Wade Hollingshaus

Redistributing the Sensible: The Disappearing Public of the NAKAMATA and Their (Video) Performance of Human Rights

This panel is about the possibilities suggested when the work of philosophy toward a radical politics is used as a starting point or frame in critical and theoretical work on performance. We draw from the recent work of philosophers such as Badiou, Zizek, Agamben and Ranciere, as well as other political theorists. We specifically take as our critical, cultural and historical location a capitalism that appears as various neoliberalisms across the globe.

In this panel, loosely hinged to the theme of the conference, we ask the following: What are ways to reconsider the notion of the public, and of the private, which is not so much the opposite of the public but its constitutive, if sometimes masked, element? What are theoretical forms of space, collectivity, subjectivation, and opposition that can be imagined to intervene in the circulation of the public/private figuration of capitalism, or what Badiou calls democratic materialism? We are interested in the assumptions that development, rights, NGO and civil society discourses make, or perpetuate about the bond, including their promotion of tolerance as a public virtue, and democracy as the political practice of a remade or ideal public. We’re interested in the ways these discourses shape and professionalize an activist and humanitarian public. And, we’re interested in the ways that these discourses evacuate political potential from publics and public spaces assembled by them. Who might be different kinds of political subjects and in what kinds of spaces might they thrive?