CFP – Workshop “Theorising Destituent Power”

November 26, 2024 9:00am

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

International Workshop

Theorising Destituent Power

School of Arts and Humanities

University of Lisbon

26th November 2024

Event organized as part of the activities of Praxis-CFUL

 

Keynote speakers: Luhuna Carvalho and Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen)

 

The political life of the twenty-first century – fuelled by rampant globalised capital, an ideology of market fundamentalism, a nascent yet perilously pervasive networked digital infrastructure and a political system serving little more than the protection and encasement of the above listed interests – calls for a radical reformulation of the notion of revolution, broadly construed.

This workshop aims to bring together various perspectives on destituent power in order to expand on theories of resistance, refusal, rupture, and disavowal. It will contribute to theories of radical change through an original discussion of a heretofore relatively underexplored dimension of political and societal transformation.

The call for a destituent power is not simply grounded through its opposition to the issues of the contemporary moment. It is a concept which, crucially, places a truly radical and far-reaching significance on the meaning of change. Calling for destituent power can be framed within Arendt’s insight on the cyclical nature of history in the modern age (Arendt, 1990: 21-2). Furthermore, destituent power implies a rejection of the perceived necessity of the dialectic between the constituent and constituted powers.

Ultimately, theorists of destituent power advance the historically justified conviction that even the most transformative revolutions and radical post-sovereign conceptions of constituent power (see for example Negri, 1999), by failing to overcome the fundamental ontological foundations of the structures and institutions they seek to abolish, are doomed to eventually replicate the same norms, practices and patterns of domination. By deposing a power with no replacement power in its stead (Carvalho, 2023), the characteristic circularity of political ‘change’ undergoes an irreversible rupture, thus avoiding the haunting spectre of replication from what came prior and encapsulating the aim of destitution (Invisible Committee, 2017: 76).

Contemporary protest and insurrectionary movements, through their demands and tactics, demonstrate a different approach to the ways that revolution and resistance have previously been conceived. Already at the turn of the millennium, Colectivo Situaciones recognised the essential rift separating the nature of twenty-first century political life and “the classical paradigms of revolt and revolution” (Aarons & Robinson, 2023). To describe the response to this rift, they coined the phrase destituent insurrection (Colectivo Situaciones, 2011).

Theorists of destituent power call not only for a necessary and definitive rupture from the ontologies that have defined the dominant paradigms of political organisation, but also posit the claim that such a break is already underway (Invisible Committee, 2009; Agamben, 2014). The workshop will examine the (ongoing) rupture, discuss the variegated notions of destitution and consider the need for a concept of destituent power.

Topics might include but are certainly not limited to:

 

    • The ontology of destituent power
    • Work, inoperativity, and potentiality
    • The role of violence in insurrectionary strategies
    • Theories of refusal, rupture, disavowal and prefiguration
    • Empirical/’real world’ examples of destituent approaches
    • The relation between destitution and utopia
    • The place of theology/theological references in revolutionary theory
    • Temporalities of resistance
    • Subjectivity and destitution

 

The working language is English. There is no registration fee. Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words by 6th of October 2024 indicating the full name and institutional affiliation to Zachariah Tailor (ztailor@edu.ulisboa.pt) and Tamara Caraus (tcaraus@letras.ulisboa.pt) Decision notices will be emailed one week after the deadline.

For further details or questions, please contact: ztailor@edu.ulisboa.pt

 

This event is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., in the scope of the project UIDB/00310/2020.