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Department of Political Science

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Departmental Colloquium

Spring Semester

27 January 2012

Alexis Pogorelskin Department of History, University of Minnesota-Duluth

"Politics for Keeps: The Dynamics of the Soviet Succession Struggle in the 1920s."

6 February 2012

Elisabeth Gerber, Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan

"Geography, Campaign Contributions, and Representation."

24 February 2012

Keya Ganguly, Department of Cultural Studies, University of Minnesota

"Malady versus Remedy: Critique in/and the Global South"

Abstract:
In his landmark work of intellectual history, Critique and Crisis (1959), Reinhart Koselleck argued that there is a fundamental contradiction between intellectual positions and political action produced by the distance separating critique from circumstances of crisis. This contradiction in turn produces a split between forms of political authority and a private sphere of critical opinion that attempts to revise or transform the public. According to Koselleck, this split originally emerged during the Enlightenment – when a group of uprooted onlookers emerged to comment on political concerns from which they were themselves distant. It has since informed the constitution of critique in bourgeois societies in which intellectuals are, by their structural position as well as nature, out of touch with the very realities they wish to address. The relationship of critique and crisis has thus largely been negative, one that Koselleck describes as a "malady." However accurate this historicization of critique in bourgeois societies, it neglects the specificity of intellectual production in the global South, where the breach between political and theoretical activity is less extreme and where critique is more immediately responsive to the crisis of existence rather than to crises of ideas alone. Here, one often finds a greater articulation of the two, in part deriving from a different reading of theory, particularly the texts of historical materialism, and also from a different understanding of intellectual and political practice. This paper elaborates on the nature of "peripheral critique" by going beyond Koselleck's conservative propositions about the "pathogenesis" of crisis and showing how "antagonism" operates as a mode of both thought and action when theoretical contradictions are understood as part of the social totality.

2 March 2012

Robert Hullot-Kentor, School of Visual Arts, New York

"Severe Clear: Sacrifice and Right Wishing" (PDF)

Abstract: Severe Clear: Sacrifice and Right Wishing

In the context of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, in the midst of a sudden deepening of the economic crisis partly or entirely overshadowing the occasion, we hear raised from every corner primordial demands for the necessity of sacrifice and self-inflicted wounds as the only adequate response to the gravity of the situation. The intensification of the economic calamity itself has by any measure been intentional, while nationwide the only audible voices seem to be those calling for austerity and for every budget to be 'cut.' The moment thus urgently prompts the question of whether the seminal insight that has lapsed­-the insight from which the whole of radical modernism developed­-can be recovered: the insight into the primitive in ourselves and in the world around us.`Severe Clear,' the weather alert issued to pilots on September 11th, 2001,is an excursus on this question that examines in detail the sacral edifice now being constructed in lower Manhattan.

The Minnesota Political Theory Colloquium deeply thanks University of Minnesota Regents Professor Dr. Richard Leppert for making Prof. Hullot-Kentor's visit possible.

6 March 2012

Alex Demirovic, Department of Political Science – Technische Universität Berlin
The Minnesota Political Theory Colloquium will meet this week on Tuesday

"Reform, Revolution, Transformation" (PDF)

In collaboration with The German, Scandinavian, and Dutch Department, The Institute for Advanced Studies, The Institute for Global Studies, The Center for Austrian Studies, The European Studies Consortium, and Carleton College

30 March 2012

Cesare Casarino, Department of Cultural Studies, University of Minnesota

Paper TBD

2 April 2012

Suzanne Mettler, Department of Government, Cornell University

Paper TBD

6 April 2012

Silvia Lopez, Spanish Department - Carleton College

"Brazil: critique, crisis and politics in the age of indetermination"

Abstract:
This paper will take as its point of departure the relationship between critique and crisis as originally theorized by Reinhart Koselleck, in order to present a reflection on the understanding of politics in the age of indetermination as advanced by a number of Brazilian thinkers, such as Paulo Arantes, Chico de Oliveira and Andre Singer. These thinkers have taken seriously the premise that the emergence of a public sphere always involves a suspension of the Hobbesian state and that its dissolution brings about the return to a state of conflict and of a war of all against all. The relevant case of such a dissolution is the current state of capitalism and its manifestations in Lula's Brazil. The paper will engage the debates surrounding the redefinition of the political and of a specific political realm in contemporary Brazil, and how this redefinition contrasts with the blurred distinction between the political proper and other public realms that Koselleck early on criticized in our modern understanding of politics. The work of the aforementioned thinkers invites us to rethink the relationship between crisis and critique, but this time in dialogue with Marx, Rancière and Habermas, and from the horizon of interpretation of the global south.

13 April 2012

Linda Zerilli, Department of Political Science – University of Chicago

"Towards a Democratic Theory of Judgment"

19 April 2012

John Zaller, Political Science Department, UCLA

"Party and Ideology."

20 April 2012

Joan Tronto, Department of Political Science - University of Minnesota

"Privatizing Neo-Colonialism: Migrant Domestic Care Workers, Partial Citizenship, and Responsibility"

27 April 2012

Eric Shepard, Department of Geography – University of Minnesota

Paper TBD

4 May 2012

Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo, Department of Political Science – University of Minnesota

"Realism, Utopia, and Colonial Enlightenment"