Lilly Markaki: Universality from Below

This event will take place at SOAS in the Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Paul Webley Wing.

The talk will think through the concept of universality in emancipatory politics, insisting on the need to move beyond “bad,” transcendental, or identitarian universals toward a universality from below, emerging immanently through collective struggle. Revisiting debates on communisation—and returning, a decade later, to the ideas and contradictions that surfaced in exchanges between Endnotes, Ray Brassier, Marina Vishmidt, and others—against the backdrop of a bleak present marked by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it asks after the who, when, and how of revolutionary politics, and the promises and limits of communisation. Engaging with “the paradox of self-abolition” (Brassier, 2014), the fraught relation between theory and social practice, and the question of political violence, the talk foregrounds universality as an open, contingent horizon constituted through the self-activity of those “surplus” populations of capital who, rendered marginal, have always maintained a relation to the outside.

Lilly Markaki, Lecturer in Race and Culture in Film and Media at Royal Holloway, University of London, works across critical theory, visual culture studies, media studies, and Black radical and anti-colonial thought. Their scholarship critically interrogates the interrelation of aesthetics and politics, examining how insurgent practices—philosophical, poetic, or visual—can engender solidarities that unsettle colonial-modern ontologies and anthropocentric logics.

Photo: Bethany Collins, "Information Wanted, 1893" (2019)