From the Politics of the Subject to a Politics of a Situation

November 8, 2:30pm - 4:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Sakamaki Hall C-308 Add to Calendar

TOPIC: The crisis of contemporary politics is two-fold: It can be articulated as the problem of motivation to action and the problem of the “what” of political action. I argue that the two-fold problem can be drawn to the fact that the ontological condition of politics today provides a basis for what could be called the politics of the subject, which is characterized by political moralism. I diagnose the crisis by examining a particular instance of human rights, language and practice—voice. I then proceed to offer notes on an alternative form of politics that I see exemplified in anti-drug war political activism.

Dr. Zigon teaches in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and a visiting scholar at Columbia University. Among his recent publications are HIV is God’s Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia (2011, University of California Press), Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Narratives of Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow (2010, Brill), and Morality: An Anthropological Perspective (2008, Berg).


Event Sponsor
Philosophy, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Patricia Pimental, 956-8649, philo@hawaii.edu, Enter Title Here (PDF)

Share by email