The History of Consciousness department is pleased to announce the final talk in the Winter 25 session of the HisCon Speaker Series. HistCon Professor Banu Bargu, in discussion with HistCon Grads Key MacFarlane & Anna Yegrovoa will present “Disembodiment: A Conversation” on Monday, March 3, at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 420 with a virtual attendance option.

Please register here in advance for virtual access.

About “Disembodiment: A Conversation”
Join us for an engaging conversation on Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal, Banu Bargu’s recent book, which examines bodily agency with a focus on forms of self-destruction and self-injury. The conversation will offer an overview of the main philosophical problems Disembodiment addresses and explore the book’s central conceptual apparatus and interpretative moves. What does it mean to do global critical theory in our present? How should it relate to the dominant “canon” of Western philosophy and political thought? Discussing these and related questions, the conversation will explore how a materialist approach, which takes the suffering body as its normative compass, may make visible subterranean historical lineages as well as contemporary practices to expand our understanding of agency, dignity, and globality alike.

Banu Bargu is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2014), which received the Foundations of Political Theory First Book Prize given by the American Political Science Association and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. Her new book, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of resistance and refusal. Her edited collections include Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), The Political Encounter with Althusser (special issue of Rethinking Marxism, 2019, co-edited with Robyn Marasco) and Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique: Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser (Palgrave, 2017, co-edited with Chiara Bottici). Banu Bargu currently serves as the editor of Political Theory.

Key MacFarlane is a PhD Candidate in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the relationship between phenomenology and Marxism, and its contributions to a political theory of experience. He is co-editing a special issue in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space on the problem of space in Frankfurt School critical theory, and has articles published or forthcoming on the political geography of waste, the spatial politics of memory, and Henri Lefebvre’s theory of moments.

Anna Yegorova is a second-year PhD student in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. Her articles on the critique of the linear conception of history, multitemporality, class, and identity have been published in Russian-language journals, including Logos, Neprikosnovenny Zapas, and Sociologia Vlasti. She is also a member of the Posle.media editorial collective, where she has published two articles: “Did Lenin Create Ukraine? On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination and Marxism” and “Adorno in the Kremlin.” Her current research draws on, and seeks to contribute to, political and social philosophy, Marxism, anti-, de-, and post-colonial theory, the history of anticolonial struggles, empires and imperialism, nationalism, federalism, and secularization.