[Nettime-nl] wacht jij ook?

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

WAITING FOR THE POLITICAL MOMENT
Utrecht & Rotterdam, June 17-19 2010

‘Hamm: What’s happening?
Clov: Something is taking its course.’
Beckett, Endgame

Over the last decades, several political and cultural theorists have  
argued that the domain of politics, and even the very idea of the  
political, has been hollowed out. Politics today appears to have lost  
its proper status or has been submerged in the more powerful and  
encompassing infrastructures of late capitalism. Instead of  
frantically affirming or denying the emptying-out of the political,  
this conference traces the appropriation of the political by  
apparatuses of state, church, capitalism and media in modernity to  
look for ways to reinvigorate it. To do so, the conference focuses on  
a key concept: the political moment – the moment in which political  
agency becomes possible, as well as the formative role of the moment  
in politics.

To get to grips with the political moment we not only need to  
understand our current moment; we need to have an idea of how it  
developed over time. Not considering the political moment from an  
exclusively contemporary point of view, this conference also calls for  
proposals that focus on the formation of the political in relation to  
its emptying-out from the late Middle Ages to the present.

Contributions in the form of a 4000 words positioning paper  
distributed in advance and to be discussed in a seminar setting could  
address (but are not limited to) the following issues: what is a  
political moment? What does the emptying-out of the political imply?  
How has the appropriation of the political by state, religion or media  
shaped the conditions of possibility of the political? What is the  
role of the moment in politics?

Confirmed speakers include: Mieke Bal, Bruno Bosteels, Rosi Braidotti,  
Simon Critchley, Martin van Gelderen, Olivier Marchart, Patchen  
Markell, Benjamin Noys, and Alberto Toscano.

If you are interested in participating, please send in a 300-words  
paper proposal and a short résumé of your current research by January  
15 2010 to Frans-Willem Korsten, Professor of Literature and Society,  
Erasmus University Rotterdam, email: korsten@fhk.eur.nl; and/or to  
Bram Ieven, lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University,  
email: b.k.ieven@uu.nl.

For more information see: http://www.waitingforthepoliticalmoment.org



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