interventions

Thursday, October 26th through Saturday, October 28th 2006.

Illusions of Identity: resisting (beyond) identity politics An interdisciplinary graduate conference hosted by the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario, Canada

October 14-15, 2006

With the limits of contemporary leftist social movements becoming increasingly apparent, and in the face of advanced capitalism’s relentless appropriation of revolutionary discourses and the rise of the moral right in North America, we feel an urgent need to contribute to the ongoing efforts to rethink identity politics. We imagine this conference as an opportunity to work through and disseminate new frameworks for thinking social movement and resistance. As such, we intend to bring together students and activists whose works traverse disciplinary boundaries in an attempt to articulate some of the possibilities and pitfalls of identity categories (gender, race, nationality, class, sexuality, ability, etc.). Coming from the point of view that the much-contested division between theory and activism is a false one, our aim is that this conference will constitute a site for the proliferation of new conceptual frameworks that will be taken up, and hopefully transformed, by our fellow activists and academics.

We are seeking papers and panels troubling, re-articulating, and creating theoretical frameworks addressing identity politics in areas including, but not limited to:

• feminist theory;
• queer stuff;
• trans/figurations of identity;
• the appropriation and containment of resistance;
• global strategies and local tactics;
• nationalisms and national identities
• race and the racialization of identity categories;
• thinking coalition-building and other political maneuvers;
• capitalism and identity;
• ‘old’ thinkers, ‘new’ readings;
• critiques of capitalism;
• the politics of theoretical practice;
• trans/gressions, incoherences, destabilizations;
• identities and legalities
• law as constraint/law as possibility
• (dis)abilities and identities
• the politics of citizenship
• First Nations and the nation-state
• indigenous identities

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words by August 15, 2006 to: illusionsofidentity@gmail.com (Please include your academic or activist affiliation in your proposal.)

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Louis Althusser

Edited by François Matheron

Translated and introduced by G.M. Goshgarian

“Althusser traversed so many lives—so many personal, historical, philosophical and political adventures; marked, inflected, influenced so many discourses, actions and existences by the radiant and provocative force of his thought—that the most diverse and contradictory accounts could never exhaust their source.” — Jacques Derrida

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of intense mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this deeply troubling period, this fourth and final volume of political and philosophical writings reveals Althusser wrestling in a creative and unorthodox fashion with a whole series of theoretical problems to produce some of his very finest work. In his profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, Althusser developed a “philosophy of the encounter,” which he links to a hidden and subterranean tradition in the history of Western thought which stretches from Epicurus through Spinoza and Machiavelli to Marx, Derrida and Heidegger.