Speakers
Dr Mark Devenney, Deputy Director of the Centre for Applied Politics, Philosophy and Ethics (CAPPE), the University of Brighton
Reimagining the Suicide Bomber
Tuesday 31st January 2012
Mark Devenney is Principal Lecturer in Politics and Philosophy at the University of Brighton and Deputy Director of CAPPE. He is currently writing about the politics of life and death in contemporary societies, building upon his text Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory, and recent work on the War on Terror. He has published work in the areas of post Marxism, critical theory, post colonialism and the literature of J.M. Coetzee.
In his lecture, Mark will examine the discourse of the ‘war on terror’ through fear of one figure: the irrational, religious and fanatical ‘suicide bomber.’ As a key signifier of all that the ‘free world’ opposes, this figure is now the subject of a whole academic cum therapeutic industry. Rejecting the standard interpretations of human bombing as an irrational outburst against modernity and instead treating it as a social symptom, he contends that the human bomber’s act is a response to the politicisation of life itself in modern societies and believes the act exceeds the delimitation of descriptions such as ‘mad, bad or sad’ by social scientific literature.
- Arrival – 5:30
- Lecture – 6:30
- Drinks and networking – 7:30