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[2nd call] "Except Asia: Agamben's Work in Transcultural Perspective"
International Conference (June 25-27, 2013)
Location: Taiwan
Call for Papers Date: 2012-09-15
Date Submitted: 2012-08-02
Announcement ID: 196157
Organized and hosted by Department of English, National Taiwan Normal
University, Taipei, Taiwan, with the participation of Institut dtudes
Transtextuelles et Transculturelles, Universit Jean Moulin, Lyon,
France
Deadline for Abstracts Submission: September 15, 2012
FEATURED
Simone Bignall (University of New South Wales, Australia) Joyce C. H.
Liu (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan) Brett Neilson (University
of West Sydney, Australia) Mark Rifkin (University of North Carolina
at Greensboro, USA) Naoki Sakai (Cornell University, USA) Marcelo
Svirksy (University of Wollongong, Australia)
*Other speakers to be confirmed
Over the past several decades, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's
work has attracted a growing amount of interest spanning a wide range
of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, including
philosophy, literary theory, political philosophy, migration studies,
security studies, geography, social and cultural studies of science
and medicine, etc. The increasing recognition accorded to Agamben's
oeuvres has more recently resulted in the beginning of a serious
dialogue about the transcultural aspects of his work, particularly
with regard to the epistemological legacy of colonization,
state-building, and revolution in the non-Western world. This
conference aims to explore the enormous transversal potential of
Agamben's work by staging its transdisciplinary and transcultural
dimensions. It is open to non-specialists ("specialization" defined
here in relation to both Asia and Agamben) from any discipline
interested in the mix and mutation of Asia and Agamben as a platform
for transcultural investigation.
Too complex to characterize under a single rubric, Agamben's work is
probably best known for the Homo Sacer series of books and essays that
trace out the contours of "the logic of the exception" that operates
across discrete domains of modern experience. Sovereignty, as Agamben
shows, is the name given to the forms of experience that adhere to an
exceptional logic, beginning with the ontological status of the
philosophical subject and extending directly through the political
one. For Agamben, this is as much a foundational moment of Western
civilization as a trajectory of historical development. Sovereignty
itself, in its relation to social ontology, is not a modern invention.
The specificity of modernity lies in appropriating the distribution of
the exception between politics and life in such a way that the format
of the exception is no longer invisible and/or concentrated in a
single point in the social body, but has rather been generalized
throughout the body politic, creating spaces of "permanent exception."
The conference organizers would like us to reconsider the logic of the
exception in relation to Asia. This means, first of all, that we will
have to abandon the normativity of the historically-determined notion
of social organization that has come to coalesce around the term
sovereignty in the modern age. Although sovereignty's excess of
normativity has always been open to wild oscillations induced by the
incessant transitions of capitalist development, for that part of the
world whose historical experience of modernity has been mediated by
colonization, sovereignty has never been something that could be taken
for granted. Stimulated by Agamben's genealogy of sovereignty, an
increasing number of postcolonial theorists have begun to question the
role of the exception in the constitution of that very particular
spatialized form of exception known as "the West and the Rest."
The conference title"Except Asia"thus begins with the status of the
universal that Agamben has recently done so much to problematize and
reinvigorate. The term "Asia," like that of "the West," names neither
an essential civilization nor a substantial geographical entity but
rather something like what Agamben identifies, following Michel
Foucault, as an apparatus: a network of heterogeneous elements
spanning several registers. Throughout the period of colonial/imperial
modernity, the apparatus of "Asia" was explicitly used to manage
spaces of exception, seen for instance in the frameworks of
extraterritoriality that anchored the distinction of an Asian
"continent" on the Eurasian landmass stretching from the Bosporus to
the Yellow Sea. It goes today without saying that it can no more be a
question of attempting to assimilate Asia to yet another form of a
particularism-masquerading-as-a-universalism than an attempt to
establish a simple equivalency between the two terms, "Asia" and
"exception." In this sense, the conference title is precisely a
gesture, which, as Agamben notes, is the "communication of a
communicability." From this perspective, "Asia" and "Agamben" are
points of departure for discussions about subjective formation in
transcultural practice. Although these two points taken together
certainly might open, for instance, discussions about "Asia" as,
alternately, civilizational construct, market assemblage, economic
player, knowledge archive, translation machine, site of exceptional
space or practice, etc., the conference title is definitely not
intended to limit discussion to either "Asia" per se or to Agamben's
contributions to political philosophy. It is intended to act rather as
a moment of invitation that points to something manifestly common and
multiple in the human being. It might, if we are lucky, even engage
the process identified by Agamben as profanation: the process whereby
an apparatus (of capture), such as the civilizational region in this
case, is wrested away from the exception and returned to the common.
How should we respond to the urge to categorize Agamben's worklike
that of countless other important theoreticians of modernityas
symptomatic of that asymmetry that maps the universality of theory
onto a regioncurrently called "the West"that is but a particularity in
its own right? What elements in Agamben's work present particularly
usefulor disruptivepoints of departure for reconsidering the relation
between genesis and validity, origin and propagation? What is the cost
of ignoring, or cordoning within a single civilizational tradition (if
not a historically-determined idea of the human itself), the idea
expressed by Agamben in Homo Sacer that we must "put the very form of
relation into question, and to ask if the political fact is not
perhaps thinkable beyond relation and, thus, no longer in the form of
a connection"?
In keeping with our bias towards transversal, transcultural
approaches, the conference is interested in accommodating a variety of
perspectives on Agamben's diverse body of work. Two general
trajectories of encounter between Agamben and the non-West suggest
themselves from the outset. The first, a comparative approach, would
actively pursue a comparativist agenda, matching Agamben's
characterization of the Western tradition with what we know about
other civilizational traditions. To what extent have other traditions
offered contrasting solutions to the problems, and powers, of
ontological and political exception? How have other traditions
identified and managed the problems of indication and signification
that are understood, by Agamben, to lie at the heart of the
metaphysical quest? What does Agamben's analysis of sovereign power in
the West mask from view in our approach to non-Western societies? The
second, an applied-theory approach, would find in Agamben's work an
intriguing set of analyses about Western culture that could provide a
powerful template for re-examining the understanding of other cultures
caught in the multi-faceted processes of modernization. How can
Agamben's work be effectively mobilized in contexts far from those of
its inception?
Beyond the strategies of application and comparison, can we not also
imagine a third trajectory of encounter that would seek to
problematize the political relation that characterizes the meeting
between Agamben and Asia at every point in its formation and
development? What kind of work needs to be done to mobilize Agamben's
accomplishments in the service of a general economy of politics no
longer indebted to the restrained economy of colonial and postcolonial
relations? Situated as we are at a point of historical transition
affecting the humanities as a whole, we launch this call for papers as
an open invitation to invent anew the meaning of theoretical
reflection for a fractious global age.
****For further information, please visit the conference website:
http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/AgambenConference/
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Visit the website at
http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/AgambenConference/
--
Dr Sarah Dauncey
Chinese Language Programme Director & Chinese Degree Tutor
Careers Officer & Alumni Liaison
School of East Asian Studies
University of Sheffield (Times Higher Education University of the Year)
http://www.shef.ac.uk/seas/
Honorary Secretary & Commissioning Editor of JBACS
British Association for Chinese Studies
http://www.bacsuk.org.uk/
6-8 Shearwood Road
Sheffield, S10 2TD
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)114 22 28436
Fax: +44 (0)114 22 28432
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