An international workshop. Buffalo, New York, March 28-29, 2008.
- Directed by Alberto Moreiras
- Coordinated by Jorge Ledo.
This workshop, sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is the first in a series that will be continued at the Aberdeen Centre for Modern Thought and possibly at other institutions elsewhere. We are very grateful to the sponsors from UB that have made this workshop possible (they are all listed in the conference programme). As José Luis Villacañas, from the University of Murcia, and I started to plot, we decided to organize this first encounter around the work of three major Italian political thinkers, namely, Giuseppe Duso, from the University of Padova, Roberto Esposito, from the University of Naples, and Carlo Galli, from the University of Bologna. Esposito’s work had started to be translated into English (in fact, a special issue of the journal Diacritics on Esposito has just been published, edited by Tim Campbell, who is also translating Esposito’s Bios for the University of Minnesota Press), and Duso and Galli’s work, although very influential in Italy, in Spain, and in other European contexts, still remains mostly unknown in Anglo-Saxon academic circles. At the same time, discussions in Anglo-Saxon circles at the larger humanities level (that is, outside specialized enclaves in relevant disciplinary departments) have reached a certain impasse, as they tend to flutter around too specific a set of characters that dissertations and conference panels have almost exhausted to death. It was time to open it up, and not just for the sake of opening it up. We think that the work of our guests is of paramount importance for an adequate understanding of contemporary problems. You will forgive us if we hold back on exactly why we think this importance is dramatic—we prefer not to set up in advance the parameters of our discussion.
| International Woskshop at Buffalo | On-line Discussion |
|---|---|
| Conference programme | Forum |
| Participants | Content Cell |
We proceeded to invite a number of more junior scholars, some of them from our own circle of long-standing professional interlocutors, like Brett Levinson, Bruno Bosteels, or Jon Beasley-Murray, to the extent that we thought a fruitful interaction between their work and the work of our Italian guests was going to become possible, and others that we hope to turn into new friends, such as Adam Sitze, Tim Campbell, or Miguel Vatter, because their own work had already engaged in significant ways with the same topics our senior guests had dealt with. Vincent Gugino was invited given his knowledge of North American republican traditions, a topic that we thought we needed to incorporate into our discussions.
Linguistic difficulties were not irrelevant. We had to organize the workshop in three languages, that is, English, Italian, and Spanish. We are particularly grateful to the set of translators and interpreters that have helped and will continue to help us out, and that includes Elisabeth Fay, Jorge Ledo, Stephen Marth, Amanda Minervini, Valentina Paradisi, and Andrea Righi.
And it was also important to develop an appropriate forum for discussion both before and after the workshop. Our technical means were only developing when we started with this, and we organized a wiki that soon became too small for the amount of text that went into it. Some initial attempts to organize a better venue collapsed for infrastructural reasons, and we had to adopt an insatisfactory solution, which was to transfer the discussion to the Aberdeen Centre for Modern Thought blog. Now, finally, and thanks to the superb efforts from Finn Brunton and Jorge Ledo, we are launching our new forum, which will sustain this discussion and its consequences for the foreseeable future.
We have placed a by now considerable set of texts in our forum. But it is not necessary for anyone to read them all before they can make a contribution. The discussion is open to all participants that want to engage with the topics. We will eventually post the papers that will have been read at the workshop, and will continue to post here announcements for the second workshop at Aberdeen, and so forth. “New Paths in Political Philosophy” is a subfield of our Political Thought Track at the Doctoral Programme.
