Michel Foucault once famously said “if I had been familiar with the Frankfurt School [earlier], I would not have said a number of stupid things that I did say and I would have avoided many of the detours which I made while trying to pursue my own humble path – when, meanwhile, avenues had been opened up by the Frankfurt School.”
This conference aims to bring together both complementary and dissident readings and re-readings of those ‘avenues’ opened up and developed by Foucault and first-generation Frankfurt scholars.
Notably, Foucault and the members of the first-generation Frankfurt School share many of the same concerns, albeit articulated from different perspectives — history and the critique of Western rationality; the discontents with modernity and subjectivity; historicity and historical method; analyses of discourse and language; the status of Enlightenment; the relationship between knowledge, power and ideology; the possibility of freedom, resistance and human emancipation; praxis, discursive and nondiscursive practices; and transformative action.
This conference aims at opening and uncovering the avenues for thinking of the relation (or lack thereof) between the analytic endeavors of Foucault and the project of the Frankfurt School in the 20th century, presented in the works of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Pollock, Otto Kirchheimer, and in their precursors — such as Georg Lukács and Siegfried Kracauer.
We welcome submissions for papers on any subject relating to the work of Foucault, the Frankfurt School, or the intersection of the two, such as studies, critiques, applications of their thought, and explorations of their limits. We also welcome works that shed light on the legacy of Foucault and the Frankfurt School for contemporary thought, including but not limited to political reflections on liberalism, neoliberalism and populism; capitalism and the idea of human capital; feminism and gender studies; aesthetics and literary studies; the history of modernity; biopolitics; necropolitics; environmental ethics; and radical geography studies.
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13 June 2024