Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Political Theory

Prof. Bethania Assy is going to hold the opening keynote to a workshop within the project 'Spheres of Citizenship' funded by CAPES and DAAD. Her talk deals with 'Political (re)existence and the subject of injustice' and will take place on November 7th 2022 at 1 p.m at Dorotheenstr. 26, Room 422.

Political (re)existence and the subject of injustice proposes a new epistemological approach to a theory of justice based on the concrete experience of the subject of injustice. In her presentation, Bethania Assy explores the relationship between capture, understood as vulnerability in the access to rights, and resistance, understood as the development of potency to self and collective affirmation, from three aspects: the development of political capacity as a process of subjectivation, the production of rights through the development of a new grammar of rights and the ethic of responsibility of the subjects that are not exposed to that violence. Her concept of resistance as re-existence starts with the recognition of state violence as formative in the process of subjectivation, the different temporalities of emergence, injustice, and reparation, as well as the spatiality that determines the concrete experience of injustice.

With the Special Issue on 'Protest and the Democratic Order', the results of an international workshop held in 2021 as part of the POWDER project at the Research and Teaching Area appear in Democratic Theory. The issue brings together contributions by Christina Flesher-Fominaya (Aarhus University), Erin Pineda (Smith College), José Medina (Northwestern University), Oliver Marchart (University of Vienna) and Paolo Gerbaudo (King's College London) and Christian Volk.

The contributions deal with the dynamics of political protest in the context of democratic orders and thus combine discourses on the conceptualisation and theorisation of protest with empirical findings on the topic. Also part of the issue is a symposium on Jason Frank's 'The Democratic Sublime' with contributions by Karuna Mantena, Adom Getachew, Sofia Näsström and Jason Frank. All contributions are available in open access.

A thematic focus issue of Zeitschrift für Politische Theorie (ZPTh) dedicated to 'Postcoloniality and Crisis of Democracy' is published. 

Jeanette Ehrmann (ed.) has collected contributions that question debates of democratic theory about the crisis of democracy from a perspective of post- and decolonial theory as well as black feminist and indigenous critique. The in-depth editorial by Jeanette Ehrmann scrutinizes the meta-narrative of a crisis of democracy and discusses a postcolonial democratic theory. The contributions can be accessed (partly open access) here.

The current special issue of Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft (ZPol) collects contributions that engage with the relations of political theory and digitization in a reconstructive, systematic and normative manner. All contributions are open access. 

Daniel Staemmler, Sebastian Berg and Thorsten Thiel are the editors. The expansive Introduction deals with the pitfalls of theorizing digitization in order to conceptualize an useful alternative: the digital Constellation.

Organized by:The research and teaching area Theory of Politics 

More information: Liesbeth Schoonheim liesbeth.schoonheim@hu-berlin.de

The lecture will be streamed live via Zoom. Access: https://hu-berlin.zoom.us/j/64442309929?pwd=K2JTNnc2YWx1RGl1Q1VaKzFQVS9vQT09

This lecture is concerned with how ‘sex’ as a biological category is mimetically formed by historically and culturally constructed notions of gender, including what Sara Ahmed calls “gender fatalism.” In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler criticizes the expressive model of sex, gender, and desire which assumes a linear relationship in which gender and desire express sex. They propose that the binary category of sex can be better understood as constructed and not innate. The concept of ‘sex’ too has a genealogy and like ‘gender’ it has been formed through discursive and cultural networks of power that bind it to heteronormativity and repronormativity. In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed outlines how not only gender but also sex becomes “a homework”: when it is “assigned” at birth it points to an expectant future. As Ahmed indicates the statements, “boys will be boys” and “girls will be girls,” are exemplary of the kinds of gender discourses that reify binary concepts of sex difference in which being a coherent sex is dependent upon representing a ‘correct’ gender.

The notion that sex is primary and gender follows as a representation of sex is questioned by Butler and Ahmed. Instead, it is suggested by them that this imitative relationship also moves in the opposite direction, so that sex imitates gender too. I agree with Butler and Ahmed that it is important to reject the one-sided expressive view. However, I also claim that to sufficiently understand the relation between sex and gender, we require a notion of gendered mimesis as an immanent and affective force which can act to dispossess the episteme of sex of truth claims that resist the gender binary. Thus, the philosophical concepts of sex and gender are not only structured by a relationship of imitation, they are also regulated and modified by a mimetic pathos which has historically acted to divest ‘sex’ from attributes that do not cohere with repro- and hetero- normative values.

Bio

Willow Verkerk is a Lecturer in Continental and Social Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Gendered Mimesis Project at KU Leuven. She was previously a Lecturer in Modern European Philosophy at CRMEP, Kingston University. Willow is the author of Nietzsche and Friendship (Bloomsbury, 2019) and other academic texts in feminist and continental philosophy. Current research interests include the philosophy of sex and gender, alternative feminist genealogies of the subject, and Nietzsche’s concept of sovereignty.

Book talk on Édouard Glissant and the Middle Passage
June 8, 2021, 4 pm
Humboldt-University Berlin
Please register by sending an email to: shk.theorie.politik@hu-berlin.de

On Édouard Glissant and the Middle Passage, University of Minnesota Press 2019: "While philosophy has undertaken the work of accounting for Europe’s traumatic history, the field has not shown the same attention to the catastrophe known as the Middle Passage. It is a history that requires its own ideas that emerge organically from the societies that experienced the Middle Passage and its consequences firsthand. Glissant and the Middle Passage offers a new, important approach to this neglected calamity by examining the thought of Édouard Glissant, particularly his development of Caribbeanness as a critical concept rooted in the experience of the slave trade and its aftermath in colonialism.

Author meets critics book talk with Donatella della Porta (SNS Florence) 
31. May 2021, 19:30 Uhr
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Zoom
Registration via E-Mail an sowitpsh@hu-berlin.de

Donatella della Porta (SNS Florence) will present her latest book 'How Social Movements Can Save Democracy' and join Dieter Rucht (WZB), Daniel Staemmler (HU Berlin) and Anton Haffner (HU Berlin) in discussion. All further information can be found on the event page.

The event takes place in cooperation with the Institute for Protest and Movement Research and is part of the international workshop 'After the Event: Conceptualizing Political Protest', which takes place at the Department of Political Theory. Della Porta's book was published last year by Polity Press and is available in German translation from Campus Verlag.

The research- and teaching area Political Theory is seeking to fill two positions as Postdoctoral Researchers (full time) for up to 5 years.

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