Call for papers and
announcement of stipends for the attendance of the international conference
Configurations of the Third: 1800 to the Present
Third Agents and the Missing Links of Modernity
St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, UK
29-31 August 2005
Organisation
Department of German, University of Cambridge
Research Group ‘Figur des Dritten’, University of Konstanz
Keynote Addresses
Zygmunt BAUMAN, Leeds (Sociology)
Hubertus von AMELUNXEN, Lübeck/Montréal (Media Studies)
Andrew BOWIE, London (Philosophy)
Rüdiger GÖRNER, London (Literary Theory)
Ann HARDY, Wellcome Institute, London (History of Medicine)
Jochen Hörisch, Mannheim (German Studies)
George HUNSINGER, Princeton (Theology)
Judith RYAN, Harvard (Comparative Literature)
Webpage
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/bfm22/conference.html
STIPENDS
CRASSH, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, Cambridge/U.K., provides
funding (travel expenses) for outstanding post-graduate students from the
U.K and continental Europe to give a paper at the conference. Applicants
should add a note to their abstract (te be submitted by 15 January 2005).
PARASITES, MIASMATA AND MISSING LINKS; dialectics, the unconscious and
chiliasm; Hermes figures, rivals and tricksters – all these catchphrases
refer to third agents or tripartite agencies. The ‘figure of the third’
often takes the form of a privileged entity or space which overcomes binary
oppositions and effects transformation. Post-Cartesian intellectual and
scientific enquiry has witnessed an explosion in attempts to move beyond
the dichotomy of mind vs. matter and develop and criticise triadic
structures of thought.
This has unleashed modes of thinking which relate the figure of the third
to fundamental questions of subjectivity and self-consciousness. With this
conference we want to create an opportunity to engage in an
interdisciplinary debate on continuities and discontinuities between
tripartite configurations during the last 200 years.
Linking the imaginative and theoretical implications of these structures to
post-Enlightenment culture’s unease with both ambivalence and binary
oppositions has been a central preoccupation of cultural theory (e.g. the
Frankfurt School, J. Habermas, N. Elias, Z. Bauman). The conference will
pursue this further and ask whether the modern human condition can be
adequately captured as an unfinished project of invoking third agents to
reconfigure ambivalence and binarity.
We are inviting contributions from the following fields:
1. Philosophy and Theology:
· 1800 and all that? The late 18th century as a paradigm shift
· Idealism and Materialism
· German philosophy − French theory: the migrations of thirdness
· Configurations of the Third in Modern Theology
· Chiliasm, millenarianism and utopia in the 19th and 20th century
2. History & Philosophy of Science:
· Third bodies
· Parasites, epidemics, infections: history of medicine
· The dialectics of evolutionary theory
· The uncertainty principle and metareflexivity in modern science
3. Social and Political Sciences:
· Third ways
· Money, circulation, acceleration: reflections on modernity
· Concepts of time and space in postcolonial discourse
· Jürgen Habermas and the public sphere
· Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘homo sacer’
4. Literary Studies:
· The Third as a literary theme: angels, rivals and tricksters
· Theories of metaphor
· Reader-response criticism and the author-text-reader triangle
· The sublime, the uncanny, the individual: psychoanalysis and literature
5. Media Studies / Cultural Studies:
· Intertextuality, Intermediality
· Tertiary models in media studies and communication theory
· Configurations of the uncanny in media studies
· The Third in cultural studies (eg cultural materialism, postcolonialism)
· The notion of 'ecology' in cultural theory
Papers are welcome in English, French and German.
Abstracts should be sent to
Ulrich Bröckling (ulrich.brö[log in to unmask]),
Ian Cooper ([log in to unmask]),
and Bernhard Malkmus ([log in to unmask])
by 15 January 2005.
A selection of papers will be published.
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