Foucault News

Seminar: Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature
Call for Papers Deadline: 2010-09-30

Conference Date: April 7-10, 2011
Conference Venue: Hyatt New Brunswick, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA

Deadline for Abstract Submission: Sept. 30, 2010
(300-500 words)

Notification of acceptance of papers by 5th of October, 2010.

Deadline for Final Paper Submission: March 15, 2011

Length of Full Papers: 4000-5000 words

The seminar seeks to explore the complex and paradoxical relationship between the discourses of philosophy and literature focusing on the works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett has had a long standing dialogue with philosophy. From comments like ‘I am not a philosopher’ and ‘I do not understand philosophy’ to his love of Democritus, Arnold Geulincx and Arthur Schopenhauer, from a rich texture of philosophical allusions in early works like Murphy to a more resistant non-allusive (or allusive in a very subterranean way) later prose like Worstward Ho, Beckett’s work has always been seen in relation to philosophy, from championing a certain kind of Cartesianism to reviving the latent philosophical discourses of the Atomists, from positing existentialism to parodying it and so on.

In the 20th century, Beckett’s oeuvre has attracted a handsome amount of philosophical attention with almost all major philosophers responding to his work in vastly different ways. From early readings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to the responses of the poststructuralists like Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, reactions from Adorno, Stanley Cavell, Julia Kristeva, Irigaray, Martha Nussbaum and in more recent times perhaps in the most extensive fashion in the writings of Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley and a host of others, Beckett has commanded a rigorous attention of the philosophers. They have sometimes cited Beckett by way of exemplifying their own philosophical conceptualization and problematization while on other occasions they have seen his work as a genuine philosophical repository, generating issues and debates, intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy.

Eminent Beckett Scholars like Ruby Cohn, Stanley Gontarski, Anthony Uhlmann, Garin Dowd and others have been sensitive to what we can call a ‘philosophical turn’ in the field known as Beckett Studies. Apart from dealing with the philosopher’s influence on Beckett from a biographical point of view and Beckett’s influence on 20th century philosophy, the seminar also encourages papers that see Beckett’s work as a topos where different and often contesting ways of conceiving the philosophy-literature interface meet each other. Beckett’s interest in classical philosophy and the supposed representational relation between philosophy and literature is on the one hand while on the other is the poststructuralist and postmodernist appropriation of his canon which tends to locate his body of work at the margin of philosophical thought. Samuel Beckett thus remains the fascinating literary icon that he is with Derrida defining an auto-deconstructive margin of philosophy in literature with Beckett and Badiou drawing on Beckett as an original philosophical thinker, who is instrumental in his discourse of a return to philosophy.

All enquiries and abstracts are to be directly sent to:

Arka Chattopadhyay
M.Phil Scholar
Department of English
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Address:
Krishna, Flat-105
75, J.K. Street
Uttarpara, Hooghly
Pin-712258
Ph: 033-2663-8270
91-9231536815
Mail: arkaless@gmail.com
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Conscripted Subjects: Disciplined Society, Critique, and the Humanities. Graduate Student Conference,
Department of Comparative Literature,
UCLA, USA
February 23-25, 2011

Submission deadline: October 15, 2010.

In light of our current moment marked by economic collapse, heightened political paranoia, racial profiling, and ubiquitous surveillance, this conference wishes to highlight the connection between states of crisis and the wider social question of the prison as a space of social production. “Discipline” as such does not simply imply policies that police subjects, but rather policies that produce them — not just in “correctional facilities”, but also in the discourses and practices appropriated by universities, workplaces, hospitals, and bureaucracies. In this regard, we seek to question the normalization of the prison as a model for social relations between classes, sexes, races, and other subjectivities. The humanities have long been a central site for the critique of such disciplinary modes of social relations. While Foucault’s notion of “disciplinary society” has in many ways enabled this line of social critique, scholars of the humanities have since expanded it beyond its native terrain of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, to encompass a wide array of historical moments and geographic terrains. We therefore invite papers from all disciplines that engage with the means through which modern ―subjects‖ have been organized, taxonomized and controlled.

Possible topics include:

– Institutionalized discipline and subject formation – schools, hospitals, government.

– Literary forms and disciplinary textual practices – forms, genres, disciplinary boundaries.

– Critical responses to the disciplinary society – discourses of critique, crisis, and secular criticism.

– Secularism – the relationship between the private/public and the sacred/profane.

– Urban design, architecture, and the disciplined organization of space, place, and mobility.

– Empire, nationalism, “terrorism,” and territorial occupation.

– Visibility and subject recognition in postcolonial societies – the visibility of policed subjects vs. the invisibility of subaltern/abject subjects.

– Crime and mobility – criminality as the transgression of physical, social, and ethical boundaries.

– Police and surveillance (“Identity Cards”, CCTV, legal & illegal migration).

– Prison spaces, punitive practices, and the “Prison-Industrial Complex.”

– Psychoanalysis and discipline – the normal and the pathological.

– Racialized discipline and the generation of “minorities.”

– Anti-disciplinary figures – the stateless (exile, refugee, nomad), the non-human (monsters, vampires, the trans-human), and the otherworldly (aliens, ghosts, the prophetic).

– Disciplinary practices and docile bodies – heteronormativity and gender forms.

– “Biopower”, “Governmentality”, and Continental Philosophy.

– Popular culture and the disciplined body (“boot camps,” extreme body modification).

Abstracts should be between 250-350 words. All examples and quotations must be translated into English. Unaffiliated scholars are welcome.

Submissions in English (in doc. format) should be sent to the following address: uclagradconf@gmail.com

There is no participation fee, and refreshments and a light lunch will be provided. Travel and accommodation is at the participants’ expense. Local hotels in the area will be offering conference rates.

Sina Rahmani
University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Comparative Literature
345 Humanities Building
Email: uclagradconf@gmail.com