New Faculty Seminar: Brian Whitener

HI Seminar Room (218 Clemens Hall)

In this talk, Whitener will present an overview of his in-progress book, The Communal Hypothesis, which theorizes the communal as a term of art for thinking new avenues for survival and flourishing in the present. In this project, Whitener argues that under the two great ideologies of industrialization, capitalism and communism, the communal was what had to be defeated so that modernity could be realized. This involved an infinite number of processes, including, as Robert Nichols has shown, that land had to be made into property so that it could be dispossessed and that people’s means of reproduction, as Silvia Federici and others have demonstrated, had to be fenced in, stripped from them and despoiled. The end result has been an attempted annihilation of the vast world of communal social forms that provided minimal levels of sustenance for millions before the advent of modernization, even when nested inside other imperial or non-communal formations. This talk will touch on three interventions this project makes: 1) how the communal has been the silenced other of radical thought, 2) the theorization of violence proposed by Rosa Luxemburg’s work, and 3) what a minimal political definition of the communal might look like in the present.

Brian Whitener is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo and author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (2019), and editor and translator of numerous other volumes. In addition, he has published two books of experimental poetry, Face Down (2016) and The 90s (2022), and for many years he was a member of La Lleca, an artistic collective based in Mexico City. His most recent projects include the edited volume In Defense of Common Life: The Political Thought of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (Common Notions, 2024) and a translation of Maurizio Lazzarato’s Revolutions of Capitalism: The Politics of the Event (Duke UP, 2026).