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School of Politics and International Relations

International Conference: The Power of the Monstrous

26 June 2014 - 27 June 2014

Time: 9:30am - 6:00pm
Venue: Room 239, Gaskell Building, Brunel University, London

The conference focuses on the figures of the multiple and the monstrous within modern and contemporary theory. Our aim is to build a conceptual vocabulary to understand the relationship between the destructive and transformatory power of the monstrous, and new forms of political being configured by and through it.

By tracing the various mutations of the power of the monstrous across disciplinary boundaries, as an explosive force that shapes corporeal and bio-political formations, the conference brings together conversations about reframing of politics of the human, the potential becoming of the subjective in the context of novel theories of agency, political ontologies of accident and event, the force of law and the norm as a philosophical battlefield, radical materialism and the power of imagination, immanentism and the critique of teleological reason, the autonomous and spontaneous power of chance.

Confirmed speakers

  • Mark Neocleous (Brunel University, London) Hunting Monsters
  • Vittorio Morfino (Università di Milano-Bicocca), Lucretius and Monsters: Between Bergson and Canguilhem
  • Fabio Frosini (Università di Urbino) Absolute and relative perfection of the "monsters": politics and history in Giacomo Leopardi
  • Laurent Bove (Université de Picardie, Emeritus) La monstruosité chez Camus: de l’absurde à l’histoire
  • Yannis Stavrakakis: Irrational, Extreme, Populist: The New Fear of the Masses in Debt Society
  • Amy Stefanovic (The School of Humanities and Communication Arts. The University of Western Sydney) The Extralegal Beast: On Hobbes and Sovereignity
  • Andrea Torrano (Universidad Nacional de Cordoba) The Political Monster between Sovereignity and Biopolitics
  • Sue Ruddick [University of Totonto ] Monstrous Earth
  • Lasse Thomassen [QMUL, London] Monstrous masses beyond representation? The Spanish indignados

Convenors:  

Filippo Del Lucchese, Brunel University, London and Collège International de Philosophie

Caroline Williams, Queen Mary, University of London

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