2. Foundations of Political Theory

Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, jdean@hws.edu

The theme of the 2008 conference, “Categories and the Politics of Global Inequalities” is well-suited to the concerns of division two, “Foundations of Political Theory.” Political theorists have long explored the workings of categories and concepts, the ways thinking opens some experiences and arranges them into worlds while at the same time closing off and casting into shadow people, places, and possibilities. This year, the conference theme invites us to inquire into the ways global inequality informs the categories of thought as well as into the ways categories contribute to these very inequalities.

Accordingly, this division encourages papers and panels that explore the politics of categories. How are categories sites of antagonism, contestation, deliberation, or solidarity? What conditions or habitats enable some categories to flourish or resonate and others to decline or disturb? What prevents or allows categories to link together into discourses, fundaments, arguments, ontologies, forms of knowledge, machines, identities, or movements? Whose categories matter and for what purposes? What are the repercussions of certain intensive attachments to some categories rather than others? In what ways do categories encounter their constitutive limits and what might be the political repercussions of such encounters? Does political change entail refiguring old categories, producing new ones, attempting to move beyond categories altogether? How does politics exceed the categories of global inequalities? How might categorical failures be failures of political imagination or will (in this vein, the conference theme might be rephrased: categories or the politics of global inequalities)?

Panels featuring confrontations between differing approaches to political theory are particularly welcome. Such panels might address a single category or concept (e.g., desire, sovereignty, enjoyment, neoliberalism, neoconservatism, freedom, rights, biopolitics, nonhuman, inhuman, revolution, subject, agency, object, act) from various perspectives: are perspectives on or usages of a term so different as to be ultimately incommensurable or are points of commonality possible? What are the political repercussions of incommensurability and/or commonality in these specific instances? In this vein, interdisciplinary proposals and proposals with explicit connections to contemporary politics are encouraged.

Papers, panels, and roundtables on topics other than the conference theme are acceptable as are experimental formats. Panels comprised of established and emerging scholars are encouraged.