21/10/2025
*The Political and Its Limits* (July 2026, Summer School with Alenka Zupančič, Gil Anidjar and Amanda Beech (with Daniel Tutt and Haela Hunt Hendrix as guest speakers), Course Descriptions:
“Political” in the contemporary sense, and as bound by its disciplinary definitions in political science and political philosophy, assigns societal categories, forms of law and moralities to the edges or beyond the limits of what is political. Yet again, these excluded categories are both legislated by the Political within its limits of “discursive legibility,” in Judith Butler’s parlance, and relegated to the realms of the pre-political (including anti-political, non-political). The “beyond political” serves to constitute the political as its Other, to be subjugated or negated by it, but also to be kept at bay as the source of elemental revolt, i.e., “prepolitical.”
Abstracts of master classes:
Alenka Zupančič will offer two master classes on the following topics: Can we devise recipes for what would be “truly” political, or politically efficient, and not just a continuation of non-politics by political means, which is how politics seems to work most of the time? Is “true politics” an exception to politics itself? We could agree that it is rare, but how are we to situate it? Could we even do this in abstract terms, or does it always depend on concrete circumstances rather than on some pre-established substance of the political? We will be looking into the relationship between the structural/a-historical and the contingent/historical at work in social formations, and attempting to show in which ways they imply, consolidate, or disrupt each other. Another emphasis will be on examining the vocabulary used today to describe our political moment: “radical,” “radicalization,” “extremism,” and the like.
Gil Anidjar: The Concept of the Antipolitical
Anidjar’s masterclass, “The Concept of the Antipolitical” investigates the boundaries of the political in the wake of the Copernican revolution. Drawing on Cedric Robinson’s notion of the antipolitical and on Laplanche’s suggestion with regard to an “Unfinished Copernican Revolution,” the course will asks whether politics might be said to revolve around a different center, whether it has been de-centered, ex-centered or perhaps without a center at all. Are there alternative gravitational fields, antipolitical fields or objects that merit reflection but have not quite gained the excentric attention they deserve? In order to address these questions, we will turn our attention, primarily, to mothers.
Amanda Beech: Art and the Construction of the Necessary (Draft title)
Art’s mid-20th-century alignment with Marxian and critical theory has slid into Romantic capitalist and irrationalist aesthetics, entangling it in bourgeois idealism. Unable to shift to dialectical materialism without fetishizing its illusory freedom or negating emancipatory possibilities, art faces a paradox: achieving political relevance may require its own destruction, leading to political quietism and pessimism. Despite appearances, art remains steeped in a theological and capitalist identity, perpetuating a solipsistic, atheistic theology that manifests as objective idealism—an indifferent, sensual form resistant to historical engagement. Can art, often marginalized as non-political, become a political possibility? Drawing on Georg Lukacs’ critiques of irrationalism, particularly his analysis of fascism and Schelling, this exploration examines how art might bridge its idealism to concrete praxis. By investigating whether art can construct the “necessary” for political transformation, it engages the summer school’s theme of probing the political’s boundaries and its constitutive others, like art, deemed prepolitical or extreme.
Haela Hunt Hendrix will announce her topic and format of intervention: TBA.
NB: The Summer School is structured as a symposium/conference and the participants will have the opportunity to present their own work followed by Q&A. The entire collection, or several of them combining contributions from the previous summer school, will be published by an international press as a collection or an edited book.
