This panel is the keynote session of a conference on neoliberalism that asks whether ours is a moment of unprecedented political consolidation, in which capital has fully subsumed and subordinated the state, or rather a juncture where the crisis-prone nature of capitalism is most fully on display. If the state is reduced to just another site of accumulation (an indemnifier of financial institutions and other market actors), what becomes of the enterprise of governance and the work of securing the forms and institutions of social reproduction?  Does the decomposition of the social body so palpably occurring in the U.S. and elsewhere across the globe – the defacto state of domestic antagonism verging on simmering civil war – signal that capitalism has finally cannibalized its own social and political life support system?  And what do our answers to these and allied questions suggest about the practices and imaginaries of opposition?

The event is sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities, with the generous co-sponsorship of American Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, CHID, English, Geography, Political Science, the Jackson School of International Studies, and the Harry Bridges Labor Center.

Speakers:
Jean Comaroff, Harvard University, “After Labor”
Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame, “Can the Left Even Understand Why the Right is Winning?”

Respondents: Eva Cherniavsky (University of Washington) and Leerom Medovoi (University of Arizona)

Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology at Harvard University.   Professor Comaroff’s research, primarily conducted in southern Africa, has centered on processes of social and cultural transformation – the making and unmaking of colonial society, the nature of the postcolony, the late modern world viewed from the Global South. She is the author of Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: the Culture and History of a South African People (1985), “Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order” (2007); and, with John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (vols. l [1991] and ll [1997]); Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992); Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2006), Ethnicity, Inc. (2009), Theory from the South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011), and The Truth About Crime: Policing and the Metaphysics of Disorder in South Africa (2016)

Philip Mirowski is the Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Stuies and the History and Philosophy of Science at Notre Dame University Professor Mirowski studies the history and philosophy of economic theory with a focus on neoliberal ecomomics.  He is the author of Against Mechanism: Protecting Economics from Science(1988). More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics (1989). Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (2001). The Effortless Economy of Science? (2004). ScienceMart: Privatizing American Science (2011), co-editor with Rob van Horn and Thomas Stapleford of Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program (2011) and Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism survived the Financial Meltdown (2013).