| ASCP Conference |
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| Friday, 14 November 2008 04:12 |
 The 2010 ASCP Conference will be themed Affect, to be held from December 3-5 at the University of Queensland, Brisbane The question of affect is at the heart of philosophy, a question at the nexus of ethics, aesthetics, the ontology of the real, the nature of knowledge, the phenomena of experience, the composition and function of the mind, and the structures of living. The conference calls for papers on the theme of the philosophy of affect, as well as general papers.The tradition of philosophies of affect is deep and wide, encompassing both denigration and celebration. For the Stoics, passions such as yearning, spite, grief, and fear are incorrect judgements which are excessive and contrary to reason and nature. However, not all affects are maligned: joy, caution, and goodwill, are to be cultivated. For Descartes the passions were associated with the animal spirits. If properly trained, they contribute to the good life. Socrates, understanding the affective power of art, banishes the poets from Plato’s Republic. Yet, famously, Plato found the origin of philosophy in wonder and the love of wisdom in erôs. In Nietzsche’s hands the denial of passion was rewritten and became a philosophy of affirmation. For Spinoza all human activity including cognition produces, and is produced by, affect. His account of the actions and passions of the human mind was crucial to his task of showing the connectedness of humans to nature, and so in the naturalising of moral concepts. Spinoza’s move towards materialism was hastened in the French Enlightenment as thinking matter was itself thought. The French Enlightenment is the subject of a proposed specialist stream, Sensibilité: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment (see below for details).The tradition took a decisive turn in the twentieth century, through the work of philosophers such as Deleuze, Guattari, Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, Foucault, and many others. Affects, according to Deleuze in his uptake of Spinoza, are independent of their subject. With Guattari he developed an anti-Œdipal philosophy of desire, and theorised art as a bloc of sensations, a compound of perceptions and of affects. Merleau-Ponty recognised that as different cultures variously express love, they express a variance to archetypal Western conceptualisations and this difference of affect is a difference in the very emotion itself. The space between conscious emotion and affect in its non-conscious guises is the space for the unconscious. The psychoanalytic tradition reads the life of the body into that of the mind: libido is in part embodied drive. For some feminists, between the lips and the phallus a philosophy of embodied difference emerges. Irigaray links wonder to an ethics of sexual difference. And for Foucault, far from being a mere descriptor of emotional states, affect is nothing less than the site of the production of the modern soul. Can affects enable us to theorise particularity and difference? Do the affects oppose rationality and ethics or are they central to both? What do the affects tell us about the relationship between embodiment and cognition? Papers are invited to engage with these and other questions about the affects. Call for PapersIf you would like to submit an abstract, or if you have any queries about the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Annual Conference 2010, please contact the convenors at ascp2010@gmail.com.Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and include a list of keywords. Please include a short biography (100 words) including institutional affiliation.Suggested StreamsArt and its AffectsPhilosophy and the Sexed/Gendered Body Deleuze’s Philosophy of Affect Affect: Literature: Emotion Embodied Imagination Philosophies of Hope The Affect of the Other Merleau-Ponty: The Phenomenology of Affect Libidinal Affects Affect in Politics Mimesis and Embodiment Psychoanalytic Affect: Freud, Klein, Lacan Specialist StreamSensibilité: The Knowing Body in the EnlightenmentIn conjunction with the Centre for the History of European Discourses (CHED) we present a specialist stream, concerned with Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy, and focusing on the embodied epistemology of Enlightenment thought.In mid- to late- eighteenth century thought, particularly in France and in the thought of the philosophes, materialism and atheism were seriously considered both publicly in the writings of, for example, d’Holbach, and privately by others such as Diderot. The 1743 treatise Le Philosophe presents the philosopher in materialistic and mechanistic terms as a human thinking machine that reflects on its own motion. In the context of vitalist medicine, this, however, is far from a mechanistic description in the modern sense. Sensationism was the highly idiosyncratic epistemology of the period—formalised and systematized by Condillac, the system was widely shared including by Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, and Sade. Sensibility is an embodied epistemology briefly flourishing in a period before “the theory of knowledge” was taken as a discrete field of philosophical inquiry. Hence sensationism was heavily influenced by the philosophical anthropologies of the day and by medical science. This is evident in the highly contested work of La Mettrie but also in the work of Roussel, Tissot and Rousseau. Rousseau was a dualist, a sensationist and a theorist of virtue, and purity of the heart. The violence of passion was itself an enemy, the unnatural product of modernising society. Sade was a materialist, a sensationist and a theorist of vice, cruelty and lust. For him the purity of the heart was an impediment to pleasure. Here the philosophical novel’s power to affect makes it the philosophical genre of choice. The Enlightenment notion of sensibility provides a paradigm that integrates such diverse fields as physiology, medicine, philosophy, ethics, anthropology, aesthetics and literature.One of our keynote speakers, Anne Vila, will link the general conference theme and the CHED specialist stream. Plenary SpeakersAntonio CalcagnoAntonio Calcagno is a member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at King’s University College, London, Ontario. He has special interests in twentieth- and twenty-first century continental European thought as well as medieval and renaissance thought. He also works on questions of community and intersubjectivity, statehood, consciousness, humanism and post-humanism. His publications include: Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence (Peter Lang, 1998), The Philosophy of Edith Stein (Duquesne University Press, 2007), and Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time (Continuum, 2007). He is also the editor of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Symposium : Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale.
In July 2008, the University of Queensland journal, Crossroads, published a Special Issue on the work of Brazilian intellectual, Luiz Costa Lima. In December 2009, a follow up Special Issue will be published, bringing together a range of international academics responding to Costa Lima’s work. This project marks the 20th anniversary of the English translation and publication of Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times (University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Costa Lima works in the areas of comparative literature, philosophy and cultural history. For the past thirty years, he has traced the contours of mimesis in modernity, and the relationship between historical, philosophical and fictional discourses. This invitation will cement the already strong relationship between Luiz Costa Lima and the University of Queensland and Australian philosophy and will serve to further promote his work in the English-speaking world. |
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