Centre For Law and the Humanities Research Seminar with Professor James Martel
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Central
Professor James Martel (San Francisco State University)
The Spirit of '77: Italian Autonomism and the quest for a revolution for everyone.
This talk will be about how leftists in the Global North would do well to follow organizing patterns of political and economic organization that you find with many Indigenous and Black radical traditions where they are effect always engaged in a form of continuous political assembly. This solves two problems that have long pestered the left in the Global North. First, the question of spontaneity is resolved because these societies are so well organized that their uprisings do not peter out the way they do in the Global North. Second, the issue of vanguardism is also solved since the society itself is in effect the vanguard. In the talk I will focus on the year 1977 when Italian autonomists attempted a revolution that was meant to be along the lines of continuous assembly, a revolution where everyone, every category was fully represented. In the end this revolution did not succeed but it's initial failure should not deter us. I will conclude that contemporary leftists in the Global North need the "spirit of 77" rather than the more conventional model of 1968 in order to succeed in their revolutionary goals.
Contact name: Patrick Hanafin
Speakers-
PROFESSOR JAMES MARTEL
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James Martel is a professor in the Department of Political Science at San Francisco State University. He teaches courses in political theory, continental philosophy, anarchism, post-colonial theory and theories of gender and sexuality. He is the author of eight books, most recently Anarchist Prophets: Disappointing Vision and the Power of Collective Sight (Duke University Press, 2022). He previously published Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead (Amherst College Press, 2018); The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke University Press, 2017); The One and Only Law, Walter Benjamin and the Second Commandment (Michigan 2014); Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (Routledge/GlassHouse 2011); Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory (Michigan, 2011); Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (Columbia, 2007) and Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (Routledge, 2001). He is also co-editor, along with Dr. Peter Burdon of the Routledge Handbook on Ecological Law and the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2023), as well as How not to be Governed: Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left (Lexington, 2011) along with Dr. Jimmy Casas Klausen (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro). He has a new book under contract with Duke University Press entitled Continual Assembly: The Power and Promise of Non-Archism. He is also the author of many essays, encyclopedia entries, book chapters and book reviews.
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