With contemporary political life in mind, this panel calls for an urgent return to, but also a reconfiguration of, the politico-ethical concept of “the common.” Since Aristotle’s designation of “the common good” (to koinon agathon) as the grounding principle of all communal life (koinonia), the concept has had a long and contested life in political theory. Among its genealogies, Hegel’s argument about a particularity’s ascension, or “sublation,” into universality (the “synthesis” that enables the ethical life of Sittlichkeit) marks an intensive point, as does Marx’s subsequent critique according to which it is only through ideological obfuscation that the bourgeois particularity sold itself as the common destiny of ethicalness in modernity. Among those who follow Marx’s suit, Hannah Arendt traces the rise of European totalitarianisms to the loss of the common (its dissolution into “loneliness”) in the early twentieth century. If, for Heidegger, death is the unshareable that we share, psychoanalysis finds in the impossibility of the sexual relation “a new understanding of the common” (as Joan Copjec writes): being-toward-sex supplants being-toward-death. Echoing both psychoanalytic ontology and Marx’s argument regarding the proletariat’s “radical chains,” afropessimist thinkers have in turn posited Blackness as the inassimilable ground that, in its abjection, enables the “commonness” on which all political categories rest. Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten respond to such arguments in emphasizing the fugitive potential of the “undercommons,” while José Esteban Muñoz celebrates the resilience of the “brown commons.” Most recently, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval argue that reclaiming the common “has become the defining principle of alternative political movements in the 21st century.”


We invite proposals that, avoiding all redemptive motifs, seek to reconfigure the common via the category of aesthetics, capaciously understood. Our wager is to present an aesthetic common as that which remains of the category beyond its colonization by neoliberal political institutions.