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July 16, 2012 by Peter Gratton

The School of Language, Arts and Media (University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji)

The Humanities Seminar Series

USP staff and students are invited to attend a talk by Professor Peter Gratton

Topic:  The State of Sovereignty: Some Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity

Venue: Postgraduate Seminar Room, FALE

Date and Time: Thursday 19, July, at 2.30pm

In this talk, I discuss some of the mainlines of my recent The State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity (New York: SUNY Press, 2012). In particular I will discuss how nationalist narratives—not the sovereign exception as in discussions of Giorgio Agamben’s work—are still the pass-key to modernity and its political fictions. I will ask if we can think past sovereignty as a political category, or whether dreams of a post-sovereign future only repeat the worst forms of sovereigntisms.

Peter Gratton is a professor of Philosophy at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has published numerous articles in political, Continental, and intercultural philosophy and is the author of The State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity (SUNY Press, 2012) and Speculative Realism (Continuum, forthcoming). Co-Editor of the influential interdisciplinary journal Society and Space (Environmental Planning D), executive board member of the North American Sartre Society and other national philosophical societies, and area editor for Africana philosophy for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Peter has also edited three works: Traversing the Imaginary (Northwestern University Press, 2007), co-edited with John Mannousakis, and Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Politics, Art, and Sense (SUNY Press, 2012), co-edited with Marie-Eve Morin.

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