Dr Alastair Hemmens

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

My research focuses on political theory and European political and intellectual history. I have particular expertise in nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical movements with a major focus on the Situationist International. I am, for example, currently working on a new book project, The Spectacle of the Self, that examines the concept of the subject in Situationist thought and its political consequences. My previous book, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought, from Charles Fourier to Guy Debord (2019), puts forward a critical negative theory of labour as a destructive social form historically specific to capitalism in order to analyse critically the political and intellectual history of anti-work discourse among radical French artists and intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similarly, I edited a major collective volume, The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook (2021), that provides a critical introduction and new perspectives on one of the most politically radical revolutionary avant-gardes of the twentieth century. My contribution to the volume focuses in particular on assessing the reception and legacy of the group as well as its relationship to the concepts of 'alienation' and the 'subject of history'. My research is therefore concerned both with the elaboration of a critical theory of modern society, both in the abstract and in its many concrete manifestations, and the critical analysis of the history of intellectual engagement with these same issues. My critical perspective is primarily based on an engagement with the critique of value and critique of value-dissociation frameworks advanced in the work of such authors as Moishe Postone, Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz and Anselm Jappe. The critique of value provides a radical Marxian critical theory of capitalism as a form of abstract and impersonal domination, rather than, as in 'traditional Marxism', an analysis that assumes the critique of modern society is primarily a matter of personal domination in the form of private property and class relations.

Teaching

Biography

I completed a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature at University College London before moving to Paris to study for an MA in Paris Studies: The History and Culture of Paris at the University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP). I subsequently completed a PhD at ULIP in French and Comparative Studies, with a thesis on the life and work of the Belgian Situationist thinker Raoul Vaneigem.

Following teaching positions in Paris with the American University of Washington and Accent International, I was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Cardiff University’s School of Modern Languages in 2014. I was appointed Lecturer in French at Cardiff in 2019 and later promoted to Senior Lecturer in French. I recently joined the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University as Lecturer in Politics, where I teach and research in political theory and critical social thought.

Honours and awards

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, 3 Years

Supervisions

• Political Theory and the history of political ideas.
• Marxian Theory
• Political Memoru 
• Guy Debord and the Situationist International
• The Post-War European Avant-Garde
• Marxian Theory
• The Critique of Value Dissociation / Wertabspaltungskritik
• Anti-capitalist analysis in French contexts

News articles

Two Leverhulme Fellowships awarded to the School of Modern Languages

21 July 2014

The School has been successful in supporting two applications to the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship scheme.