On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory.
05.03.2010
Nietzsche with Deleuze II
The thought of becoming
03.12.2009
International conference
Becoming-major, becoming-minor
02.12.2009
Global capitalism, necropolitics and contemporary art
01.12.2009
Roberto Esposito
The dispositif of the person
09.10.2009
International Conference
Encountering Althusser
09.10.2009
Conference material: schedule, abstracts, articles
Encountering Althusser
03.09.2009
Antke Engel
Queer/ing Images of Sexuality and Economy
The Surplus of Paradoxes
02.09.2009
Matteo Mandarini
Negri's encounter with Guattari: the elision of Lenin
Communists like us
01.09.2009
Ruth Sonderegger
A cinematic diagnosis of biopolitics
The cinema of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
16.06.2009
Christian Kerslake
The specter of an unsolved problematic
The Meanings of Immanence in Deleuze's Philosophy
19.05.2009
Luca Basso, Vittorio Morfino
A French Marx
The singular, the trans-individual and the common
07.04.2009
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Andrea Cavaletti, Katja Diefenbach, Mark Purcell, Miguel Robles-Duran, Lukasz Stanek, Roemer van Toorn, Peter Trummer, Sven-Olov Wallenstein
State-space symposium no. 1
Biopolitics of scale
09.03.2009
Paul Hegarty, Vanessa Theodoropoulos, Jean Louis Violeau
Against the economic: Reading Baudrillard with Bataille, Lacan, Marx, and Debord
A Workshop on Baudrillard
03.02.2009
Lecture of Tom Rockmore at the International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam
Is Marx a Fichtean?
04.12.2008
Martin Saar
Negri on Power.
Political Spinozism
03.11.2008
Steve Wright
The Refusal of Labor
Tronti's Legacy
05.06.2008
Massimo De Angelis, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Anne Querrien
The production of commons, subjectivity and space
Communists like us
05.12.2007
A. Auerbach, K. Diefenbach, S. Dillemuth, M. Vishmidt
The politics of bohemia
08.11.2007
Maria Muhle
Politics, police and power from Foucault to Rancière
07.11.2007
Manfred Hermes
Narrative strategies of subjectivisation in Fassbinder’s "Berlin Alexanderplatz"
In the figurative sense
05.10.2007
Serhat Karakayali
On political hegemony and militant becoming: Gramsci and Deleuze
The poetics of knowledge
29.06.2007
Ruben Martinez, Jaron Rowan, Marina Vishmidt, Katja Diefenbach
The cultural producer as model of the post-fordist worker
In the mood for work
05.04.2007
Grahame Lock
The actuality of Althusser's thinking
Dictatorship of the proletariat as political science
04.04.2007
Judith Hopf
The imposition of creative work
Hey production!
08.03.2007
Raul Zelik
Notes on asymmetric warfare and governance
Sovereign police
Martin Saar's talk will assess and discuss the importance of the work of early modern Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza for Postmarxist and Postoperaist theorizing and in particular for the work of Antonio Negri.
The crucial feature of Spinoza’s writing for political thought, one might say, is his fundamental (or ontological) theory of power. Saar will give an overview of this theory and try to show why such a line of thinking has proven attractive for 20th century political or social philosophy (from Althusser to Balibar).
He will then comment on Negri’s extensive interpretation of Spinoza and try to determine where he creatively transforms (or rewrites) the early modern themes. But this, he argues, comes at a price: Negri’s own account of power suffers from some elements that relate to his Marxist commitments but that might be said to weaken the potential inherent in the Spinozist framework, as can be seen in Empire and Multitude.
The lecture will close in discussing the importance of ontology for political thought, drawing on the case of Negri, but also referring to Balibar, Deleuze, and Virno.
Martin Saar is assistant professor at the University of Frankfurt/M., Institute of Political Science. His major research orientations are both, poststructuralist theory, especially the writings of Michel Foucault and his references to Nietzsche, and the political philosophy of the 16th and 17th century, especially Machiavelli, Spinoza and Hobbes.