CFP: Abstraction

POSTED IN: CFP

UC Irvine’s Comparative Literature Department will hold a conference on “Abstraction” on March 11-12, 2016. A selection of the CFP can be found below. For the complete CFP and more information on the conference, please see here.

We are particularly interested in investigating abstraction as it opens onto the question of the production of thought, of resources for thinking, of the capacity as well to delimit thinking from what is not, what is neither thinking’s violence, nor its force: worn out thinking, tired thought, thought that gets ahead of itself and trips on its laces, thought that lingers only to fall behind, thought-in-progress, confused and jumbled thought. This may lead to addressing conceptuality as a venture in porosity: an oscillation between the inevitability of identity and the impossibility of totality. However, it must also ask about the scenes and scales of theorization and the historical damage and institutional violence wielding the ratchet by which to modulate between them. Indeed, it may well be that getting clear on abstraction requires weighing in on the labor undertaken and promulgated by the University itself.

We invite submissions of papers and/or panels in all disciplines and treating material from all time periods by those who conceive of their work within the thematics of abstraction as well as those who operate beyond the fields touched on above — even if their relation to this critical concept is not yet a project, nor a question: merely a hunch. We also welcome submissions as experiments in reflexive critical practice; the limtis of what “we” can think together are as interesting as any single quesiton “we” all already know how to pose.

Due January 15, 2016.