RADICAL DEMOCRACY CONFERENCE PROGRAM

April 4 – 5, 2011

MONDAY, APRIL 4 – The New School

Wolff Conference Room
6 E 16th St., 11th Floor

08.30 Registration

09.00 PANEL I: AGONISTIC DEMOCRACY

Chair: Andreas Kalyvas, NSSR

Discussant: Chris Crews, NSSR

Panelists:

“Radical Democracy Goes Global: A Postcolonial Critique of Mouffe”

Jakeet Singh, Department of Political Science, The University of Toronto

“Us and ‘Them’: The production of the common in the work of Artur Zmijewski”
Harry Weeks, History of Art, the University of Edinburgh

“Fugitive Reconciliation: The Agonistics of Respect, Resentment, and Responsibility in Post-Conflict

Society”
Alexander Hirsch, Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

“'Agonistic Democratic Subjectivities' in South America: from disagreement to participation?”

Juan Pablo Ferrero, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bath

11.00 Coffee / Refreshments

11.15 OPENING REMARKS by Andreas Kalyvas, NSSR

11.30 PANEL II: THE “ROOTS” OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY

Chair: Ross Poole, NSSR

Discussant: Peter Janos Galambos, NSSR

Discussant: Tomer Zeigerman, NSSR

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Panelists:

“Radical Democracy: A Tree without Roots? Investigating the Praxis of Radical Democracy beyond
Classical Conceptions”
Felix Petersen, J.W. G. University Frankfurt am Main, Department for Gesellschaftswissenschaften,
Institute for Political Theory, Germany

“The Imaginary Roots of Democracy: An Exposition of Castoriadis’s EHESS Lectures, 1982-1983”

Gerasimos Karavitis, Department of Politics, The New School for Social Research

“The Ethical Constitutive Power of the Multitude in Spinoza's Political Treatise”

Sandra Field, Department of Politics, Princeton University

“The Radicality of Speech: Freedom of Expression in Spinoza’s Theory of Democracy”

Camila Vergara, Department of Politics, The New School for Social Research

“Castoriadis on Democracy: Radical Questions”

Antoine Chollet, Institut d’Études Politiques et Internationales, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

13.30 Lunch

14.00 PANEL III: CONSENSUS AND DISSENSUS

Chair: Chiara Bottici, NSSR

Discussant: Gerasimos Karavitis, NSSR

Discussant: Juan Pablo Ferrero, University of Bath

Panelists:

“Interrogation vs. Interpretation: Speech, language and the moment of autonomy”

Marina Kaneti, Department of Politics, The New School for Social Research

“Political Relationship as Politics and Democracy in Ranciere’s 'Ten Theses on Politics'”

Mykolas Gudelis, Department of Politics, The New School for Social Research

“Fragments of Democracy in a World in Fragments”

Victoria Briggs, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London

“Rethinking Carl Schmitt’s Radical Democratic Theory”

Sam BenMeir, Department of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research

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16.00 Coffee / Refreshments

16.15 PANEL IV: MICRO/MACRO POLITICS

Chair: Jeremy Varon, NSSR

Discussant: Chelsea Ebin, NSSR

Discussant: Benjamin Nienass, NSSR

Panelists:

“Becoming Political: Everyday Life and Radical Democracy”

Salih Gercek, Department of Government, University of Essex

“Arendt and Domesticity”

Mitchell Verter, Department of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research

“Diaspora Politics as a Form of Radical Democracy?”

