Keynote Speakers & Session Speakers

"What Comes After All Humanisms?"

Roberto Nigro is full Professor of Philosophy at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, where he holds the Chair of Continental Philosophy. He is a former directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. He has been a lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste), a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris 8, the University of Paris-Ouest Nanterre, the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris, and the ENS (École Normale Supérieure) in Lyon. He was Visiting Assistant Professor at Michigan State University (USA), an Assistant Professor at the American University of Paris (AUP), a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, a Visiting Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin and at the University of Basel’s eikones Center, and archivist at IMEC (Institut Mémoire de l'Édition Contemporaine, Paris). He studied philosophy at the University of Bari and continued his education at the University of Paris 8, Frankfurt am Main, and Paris X-Nanterre, where he engaged in long-term collaborations with Antonio Negri and Étienne Balibar, among others.His research interests include the Marxist traditions of operaismo and neo-operaismo, the work of Michel Foucault, the Nietzschean legacy in modern thought, and the critique of Heideggerian influence in contemporary philosophy. He has published widely on Foucault, Althusser, and post-1960s French thought.

Some of his last publications (a selection) include:

-        Nigro, Roberto (forthcoming 2026): Subversive Negri: From the Refusal of Work to the Multitude, Routledge, London.

-        Nigro, Roberto (2024): Antonio Negri zur Einführung, Junius, Hamburg.

-        Nigro, Roberto (2024): Dal rifiuto del lavoro alla moltitudine. La filosofia sovversiva di Toni Negri, Derive Approdi, Rome.

-        Nigro, Roberto (2023): Antonio Negri. Une philosophie de la subversion, éditions Amsterdam, Paris.

-        Nigro, Roberto/ Spagnuolo, Marco (ed.) (2025): La rivoluzione inquieta. N. M. De Feo vent’anni dopo, Manifestolibri, Rom.

-        Nigro, Roberto (with Hahn, Till/ Szàsz, Charlotte) (ed.) (2025):  Kritische Philosophiegeschichte, Diaphanes Zürich/Berlin.

-        Nigro, Roberto (2025): „Discomfort in the Italian Operaism: The Nietzschean Legacy in the Work of Nicola Massimo De Feo“, in Federico Dal Bo, Carlo Salzani (Hrsg.), The Resistible Crisis of Italian Thought, Suny Press, New York, p. 35-54.

-        Nigro, Roberto (2025): " Enjeux de la question anthropologique. Foucault en dialogue avec Kant, Nietzsche et Heidegger ", in ‚Archives de Philosophie‘, 2025/1, tome 88, pp. 27-44.

-        Roberto Nigro (2023): “Critique de la morale sacerdotale et pouvoir pastoral”, in: ‘Cahiers Philosophiques’, n. 175 / 4e trimestre, Paris : Vrin, p. 117-128.

Abstract

The anthropological question and the critique of all theoretical humanisms were central to Foucault’s investigations throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The rejection of the anthropological theme and of the question of alienation carries not only philosophical implications but also important political ones. Humanism, for instance, misses the relevance of contemporary struggles, particularly those emerging from the 1960s onward. The question of alienation, associated with a humanistic approach, reflects a perspective—what might be called a bourgeois perspective—centered on the notion of the normal and healthy individual. These notions were precisely the targets of the struggles of the 1960s, movements that sought to liberate themselves from them. Consequently, a humanistic approach proves inadequate for understanding the upheavals of 1968, which revolved around the dynamics of power.

Throughout the 1960s, Foucault also emphasized concepts such as desubjectivation, with particular attention to the works of Bataille and Blanchot, among others. By the 1980s, however, Foucault appears to have shifted his focus toward processes of subjectivation. My talk explores the complex relationship between desubjectivation and subjectivation. I argue that at the core of Foucault’s work lies a consistent engagement with desubjectivation—understood as the process of liberating oneself from the constraints of the self. This relationship between desubjectivation and subjectivation manifests in different forms throughout his oeuvre, as the recent publication of Les Hermaphrodites (Gallimard, 2025) also demonstrates.

This critique intersects with Foucault’s later concerns regarding the culture of the self, which he critiques as the illusion that selfhood constitutes the key to liberation. He notes that from the 16th century onward, numerous efforts have aimed to challenge an ascetic morality of renunciation. These efforts became increasingly pronounced in the 19th century, taking on aesthetic and political dimensions. What united these movements was a shared drive to affirm a culture of the self, often expressed through the desire to discover and liberate the self. This trend is linked to what Foucault calls the “permanent anthropologism” of Western thought—a legacy of attempts to define the foundation of a positive self as the basis for subjectivity. In contrast to a morality of self-denial, these movements celebrated the discovery and reclamation of the self. Today, however, the political challenge is no longer the discovery of the self but breaking free from its constraints and tyranny.

"Subjectivity as Self-Modification in the 

Medium of Thought

Modes of Human Existence after the 'Death of Man'”

Sverre Raffnsøe, Dr Phil, is Professor of Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. He served as Editor-in-Chief of Foucault Studies (2008–2025) and remains a member of its editorial committee.

He is the author of Michel Foucault: Philosophy as Diagnosis of the Present (Palgrave 2016/2018), Philosophy of the Anthropocene (Palgrave 2016), and A History of the Humanities in the Modern University: A Productive Crisis (Palgrave 2024/25). He has published widely on Foucault, including articles in Organization Studies, Organization, and Foucault Studies, and is the editor of the forthcoming SI of Foucault Studies, Critique beyond Criticism (2026).

