CCDS Presents: Frank Ruda, “The Excluded and Grotesque Sovereigns. Luhmann, Foucault, Hegel”

The AUP Center for Critical Democracy Studies in partnership with the College International de Philosophie presents, the Oliver Feltham’s philosophy research seminar “Genealogy and Comparative Ontology of Political Action in European Modernity” in its four-year running. This semester they welcome Dr Frank Ruda (University of Dundee) who is slated to lead a discussion titled, “The Excluded and Grotesque Sovereigns. Luhmann, Foucault, Hegel”

About the discussion:

Niklas Luhmann – often referred to as the Hegel of sociology – felt forced to revise his theory after witnessing first hand exclusory practices in the favelas in Brazil. Michel Foucault analyzed strategies of a decaying system to safe themselves and argued that they can implement an idiot in chief, a fool in power, a grotesque sovereign. This lecture will show how both phenomena, still pertinent to the very coordinates of our contemporary situation can be productively elucidated when looking at the world – not simply rationally, but – with Hegelian eyes.

About Professor Frank Ruda:

Frank Ruda is a German philosopher and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. He is a founding editor of the online journal Crisis and Critique. He has published heavily in the area of contemporary critical theory with many articles and interviews on key figures and monographs on Alain Badiou - For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Northwestern University Press, 2015) - and Hegel – Hegel’s Rabble: an Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Continuum Books, 2011), and co-written with Rebecca Comay, The Dash-the Other Side of Absolute Knowing (MIT Press, 2018).