Márton Rövid, Department of International Relations and European Studies, Central European
University

“Law and Non-Law: A Study in Bookchin and Agamben”

Bea Bookchin, English Department, University of Vermont in Burlington

18.15 Reception

TUESDAY, APRIL 5 – Columbia University

Heyman Center for the Humanities, Common Room

16.15 PANEL V: ANARCHISM, COMMUNISM, RADICALISM

Chair: Robyn Marasco, CUNY/Hunter College

Discussant: Arya Zahedi, NSSR

Discussant: Alexander Hirsch, UC Santa Cruz

Panelists:

“Future Present(s): Zizek on Radical Democracy, The Precautionary Principle and Project Time”
Ryan O'Neill, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto

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“From Monarch to Party: Zizek against Lefort and Radical Democracy”
Gregory C. Flemming, Social and Political Thought, York University, Toronto

“Hostile Takeover: The Radical Potential of Worker Cooperatives in Argentina”

Nicolas Saldias, Department of Political Science, The University of Toronto

“Arendt’s Council System – A utopia or a form of radical democracy?”

Julia Honkasalo, Department of Politics, The New School for Social Research

18.15 Coffee / Refreshments

18.30 KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Todd May, Clemson University

19.30 Closing Roundtable:

Chiara Bottici, The New School for Social Research

Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University
Andreas Kalyvas, The New School for Social Research
Robyn Marasco, CUNY/Hunter College
Todd May, Clemson University
Ross Poole, The New School for Social Research
Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University

BIOS OF PANEL CHAIRS & CLOSING ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS:

Chiara Bottici
Assistant Professor. PhD 2004, European University Institute.

Professor Bottici obtained her PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and taught
at the University of Frankfurt before joining the New School for Social Research. She has written on
myth, imagination, ancient and early modern philosophy, Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, Marxism,
anarchism, contemporary social and political philosophy.

Stathis Gourgouris
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA 1990.

Professor Gourgouris writes and teaches on a variety of subjects, ultimately entwined around
questions of the poetics and politics of modernity. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment,
Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996) and Does Literature Think?
Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003), and editor of the forthcoming Freud and
Fundamentalism (Fordham, 2009). Outside these projects he has also published numerous articles on

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Ancient Greek philosophy, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, Enlightenment law,
psychoanalysis. He is currently completing work on two projects of secular criticism: The Perils of the
One and Nothing Sacred. He is also an internationally awarded poet, with four volumes of poetry
published in Greek, most recent being Εισαγωγή στην Φυσική [Introduction to Physics] (Athens,
2005). He has translated the work of various Greek poets
into English – notably Yiannis Patilis’ Camel of Darkness (Quarterly Review of Literature Book Series,
Vol 36, 1997) – as well as the poetry of Heiner Müller and Carolyn Forché into Greek. He writes
regularly in major Greek newspapers and journals on political and literary matters. He is currently the
President of the Modern Greek Studies Association.

Andreas Kalyvas
Associate Professor of Political Science. PhD, Political Science, Columbia University; MA, Columbia
University; BA, National and Kapodistrian, University of Athens, Greece.

Professor Kalyvas is interested in democratic theory and the history of political ideas from ancient
Greek and Roman to modern to contemporary continental political theory. In particular, his work
focuses on the relationship between democracy and constitutionalism; problems of popular
sovereignty, representation, and political autonomy; radical foundings, revolutionary breaks, and
constitution making; the norm and the exception; emergency rule; citizenship and cosmopolitanism.
His current research is oriented toward questions of constituent power and radical democratic politics
on the one hand and on the overlapping of tyranny and dictatorship in Western political thought, on
the other. He is currently completing a book manuscript provisionally titled "Legalizing Tyranny:
Constitutional Dictatorship and the Enemy Within" while working on a second one, "Constituent
Power and Radical Democracy."

Robyn Marasco
Assistant Professor at Hunter College. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (2006); M.A., University
of California, Berkeley (2000); B.A. Smith College (1999). Areas of Specialization: History of Political
Thought: Modern and Contemporary; Critical Theory; Feminist Theory.

Publications:
"'I would rather wait for you than believe you are not coming at all': Revolutionary love in a post-
revolutionary time," Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 36, no. 6, July 2010, 643-662.
"A Grammar of Hope in An Age of Empire?" Review of Paolo Virno's Grammar of the Multitude,
Theory & Event, Vol. 9, issue 4, 2006.
"'Already the Effect of the Whip': Critical Theory and the Feminine Ideal," differences, Vol. 17, no. 1,
Spring 2006, 88-115.

