Critical Studies Programme / Sandberg Institute

We're pleased to announce that we're being joined this Thursday, February 27, by Søren Mau
His lecture, 'A Materialist Defense of Utopian Thinking' will start at 17.00 (Amsterdam time) and will take place at the Critical Studies studio.
All are welcome.
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Ever since Marx dismissed the 'utopian socialists' and declared that "communism is the most determined opponent of all utopianism," Marxists have been skeptical of attempts to provide detailed descriptions of a post-capitalist world. Utopian thought has been deemed impossible, useless, and undesirable. In this talk, Søren Mau will argue that Marxist anti-utopianism contains many important insights but is not equally valid in all historical contexts. He will contend that our contemporary moment—marked by the rise of the far right, fragmented struggles, unchecked capitalism, prolonged economic stagnation, deindustrialization, and escalating climate crises—calls for a reevaluation of utopian thought. Drawing on a philosophical critique of classical anti-utopianism and a historical analysis, Mau offers a materialist defense of utopian thinking as an integral part of the struggle for freedom in the 21st century.

Søren Mau is an unemployed communist philosopher based on the Danish island of Lolland. He is interested in capitalism, power, the body, human nature, freedom, and utopianism. In 2023, he published the book Mute Compulsion, and now he is writing a book about communism.

We're pleased to announce that we're being joined this Friday, February 16, by Dr. Nadia Bou Ali.
Her talk, 'Resistance to Theory,' will start at 14.00 (Amsterdam time) and will take place at the Critical Studies studio.
All are welcome. To register, email: [email protected]
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Nadia Bou Ali is Associate Professor and director of the Critical Humanities Program for the Liberal Arts at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Hall of Mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic.

The immanentism of power, shared by Foucault and Habermas, today plagues critical theory and blocks the development of political forms capable of responding to the increasing urgency for social transformation. This talk proposes that a Hegelian psychoanalytic concept of resistance is more useful for critical theory than this understanding of power, precisely because it introduces a different account of time to that of legal and moral adjudications. The suspension of judgement in acts of resistance disrupts stasis and introduces an anxious opening, an interruption, a concrete experience of that which does not work and begets repetition. The talk aims to ask: how do we resist the hegemony in theory that disavows the possibility of an excess to the binary of the law and its exception?