Organised by Filippo Del Lucchese (Brunel University, London and Collège International de Philosophie, Paris) and Oliver Feltham (American University of Paris)
This conference focuses on the ontological and political consequences of the act of naming, on the violence that makes such an act possible and the violence that ensues from it. How is the right to name claimed, established or appropriated? What are the effects of naming, in dividing, decomposing and recomposing the political body ?
We will concentrate on the phenomenon of ‘national unity’, an effect produced by the act of naming self and other, friend and enemy, interior and exterior. We consider such an act to be an operation of auto-immunisation of the social body. Our hypothesis is that Europe is haunted by an obliterated presence of its colonial past, and further that this obliteration is what makes it possible to disregard urgent and compelling issues in our societies, such as the question of ‘Western’ identity and the relationship with its other.
We will specifically question the efficacy of language in redefining and reorganising political forces, following in particular exceptional and largely mediatised events, such as 9/11 in New York, or 11-M in Madrid, or 7/7 in London. We propose to examine the power of the act of naming in the production and exploitation of critical situations, in which certain words are able to either open or close spaces for comprehension and for political action.
If language is at stake in the recomposition of the unity of the body politic, language can also operate as an antidote to the operation of auto-immunisation. Although such an antidote cannot immediately take the form of a counter-definition of friend and enemy, it at least does not completely overlook the fundamentally conflictual dimension of politics. Both the act of naming and the resistance to this act take place in the polemical dimension of politics (in the sense of polemos).
The core idea of this conference arose following the bloody events of 7-9 January 2015 in Paris, when the blinding imperative of inclusion within the ‘national unity’ against terrorism was being named. However the conference’s perspective is much broader, a philosophical and political reflection which, beyond the emergency, questions the problem of naming and its violence, in the continuing presence of our colonial past.