Politics in terms of self and other is the prevailing conception in the current order, where
the logic of alterity maintains the ever-present possibility of existential conflict. However,
recent engagements with Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault,Jacques Lacan and Jean-Luc Nancy have drawn attention to
the prevalence and the importance of a new idea of politics emerging in their work.
In varied ways these thinkers all attempt to delineate a radically different kind of politics
that moves towards a conception of politics no longer based on the self-other relation.
Examples of this include Agamben’s notion of a community of whatever singularities,
Badiou’s generic extension of humanity, Deleuze’s plane of immanence, Derrida’s
politics of singularity, Foucault’s idea of concrete freedom and aesthetic of
self-fashioning, Lacan’s sinthomal naming and Nancy’s politics of the singular plural.
This conference will address in more detail what the exact implications of these
alternative notions of the subject are for thinking about politics, both by exploring
connections between philosophical concepts and by examining their relation to
various social and political practices.
