Workshop: Disruption, Conspiracy, Revolt

17. Jan

Workshop with Donatella di Cesare (Rome/Lüneburg), Christine Achinger (Warwick), Leo Roepert (Hamburg), Astrid Séville (Lüneburg)

Wednesday, 17 Nov 2024 2:00 - 6:00 pm. Room C 40.704

Advance registration required

The Disruptive Condition confronts us with a paradoxical entanglement of rupture and continuity. While figures of absolute rupture have long lost credibility, calls for a break with ways of life and referential systems for the benefit of the preservation and reproduction of existing economic orders enjoy great popularity. This disruptive dialectic of continuity and discontinuity creates increasing cognitive and emotional dissonances that give rise to resignation but also resentment, prejudice and acts of violence, which find their expression in political movements that take their cue from the fascist movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Faced with the ever-increasing degree of organisation of the capitalist social formation and the decreasing scope for individuals to reconfigure their relations to the world, the return to traditional forms of domination and the schemes of identification they afford seems to offer consolation to many. In this, conspiracy theories play a key role. At the same time, we see a proliferation of insurrectionist movements that focus on a revolt against that which exists rather than on identifying allegedly all-powerful conspirators. How do these diverging forms of dissidence, of disruption, relate to each other? How are conspiracy theories and political action connected in attempts to deal with or change the Disruptive Condition? What is the role of conspiracy in the supposed resolution of the contradictions of contemporary societies?

Programme

14.00-15.00 Donatella di Cesare: Enframing of Power, Depoliticisation, Revolt
15.00-15.45 Astrid Séville: Micropolitics of Anticomplottism
15.45-16.15 Coffee break
16.15-17.00 Leo Roepert: The Conformist Revolt. On the Dialectic of Adaptation and Destructivity
17.00-17.45 Christine Achinger: Politics of Non-Identity?
17.45-18.00 Concluding discussion

Chair: Nicolas Schneider (Leuphana)

This workshop will be held in German

Please register per email

Contact: Nicolas Schneider (nicolas.schneider@leuphana.de)

Speaker bios

Astrid Séville  is Professor of Political Science with a focus on Political Theory at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Christine Achinger  is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Warwick.

Donatella di Cesare  is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Sapienza University.

Leo Roepert  is a sociologist and Research Associate at the University of Hamburg.