Progressive Geographies

Alexandre Kojève, Atheism, translated by Jeff Love, Columbia UP 2018

One of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and unconventional thinkers, Alexandre Kojève was a Russian émigré to France whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s galvanized a generation of French intellectuals. Although Kojève wrote a great deal, he published very little in his lifetime, and so the ongoing rediscovery of his work continues to present new challenges to philosophy and political theory. Written in 1931 but left unfinished, Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Kojève’s thought.

Ranging across Heidegger, Buddhism, Christianity, German idealism, Russian literature, and mathematics, Kojève advances a novel argument about freedom and authority. He investigates the possibility that there is not any vantage point or source of authority—including philosophy, science, or God—that is outside or beyond politics and the world as we experience it. The question becomes whether atheism—or theism—is even a meaningful position since both affirmation and denial of God’s existence imply a knowledge that seems clearly outside our capacities. Masterfully translated by Jeff Love, this book offers a striking new perspective on Kojève’s work and its implications for theism, atheism, politics, and freedom.

The book is discussed by Jeff Love and Carrie Lynn Evans at the New Books Network. Thanks to dmf for the link.

One-day Symposium at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Roehampton, London the 1st of July 2019

We invite you to a one-day symposium on Monstrous Ontologies. Politics, Ethics, Materiality at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Roehampton, London, the 1st of July 2019.
The intention is to provoke participants to think and engage with monstrosity as not a mere cultural construct of the ‘other’ (to be deconstructed), but an ontological reality that require to be faced (speculatively, politically, and ethically) in its complex and really-existent materiality.

The scope of the symposium is widely trans-disciplinar, welcoming contributions, from sociological, legal, geographical, psychological, philosophical, political and cultural studies, as well as from the arts. The symposium will compile the research papers presented into a book to be published in 2020.

We expect to receive a 250-word abstract by 1 March 2019 (send to Caterina.Nirta@roehampton.ac.uk or andrea.pavoni@iscte-iul.pt).

Monstrous Ontologies. Politics, Ethics, Materiality

Fantastic animals, evil criminals, notorious neighbourhoods, mysterious objects, invisible ideologies, unspoken laws: monstrosity can take different shapes, crossing the boundaries between the visible and the thinkable, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, as an uncanny atmosphere always on the verge of being materialised and individualised in the monsters that populate collective imagination, biological taxonomies, legal discourses, and moral panics. Contemporary critical thought has done much to frame monstrosity as reflecting the cultural anxieties of the contexts from which it is drawn. Accordingly, much of its wider significance has been located in the affective impact and emotional salience of monsters: the ability to become fearsome, to provoke feelings of disgust, but also to agglomerate desire around a not fully-explored alterity, and create curiosity towards their embodied transgression. Insofar as a purely cultural construction depending on the transgression of given (social, cultural, moral, biological) norms, monstrosity has been critically demystified, by challenging its insidious categorisations of the other (species, body, race, gender) as monstrous. While, as the current climate forcefully shows, it is necessary to challenge these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, we do contest the consequent reduction of monstrosity to a mere cultural construction of the other. Against this dialectical definition, we do claim that monstrosity is not a merely epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality.

There is a more that the monster embodies and communicates, a monstrous excess that materially resists being ingested within an order (it is this very resistance that is unbearably shown and viscerally exposed by the disgust the monster elicits), and yet cannot be placed in a negative, dialectical opposition to that order either. Reason, Language, Law, Science and other conceptual mechanisms do not simply produce monsters (as their dialectical counter-part), they rather capture, domesticate and naturalise them within their own system, denying their monstrous excess. As George Canguilhem suggests, the sleep of reason does not generate monsters: it liberates them. While monsters may be said to be the end product of discursive rhetorics, normative pressure, and bio-political apparatuses, we suggest monstrosity to be inherently excessive to them. As such, understanding monstrosity means to radically challenge not only the (legal, social, political) categories we use, but also the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical and political dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and requires facing its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This is the challenge this symposium addresses, encouraging participants to do so by engaging with questions such as (but not limited to):

• What makes a monster a monster?
• What is the material reality of monstrosity?
• What is the advantage of approaching monstrosity ontologically?
• What would a monstrous ethics look like?
• What is the political potential of a monstrous ethics?
• Human, nonhuman, inhuman monsters.
• Monsters, fear and the politics of affect.
• Invisible monsters: atmospheres, ideologies, structures.
• Is gender monstrous?
• Monstrosity, violence, resistance

Organisers
Caterina Nirta, University of Roehampton
Andrea Pavoni, DINAMIA’CET, ISCTE-IUL, University Institute of Lisbon