Garen Karapetian
History
- Links
- View recent links
- Blog
- View recent blog entries
- Member for
- 1 year 15 weeks
My Profile
- Title
- Dr.
- Occupation
- Independent Scholar
- Discipline(s)
- Politics, Philosophy, International Relations, Film
- University
- University of Wales - Aberystwyth
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Town / City
- Aberystwyth
- Previous Universities
- University of Wales - Aberystwyth, Keele University
- RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Cinema, Filmmaking, History of Ideas, Anarchism, Poststructuralism, Post-Anarchism, postanarchism, Sovereignty, Exception, Sovereignty and Subjectivity, phenomenology, hermeneutics, Identity, Psychoanalysis, State Reification, Reification, State Theory, Cultural Theory, Lacan, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Foucault, Nietzsche, Stirner, Debord, Situationism, Zizek, Durkheim, Bakunin, Chomsky, Empire, Web2.0, Heidegger, Critical Theory, Sartre, Carl Schmitt, resistance, Solidarity
My_Publications
- My Publications
The State of the Spectacle: A Post-Anarchist Investigation Of The Problem Of State Reification, 2004 (Unpublished PhD thesis)
Other info
- Main Influences
- Deleuze, Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard, Debord, Lukacs, Durkheim, Bataille, Carl Schmitt, Heidegger, Agamben, Feyerabend, Nietzsche, Sartre, Marcuse, Adorno, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Rocker, Tucker, Malatesta, Thoreau, Emerson, Hakim Bey, Rolando Perez, Todd May, Saul Neumann, Lenin, Zizek, Lefebvre, Barthes, Negri, Martin Wight, Andrew Linklater, RBJ Walker, Jenny Edkins, Laclau, Cynthia Weber, Bill Connolly, Michael Dillon
- Favourite Books
- Difference and Repetition, Simulacra & Simulation, The Ego and Its Own, The Order of Things, Discourses of Power, Empire, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, One Dimensional Man, Being and Time, Being and Nothingness, Homo Sacer, Heidegger: On Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, Inside/Outside, Political Theology, God and The State, Statism and Anarchy, Demanding the Impossible, Simulating Sovereignty, The Critique of the State
About me
My general area of interest and competence is Political Theology and Sovereignty. However, after I completed my PhD I decided to dedicate most of my time to my filmmaking, which has always been my other passion.
Though I'm no longer a full time researcher, I still dedicate a considerable amount of time to an area that can be best summarised as "Visual Politics". It is located at the crossroads of Theories of Film, Cultural Politics, Continental Philosophy and Poststructuralist Anarchism. I am also interested in IR theory and History of Ideas (from Young Hegelians to Existentialists, Situationists and Poststructuralists). My original doctoral research was an attempt to construct an Anarchist Theory of International Relations -- something that would transcend the limitations of English School and Marxian-inspired Critical Theory in IR. But then the project had to evolve into something else as it repeatedly confronted the structural and epistemological problems of the discourse of IR itself -- ones emanating (in my opinion) from its inherent Statism. Thus I started focusing on themes of sovereignty, exception, State, sacredness, spectrality and spectacularity. I investigated these with existential psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches. As a result, my doctoral thesis highlighted the hitherto unexplored problem of State-reification (the term that I had coined). It investigated how the production, simulation and reification of the State as a pure presence logically systemises popular and theoretical conceptions of what and how reality, world order, ethics and action are and ought to be. Put differently, how States' presence, sovereignty and authority are constituted and simulated in post-industrial societies; and, in turn, how such ritualistic processes of state-reification are mediating action/responsibility/Bad-Faith, and systemizing ethics and the understanding of what and where the Real is. As a continuation of that project I am now looking at something a lot simpler: how processes of State-reification systemize ethics in a particular way so that questions of legal/illegal take precedence over questions of just/unjust?
I like importing and mixing various aspects of cultural, social and anthropological theories, as long as it is done in an ontologically and methodologically coherent way. In general, I'm interested in
(A) How that which is known to be the Reality is constituted in post-industrial/consumer/information societies? and
(B) How political action/responsibility is motivated and mediated? In many ways, my work is a continuation of what has already been achieved by Michael Taussig, Giorgio Agamben, Cynthia Weber, Richard Ashley, Rob Walker, Andrew Linklater, Benedict Anderson, Costas Constantinou, Zigmund Bauman, John Hoffman to list but a few.
- Member for
- 1 year 15 weeks