Coming soon - The Disaffection Seminar Series: Feeling in Crisis

This six-part seminar series, organised by ERCC Associate Researcher Dr Ben Gook, will run online from 20 September - 28 October 2021.

Rioter in elmo mask

Around the world in recent decades, we have witnessed increasing levels of disaffection with existing institutions. At once naming feelings of apathy and anger as well as withdrawal and rage, “disaffection” itself is a term that compresses different responses to the status quo. Exploring disaffection in various conjunctures, this seminar series focuses on the conceptual field of negative affects within social and cultural life. It goes beyond our contemporary moment to consider historical moments of disaffection and their symptoms. It brings together philosophers, cultural historians, intellectual historians, criminologists, literary scholars and psychoanalytic theorists to explore a range of questions about disaffections, both contemporary and historical.

Format: All seminars will be run via Zoom. Given the international nature of the participants, the time of the seminars will vary – so please note the time as well as date for each seminar. All welcome!

Confirmed dates and speakers:

20.09 — 6pm AEST — Revolution and Transformation: Habit, Routine, Praxis

Carolyn Pedwell on her book Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation and Eva von Redecker on her new book Praxis and Revolution: A Theory of Social Transformation

27.09 — 5pm AEST — Over-Affection: From Anxiety to Ressentiment and Back

Samo Tomsic, Justin Clemens & Nadia Bou Ali — Ressentiment, enjoyment, and anxiety

07.10 — 11am AEST — Disalienation and Disaffection: Postwar France and Colonial Genealogies

Tanya Agathocleous on her new book Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere & Camille Robcis on  her new book Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France with John Cash as discussant.

14.10 — 5pm AEST — Conspiracy, Alienation and Anxiety in Crises of the Political Present Imogen Richards (Deakin) & Pete Chambers (RMIT) on  alienation, anxiety, conspiracy and the alt-right, with P

21.10 – 1pm AEST — Aesthetics and Disaffection: From French Algeria to 21st Century Japan Maïté Marciano on her PhD dissertation “The Politics of Disaffection: Revisiting Affect in Modern and Contemporary French Literature, 1940 to the present” & Patrick Noonan on his forthcoming book on disaffection in Japan.

28.10 – 7pm AEST — Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling Xine Yao on her new book Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America

More Information

Ben Gook

benjamin.gook@unimelb.edu.au

  • Seminar series