Survival
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
March 12th – March 15th 2015
Keynote Addresses: Professor Christopher Fynsk (University of Aberdeen) and Professor Elizabeth Rottenberg (DePaul University)
Linda Hutcheon and J. Edward Chamberlin Lecture in Literary Theory: Professor Eric Cazdyn (University of Toronto)
Every catastrophe tests the limits of the human drive for s
elf-preservation and exacts our prolonged negotiation with what has happened and what is to come. Estranged from traditional scaffoldings for her desires and values, the need for survival forces the individual to recognize the insufficiency of her inner resources if she is to live otherwise. Survival under the weight of loss – of faces and words, of relics and homes, of meanings and intimacies – survival in the wake of catastrophe carries the presentiment of a transfigured existence. This promise is a call that brings people together to rebuild the fragile yet necessary connections that constitute a world. We conceive of survival in diverse modes: the future of the work of art after canonicity; the ethics of testimony and witness; the precarity of the environment; the fatal effects of heteronormativity; the inheritance of cultural histories through interpretations, translations and archives; the experiences of globalization, displacement, and conflict. Its reification in the canon endows it with fame while the stamp of periodization and genre dissimulates other ways in which it might show itself. Modes of criticism have been inherited via a cultural directory that shapes and is shaped by the same means of production that have debased the afterlife of art. In the ritual pageant of cultural heritage, the predicament of lives trapped behind glass partitions is the catalyst for critical interventions. To counteract this process of incremental consolidation, a critique that refuses to remain complicit with fantasies of mastery must shatter the ideology of preservation at all costs. The myth of nature’s cyclical longevity and infinite duration belies the omnipresent threat of its extinction. The homogenizing forces of modern technology perpetuate the myth of Earth as inexhaustible reservoir. Such factitious discourses of vitalism continue to occur at the same time as the exponential proliferation of signs of environmental destruction. By situating what passes as natural in ‘natural catastrophes’ within the larger frame of global debt structures that perpetuate the mythic cycle of guilt and compensation, an ecology of survival would reclaim the force of analysis and the future of the intellect from market capitalism. Strategies of privatization that preserve a complex of institutions conceal the universal subject of debt constructed by them. We must comprehend a logic in which the need to systemically change our society has been replaced with a series of economic transactions that pacify individual afflictions. Our task as thinkers of survival is twofold: to render the contours of subjectivity burdened with debt and to construe our desire in its truth. The foreclosure of desires and intimacies reinforces a repertoire of compulsory imitations. Playing empty roles that determine our ways of responding in advance, we lack a sense for recognizing otherness. An ethics of testimony bearing witness to what remains of otherness must reckon with questions of survival. To renew the dead script of our social interactions, a reflection on survival is necessary. The organizing committee of this conference invites all contributions that respond to the need to rethink what survival means today. Possible topics for presentations include, but are not limited to:
Freudian death drive; the undead; the uncanny
Survivor’s guilt; mourning; surviving the death of others
The survival of the name
Suicide and sacrifice
Apocalyptic economies
Aesthetics of eschatology
Erotic foreclosure
Afterlife of artworks
Survival of/in capitalism
Intersection of survival and obsolescence
Apparitions; hauntology; revenants
Survival of philosophy and the humanities
The death of god
Class struggle; the nation-state; warfare
Surviving gender- and sexuality-based violence
Survivalist movements
Ecology; ecopoetics; anti-evolutionism
Consumer goods that have outlived their use (antiques; collectors)
Guilt and debt
Gentrification; architectural history; ruins
‘Livability’
We invite joint proposals for panels/roundtables as well as proposals for individual talks. Proposals should be a maximum of 250 words. Individual talks should be approximately 20 minutes in duration and panels/roundtables should not exceed 90 minutes. If you are participating in a roundtable, please be prepared to speak for no more than 10 minutes in order to facilitate discussion. We request that you include a biographical statement of no more than 50 words. We prefer that all participants in panels/roundtables have been confirmed when the proposal is submitted. Our submissions deadline is October 15 2014. All proposals must be submitted via our website at: conference.complit.utoronto.ca/Survival. Please contact us at [email protected] with any questions or concerns.
