PANEL 20 / CRITICAL CONCEPTS IN TURBULENT TIMES: CONTEMPORARY RECONFIGURATIONS
CONVENOR: MATTEO POLLERI
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
Since its origins, critical thought has mobilized a variety of concepts to theorize social domination and practices of liberation. Categories as different as alienation, ideology, patriarchy, racism, violence, accumulation, resistance, class struggle, and revolution, to only name a few, have constituted a dynamic vocabulary, constantly reworked to interrogate capitalism as a globalized form of life and to delineate possible paths to overcome it. Rethinking this lexicon is especially urgent today, at a moment when capital weaponizes war, genocide, and fascism to reassert its dominance amid global warming and ecological collapse. Analyzing the complex web of capitalist operations and their war regimes demands new conceptual tools capable of grasping multiple technologies of power, as well as heterogeneous forms of political struggle and social cooperation that are simultaneously local and global, material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, thus advancing what Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi describe as a “multidimensional” critique of capital.
This panel contributes to this collective endeavor by reassessing key concepts of critical thought — War, Fascism, Discipline, Work, Utility, and Nature — in light of the turbulent transformations of the present conjuncture.
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
Since its origins, critical thought has mobilized a variety of concepts to theorize social domination and practices of liberation. Categories as different as alienation, ideology, patriarchy, racism, violence, accumulation, resistance, class struggle, and revolution, to only name a few, have constituted a dynamic vocabulary, constantly reworked to interrogate capitalism as a globalized form of life and to delineate possible paths to overcome it. Rethinking this lexicon is especially urgent today, at a moment when capital weaponizes war, genocide, and fascism to reassert its dominance amid global warming and ecological collapse. Analyzing the complex web of capitalist operations and their war regimes demands new conceptual tools capable of grasping multiple technologies of power, as well as heterogeneous forms of political struggle and social cooperation that are simultaneously local and global, material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, thus advancing what Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi describe as a “multidimensional” critique of capital.
This panel contributes to this collective endeavor by reassessing key concepts of critical thought — War, Fascism, Discipline, Work, Utility, and Nature — in light of the turbulent transformations of the present conjuncture.
