Fifth Annual
University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference
"The Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism
in the Twenty-First Century"
February 13-15, 2003
Keynote Speaker: Slavoj Zizek (Lubijana)
Plenary Speakers: Julia Kristeva (Paris VII)
Toril Moi (Duke)
Kaja Silverman (Berkeley)
This conference initiates a conversation about the relevance of
psychoanalytic ideas in the twenty-first century. Why do some of
us continue to have a desire for psychoanalysis? What is the
nature of that desire? What can psychoanalysis teach us about
the social arrangements of our increasingly globalized world, and
especially, about the psychic origins of our most pressing social
problems (racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalistic violence,
terrorism, genocide)? Do psychoanalytic theories have anything to
say about the highly "dispersed" identities of new information
technologies? Or do those theories remain too invested in
embodied identities grounded in what Freud calls "the bodily ego"?
Finally, can psychoanalytic accounts of creativity and agency offer
resources for cultural critique? Can they help us resist the
fashionable pessimism that sees the new global culture as
inevitable? Or is analysis in some basic way conservative,
concerned with accommodating subjects to the norms of the
societies in which they live?
Presentations should be broadly interdisciplinary. In order to
encourage full participation, we will not run parallel sessions. The
conference will end with a roundtable in which we try collectively to
pull together the threads of our discussion--andto assess where our
desires have led us. We plan to publish selected papers from the
conference in a collection of essays with a major university press.
Please send abstracts of 20-minute papers by 30 September 2002
to: Paul Allen Miller, Chair, Comparative Literature Program,
Humanities Building, Columbia, SC 29208.
Sponsored by the University of South Carolina College of Liberal
Arts, Program in Comparative Literature, Department of English,
and associated departments and programs.
----- End forwarded message -----
Dr Peter Davies
School of European Languages and Cultures (German)
University of Edinburgh
David Hume Tower
George Square
Edinburgh
EH8 9JX
Tel.: 0131 650 3632
email: [log in to unmask]
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