![Acts of reading. Non-philosophy and humanities](https://www.fabula.org/actualites/documents/111229_c031a67248c56ff4d67737b3daba071e.png)
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
ACTS OF READING: NON-PHILOSOPHY AND HUMANITIES
NEH Comparative Literature Symposium
University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma (USA)
Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th February 2024.
Organizer: Karl Pollin-Dubois (karl-pollin@utulsa.edu)
Inaugurated by François Laruelle in the 1990’s, non-philosophy is an experimental and heretic mode of thinking that aims, among others, to revisit the presuppositions and foundations that cement the way western Philosophy ultimately not only influences but also supervises our logocentric textual constructions. As a discipline, philosophy claims indeed to have the ability to tackle any possible worldly topic, and to extract an intelligible meaning from it, at the risk of ignoring multiple elements (silences, affects, background noises…) that resist its own power of rational harmonization.
Far from contradicting philosophical interpretations – the same way non-Euclidian mathematics do not contradict Euclidian geometry -, non-philosophy questions primarily our ability to rely on stable premises to do justice to the texts we read, beyond their specific institutionalized positions within literary/philosophical history. To do so, non-philosophy suggests first, through its principle of philosophical self-sufficiency, that philosophical materials, as such, have an inner theoretical consistency that enables scholars and students to orient all their textual readings based on the production of an ultimate decipherable, communicable “meaning” (often devolved nowadays to a basic “message” or “pitch”). It offers then readers/students/scholars the possibility to construe texts otherwise, by inviting them to experiment with language, and to approach the “Real” from a perspective that questions, in every disciplinary field, the idea that Philosophy, along with mainstream institutionalized theory, would remain in a privileged position to secure and validate the legitimacy of our own experience with texts.
Due possibly to its initial scientific ambitions, non-philosophy has never addressed directly so far its possible connections to literature, in the broadest sense of the term. This colloquium aims at giving scholars the opportunity to do so, by inviting them to imagine what could be a non-philosophical reading of a literary text.
While being primarily a Comparative Literature symposium, this interdisciplinary international colloquium, besides literature (taken in a very broad way), will also be open to other disciplines, such as Philosophy, Religion Studies, Political Science, Gender Studies, History/Art History, Film/Media Studies or Anthropology, since all these fields involve an initial act of reading.
Possible research topics:
- Reading “texts” in a non-philosophical way.
- Non-philosophical approaches to literature/film
- Non-Philosophy and “literature”
- Revisiting Art, Politics and Religion through Non-Philosophy
- Non-philosophical approaches to sex & gender.
- Non-philosophy and post-colonial studies.
- Any other contribution is welcome, as far as participants unpack in their initial abstract the connections between non-philosophy and the specific “text” they would like to read.
All presentations will be given in English.
Please e-mail your abstract before March 1st 2023 to Karl Pollin-Dubois: karl-pollin@utulsa.edu