His forthcoming books include The Aesthetic Turn: A Genealogy of the Aesthetization of the Modern World in Philosophical Aesthetics and Art (Bloomsbury, 2025), History, Diagnostics and Metaphysics in Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality” (Palgrave, 2026) and The Human Turn in Management Thought (Oxford UP, 2026).

Abstract

In this keynote, I argue that Foucault’s oeuvre may be read as far more normatively engaged, committed and committing than is usually claimed in established Foucault-scholarship where his approach is frequently characterized as primarily negative and debunking, distanced, subversive and noncommittal. I take my point of departure in the persistent experience of critical subjectivity, affirmative critique and auto-affectivity, as well as the dimensions of the dispositional and the virtual, as they are continuously significantly present in Foucault’s work.

Foucault made numerous important contributions to the understanding of human subjectivity as positioned within different historical and social contexts. Yet an enduring experience of critical subjectivity, situated in and continually modified by the exercise of thought itself, also makes itself markedly felt throughout his work. Moreover, it constitutes an important transversal and distinguishing, but often unrecognized feature of his thought throughout his oeuvre.

While repeatedly practising various diagnoses of the present, the practice of this mode of thinking equally and importantly entails an ongoing process of self-modification in the medium of thought. This process operates on a plane that cuts across individual diagnoses and articulates a persistent thread running through his work as a whole.

If this transversally unifying dimension, established at the level of an insistent, self-critical, auto-affective subjectivity, is not adequately recognised, Foucault’s intellectual itinerary cannot be perceived as a coherent trajectory. Rather, his writings risk being reduced to disjecta membra poetae, scattered leftovers of an intellectual body whose living unity has been lost. Likewise, his philosophical practice may come to appear as merely negative, noncommittal and distancing, primarily epistemic exercise, rather than a normatively engaged and engaging, committed and (re)committing enterprise.

From this point of departure, the keynote will further address central issues such as Foucault’s relationship to negative and affirmative critique, the dimensions of the dispositional and the virtual, affectivity and auto-affectivity, as well as to the themes of anthropology and the “death of man,” Anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene, selfhood, the human and the posthuman.

When understood at the level of an elementary emerging critical subjectivity and in the context of the dimension of an ethical auto-transformative practice where thought seeks to regain its voice as it picks itself up in the marginal region bordering its limits, Foucault’s assertions on anthropocentrism and the “death of man,” the human and the posthuman, acquire a renewed and different significance. Equally, the Eurocentric limitations and racial shortcomings of Foucault’s genealogical and archival investigations, along with their potential transformations may appear in a new light and come into clearer view.

"The Enlightenment of Anxiety: Foucault’s Ethos of Critique in the Age of Polycrisis"

Ulrich Hoinkes is a professor of Romance studies and teacher education at the Christian Albrechts University of Kiel, Germany. He has made numerous research contributions during his academic career as a Romance philologist (French, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, and Occitan) and as a linguist specializing in semantics, history of linguistic thought, variety linguistics, language sociology, and minority languages.

After studying Romance philology, German philology, and general linguistics at the University of Münster, he received his doctorate in 1990 with a thesis on philosophy and grammar in the French Enlightenment, which was awarded the Doctoral Thesis Prize of the University of Münster and the Strasbourg Prize of the F.V.S. Foundation of Hamburg. He subsequently habilitated in 1999 with an empirically based thesis on bilingualism and technical language use in regionally relevant fields of work that was funded by the German Research Foundation (revised online edition, 2018). During his studies and between academic promotions, he spent extended periods in Spain, France, and Belgium, where he did extensive empirical field research on social multilingualism and was a visiting professor at the Multilingualism Research Centre of the Katholieke Universiteit Brussel (1998–1999).

Since his appointment at Kiel University, he has turned attention to education and foreign language didactics, becoming director of the Centre on Humanities in Education at Kiel University in cooperation with the IPN Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education in Kiel. As a university teacher, Hoinkes built long-term projects on student filmmaking, international exchange in teacher education, the social responsibility of professional education, and the creation of artistic performances (jazz, spoken word) with students. Since 2015, he has been energetically dedicated to building the international and interdisciplinary Anxiety Culture research project in collaboration with Teachers College, Columbia University, where he was a visiting scholar during the 2017–2018 academic year.

 Allegrante, John P., Ulrich Hoinkes, Michael I. Schapira, and Karen Struve, eds. Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024.

Abstract

This keynote revisits Michel Foucault on the occasion of his 100th anniversary not as a thinker to be canonized, but as a critical resource for diagnosing the present. Starting from Foucault’s understanding of Enlightenment as an ethos of critique, the lecture asks how concepts such as power/knowledge, biopolitics, governmentality, and subjectivation can illuminate today’s culture of anxiety.

The central claim is that the contemporary crisis of Enlightenment is not only a crisis of rationality or truth, but also a crisis in the regulation of affect. In an age of polycrisis, anxiety becomes more than a private emotion: it functions as a cultural and political medium through which subjects are addressed, mobilized, and governed. Drawing on the Anxiety Culture Project, the keynote proposes a Foucauldian reading of anxiety culture as a defining condition of our present.