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Derrida 2021: biopolitics & deconstruction

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On June 27, 2021

In Biodeconstruction, Calls for Papers

15-18 December 2021
Aix-Marseille Université
Campus Schuman, Pôle multimédia
https://derrida.sciencesconf.org

Sponsors

Keynotes
Danielle Cohen-Lévinas (Paris-Sorbonne)
Joanny Moulin (Aix-Marseille)
Alexis Nuselovici (Aix-Marseille)
Charles Ramond (Paris 8)
Avital Ronell (NYU)
Francesco Vitale (Salerno)
Naomi Waltham-Smith (Warwick)

Conveners
Francesca Manzari & Stéphane Lojkine

Call for papers:
When the seminar The Beast and the Sovereign came out in 2008, it drew the attention the of the community of Derrida specialists to the famous seance of 20 March 2002, in which the philosopher looked closely into the theses propounded by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer (1995), on the recent advent of biopolitics. This is related to a certain heritage of Michel Foucault, and the themes developed since 1977 in his lectures at the Collège de France. The indirect, postponed dialogue this inaugurates between Derrida and Agamben offers a criticism of this inheritance: whereas Foucault described a gradual transformation of the techniques of government since the 18th century, Agamben notes a recent rupture, signalled by the camps and the experience of totalitarianism. Derrida disagrees with Agamben on the reading of Aristotle’s Politics: the distinction between bios, or life in the city, and zoe, or naked life, says Derrida, does not exist as such, literally, in Aristotle’s original text. Hence, the present undifferentiation of the two notions would not at all be an event, or an epistemological threshold from which to think a modern mutation of the political. If bio-power is undergoing unheard-of developments and transformations today, this bio-power, for Derrida, will always already have been there.

Derrida proposes to read-write Agamben reading Foucault. The textual machine of the seminar is here complexified by this double reading-commentary movement that makes us read Foucault in the light of the interpretations his own works have enabled. On the one hand, Foucault’s reflection on biopolitics as a distinctive mark of contemporary political exercise and systems never alludes to Heidegger, from whose work it nevertheless derives. On the other hand, and most importantly, Derrida does not validate the apocalyptical announcement of the biopolitical, as if coterminous with Fukuyama’s Gospel of the end of history, which he had denounced in Specters of Marx.

Twenty years later, as a pandemic strikes the bodies worldwide, as the climatic emergency threatens the survival of species, as borders open up and close down according to more and more fluctuating contingencies, the time has come to reopen the debate of biopolitics.

  • How should we understand Foucault’s biopolitics? Can this new construction of the political be deconstructed? Can it be said to result in a perhaps insurmountable disagreement between the two philosophers?
  • The point is to work on the comparison between Derrida and Agamben. Notwithstanding the frontal opposition that manifests itself in The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida and Agamben are nevertheless the two main intellectual heirs of Heidegger’s thought in continental philosophy.
  • How does Derrida work on the bios of life, from the bio-logical to the bio-graphical, in La vie la mort (1975) until the time of the seminar on The Death Penalty (1999)?
  • Another angle of reflection will be the question of life and the political, from the age-old stakes of sacrifice, hospitality, and forgiveness. How should we understand this apparent reserve respecting the political upheavals of globalization?
  • Particular attention will be paid to the place of literature in Derrida’s writing, convoking La Fontaine and Rousseau in The Beast and the Sovereign, Baudelaire in The Gift of Death, Shakespeare in Specters of Marx and The Death Penalty, Ponge in Signéponge, Joyce in Ulysses gramophone, etc.?
  • In twenty years’ time, thinking on the biopolitical has undergone considerable developments, and new theoretical models have appeared. What has it got to do with deconstruction?`

Paper and panel proposals to be sent to Francesca Manzari et à Stéphane Lojkine before 30 Septemb 31 2021 : abstract (350 words) bio-biblio (200 words : university, postal address, e-mail, mobile phone). Panels consist of 3 papers of 20 minutes delivery and 10 minutes discussion time each: submit overall panel presentation (350 words), 3 individual abstracts and 3 personal bios as above.

