The Two Faces of Natality: On Responsibility, Affect, and Collective Action
21 November, 16:00-18:00, Lecture

This lecture will explore the relationship between affect, implication, and ‘natality’, which, building on a critical engagement with Arendt (1958), I conceptualise as the unchosen ground of our political responsibility. In what sense and to what extent are we responsible for the unchosen conditions we are born into, and for the socio-political position they ‘throw’ us into? The connection between natality and responsibility seems paradoxical, for the conditions and the position we are born into lay beyond our control. Yet my presentation is not concerned with biological birth, but rather with the subject position we are ‘thrown into’ and how the latter shapes the context in which we live. Drawing on Heidegger’s concept of ‘throwness’ (1927), I will analyse how socio-political structures frame and reproduce the givenness of our being, generating stark inequalities of power, freedom, and rights.
Taking Italy’s citizenship laws and Europe’s mobility policies as a case study, I will ask: How are feelings of belonging related to feelings of implication (Rothberg 2023)? In which ways and to what extent does the subject-position we are born into might implicate us in histories and actualities of oppression? And how should we take responsibility for the structures of power we are born into and the way in which they are reproduced by our society? Exploring how the randomness of birth places us in different predicaments of power, this lecture will discuss how diverse affective dynamics might facilitate one’s implication in regimes of oppression or catalyse the resistance to them. 

Expanding our Sense of the Possible: Memory and Political Imagination in the Age of Presentism
22 November, 16:00-18:00, Workshop

Workshop questions: 
1. Why have ‘horizons of expectation’ largely disappeared from today’s political thinking and practice? 
o Why do today’s political movements struggle to project themselves into the future? o Why have we ‘forgotten the future’ and turned our vision toward the past, imagined as a ‘retrotopia’? 
2. How does the disappearance of horizons of expectation – the loss of a utopian dimension – affect a society’s collective memory and sense of responsibility? 
o What are the social and political effects of ‘presentism’? (the current regime of historicity, which posits a kind of perpetual present, absorbing in itself both past and future) 
o To what extent can we use 20th century categories such as ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectation’ (Koselleck) to analyse 21st century phenomena? 
3. What can we do to reactivate the dialectic of history and fight the crisis of our political and social imagination? 
o How can memory activism expand our sense of the possible and help us to break the iron cage of presentism?

Stefano Bellin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. Prior to joining the University of Warwick, he worked in the Department of Classics at King’s College London and was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at University College London (UCL). Stefano’s research focuses on how contemporary literature addresses questions of racial and social justice, transcultural memory studies, theories of collective responsibility, affect theory, political imagination, and the environmental humanities.