Catherine Malabou: Why the Need for a Philosophical Exploration of Anarchism Today?

08 juillet | 19h30

The keynote lecture will take place as part of the conference:

Anarchē

Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Ground

Organized by Damiano Sacco and Facundo Vega

Confronted with an arguably incomplete critique of the notion and history of sovereignty, contemporary lines of thinking have forcefully returned to the inquiry into political foundations. These theoretical approaches in philosophy and the humanities at large have attempted to find possibilities of dialogue concerning the critique of sovereign structures of power, the undoing of systemic violence, as well as the development of ideas of community and mutual aid. The conference ‘Anarchē’ aims to investigate the contemporary philosophical attempts at questioning traditional concepts of political foundations in order to rethink the central notion of ground or archē.

Why the Need for a Philosophical Exploration of Anarchism Today?

In this talk, Catherine Malabou will elaborate on the current crisis of horizontality, which can be attributed to the flexible architecture of the Internet and the factual anarchism it makes possible. Is it possible to genuinely differentiate political anarchism from anarcho-capitalism? Malabou will show that a new philosophical elaboration of anarchy is needed to sustain such a differentiation, and the extent to which the concepts of anarchy provided by some of the most prominent thinkers of the twentieth century (Schürmann, Foucault, or Rancière) can help with yet are ultimately insufficient for this task.

Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University (UK) and in the departments of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies at UC Irvine. Her last books include Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2016, trans. Carolyn Shread), Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artifial Brains (2019, trans. Carolyn Shread), and Le Plaisir effacé. Clitoris et pensée (2020). 

Organisateur

ICI Berlin

Partenaires

In cooperation with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Berlino and the Centre Marc Bloch