Winter 2025 Speaker Series
Winter 2025 Schedule:
From Left/Right to Up/Down: Technological Transcendence, Ecological Collapse, and a New Polarity in Politics with Dan Zimmer, Stanford University
Monday January 27 at 1pm PST
Talk co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute with Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Recent years have seen a growing number renounce the anthropocentrism of the modern Left/Right political spectrum to champion nothing less than the cause of Life itself. This talk charts how the totality of Life became a source of political concern and maps the consequences. It traces the beginning of these developments back to mid-20th century cybernetics before proceeding to show how the environmental crises of the 1970s split the servants of Life into competing camps: one wing striving to ensure that human beings do not overstep Life’s planetary boundaries and the other seeking to use artificial intelligence to free Life from all earthly limits to growth. The talk introduces an Up/Down dichotomy as a heuristic tool to help observers better parse this growing opposition. It concludes by warning that the growing struggle between Life’s partisans may come to resemble less the human-scale conflicts of Western political modernity than a new war of religion.
Dan Zimmer is a political theorist who studies the planet-scale application of human power, with a transdisciplinary focus on nuclear weapons, global warming, and artificial intelligence (AI). He received a doctorate in political science from the Government Department of Cornell University and has since studied contemporary issues in climate science and AI with STS scholar Paul Edwards as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He now works as a lecturer in the Stanford Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Program and is currently completing a book manuscript that traces the emergence of the human species as a political object from Aristotle to the atom bomb to the Anthropocene.
Nature, Women, and Capital: A Critical Reconsideration with Riccardo Bellofiore & Giovanna Vertova, University of Bergamo (the class[y] economists)
Monday February 10 at 1pm PST
In the last decades there has been a large debate of what may referred to as the "gender question" and the "nature question". Large parts of feminism and ecologism have been critical of the Marxian approach, while Marxists have never really engaged in a debate, either seen the encounter as unproblematical or dismissing it altogether. Discussing also aspects of the Italian debate, we argue that feminism and ecologism need finally to meet Marx, at least the Marx where the centrality of the working condition in capitalism is at the same time a criticism of the overwhelming centrality of production. Common misconceptions of what is the meaning of the “primacy of labour” point of view, as well as about domestic labour and social reproduction, need to be clarified and dispelled.
Riccardo Bellofiore, formerly Professor of Political Economy at the University of Bergamo (Italy), is interested in the Marxian theory of value and crisis, the development and crisis of capitalism, the endogenous theories of money, the history of economic thought and economic philosophy. He has published ‘The Adventures of Vergesellschaftung’ (in Consecutio Rerum, 2018) and, with Giovanna Vertova, The Great Recession and the Contradiction of Contemporary Capitalism (Edward Elgar, 2014). He has recently co-edited, in English. with Tommaso Redolfi Riva, Marx: Key Concepts ((Edward Elgar, 2024) and, with Stefano Breda, the Italian translation of Michael Heinrich’s Die Wissenschaft vom Wert [Science of Value] (Pgreco, 2024). With Giovanna Vertova he runs the facebook page Economisti di Classe.
Giovanna Vertova, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the University of Bergamo (Italy), is interested in the spatial dimension of economics, with a focus on the globalization debate; the economics of innovation, especially in reference to national innovation systems; gender and feminist economics, especially in relation to the labor market. With Riccardo Bellofiore she has published The Great Recession and the Contradiction of Contemporary Capitalism (Edward Elgar, 2014). She has recently published chapters for Spinger’s and Elgar’s collective volumes and articles in scientific journals, on the themes of the permanent catastrophe of capitalism, gender mainstreaming, and the so-called Great Resignation. With Riccardo Bellofiore she runs the facebook page Economisti di Classe.
Disembodiment: A Conversation with Banu Bargu, UC Santa Cruz in conversation with Key MacFarlane & Anna Yegorova, UC Santa Cruz
Monday March 3 at 1pm PST
Register here to attend virtually
Join us for an engaging conversation on Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal, Banu Bargu's recent book, which examines bodily agency with a focus on forms of self-destruction and self-injury. The conversation will offer an overview of the main philosophical problems Disembodiment addresses and explore the book’s central conceptual apparatus and interpretative moves. What does it mean to do global critical theory in our present? How should it relate to the dominant “canon” of Western philosophy and political thought? Discussing these and related questions, the conversation will explore how a materialist approach, which takes the suffering body as its normative compass, may make visible subterranean historical lineages as well as contemporary practices to expand our understanding of agency, dignity, and globality alike.
Banu Bargu is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2014), which received the Foundations of Political Theory First Book Prize given by the American Political Science Association and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. Her new book, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of resistance and refusal. Her edited collections include Turkey's Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), The Political Encounter with Althusser (special issue of Rethinking Marxism, 2019, co-edited with Robyn Marasco) and Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique: Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser (Palgrave, 2017, co-edited with Chiara Bottici). Banu Bargu currently serves as the editor of Political Theory.
Key MacFarlane is a PhD Candidate in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism, and its contributions to a political theory of experience. He is co-editing a special issue in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space on the problem of space in Frankfurt School critical theory, and has articles published or forthcoming on the political geography of waste, the spatial politics of memory, and Henri Lefebvre’s theory of moments.
Anna Yegorova is a second-year PhD student in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. Her articles on the critique of the linear conception of history, multitemporality, class, and identity have been published in Russian-language journals, including Logos, Neprikosnoven
