In which sense can one affirm politics as thought and as thinking – and indeed as a figure of intellectuality? That is, not as mere doing, practicing, exercising or applying , and neither as mere ability, the knowing-how of doing – but also not as judging, as judiciously deliberating or negotiating – rather, as genuinely thinking, as the creation and invention of previously unforeseen possibles? If it is imperative in this sense to go beyond its identification with consensual and deflating ideologemes of communicability and normativity – it is also necessary to do away with the old divide – orienting as it did the emancipatory struggles of the past century – between theory and practice. Affirming politics as thought means immediately affirming the inventiveness of movement and form stemming from collective situations and struggles, from mass political experiences and experiments. At the same time, it means affirming thinking as immediately practical, as an act and an actuality, rather than a reflection and deferral, and moreover an act manifesting the consistency of a heterogeneous capacity, pivoting upon an immanent affirmative expansion of its strength, in continuous rupture with what is. Materialised in actions and declarations, in interventions and demonstrations, crystalising a body – the holding together of a collective capacity – thinking is instantly a real force – a manifestation of strength, an empowerment and a mobilisation, which can only take place if it is at the same time constituted around its direct universalizability – its address for all. But what is its exact texture then, what are the internal operators through which one is able to identify it with intellectuality? Especially, in which sense does its objective nature – the determining of the essence of concrete situations (through inquiries and knowledges) – stand in relation with its subjective one – with declarations of strength and capacity, with nominations of change or rift and prescriptions of movement? And how should one rearticulate the classical oppositions between knowledge and will, between concept and slogan, between explication and decision? And moreover, where then to gather together, and in which form, its singular and multiple guises – the intellectualities which have, sequence by sequence, never ceased characterising emancipatory struggles?
Participants: Ray Brassier · Rebecca Comay · Peter Hallward · Ozren Pupovac · Jelica Šumič Riha
Organised by Multimedijalni Institut, the Centre for Theoretical and Critical Research, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka
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SCHEDULE
October 23, 2026 (Friday)
16:00 · Ray Brassier · Communist Politics versus Political Marxism
17:45 · Jelica Šumič Riha · Disorientation of the Placeless Subject in a Time of the Absence of Limits
19:30 · Ozren Pupovac · The Actual Concept: Spinoza’s Lenin
October 24, 2026. (Saturday)
16:00 · Peter Hallward · The Challenge of Political Moralism: Rousseau, Gandhi, Che Guevara
17:45 · Rebecca Comay · Lines in the Sand
