Authoritarian Times: Crisis and Utopia

New authoritarianisms are often taken to emerge in a time of crisis. However, beyond indicating an uncertain future, the precise conditions of this crisis often remain elusive. Questioning the relationship between the crisis of the temporal regime of modernity and the new authoritarianisms, this panel will simultaneously promote a discussion on what is new about these authoritarianisms, and on the very diagnosis of our present as an era emptied of images of the future. Analyzing the transformations of temporal regimes in their heterogeneity, as well as their relationships with other material and symbolic crises, the panel will seek to address the contradictory aspects of our time on a double level. On the one hand, it seeks to question the meanings of the current crisis. How can this crisis be thought and how does it relate to what authoritarianism does to time? On the other hand, a series of questions related to the challenges of political struggle impose themselves. What openings, if any, for emancipatory responses to authoritarianism does the crisis of historical time bring about?

Paula Biglieri is an independent researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and co-organiser of Cátedra Libre Ernesto Laclau at the University of Buenos Aires. Zeynep Gambetti is an independent researcher in political theory, based in Istanbul, and co-chair of the board of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. Daniel Loick is associate professor of political and social philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and principal investigator of the international project “Emergencies of Authoritarianism” as well as of a research project on abolition democracy. Rosaura Martínez Ruiz is professor of philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a member of the National System of Researchers (Mexico). Gisela Catanzaro is professor of political science and sociology at the University of Buenos Aires and an independent researcher at CONICET.

Gambetti, Loick, Martínez Ruiz and Catanzaro are members of the research project “Emergencies of Authoritarianism,” an initiative of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP) funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung (Germany). This event is co-organized by the ICCTP, the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación Floreal Gorini, and the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani at the University of Buenos Aires.