On May 19th at 9:00 AM in a room yet to be announced, I’ll be giving the first public presentation on my work on barbarians and savages, drawing upon Hobbes and Montesquieu as examples. Apparently my session is entitled “Fundamentalisms” (I’m not sure why!) as one other person is doing a paper on Israeli fundamentalism and Sharon and the other person is doing something on history, myth and memory. I’ll give the organizers the benefit of the doubt and assume that we haven’t been stuck in a catch-all session at a crappy time. Anyway, the full program for The Human Condition: Empire conference is available here.
Because this is the first public presentation of this work, I’m a bit anxious and, generally, I’m not fond of conferences. I find the format more than a little restrictive – fifteen to twenty minutes to talk about something you’ve been working on for months or even years, on a panel with people potentially talking about completely different topics, and the tendency for a single paper to end up monopolizing the discussion.
More to the point, I’m not sure if it is possible to do what I want to do in my allotted time: I had planned to discuss the “savage” in relation to Hobbes and the “barbarian” in relation to Montesquieu pointing to how this “political anthropology” paves the way to the creation of the state. However, I’m not sure I can expect my audience (how arrogant I am: this is a conference at 9:00 AM – presenters, their friends and a few stragglers at most, right?) to be familiar with Hobbes and Montesquieu – including the secondary literature! – to appreciate what it is I am trying to do. The other option, then, is to go to the complete opposite extreme and abstract from the historical context thus focusing on formal definitions, which is rather dry and ends up losing sight of the argument itself.
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