Dear all,
me and Caterina Nirta are organising a one-day symposium on *Monstrous
Ontologies.
Politics, Ethics, Materiality *at the Department of Social Sciences,
University of Roehampton, London, the *1st of July 2019*. The intention is
to provoke participants to think and engage with monstrosity as not a mere
cultural construct of the 'other' (to be deconstructed), but an ontological
reality that require to be faced (speculatively, politically, and
ethically) in its complex and really-existent materiality.
The scope of the symposium is widely trans-disciplinar,
welcoming contributions, from sociological, legal, geographical,
psychological, philosophical, political and cultural studies, as well as
from the arts. The symposium will compile the research papers presented
into a book to be published in 2020.
If further information is needed, do not hesitate to send me an email.
We expect to receive a *250-word *abstract by* 1 March 2019*
(send to [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
or [log in to unmask]).
full CfP below
*§*
*Monstrous Ontologies. Politics, Ethics, Materiality *
Fantastic animals, evil criminals, notorious neighbourhoods, mysterious
objects, invisible ideologies, unspoken laws: monstrosity can take
different shapes, crossing the boundaries between the visible and the
thinkable, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, as an uncanny
atmosphere always on the verge of being materialised and individualised in
the monsters that populate collective imagination, biological taxonomies,
legal discourses, and moral panics. Contemporary critical thought has done
much to frame monstrosity as reflecting the cultural anxieties of the
contexts from which it is drawn. Accordingly, much of its wider
significance has been located in the affective impact and emotional
salience of monsters: the ability to become fearsome, to provoke feelings
of disgust, but also to agglomerate desire around a not fully-explored
alterity, and create curiosity towards their embodied transgression.
Insofar as a purely cultural construction depending on the transgression of
given (social, cultural, moral, biological) norms, monstrosity has been
critically demystified, by challenging its insidious categorisations of the
other (species, body, race, gender) as monstrous. While, as the current
climate forcefully shows, it is necessary to challenge these monstrous
*otherings* and their perverse socio-political effects, we do contest the
consequent reduction of monstrosity to a mere cultural construction of the
other. Against this dialectical definition, we do claim that monstrosity is
not a merely epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological
reality.
There is a more that the monster embodies and communicates, a monstrous excess
that materially resists being ingested within an order (it is this very
resistance that is unbearably shown and viscerally exposed by the disgust
the monster elicits), and yet cannot be placed in a negative, dialectical
opposition to that order either. Reason, Language, Law, Science and other
conceptual mechanisms do not simply produce monsters (as their dialectical
counter-part), they rather capture, domesticate and naturalise them within
their own system, denying their monstrous excess. As George Canguilhem
suggests, the sleep of reason does not generate monsters: it liberates
them. While monsters may be said to be the end product of discursive
rhetorics, normative pressure, and bio-political apparatuses, we suggest
monstrosity to be inherently excessive to them. As such, understanding
monstrosity means to radically challenge not only the (legal, social,
political) categories we use, but also the very mechanisms of
categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies
the profound ethical and political dimension that monstrosity forces us to
acknowledge, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing
monstrosity, and requires facing its uncomfortable, appalling, and
revealing materiality. This is the challenge this symposium addresses,
encouraging participants to do so by engaging with questions such as (but
not limited to):
• What makes a monster a monster?
• What is the material reality of monstrosity?
• What is the advantage of approaching monstrosity ontologically?
• What would a monstrous ethics look like?
• What is the political potential of a monstrous ethics?
• Human, nonhuman, inhuman monsters.
• Monsters, fear and the politics of affect.
• Invisible monsters: atmospheres, ideologies, structures.
• Is gender monstrous?
• Monstrosity, violence, resistance
*Organisers*
Caterina Nirta, University of Roehampton
Andrea Pavoni, DINAMIA’CET, ISCTE-IUL, University Institute of Lisbon
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