CRMEP 2015 Graduate Conference: Philosophy, Power, Potentialities

CRMEP 2015 Graduate Conference: Philosophy, Power, Potentialities
Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy,
Kingston University London

Thursday 21st – Friday 22nd May 2015

Confirmed keynote speaker: Alenka Zupančič (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts/EGS)

In a contemporary discourse suffused with the theme of ‘crisis’ – political, economic, educational, social, ecological, technical – what are the resources of philosophy at this moment for thinking power relations and potentialities?

‘Power’ has long been a central concept for philosophy and critical thought. The theme gained particular influence in the wake of Michel Foucault’s studies of the 1970s and ’80s, spurring productive dialogue with different accounts of power and domination provided by the feminist, post-colonial and Marxist traditions, and in race/ethnicity, gender and queer studies. More recent European thought – drawing on influences as broad as Spinoza, Marx, Aristotle, Heidegger, Benjamin, mathematics and religious texts – has provided challenging new resources for thinking power, potency, potentiality, subjectivities and politics.

For all this, to what extent can philosophy in 2014 contend with contemporary social and political forces? Can it think the powers and potentialities at work within our modern context? Have the concepts of power, potency and potentiality been adequately theorised? How might these concepts help us to think the relation of theory and practice? How do powers and other force relations manifest themselves in the very location of philosophical and critical thought itself?

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