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"Genealogies of Emergency"

Theorists conventionally treat the global state of emergency in which we live as a political and juridical condition. But it is, first of all, a discursive practice, whereby the sovereign circumscribes language’s performative power within his own speech. He arrogates the right, univocally, to suspend the constitution and to declare the laws that govern in its place. Literary scholars have not yet imagined a critical method that opposes emergency, even though it is now the practice that expropriates language’s creativity. This talk imagines what such a method might be.

Professor Siraj Ahmed has a recent book, Archaeology of Babel: the Colonial Foundation of the Humanities. Professor Ahmed is Associate Professor, English and Comparative Literature, Lehman College; Associate Professor, Ph.D. Program in English, The Graduate Center