The Departments of Political Science and History, the Edward J. & Dorothy Clark Memorial Kempf Fund, the Whitney & Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the European Studies Council, the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, and the Whitney Humanities Center present:
The 23rd Annual Critical Theory Roundtable.
This three day conference brings together a diverse group of academics, including faculty and graduate students, working in the tradition of critical theory broadly understood, and spanning the academic disciplines of Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, History, Literary Studies, Law, and European Studies.
This year, in conjunction with a symposium hosted by Yale’s History Department marking the 20th anniversary of Strange Multiplicity, our conference will kick off at 5pm on Thursday, October 1st with a lecture entitled “A View of Transformative Reconciliation” by Dr. James Tully, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Law, Indigenous Governance and Philosophy, University of Victoria. The lecture and attending discussion will take stock of the book’s legacy and of the trajectory of its major themes into the twenty-first century, and look forward to future opportunities for interdisciplinary developments across the fields of political theory, indigenous studies, and intellectual history. A welcome reception will follow.
Sterling Memorial Library (SML), 120 High Street
8:30am – Breakfast, SML memorabilia room
8:50am – Opening Remarks, Seyla Benhabib
9:00am-10:30am Panel 1: Eurocrisis and the End of Cosmopolitanism?, SML lecture hall
- Seyla Benhabib, (Yale University), chair; Brian Milstein (Goethe University Frankfurt), discussant
- Hauke Brunkhorst (University of Flensburg), “European Dual State: The Double Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and the Need for Re-Politicization”
- Peter Verovsek (Harvard University), “Integration through Religious Reason: Habermas’s Postsecular Rationality and the Origins of the European Union”
- Paul Linden-Retek (Yale University), “Solidarity as a post-national legal concept, or what is it to be a cosmopolitan constitutional patriot?”
10:30am – Break
10:45am -12:00pm Panel 2: Canons of Critical Theory, SML lecture hall
- Clara Picker (Yale University), Chair; Stephen Bourque (Temple University), Discussant
- Gordon Finlayson (University of Sussex), “The Real Political Contradictions of Adorno’s Critical Theory”
- Karen Ng (Vanderbilt University), “Hegel and Adorno on Negative Universal History: The Dialectics of Species Life”
- George Shea (Misericordia University), “Suffering as a Post-Metaphysical Foundation for Normativity in Horkheimer’s Dialectical Materialism”
12:00pm – Lunch, SML memorabilia room
1:00pm-2:30pm Panel 3: On the Contemporary Critique of Capitalism, SML lecture hall
- Stefan Eich (Yale University), Chair; Max Pensky (Binghamton University), discussant
- Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt University Berlin), “Economy as a Social Practice and the Critique of Capitalism as a Form of Life”
- Nancy Fraser (The New School), “Legitimation Crisis? On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism”
- Turku Isiksel (Columbia University), “Cosmopolitanism, De-Commercialized”
2:30pm – Coffee Break, SML memorabilia room
2:45pm – 4:15pm Panel 4: Critical Theory as Method
- Anna Jurkevics (Yale University), chair; Allan Breedlove (Loyola University Chicago), discussant
- Alessandro Ferrara (University of Rome Tor Vergata), “Exemplarity and Critical Theory: Which Normativity for Critical Theory as Immanent Critique?”
- Roy Ben-Shai (Haverford College), “Critique, Emancipation, Revolt: Three Paradigms of Critical Thinking”
- Andy Buchwalter (University of North Florida), “Normative Reconstruction in Honneth and Hegel”
5pm – Keynote Address by Peter Gordon (Harvard University), “Critical Theory Between the Sacred and the Profane,” WHC Auditorium, 53 Wall Street
6:30pm – Wine reception, WHC 108