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Reading the Enemies present Giovanni Campailla: ‘Democracy as the Enemy of Postdemocracy: A Rancièrian Reading of The Crisis of Democracy (1975)’
May 31, 2019 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm BST
In his workshop Giovanni Campailla presents a reading of The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, a political report of the right-wing think tank Trilateral Commission, published in 1975. Campailla’s reading highlights the ideological resonances of the report for the politics of today. He argues that instead of dealing with genuinely democratic experiences, we should read it as a manifesto of ‘post-democracy’: as an example of effacing democratic practices in the name of an inadequate concept of democracy.
Bio
Giovanni Campailla obtained his PhD in philosophy and political sciences from the Universities Paris Nanterre and Roma Tre (French-Italian joint supervision). He is a researcher at the Laboratoire Sophiapol, University Paris Nanterre, and a fellow at Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Naples. His areas of research interest are, among others, social and political philosophy, and history of political thought. His book L’intervento critico di Rancière [The Critical Intervention of Rancière] is being published by Meltemi (Milan: 2019).
Reading the Enemies is a series of workshops where invited speakers present readings of their enemies: texts or arguments that are in opposition to their own politics. The workshops allow the participants to engage head-on with the political aspects of intellectual and artistic practices. While scholarly work normally tends to downplay, if not bracket, subjective positions, Reading the Enemies aims to bring such positions to the fore. The aim of the project is to create a collective space for the production of shared political opinion.