Why is it that power is all too quickly reduced to constituted power? Maybe it is because the second compound of the word “democracy,” that is, the noun “kratos,” is almost always interpreted as rule or government. This workshop will be challenging this widely held assumption.

Program:

2-2:05

Lydia H. Liu: Welcome

2:05-2:45

Emanuela Bianchi: “Genos and Kratos: Kinship between nature and power”

This paper explores the Greek concept of genos – lineage, breed, kinship, kind – as a site where nature and hegemonic power come into collision.  Following the post-Heideggerian work of John Sallis and Reiner Schürmann, and with a particular focus on Aeschylus’s Oresteia, I develop a phenomenological account of Greek nature (phusis) alongside the emergence of Greek metaphysical and patriarchal hegemony.

Respondent: Yannik Thiem (Villanova University)

2:45-3:25

Gil Anidjar: “The Suicide State”

When he refers to civil war as “self-laceration,” Schmitt evokes a strange figure, whereby the state may at times be bound for self-destruction. In this paper, I am less interested in civil war than in the conception of a state as suicidal. What could that even mean? What could be gained by asking whether there are, among states, suicide states?

Respondent: Talal Asad (CUNY)

3:25-3:40   Coffee Break

3:40-4:20

Cinzia Arruzza: “Tyrannical Democracy’s Deceiving Gentleness in Plato’s Republic”

In book VIII of the RepublicPlato characterizes democracy as a form of regime based on the pursuit of freedom. This pursuit of freedom is characterized by an insatiable desire, such that freedom becomes the only concern and the only criterion for making judgments and deliberating about both the practical affairs of the city and the private vicissitudes of the households. Life under this democratic regime appears colorful and sweet. Some have interpreted this description as indicating that this regime represents a more gentle and tolerant society than the Athenian democracy that put Socrates to death. On the contrary, in this paper I will argue that this anarchic notion of freedom refers to a specific, negative, conception of the sovereignty of the demos as a collective body, and corresponding understanding of its collective decision-making processes, which is echoed in the identification of the Athenian demos as a tyrant in Fifth century sources and in its characterization as the ‘tyrant’s father’ in Plato’s Republic.

Respondent: Giovanni Giorgini (University of Bologna)

4:20-5:00

Dimitris Vardoulakis: “Before the Demos Comes Kratos: Agonistic Democracy and Stasis”

I start with a double premise. First, that there is dissatisfaction with “democracy” as it is actualized today. And, second, that the dissatisfaction with democracy always returns, in one way or another, to how the “people” or “demos” is conceptualized. Can we think of democracy in a different way? My starting point is to ask what it would mean to take kratos (power) rather than demos as the starting point of the thinking of democracy. I will argue that this is consistent with Solon’s first democratic constitution and that it leads to a thinking of democracy in terms of agonism. My attempt at a definition of agonistic democracy comes from the introduction to my current book project, provisionally titled Stasis: On Agonistic Democracy.

Respondent: Etienne Balibar (Columbia University)

Presenters:

Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His most recent publication is “The Dignity of Weapons” in Law, Culture, and the Humanities (2015).

Cinzia Arruzza is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Plotinus. Ennead II 5. On What is Potentially and What Actually(2015); Dangerous Liaisons, Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism (2013); Les Mésaventures de la théodicée. Plotin, Origène et Grégoire de Nysse (2011). She is currently completing a book manuscript titled A Wolf in the City. Tyranny and the Tyrant in Plato’s Republic, under contract with Oxford University Press.

Emanuela Bianchi is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, with affiliations in Classics and Gender and Sexuality Studies, at New York University.  She is the author of The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos(Fordham University Press, 2014) and the editor of Is Feminist Philosophy Philosophy?(Northwestern University Press, 1999).  She works at the intersections of ancient Greek philosophy and literature, feminist and queer theory, and contemporary continental philosophy, and her work has appeared in various journals including Continental Philosophy Review, Hypatia, Angelaki, the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Epoché, and the Yearbook of Comparative Literature.

Dimitris Vardoulakis, University of Western Sydney and ICLS Visiting Scholar, is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (2010), Sovereignty and its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence (2013), Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016), and The Ruse of Soveirgnty: Democracy and Stasis (2017). He has also edited or co-edited numerous books, including Spinoza Now (2011) and Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger (2015). He is the director of “Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society.”

Image is “The Premature Burial” by Ivor Abrahams (1935-2015).