Pessimism of the Will: Sectarianism Before and After Asad Haider
Toronto, ON
Organization: Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought, York University
“Our subjective horizon is the optimism of the intellect; our objective, structuring condition is pessimism of the will. Without optimism of the intellect, we have the party without the people. Without pessimism of the will, we have the illusion of power. Until we recognize this there is no path for action.” (Asad Haider)
The 2026 Strategies of Critique Conference, organized by the Graduate Student Association for Social and Political Thought, celebrates the life and work of Asad Haider. In addition to his professorial appointments at York University, Haider was the founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine and the author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. His work as a scholar and pedagogue exhibits an energetic commitment to the emancipation of the working class and fellow travelers irrespective of tactics, strategies, and internal disputes.
Amidst rapidly changing social and (geo)political economic circumstances, both dire and ripe with possibility, we beckon to Haider’s reversal of the Gramscian platitude: “optimism of the intellect” and “pessimism of the will.” In coming together to remember a lost comrade, we hope to sketch new, preliminary path(s) for action.
We welcome a diverse range of papers on historical and contemporary emancipatory theories. This year’s conference aims to create a space in which leftists of all stripes can explore critiques of capitalist production and, in turn, engage in debate framed by and constitutive of lived experience.
We are looking for papers that engage with:
The Limits of Sectarianism, including:
- Marxist-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Third Worldism, Communization
- Marxist Feminisms
- Black Marxisms
- Queer and Trans Marxisms
- Health Communism and Disability Justice
- Psychoanalysis After Freudo-Marxism
- Historiography and Marxology
- Aesthetics and Cultural Studies
- Leftwing Melancholia, “Hauntology,” and (De)politicization
- Conspiratorialism and Parapolitics
- Identitarianism, Parasociality, and Hobbyist Politics
- Crisis Beyond Critique
- The New Left and the Long ’68
Submission Guidelines: For individual proposals, please email a 250-word abstract and a 100-word biography. For panels, workshops, and seminar proposals, please submit a description of the event (up to 250 words per panelist or facilitator) and 100-word biographies. Please forward your submission(s) to strategies.critique@gmail.com.
Submission Deadline: March 15, 2026
Notification Deadline: April 1, 2026
Conference Date: May 1, 2026
Keynote: Dr. William Paris
William Paris is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is also an associate editor for the journal Critical Philosophy of Race and one of the co-hosts of the podcast What’s Left of Philosophy? His research focuses on history of African American philosophy, critical theory, 20th-century continental philosophy, and political philosophy. He has published on Frantz Fanon and gender, Sylvia Wynter’s phenomenology of imagination, and C. L. R. James and Hannah Arendt. He has also published articles on subjects concerning critical theory and utopian consciousness, as well as a defense of the explanatory work of critical theory vis-à-vis race in Puncta and Critical Philosophy of Race. He has an article forthcoming on self-emancipation in the New German Critique. He is also the author of Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (Oxford University Press, 2025). In this text, he brings together the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Delany, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs with Ernst Bloch, Rahel Jaeggi, and Rainer Forst to generate a novel critical theory of racial domination under capitalism as essentially the domination of time. Critical theory, thus, is tasked with reconstructing the real utopian tendencies in historical processes that can negate the domination of time.
MLA Chernoff