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

My first year teaching introduces students to the 'big' political ideas and movements that have defined the modern history of France and its relationship with the world. These include, but are not limited to, nationalism, citizenship, rights, identity, state-building, socio-economic change and populism. In the second year, I teach on theories of power and political memory (in particular as it pertains to the memory of Napoleon I in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the final-year, I teach the broad political and cultural transformations of the 1960s, including the role of the workers' and student movements in the events of May '68 in France. I also teach an innovative final-year research-led module on the political history of art that includes regular field trips to the National Museum Cardiff to come face to face with the art of some of the greatest artists of the modern era.

Biography

My university education began with a BA Hons in English Language and Literature at University College London. After this, I moved to Paris where I recieved a grant to study an MA in Paris Studies: The History and Culture of Paris at the University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP). I went on to do a PhD at ULIP in French and Comparative studies with a thesis on the life and work of the Belgian Situationist, Raoul Vaneigem. During my studies I worked as a TEFL teacher for the Riviera School of English in Torbay and as a private tutor in Paris. My first academic teaching post was working for the American University of Washington and Accent International in Paris as a lecturer in Paris: Civilization and Culture. In 2014, I was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowshop at Cardiff University School of Modern Languages. In 2019, I took on my current post here at Cardiff as Lecturer in French.

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