IAPL 2001 INVITED SPEAKER

Wednesday, May 2^nd, 2001

PAUL PATTON

Paul Patton comes from Sydney, Australia, where is currently Associate Professor in Philosophy at The University of Sydney. He is widely known for his books and articles on political and philosophical aspects of French poststructuralism and postmodernism. Born in 1950, he studied philosophy in Sydney before moving to Paris in 1975 where he wrote a Doctorat d’Université on Althusser’s marxist philosophy of science. One of his publications from this period was a collection of translations of interviews and essays by Foucault, along with critical essays on Foucault’s work during the 1970’s, co-edited with Meaghan Morris under the title Power, Truth, Strategy (Sydney: Feral 1979). In addition to translations of interviews and essays by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and others, Paul Patton translated Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (Columbia 1994) and Baudrillard’s The gulf war did not take place (Indiana 1995). He also edited Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, (Routledge 1993) and Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Blackwell 1996).

His most recent book is Deleuze and the Political (Routledge 2000), which explores the political philosophy developed in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative volumes (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus) in the light of their subsequent definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts, and in relation to the understanding of power and freedom in Anglo-American political theory. Work currently in progress includes a proposed collection of comparative studies on the work of Deleuze and Derrida (provisionally entitled Between Deleuze and Derrida, co-edited with John Protevi) and an essay on ‘Language, Power and the training of horses’ to appear in Tom Cohen and Cary Wolfe eds Human/ Animal: Figurations in Contemporary Theory and Culture (Minnesota, forthcoming).

Along with Terry Smith, Paul Patton is Co-editor of Engaging Derrida: The Sydney Seminars, to be published later this year by Power Publications (perhaps in conjunction with Chicago University Press). This book records two seminar discussions undertaken by the editors and others with Jacques Derrida in Sydney in 1999 on issues related to Derrida’s recent writings on art and politics. Extracts from one of these seminars are currently available online in issue 5.1 of Theory & Event at [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/toc/index.html]. Paul Patton has been a member of the Co-ordinating Editorial Board of Theory & Event since the foundation of this journal in 1996.  From 2002, he will become Co-editor of T&E.

                A particular focus of his recent research and writing has been the legal, political and constitutional rights of colonized indigenous peoples. Paul Patton has been instrumental in promoting theoretical as well as political discussion of the consequences of the Australian High Court’s belated recognition in 1992 of Aboriginal title to land, and he was one of the organisers of a major international conference in Canberra 1997 on Indigenous Rights, Political Theory and Reshaping Institutions. Papers from this conference have recently been published as Ivison, Patton, Sanders eds Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, (Cambridge University Press 2000). He continues to publish essays on issues raised by the ongoing process of internal decolonisation, including most recently “The translation of indigenous land into property: the mere analogy of English jurisprudence,” Parallax Issue 14 (January – March 2000).