Lines of Force - A Symposium on Althusser and His Contemporaries, Second Panel

Celebrating 10 years of Warren Montag's Althusser and His Contemporaries! November 13, 2023 Second Panel: (00:53) Etienne Balibar - Born in 1942. He graduated at the Sorbonne in Paris, later took his PhD from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). He is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, and Anniversary Chair of Contemporary European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He is also visiting professor at Columbia University in the City of New York. He specializes in epistemology, political theory and philosophical anthropology. He is author or co-author of Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser) (1965); Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein); The Philosophy of Marx (Verso 1995), Spinoza and Politics (Verso 1998); We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004); Violence and Civility (Columbia University Press, 2015); Citizen Subject. Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (Fordham University Press, 2017); Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (Columbia University Press, 2018); On Universals. Constructing and Deconstructing Community, (Fordham University Press, 2020). (27:53) Oscar Valle - Graduate student at the University of California, Riverside. His research primarily focuses on cultural production in Mexico roughly from 1927-1942. More specifically, he is interested in a mis-encounter that I believe occurred, or could have occurred,between the work of the so called “group without a group” (or “grupo sin grupo”) the Contemporaneos, and the visit to Mexico in 1936 by the French surrealist writer Antonin Artaud. Between them, he has been exploring the baroque period and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in particular. He is in the beginning stages of his dissertation. (49:48) Robyn Marasco - Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research has focused on the distinctive contributions of critical theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis to the study of politics. Her first book, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (Columbia UP, 2015), reconstructs the emancipatory project of critical theory around the idea of negative dialectics. Her articles have appeared in leading journals in the humanities and social sciences, including Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, New German Critique, boundary2, Philosophy & Social Criticism, and Constellations. Professor Marasco was the guest editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “The Authoritarian Personality” and guest co-editor, with Banu Bargu, of a special issue of Rethinking Marxism on “The Political Encounter with Louis Althusser”. Prior to coming to Hunter College and the GC, Professor Marasco taught political theory at Williams College. More recently, she was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and a Fellow at the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale University. Her current book project, Toward a Political Theory of the Family, explores the distinctly political concept of the family in twentieth-century critical theory. Professor Marasco is co-editor of Polity, Journal of Political Science. (01:13:19) Despina Paraskeva-Veloudogianni - PhD candidate in social theory, focusing on the relation of subjection and resistances. Her main research interests are political philosophy, social and feminist theory. She is a co-editor of Ektos Grammis publishing initiative and a member of Athens Historical Materialism Conference organizing committee. She is the author of the book The Enemy, the Blood, the Punisher. Analysing thirteen speeches of the 'Leader' of Golden Dawn.