Welcome and Introduction

• Niclas Rautenberg (Universität Hamburg)

Room: ESA W 221

‘The Coloniality of International Law: A Critical Phenomenology’

• Lisa Guenther (Queen's University, Canada)

Room: ESA W 221 Peruvian scholar Aníbal Quijano coined the term coloniality to name the deep imbrication of colonial violence with modernity itself. In this paper, I examine the coloniality of international law, which emerged in the early modern period as a legal framework for managing European colonial exploits. Drawing on Vitoria’s 1539 lecture, *De Indis*, and Merleau-Ponty’s 1959-60 lecture notes on the philosophy of history, I reflect on the conditions under which the philosophical tradition and political history of international law may be reclaimed, reactivated, and reoriented for decolonial philosophy and politics.

Democracy, Sustainability, and Climate Disobedience—Refracted Through Sophocles’ Antigone

• Matthias Fritsch (Concordia University, Canada)

Room: ESA W 221 This talk argues that Sophocles’s tragedy *Antigone* can help our times respond to ecological destabilization and the associated injustices between generations. I suggest that the play centrally revolves around civil disobedience in the face of a political power that that does not fully recognize obligations to non-present generations despite its constitutive dependence on ancestors and descendants as well as on ecological conditions. Scholars have often remarked upon the contrast between monarchy and democracy in the play, especially in view of Creon’s authoritarian lack of counsel, which democracy should have been able to prevent. This lack of counsel, I suggest, also extends to Creon’s inability to grasp the democratic significance of rotation among governed and governing, which Aristotle would soon argue is central to democratic constitutions. Aided by phenomenological accounts of time, I then seek to show that democratic rotation entails fair turn-taking among generations. In the Capitalocene, governments similarly disrespect fair turns, rendering them liable to climate disobedience.

Walking-with in Public Spaces in Times of Political Crisis: Phenomenological Reflections

• Marieke Borren (Open University, Netherlands)

Room: ESA W 221 In this paper, I explore the contours of a phenomenology of walking-with that addresses the transformation of collective embodied movement in public urban space under current conditions of political crisis, particularly the erosion of radical democratic possibility. Revisiting the alleged tension between so-called political and critical phenomenology, I bring into dialogue accounts of capable-mobile bodies (Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Sheets-Johnstone) and vulnerable, precarious bodies (Butler, Ahmed, Salamon). I argue that the phenomenological figures of “we can” and “we cannot” bodies must be rethought in light of intensified anticipatory repression, securitization, and obstruction that pre-empt collective appearance—not only in authoritarian regimes, but also in so-called liberal democracies. Drawing on these sources alongside contemporary feminist reworkings of psychogeography, I analyze differential radical-democratic practices of walking-with in public spaces, focusing on (1) pro-Palestine protest marches in the UK, Germany, and the US, and (2) everyday feminist collaborative walking. Perhaps the radical democratic potential of walking-with under present conditions of crisis consists in nothing more—and nothing less—than the enactment of fragile, contested, and dispersed spaces of appearance.

Concluding Remarks Room: ESA W 221