The Remarque Institute’s KANDERSTEG SEMINAR
“The Manner of the King that Shall Reign Over You”: Reconceptualizing Sovereignty
Wednesday, March 11th – Sunday, March 15th, 2015

 

Programme

Wednesday, March 11th

Arrival of participants by train in Kandersteg

Check in:             Waldhotel Doldenhorn CG-3718 Kandersteg Tel. +41.33.675.81.81

Fax +41.33.675.81.85

19:00         Welcome reception and dinner at hotel

 

Thursday, March 12th

09:30         Introduction and Welcoming Remarks

Stefanos Geroulanos and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (NYU) Welcoming Remarks

 

Session I

10:00 – 12:30              Stefanos Geroulanos, Chair

Continuities, Genealogies, Revolutions

 

10:00 – 11:00              Brief opening comments (Jerr, Ben-Dor Benite, McQueen, Guilhot)

A somewhat critical beginning: The dominant models for the conceptualization of sovereignty (Cambridge-School; biopolitics; international law) have forced a series of parameters that are

 

Eurocentric, and hostile to the complexity of its attendant or accompanied aesthetics. The first panel sets the tone for reconceptualizing sovereignty: how do we think about conceptual continuity, about genealogies? What regimes of citation does sovereignty involve? How do we engage the consistency and transformation of practices of power with an eye to the experience of sovereignty? In what ways does the theatricality of sovereignty, the staging of power, relate to the history of its aesthetics, and what role does it play in establishing continuity and transformation?

 

 

11:00 - 12:30               Discussion

12:45                           Lunch at hotel

Free afternoon until:

 

Session II

16:30 – 19:00              Ayça Çubukçu, Chair

Empires, Orders, Regimes, New and Old

Moving beyond—or beneath—the identification of sovereignty with the state and its leader, the second panel addresses questions of the instauration and transformation of authority, legitimacy, and power in new domestic and international regimes (from early modern China to 1919, and from French ‘Eurafrica’ to the governance of the economic order and the post-WWII regimes). How is newness to be conceived? How do we think of different kinds of political regimes, different forms of leadership, and different types of international orders and institutions in their interplay and conflict?

 

16:30 – 17:30              Brief opening comments

(Di Cosmo, Martin, Wheatley, Davis, Takács)

 

17:30 – 19:00              Discussion

 

19:00                           Drinks followed by dinner at hotel

 

 

Friday, March 13th

 

Session III

10:00 – 12:30              Nicole Jerr, Chair

Temporality, Religion, and Representation in the Construction of Power

The peculiar temporality of sovereignty—its capacity to become or appear extra-temporal, to abstract from history, to exceed and structure social life—remains not only one of the distinctive characteristics of those agents ascribed sovereign power, but also the one most closely linked to religion, the sacred, and the secular condition. The aim in this panel is to foreground the relation between political regimes, religion, cultural foundations, and their constructions of temporality by looking at articular instances of the intertwining of religion, time, politics, and representation.

 

10:00 – 11:00              Brief opening comments

(Most, Frank, Smolkin-Rothrock, Geroulanos)

11:00 – 12:30              Discussion

12:45                           Lunch at hotel

Free afternoon until:

19:00                           Drinks followed by

Dinner at the Landgasthof Ruedihaus

 

Saturday, March 14th

 

Session IV

10.00 – 12:30              Glenn Most, Chair

Today, and the Day after Tomorrow

 

Recent discussions of sovereignty have focused on biopolitics and the (social) scientific role in political rule; secularism and its limitations; the fading, or transformation, of traditional nation-state-style sovereignty since the oil shock of the 1970s; human rights; and environmentalism. The idea here is to restage these questions, gauge their effect on the global, theologico-political, and aesthetic dimensions of sovereignty as a concept that still persists despite the radical and continuing shift of its premises and purpose.

 

 

10:00 – 11:00              Brief opening comments

(Çubukçu, Robcis, Riemenschnitter, Scholz)

11:00 – 12:30              Discussion

12:45                           Lunch at hotel

Free afternoon until:

 

 

17:30                           Wrap-up Session chaired by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite

 

 

19:00                           Drinks and Gala dinner at hotel

 

 

 

Sunday, March 15th

 

Departure of participants

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