[Discussion] CFP: Thinking the Present: The Beginnings and Ends of Political Theory (grad) (1/31/05; 5/27/05-5/28/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Call For Papers
A Graduate Student Conference in Political Theory
27-28 May 2005
University of California, Berkeley

Note: to facilitate participation, the conference will provide
accommodation for invited presenters, and will contribute up to $300
towards transportation costs for invited applicants, funding permitting.

Thinking the Present: The Beginnings and Ends of Political Theory

Keynote speaker: Bonnie Honig, Professor of Political Science and
Director of the Center for Law, Culture and Social Thought, Northwestern
University

Closing remarks will take the form of a roundtable discussion, featuring
the keynote speaker and several distinguished panelists from UC Berkeley.

Our present can be characterized as a time of new and old forms of
political and military domination and dramatic re-organizations of
power. We face a widespread redefinition of rights, liberties, and
constitutions, alongside and intertwined with patterns of segregation,
exclusion, and occupation; a global network of interrogation and torture
camps, a perpetual war, sustained invocations of emergency powers,
bulldozed and bombed homes and cities. But what is the status of this
present, this particular historical era? How does (or should) this
present define, condition, or circumscribe the activity of theorizing?
What erasures of the past are performed in theorizing the present?

In confronting the present, the political theorist also confronts the
beginnings of political theory itself. What are the conditions, grounds,
and triggers from which theorizing proceeds? What histories and
genealogies impel and inform political theory, and how does the location
of this beginning limit the horizons of political theory, either in its
specific iterations or in its status as a historical discourse and as a
vocation?

What is the relationship between political theory's beginnings and its
ends? Is theory instrumental, pursuing specific ends? If so, how should
we articulate these ends? Can political theory one day achieve its ends,
thereby exhausting itself? Or, conversely, can theory irrevocably fail
to achieve its ends, proving itself inadequate to the demands of the
present? Can we perhaps theorize without end(s)? What would a
non-instrumental, unending political theory look like, especially in
relation to the present? Is there a moment in politics when theory
becomes improper?

In asking these questions, we mean to direct attention to the role of
the present in the practice of political theory. How do ideas about the
present as a teleological end, or an interruption of history, or a
return of history partially constitute the very act of theorizing about
politics?

Potential topics might include:

* Representations of Newness and Nowness
* Thinking the Event: Theorizing Continuity and Discontinuity
* Historical Iterations and the Politics of D=E9j=E0 Vu
* Nationalism, Natality, and Narration
* Constitutional Fictions
* The Function of Crisis in Theory and Theorizing
* The Violence of Beginnings: Genocides, Colonization, Insurrections
* The Violence of Ends: Foreclosures, Horizons, Solutions
* Theorizing Body Counts and (Neo-)colonial Warfare
* Contemporary Despotism: the Politics of Emergency Powers
* Situating, Contextualizing, and Provincializing Political Theory

The Conference invites paper submissions from all graduate students
working on topics in political theory. Please send proposed paper
abstracts of 750 words to critsens@socrates.berkeley.edu by 31 January 20=
05.

Proposals should include:
* a proposal title and summary
* name, departmental affiliation, address, telephone number and e-mail
address of the applicant

For further enquiries, please contact theoryconference@lists.berkeley.edu

Organizing Committee:
George Ciccariello Maher, Political Science
Tucker Culbertson, Jurisprudence and Social Policy/Boalt Hall
Jack Jackson, Political Science
Sharon Stanley, Political Science
Yves Winter, Rhetoric


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