in recent decades. This panel aims to explore the
intersections of politics and ontology and the resulting implications for
thinking both the political and the philosophical.

We invite papers addressing the following and any other related themes:

-Is there a place for reflection on ontology in the theorisation and study
of politics?

-Is there a necessary transitivity between the ontological and the
political? How should this relation be conceived?

-Is there a necessarily leftist or emancipatory ontology?

-Should the politics which has generally been thought to follow from
post-foundational or post-structuralist ontologies be re-evaluated in light
of recent critiques?

-Does a new and different relation between ontology and politics follow from
recent speculative materialist ontologies?



If you would like to present a paper at this workshop, please submit an
abstract of 300-500 words (or a full paper) to
p.rekret@xxxxxxxxxx <corey.maciver@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>or
S.Choat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx by 15 June 2011.

For more information on the conference see:
http://manceptworkshops.wordpress.com/

<http://www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/polphil/news/article.php?id=343>

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