Transnational Biography in Europe

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On December 1, 2017

In Calls for Papers

Transnational Biography in Europe
Biography Society Seminar
14th ESSE Conference
Brno 2018
29 August – 2 September 2018

In the nineteenth century especially, biography has played an important literary and cultural part in the building of the national identities of the European nation states. Today, on the contrary, there is a discernible interest in biographies of figures of international significance – artists, scientists, politicians, etc. Such transnational biographies can be lives of historical personages belonging to linguistic and cultural areas different from the biographers’ and the readers’, or simply biographies highlighting the transnational connections and interactions of a person. This seminar, backed by the Biography Society network, would focus more particularly on biographies that forge and foreground transnational communities, which may be cosmopolitan, humanist, linguistic, religious, political, etc. Among related issues, this poses the question of the translatability of biography, not so much in terms of language as of cultural transference, for an individual’s life is bound to be written differently, depending on its reading community. The readability of a biography beyond the linguistic and cultural community in which it was originally written and published depends very much on the transnational relevance of the person whose life it relates. Some biographies focus on particular go-between figures whose lives are remarkable for the linkage they establish and cultivate between different national agents of cultural transference. Others present the lives of personages of universal relevance. There seems to be a “world biography” category of the genre, in the sense of Auerbach’s Weltliteratur, which poses the question of the place and impact of biography in global studies. It is debatable whether transnational biographies can perceptibly contribute to building a sense of cultural belonging to one region of the world, like the European Community for instance, or whether today this has become an epiphenomenon of cultural globalization. This seminar on transnational biographies would welcome proposals for contributions offering general reflections on this topic, as well as related case studies. The longer versions of the papers will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal with the permission of the authors. The presentations will be limited to 20 minutes including discussion. Abstracts no longer than 200 words should be sent before 31 January 2018 to conference@biographysociety.org.

Conveners :

Revolutionary Lives

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On December 1, 2017

In Calls for Papers

Biography Society Workshop
Annual SAES Conference 2018
Université Paris Nanterre
7-9 juin 2018 : «Revolution(s)»

The word ‘life’ is constantly revolving around the axis of writing: a life is both a biography and its topic. In a sense, we write our lives as we live them. Lives that go on being written after the death of the subject, lives that are considered interesting enough to be written and read about are often closely related to a paradigmatic shift, a revolution of one sort or another. Whether the individuals are the indispensable agents of such revolutionary moments, or simply happened to be in the right place at the right moment, is a sensitive case in point. Furthermore, in the ‘structure’ of a human life – this dated word should be understood in the broadest possible sense of what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) – time is heterogeneous: there are ‘turning points’, or moments of higher intensity, which are interesting to study as such, as well as for their two-way impact on individual lives and their contexts, but also for their incidence on the composition of biographies. Under the influence of the cinema, some modern biographies focus on particularly significant moments or periods in the lives they relate. Such ‘partial’ biographies are one instance of formal innovation in a genre that is often criticized for its conventionality, yet there have been other revolutionary experiments in biography, as for example Ruth Scurr’s recent John Aubrey: My Own Life (2015), written out like a diary, in the first-person singular. This seminar would welcome contributions proposing theoretical reflections or case studies in history, literature and cinema, on one or the other of these three heads: how individual lives relate to historical or paradigmatic revolutions, the nature and impact of ‘turning points’ in human lives, or innovations in the evolution of biography as a genre. The article versions of the presentations will afterwards be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal with the permission of their authors. Proposals of no more than 200 words, in French or in English, with short biographical notes, should be sent before 15 January 2018 to Joanny Moulin joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr and Patrick Di Mascio patrick.dimascio@univ-amu.fr.

Different Lives

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On November 9, 2017

In Calls for Papers

Conference of the Biography Society
Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures & Societies
September 19-21, 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS

On 19-21 September, 2018, the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen will host a conference designed to take a look beyond our own borders and delve deeper into the question of how the art of biography is practiced in other parts of the world. Biographers from different continents will gather to examine the ways in which their foreign colleagues practice their craft and discuss the cultural perspectives that guide biographers in their approach to the infinite complexity of the other. Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies will bring together biographers from France, Great Britain, Vietnam, South Africa, China, the United States, the Netherlands, and other nations, whose work reflect the global diversity of biographical practice. For the participants, it will provide an opportunity to learn about international research in the field.

