Anonymous Comrade writes:

The nascent Center for the Humanities and Public Sphere, the
Department of English, and the Marxist Reading Group presents:

Born of Desertion: Singularity, Collectivity, Revolution

March 20-22 at the University of Florida, Gainesville


Keynote Speakers: Michael Hardt and Kristin Ross

Where is the Left now? How do we materialize collective
formations, and enact a justice in their name? How do we do this
at a moment when the world market and the right-wing body politic,
prodigiously engineering and rewriting the global imaginary, have
appeared as the frightening answer to certain strains of a
communal impulse so crucial to the Left?

Our conference seeks papers that engage with those leftist
politics occluded from public discourse. Particularly, how might
singularities help us rethink and formulate a collective
possibility? And, along these same lines, what might a politics
mean, finally, when it invokes the word "revolution"? This will
not be limited to but certainly and inevitably caught up in
considerations of the spatial, the temporal, production, everyday
exploitation, and the state. Is it within the scope of these
concerns, especially in the context of the imperial world order,
that a truly radical Left can emerge?

Michael Hardt is widely acknowledged--both nationally and
internationally--in the ongoing debates around globalization. The
publication of Empire, which he coauthored with Antonio Negri, has
contributed to this debate by suggesting new conceptions of
capital, space, and subjectivity. In addition to Empire, Hardt's
publications engage with issues of contemporary politics and
philosophy. He is author of Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in
Philosophy (1993) and coauthor with Antonio Negri of Labor of
Dionysus: A Critique of the State-form (1994). He is coeditor with
Paolo Virno of Radical Thought in Italy (1996) and coeditor with
Kathi Weeks of The Jameson Reader (2000).Hardt is an Associate
Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University.

Kristin Ross engages with French social theory and cultural
studies and examines how insurgent moments in history--the Paris
Commune, May '68--are written and rewritten in the cultural
imaginary. Key to her work are the new spatial formations and
social practices that emerge from revolutionary actions. In
Emergence of Social Space (1988), Ross argues that space is
political, and that through space, the Commune challenges the
capitalist notion of work, leisure, and identity. Her most recent
book, May '68 and its Afterlives (2002), explores how normalizing
discourses erase the revolutionary aspects of this event, and
explain them away as an apolitical "youth movement." In addition
to these books, Ross has written Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:
Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995), and
she is co-editor (with Alice Kaplan) of a special issue of Yale
French Studies on "everyday life" (1987). Ross is a professor of
Comparative Literature at New York University.

Prospective papers may address (but are not limited to) the
following:

* Anti-humanism/post-humanism in Empire.

* Reification of history.

* Narrative mappings of the political.

* The racisms without race.

* Re-thinking subjectivities through singularity.

* Society of control and new forms of policing/discipline.

* The aesthetics of security.

* Re-writing the frontiers of the nation-state.

* Antimedia and counter-empire.

* Prosthetics, Clones, Cyborgs: The body and technological
ontologies.

* Strategies of containing revolutionary practices.

* Gender and the place of work.

* Global capital and imagining the apocalypse.

* Pedagogies and reorganizing relations to space.

* Literature and collectivity.

* Insurgent spatial practices: sites for alternative production.

* Professionalization and the corporate university.

* Media and formulations of collectivity.

* Constructions of a revolutionary identity.

* Politics of zoning.

* US policy, war, and terrorism.

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.

For info on previous conferences visit www.english.ufl.edu/mrg.

Abstracts due: February 10.