[Discussion] CFP: Grave ReMarx: The Accumulating Dead (1/15/05; 3/24/05-3/26/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Grave ReMarx: The Accumulating Dead
The University of Florida's Marxist Reading Group
Seventh Annual Conference

Keynote speakers: Warren Montag and Mark Neocleous
March 24-26, 2005 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

Non-traditional or performative panels will also be considered.

One-page abstracts, questions, and comments should be submitted to the
Marxist Reading Group at extinction@clas.ufl.edu

Abstracts due: January 15th, 2005.

For more information about our group, conferences, and keynote speakers
go to www.english.ufl.edu/mrg



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