Todd May
Dr. May took his Ph.D. from Penn State University in 1989, and has been at Clemson (after a brief stint
at Indiana University of Pennsylvania) since 1991. He specializes in Continental philosophy, especially
recent French philosophy. He has authored ten philosophical books, focusing on the philosophical
work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. His book The Political Philosophy of
Poststructuralist Anarchism has been influential in recent progressive political thought, and his work

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on Rancière is among the first in English. May’s writings also seek to bridge the gap between "Anglo-
American" and "Continental" styles of philosophy that developed in the early twentieth century. His
teaching interests are varied; he has found himself teaching classes as diverse as Anarchism, The
Thought of Merleau-Ponty, Resistance and Alterity in Contemporary Culture, Secular Ethics in a
Materialist Age, and Postmodernism and Art.

Ross Poole
BPhil 1969, Oxford University. Adjunct Professor of Political Science and Philosophy.

Ross Poole is the author of two books, Morality and Modernity (Routledge, 1991) and Nation and
Identity (Routledge, 1999), both of which were selected by Choice as outstanding academic
monographs for their respective years of publication. He has written many articles, both for academic
journals and collections and also for the press. His work has been translated into four languages. In
recent years, his main interests have been in nationalism, indigenous rights, memory, responsibility,
and historical justice. He is currently finishing a work entitled Past Justice.

Until 2001, he taught at Macquarie University, Sydney, where he was for many years Head of the
Philosophy Department. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York, and he teaches in the Departments of
Philosophy and Politics at The New School for Social Research.

Recent publications include:

(Co-author with Benjamin Nienass) ‘The Limits of Memory,’ International Social Science Journal No.
205 (Forthcoming September 2011), Special Issue: ‘Memory.’
‘Social Philosophy,’ Entry for Nik Trakakis, ed., Companion to Australasian Philosophy (Melbourne:
Monash University ePress, 2010)
‘Misremembering the Holocaust: Universal Symbol, Nationalist Icon, or Moral Kitsch?’ in Adam Brown,
Amy Sodaro & Yifat Guttman, eds., Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics, and Society
(London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Nadia Urbinati
Ph.D., European University Institute, Florence, 1989

Professor Urbinati is a political theorist who specializes in modern and contemporary political thought
and the democratic and anti-democratic traditions. She co-chaired the Columbia University Faculty
Seminar on Political and Social Thought and founded and chaired the Workshop on Politics, Religion
and Human Rights. She is co-editor with Andrew Arato of the journal Constellations: An International
Journal of Critical and Democratic
Theory. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Foundation Reset Dialogues
on Civilization-Istanbul Seminars.

Professor Urbinati is the winner of the 2008-9 Lenfest/Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award. In 2008
the President of the Italian Republic awarded Professor Urbinati as Commendatore della Repubblica

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(Commander of the Italian Republic) "for her contribution to the study of democracy and the diffusion
of Italian liberal and democratic thought abroad." In 2004 her book Mill on Democracy (cited below)
received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize as the best book in liberal and democratic theory published
in 2002.

Professor Urbinati is the author of Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of
Chicago Press 2006), and of Mill on Democracy: from the Athenian Polis to Representative
Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002; Italian translation by Laterza 2006). She has edited
Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Piero Gobetti, On Liberal
Revolution (Yale University Press, 2000). She co-edited with Monique Canto-Sperber Le socialisme
libéral:Une anthologie; Europe-Ëtats-Unis (Ėditions Esprit, 2003; Italian translation by Marsilio/Reset
2004); with Alex Zakaras, John Stuart Mill's Political Thught: A Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge
University Press 2007), and with Stefano Recchia, A Cosmpolitanism of Nations:Giuseppe Mazzini's
Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations (Princeton University Press,
2009). She is co-editing with Steven Lukes Condorcet's Political Writing (Cambridge University Press;
Cambridge Texts Series).