In addition to Richard Holmes’ adage ‘biography as a handshake across time’, we would like to know how biography can contribute to a better understanding of differences between societies and cultures. How can biographers from different parts of the world learn from each other, without becoming all the same? For this purpose, we call on our speakers to inform us about the history and the state of the art concerning biography in their own countries. By doing so, speakers can show how in their cultural background biography functions as a public genre, featuring specific societal issues and opinion-making. Presumably, this could lead to a different thinking about the role of biography in society.

The conference is jointly organized by the Biography Institute and the Biography Society.

CFP: Political Biographies in Literature and Cinema

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On February 13, 2017

In Calls for Papers

Political Biographies
in
Literature and Cinema

Abstracts due: April 15, 2017

Biographers have a strong impact on our perception of history. They offer narratives of the lives of political leaders that necessarily defend a thesis of one sort or another, whether they pretend to strive to comprehend how politicians’ individual characters have underpinned their political responses to particular crises, or present an overtly biased portrait of historical figures. Biography scholars Hans Renders and Binne de Haan contend that biography designates “the study of the life of an individual, based on the methods of historical scholarship, with the goal of illuminating what is public, explained and interpreted in part from the perspective of the personal” (Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, 2). Since the early nineteenth century, journalists have often played the role of political biographers. In the US, for example, reporters writing about figures such as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln presented themselves as “champions and guardians of American character ideal, attending to the virtues, vices and ‘flaws’ of their subjects” (Shawn J. Parry-Giles, Hillary Clinton in the News, 4). Journalistic reporting has influenced political biography by spotlighting the incongruous gossip that sells newspapers, endowing the media with the power to shape a politician’s public image through calling attention to eye-catching images and sound bite pieces that simplify the political debate into visual clichés and stereotypical phrases. Contributors may question how the individual careers of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Narendra Modi conform to conventional models or translate into a new type of political biography.

This issue of Biography aims to further reflection on the evolution of political biography in a media-saturated context, turning political figures (present and past) into celebrities. It has also become a custom for statesmen to write their own autobiography—and more often in fact to have these ghost-written as first-person biographies of sorts (see Roman Polanski’s 2010 film The Ghost Writer)—during, before, and after their terms of office, thus incorporating their personal path into their political career and vice versa. It is our purpose to question the political content of these literary endeavours undertaken by Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, Barak Obama, etc., to consider how the politicians’ written and oral words have seeped into other media. An increasing number of politicians have written political biographies, and used this genre to ponder their political choices; Labour backbencher Roy Jenkins’s biography of Churchill is a case in point.

Biographical films (whether fiction or nonfiction) have influenced the generic evolution of biography through promoting a “tabloid culture” that feeds on the private lives of public figures. Considering that political power relies on representation, including visual symbols and rhetorical devices, we aim to foster the analysis of politics and biography as two interweaving strands. Political biofilms should not be analysed as a source of entertainment that discards political analysis; they also build political discourses through specific biographical angles. Some films draw on the hagiographic tradition (e.g. Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln, 2012) whereas others question the relationship between power and the individual (e.g. Errol Morris’s The Fog of War). Biographical documentaries addressing political characters have much in common with the methods of scholarly research, which are also discernible under hybridized forms in various types of docudrama.

Contributors will be interested in bringing to light interferences between different sources, analyzing the construction of political discourses through various biographical channels. To what extent do biographies promote or question the biographee’s political values? What are the limitations of prevailing assumptions (popular and/or academic) about biography’s relationship with history? What models of the political subject do biographies of political figures presuppose, and with what consequences? Articles of general relevance, as well as specific case studies of print or film biographies, are welcome in this special number of Biography, An Interdisciplinary Quarterly on political biographies in literature and cinema.

Potential contributors are asked to submit abstracts of 250–500 words and an abbreviated CV (of all authors) by 15 April 2017 to joanny.moulin@gmail.com and delphine.letort@univ-lemans.fr. We will contact those authors from whom we wish to see full manuscripts by 15 May 2017, and will expect to see those full manuscripts by 1 December 2017.

These manuscripts should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) and should use MLA style, 8th edition. Please also include all authors’ affiliations, emails, and mail contact information in the submission. We welcome inquiries about prospective submissions.

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