Conference Announcement: ‘The Relevance of the Human in Politics’

27-28 April 2012
Room T9, Tower Building, University of Dundee

The postgraduate philosophy conferences at the University of Dundee have, over the last four years, explored the resurgence of interest in continental metaphysics. This year’s conference will continue to build on this theme, but in an explicitly political direction, by exploring the role of the human in the contemporary philosophy of politics.

This conference is free to attend.

Programme

Friday 27 April
11:30am - 12:45pm	Registration
12:45pm - 12:55pm	Welcome Remarks
1pm - 2:30pm	Christina Howells (Wadham College, Oxford) 'Politics and 'le défaut d'origine': the prosthetic constitution of love and desire in Stiegler's Technics and Time'
2:30pm - 2:45pm	Coffee Break
2:45pm - 4:15pm	Huw Rees (University of Sussex) 'The Habermas/Sloterdijk Dispute: Discourse at the Limits of the Human' Pete Wolfendale (University of Warwick) 'The Parting of the Ways: Political Agency between Rational Subjectivity and Phenomenal Selfhood' John Van Houdt (University of Tillburg) 'The Politics of the Transcendental: Fichte, Anti-Correlationism, and the Precarious Human'
4:15pm - 4:30pm	Break
4:30pm - 6pm	Gerald Moore (Wadham College, Oxford) 'Life in the Age of Biotechnology'
Saturday 28 April 2012
9am - 10:30am	Todd May (Clemson University) 'Humanism and Solidarity'
10:30am - 10:45am	Coffee Break
10:45am - 12:15pm	'Occupation on Fifth Avenue: The Anatomy of Collective Resistance' Brad Young (New School) 'On the Political Myth of Occupation' Benjamin Norris (New School) 'A Microspherological Interpretation of the All City Student Occupation: Sloterdijk, Solidarity and Sanitation' Dan Boscov-Ellen (New School) 'No Press, No Pigs, No Photos:Revolutionary Communications Strategy, Autonomy, and Heteronomy' Simone Gubler (New School) 'Becoming a Pig'
12:15pm - 1pm	Lunch Break
1pm - 2:30pm	Nathan Fretwell (University of Essex) 'Post-Anarchism, Humanism, and the Problem of Critique' Nick Srnicek/Alex Williams (LSE) ''Folk Politics', or a speculative critique of contemporary leftism' André Reichert (Freie Universität Berlin) 'Towards a Diagrammatic of the Human Being - From the Virtual to the Actual and back again!'
2:30pm - 2:40pm	Break
2:45pm - 3:45pm	Michael O'Neill Burns (University of Dundee/St. Mary's College of Maryland) 'Materialism is a Humanism' Hannah Proctor (Birkbeck College, University of London) 'The Plasticity of Nature: Catherine Malabou's Encounter with Contemporary Neuroscience'
3:45pm - 4pm	Break
4pm - 5:30pm	James Williams (University of Dundee) 'Humanity and its Special Burden - Immortality'

Registration

To book your place please email either Brian Smith (email: b.w.smith@dundee.ac.uk) or Austin Smidt (email: a.h.smidt@dundee.ac.uk).

Travel

Dundee is about one-and-a-half hours' train ride from Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, and is easy to get to by train or plane from within the UK and internationally.

Full details about getting to and around Dundee can be found on the University's travel website.

The conference takes place in Room T9 in the Tower Building, which you can find on the interactive campus map.