Ultra-politics and political conflic, subm. 19th April 2005.

Pli invites submissions for the next volume (Volume 17, Summer 2005) which
will be concerned with the topic of Ultra-politics and political conflict.

How are we to account for the sense that, just at the point when everything
becomes political, politics itself disappears? Slavoj Žižek has suggested
the term 'Ultra-politics'(1) to name that particular avoidance of the
political which results from the very intensification of political conflict.
Ultra-politics is the result of conflict which is always on its way to
warfare.

If we take contemporary political thought as symptomatic of strong
ultra-political tendencies, then we are forced to think through various
philosophical problems regarding the logic and structure of sovereignty,
domination, struggle and conflict. We would particularly welcome papers
which address these issues and their impact in recent European thought, for
example, in the work of such thinkers as Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Martin
Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou. In this context papers could
address some of the following issues:

- How can we develop a concept of the political which, whilst resisting
Carl Schmitt's ultra-politics, retains some of the advantages of his
conception, e.g., that there is no specific realm of the political and that
political struggle is indeed marked by intensity?

- In the late 1930s Martin Heidegger developed an analysis of 'machination''
as the form of power informing contemporary political phenomena. Such
phenomena as 'total war' are indicative of the dwindling distinction between
war and peace in which both become indifferent manifestations of a
prevailing totality. In doing so Heidegger anticipates the concerns of many
post-war thinkers of ''totalitarianism' and frequently gives a more radical
account of its source and prevalence. In assessing these analyses we are
confronted with the issue of how this 'being-historical' thought comes to
bear upon our understanding of political conflict.

- What are the consequences of the thought that a state of 'permanent
exception' is not simply a contemporary political expediency but, as Giorgio
Agamben analyses it, the very logic of sovereignty?

Submissions, preferably no longer than 8,000 words, should be sent in the
form of a single hard copy, plus a copy on disk as an RTF file. The deadline
for submissions is 19th April 2005. Please refer to the 'Notes for
Contributors'' in this volume (also on the Pli website). Include an e-mail
address if possible for future correspondence.

Pli:

The Warwick Journal of Philosophy,
Department of Philosophy
University of Warwick
Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK

For further information e-mail:

Pli_journal@hotmail.com

Visit http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal

1 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political
Ontology, (London, New York: Verso, 1999) p.190