CFP: Ontology and politics workshop

Call for Papers - Ontology and Politics Workshop / http://manceptworkshops.wordpress.com/

Despite its pervasiveness, the question of the relation between ontology and politics continues to be a crucial one for Continental philosophy.  While the place and status of the question of being in the realm of the political has occupied much of social theory in the past twenty or thirty years, we remain no closer to drawing any common ground on these themes. Post-structuralist or post-foundational political thought has insisted on the inherent contingency of any political ontology and has, from this notion, sought to draw out a framework for an emancipatory politics grounded
in the concepts of difference and otherness.

However, such a stance finds itself increasingly challenged today.  On the one hand, thinkers such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere call for the need to think a politics grounded in a conception of universality rather than alterity, while on the other hand, so-called speculative realism more fundamentally challenges the very notion of ontology as it has been conceived by the majority of Continental thinkers in recent decades.

This panel aims to explore the intersections of politics and ontology and the resulting implications for thinking both the political and the philosophical. We invite papers addressing the following and any other related themes:

• Is there a place for reflection on ontology in the theorisation and study of politics?
• Is there a necessary transitivity between the ontological and the political?  How should this relation be conceived?
• Is there a necessarily leftist or emancipatory ontology?
• Should the politics which has generally been thought to follow from post-foundational or post-structuralist ontologies be re-evaluated in light of recent critiques?
• Does a new and different relation between ontology and politics follow from recent speculative materialist ontologies?

If you would like to present a paper at this workshop, please submit an abstract of 300-500 words (or a full paper to Paul Rekret (Queen Mary) or Simon Choat (Kingston) by 15 June 2011.