Jodi Dean is Media@McGill Beaverbrook visiting scholar this winter. She will be visiting us in February and will give a public talk on 11 February, 5h30pm, 2010.
The talk is a collaboration between Media@McGill and the AHCS speaker series.
Whatever Blogging
Abstract: Giorgio Agamben has introduced the idea of whatever being as a tag for a contemporary mode of belonging unbound by the inscriptions of disciplinary identity. Some agree that this mode could herald a better coming community. Linking whatever being to appearances of whatever in networked communications and positioning it within a brief history of the interconnections between media and identity, I argue that whatever being is the wrong model for a subject capable of left political practice and opposition.
Jodi Dean is Professor Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Dean is the co-editor of the international journal, Theory and Event. Jodi Dean is a political theorist who is engaged with contemporary radical political thought and questions surrounding politics and emerging media technologies. She has written extensively on Slavoj Zizek (including her book, Zizek's Politics) and has also published critical articles on Judith Butler, Hardt and Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Iris Marion Young and Giorgio Agamben, among others. She is animated by concerns about contemporary media and political culture, particularly in post 9/11 North America, with quite radical takes on questions concerning publicity, contemporary democracy, network culture, the Left, conspiracy theory, strangers and secrecy (see Publicity's Secret, and, her most recent book, Democracy and Other Neo-liberal Fantasies, at Duke University Press, 2009).