[SydPhil] Agora Speaker Series - Assoc Prof Andrew Poe

[Sally Cole]

The School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong invites you to attend the
Agora Speaker Series
Thursday 23 March, 3.30 to 5.00pm
This is an in-person event at the University of Wollongong - Register here<https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/ga4_Clx1Nji1538vEcG2cOw?domain=uow.au1.qualtrics.com>



Associate Professor Andrew Poe (Australian Catholic University)

Sources of Possession: A Reading of Locke's Second Treatise of Government
How are we affected by property? The right to have and hold property is thought to be foundational to bourgeois legal subjectivity. But the ways in which changing conceptions of property affect new forms of political subjectivity is still too little theorized. In an attempt to make sense of affective instabilities in the original theorizations of bourgeois legal subjectivity, this paper turns to early modern languages of possession. I aim to show how competing rhetorics of possession - including "spirit" possession and possession of property - complicate the model of the bourgeois legal subject as merely the "property holding" possessive individual. I argue that an aporia results from a blurring of these multiple languages of possession - a confusion, which is both foundational to the bourgeois revolution, but also a pathway towards its critique. This commingling occurs in a mixing of sacrifice and possession; one made most evident in John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. In a counterintuitive reading, I draw on Roman and Hebraic resources to show how Locke develops a theory of possession. This reading counters C. B. Macpherson's famous reading of possessive individualism, showing how a multiplicity of possessions are at play in Locke's thinking and the ways in which these possessions work to develop a more insurgent politics.


The Agora Speaker Series is proudly hosted by
The School of Liberal Arts
Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
University of Wollongong
NSW 2522 Australia
SOLA Enquiries sola-enquiries at uow.edu.au<mailto:sola-enquiries at uow.edu.au>
T +61 2 4221 4160


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.sydney.edu.au/pipermail/sydphil/attachments/20230316/3fce0ed1/attachment-0001.htm>