The Peer Group of the (HGGS) HEIDELBERG GRADUATE SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCE is pleased to invite you all to our HGGS Forum 2019!
This year, it takes place on 11th October 2019 from 10 am to 4 pm in the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies in Voßstr. 2, Building 4400.
We will welcome Dr Joost de Bloois from the University of Amsterdam as a guest speaker,  who will give a lecture and a workshop about “21st Century Risks and Opportunities - The Politics of Withdrawal”.


In his introductory lecture, Joost de Bloois explores a number of more or less contemporary philosophical inquiries into the significance of ‘the political,’ from which ‘withdrawal,’ in particular, seems to emerge as a central concept. In some of the most important and widely debated works of theory today, we clearly witness the emergence of a ‘politics of withdrawal,’ an idiom that intimately relates “the political” to acts/gestures of retreat, of destitution. De Bloois argues that this politics of withdrawal is to be read foremost as a response to ‘the withdrawal of the political’ as theorized by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, and is perhaps best understood as a work of mourning of sorts; albeit one that oddly mimics that which it mourns.

In the workshop, we will explore the political significance of such practices and theories of withdrawal for socio-political thought today. Through the critical assessment of a range of theoretical texts on a possible ‘politics of withdrawal’, the workshop will offer participants means to get a grip on a key notion in contemporary radical politics, in all its complexity, contradictions and tribulations.

Please register for the forum by filling in your contact details below.