NOTE: This seminar will pre-circulate its contributions. If you are interested in attending any of its sessions, please email the organizers to receive the relevant materials: [email protected] and [email protected].

What forms of thought arise in acephalic uprisings? What modes of expression, textual genres, and rhetorical gestures appear when thinking stops being the prerogative of leaders and theorists and becomes a common practice in and of revolt? How does the irruptive thought of collective insurrectionary self-activity challenge the basic ontological presuppositions, conceptual frameworks, and normative categories of political modernity?  

This seminar gathers scholars working on a temporally and geographically wide range of subjects under the banner of popular insurgency. These might include historical and contemporary global peasant insurgencies, slave revolts and the Haitian revolution, anti-colonial insurrections and movements, as well as contemporary appearances of communization and destituent power. We are especially interested in those sites that articulate heterodox visions of political theology and challenge the ontology of the secular, the power of secularism, and the narratives of secularization. We also invite work that critically engages the violent intimacies of state and capital and expands the canon of anarchist and communist thought, especially from non-European and non-modern fields. 

We hope to convene an interdisciplinary conversation, not only to think popular insurrections, but also to explore the pressure they exert on the realm of theory. To this end, contributors might engage the following subjects: revolts that enact the unthinkable and the impossible, as in Trouillot’s theorization of the Haitian Revolution as an impossible event—unthinkable even to the self-emancipating enslaved who carried it out. Challenges to dominant understandings of the theory-practice relationship, via Arendt’s exploration of the revolutionary capacity for radical novelty, or via Agamben’s critique of the paradigm of realization and his rethinking of the modal relations of the possible and actual. The capacity of mass collective action to embody, in Tomba’s formulation, insurgent universality in contrast to juridical universalism. The experience of historical discontinuity (Benjamin) that allows collective insurgency to contest the sovereign periodization of modernity (Kathleen Davis). Guha’s reflections on insurgent peasant consciousness and its challenge to secular historiography, as well as the broader debate on the relation of peasant insurgencies to the political (Chakrabarty, Hobsbawm, Toscano). Social poesis (Hartman) or socio-poetic insurgency (Moten) as ante-political, following Cedric Robinson’s critique of the political as the transcendental principle of order.

Other potential topics might include the general insurrection and the general strike; fanaticism and the boundaries of political thought; millenarian and utopian practice; self-authorization and self-activity; the ontology of order and disorder.