All seminars are aimed primarily at graduate students undertaking or considering the Critical Theory Emphasis, but all are welcome

 

Winter 2024 CTE Mini Seminar

February 13th, 14th, & 15th 2024 in HG1010 - Professor Alex Dubilet from Vanderbilt University will be presenting his Mini-Seminar 

"Interminable Disorder"

 

"This mini-seminar is based on my current book, Interminable Disorder, which investigates how political theology is transformed as a field and theoretical orientation when viewed from the perspective of insurrection and refusal. It also pursues the converse question: what happens to the conceptualizations and genealogies of insurrection when, apprehended through a political-theological prism, it ceases to be merely a political phenomenon. Thinking with, through, and against a wide array of 20th and 21st century figures—from Jacob Taubes, Sylvia Wynter, and Michel Foucault to Cedric Robinson, Reiner Schürmann, and Fred Moten—Interminable Disorder works genealogically to create a trans-historical archive that weaves together Gnostic refusals of the world, medieval mysticism’s subversion of hierarchy and the proper, fanaticism’s challenge to individuation, and the anarchic and unthinkable dimensions of slave rebellions. Hermeneutic engagements with these topics result in the development of a novel theoretical lexicon that displaces the accepted parameters of political theology; transforms dominant understandings of the relation between the Christian, the secular, and the political; and rethinks the conceptual morphologies of destitution, delegitimation, and insurrection."

Alex Dubilet is an interdisciplinary scholar by training and sensibility, who thinks and writes across critical theory, continental philosophy, political theology, and the history and theory of mysticism. His work also engages the methods and materials of philosophy of religion, radical political theory, the critical study of Christianity and the secular, and theories of race and colonialism. He is currently working on diptych of books, Interminable Disorder and The Most Intimate Poverty, the latter of which rethinks the status of possession and dispossession by tracing the multiple ways poverty has been affirmed across the medieval/modern divide.  He has co-edited two volumes shaping political theology for the contemporary moment: Political Theology Reimagined: Theories, Ruptures, Itineraries, co-edited with Vincent Lloyd (Duke, Forthcoming) and Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology, co-edited with Kirill Chepurin (Fordham, 2021). 

His first book, The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern (Fordham, 2018), engaged the history of Christian mysticism, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as indexing a life without a why that precedes the difference between subject and transcendence. He is also the co-translator, with Jessie Hock, of François Laruelle’s General Theory of Victims (Polity, 2015) and A Biography of Ordinary Man (Polity, 2018). His work has appeared in Qui ParlePostmedievalCultural CritiqueTheory & Event, and Angelaki.