Revolutionary thinking: critiques, nuances, and ambiguities

The session will start out by exploring "revolutionary thinking" in Hannah Arendt's famous treatise "On Revolution" first published in 1963. It will foreground the inherently Occidental nature of her construction of what should be considered a good or a bad revolution. This first part will also uncover her deployment of "affective" categories to assess revolutions and at the same time it will surface Arendt's implicit project of "revolutionary worldmaking". By doing all of this, the Globinar session will offer "a theory of shadow revolutions" as a tool to help us decolonise revolution in both political theory and international legal thought.

The second part will hone into French critical theory by focusing on an ambiguity that informs this intellectual tradition in relation to revolutions. On the one hand, many French critical theorists play down the revolutionary character of revolutions, emphasizing the extent to which revolutions perpetuate and renew modern structures of thought. On the other hand, as is illustrated by Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution, the same scholars demonstrated faith in the potential for change of revolutionary movements they witnessed in their lifetime.

The session will end with a commentary on both presentations.

A seminar with Vidya Kumar, Jean d’Aspremont and Omar Kamel.

>For further details, please visit the Globinar website.

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