Event overview
Philosopher Peter Hallward (Kingston University) will give a lecture on the will and political action to launch our spring series of MFA Fine Art lectures
Willing and Able: A Voluntarist Approach to Political Action
Democracy is an empty word unless it affirms the power of ordinary people to prevail over any form of privileged interest or ruling class. As imposition of 'the will of the people', democracy should be understood as a power of autonomous self-determination, and thus as a capacity to overcome (rather than simply resist) hostile, heteronomous forms of determination. This general capacity, in turn, depends on several mutually reinforcing collective abilities or powers, in particular capacities for assembly, education, information, deliberation, organisation, resolution, and realisation. In order to flesh out this account of political will, I will draw on fragments of canonical texts by Rousseau, Kant, and Marx, and on the quasi-voluntarist accounts of political agency and capacity advanced by thinkers like Blanqui, Gramsci, and Badiou.
Peter Hallward teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London (UK). He has written books on the French philosophers Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze, on postcolonial literature, and on contemporary Haitian politics. He is currently working on a book entitled The Will of the People (forthcoming from Verso), alongside brief studies of Rousseau, Blanqui and Marx.
All welcome
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 Jan 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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