Simon Swift is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy: Expressive Rationality in Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Contemporary Theory and Hannah Arendt.
Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (1998) and The Writing of Anxiety (2007) and co-author of British Fiction After Modernism (2007). Her most recent book, The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011), takes the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point in order to think about the relation between law, justice and literature in the postwar period. This workshop will be organised around aspects of Professor Stonebridge’s recent research and will also involve a more general discussion of theory and the academic job market in the era of the REF. It will comprise three parts:
Howard Caygill is Professor of Modern European Philosophy in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. His most recent book is On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Respondent: Professor Maja Zehfuss (University of Manchester)
In 1978, Michel Foucault visited Iran twice as the protests against the Shah reached their zenith and subsequently interviewed the Ayatollah Khomenei in his Paris exile. He went on to write a series of articles for the Corrierre della sera, Le nouvel observateur and Le monde reflecting upon the implications of the Islamic Revolution. To be sure, Foucault’s writings upon Iran are now some of the notorious in his body of work and have been roundly criticised by scholars for at best political naivete and at worst complicity with Khomenei’s regime. However, after more than 30 years of radical political Islamism of all persuasions, the ‘Iranian’ Foucault also begins to seem remarkably prescient, almost prophetic: Foucault was arguably one of the first western thinkers to grasp the complex nexus of religion and revolutionary politics that has become one of the defining challenges to neo-liberal modernity. What, then, are we to make of the Iranian Foucault today? How might we read it in the light of subsequent debates around resistance, biopolitics, political theology, not to mention a new set of revolutions in the Middle East? Why does Foucault speak of a new ‘political spirituality’ beginning to be born in the Islamic Revolution?