Keynotes
Keynote 1
Department of Philosophy, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany
Pulling Strings Wins No Wisdom: Freud after Derrida
My paper concerns Freud's famous grandchild Ernst and his fort/da game as depicted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Derrida devotes a great deal of thought (and research) to this text and its tale of little Ernst's efforts to win back ("all gone/back again") his mother Sophie. Freud's daughter Sophie, the mother of little Ernst, is the "wisdom" in my title. Yet, as it turns out, nothing will win her back.
David Farrell Krell is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, where he was Chair of the Department from 1989 to 1992 and founding director of the DePaul Humanities Center in 1999. He has also taught literature and philosophy at the Universities of Essex, England and Mannheim, Germany, and currently teaches at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany as well as at DePaul. He has written eleven scholarly books and translated six volumes of philosophy. Among his books are: The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Indiana University Press, 2005), The Purest of Bastards: Works on Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Indiana, 1998), The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image, co-authored with Donald L. Bates (University of Chicago Press, 1997), Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and Body (State University of New York (SUNY) Press, 1997), and Lunar Voices: Of Tragedy, Poetry, Fiction, and Thought (Chicago, 1995). He has published some ninety articles in learned journals and anthologies on subjects ranging from the Presocratics and Plato, through German Idealism, to contemporary European philosophy, and on such themes as metaphysics, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. He is editor and translator of a wide range of books and articles by Martin Heidegger, including Basic Writings, Nietzsche, and Early Greek Thinking. His most recent academic book is an annotated translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles (SUNY, 2008). He has written short stories and screenplays and has published three novels with SUNY Press: The Recalcitrant Art: Diotima’s Letters to Hölderlin and Related Matters (2000), Son of Spirit (1997), and Nietzsche: A Novel (1996).
Keynote 2
Department of Philosophy and Literature, European Graduate School
Department of German, Northwestern University
The Singular Heterogeneity of the “I”: Freud and Derrida
From his earliest published writings to his latest, Jacques Derrida's texts remained in constant conversation with the writings of Freud. It was never a straightforward or easy dialogue, to be sure: “I write,” Derrida once said, “in order not to be analyzed.” But his writing, more than most, reflected an engagement with and an experience of Freudian psychoanalysis that was as intense as it was ambivalent. While acknowledging his enormous debt to Freud, Derrida also sought to put Freud in his place: “deconstruction” emerged as unthinkable without psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis also required deconstruction to be properly and productively interpreted. “Deconstruction” thus implicitly presented itself as a legitimate heir of psychoanalysis, and in some ways also as its successor, which might accomplish the tasks that Freud had discovered but had been unable to fulfill. The present paper explores one singular but significant aspect of the Auseinandersetzung of Derrida with Freud: namely, that involving the status of the first person pronoun, the “I,” a problem that occupied Derrida’s writing from Speech and Phenomenon until Rogues. This “I” forms the historial battlefield on which the ideal of an autonomous and sovereign subject discloses the heteronomy of its heritage. This heteronomy is elaborated by Derrida by means of the aporetical relationship of two quasi-concepts: "iterability" and "singularity." The iterable singularity of the first person singular casts new light on Freud’s “second topology,” which portrays the “I” as the non-sovereign negotiator between the irresistible urges of the “It” and the uncompromising demands of the “Super-I.” What results from such impossible negotiations is a split between "I" and "me" that calls into question the traditional notion of the "I" as a "first person." Such emergence of the dependence of the "I" upon the "me," far from establishing a reflexive unity between the two, opens the "first person" to its heterogeneity, and thus makes way for a future that might be something other than simply an extension of the past.
Samuel Weber is currently Professor of Philosophy and Literature and the Paul de Man Chair at the European Graduate School in Sass-Fee, Switzerland. He is also Avalon Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. He was previously Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the UCLA and served as Director of its Paris Program in Critical Theory. He has worked as a visiting professor at many universities in France and Germany and taught at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. Weber also served as dramaturgue at many German opera houses and theatres including those in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf. He was trained under Paul de Man and studied with Theodor Adorno whose work, Prisms, Weber co-translated into English. He has also translated the work of Jacques Derrida such as Limited Inc. (Northwestern University Press, 1988). In 1977, Dr. Weber co-founded and acted as editor of the journal Glyph. Published widely, his most critically acclaimed works include Benjamin's -abilities (Harvard University Press, 2009), Mass Mediauras: Essays on Form, Technics and Media (Stanford University Press, 1996), Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and The Legend of Freud (University of Minnesota Press, 1982). His interdisciplinary approach is notable in such publications as “Europe and Its Others: Some Preliminary Reflections on the Relation of Reflexivity and Violence in Rodolphe Gasché’s Europe, or the Infinite Task” CR: The New Continental Review (2009) and “‘Streets, Squares, Theaters’: A City on the Move—Walter Benjamin’s Paris” boundary 2 (2003). His current research projects include "Towards a Politics of Singularity" and "The Uncanny."
Keynote 3
Department of English, Kent University
Coming off Psychoanalysis
I will address the fictiveness and what Derrida calls the indirection of Freud’s thinking. Derrida more than once emphasises Freud’s courage and insists “it is not the Freudian theses that count the most.” He thinks of Freud’s early researches as “neurological fable” and takes up the term “theoretical fiction” from The Interpretation of Dreams. Fiction in this sense is not a short-cut: Derrida recognizes Freud’s patient, highly differentiated sense of how the “physical, neuronal or genetic sciences” contribute to his work. Fable and fiction have a patient, discontinuous and invented relation to truth, and they can, I want to say, bring us nearer than metapsychology to what Derrida calls “the specificity of the struggle waged by Freud.” To pursue the indirect experience of fiction I will read Freud’s “Family Romances” alongside Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” and Elizabeth Bowen’s “Notes on Writing a Novel.”
Sarah Wood is currently Professor of English at Kent University. She came to Kent from a tutorial fellowship at Mansfield College, at Oxford. She has experience teaching at Goldsmiths', Queen Mary, and the University of Gloucester. In 1993 she helped found Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities and remains on the journal's executive board. She is also one of the editors of the Oxford Literary Review. Dr. Wood is also a member of the Institute for Creative Reading and of the Centre for Modern European Literature. She recently presented a paper called "What happens to rigour after deconstruction?" at the International Conference on Deconstruction, "Living On: New Prospects for the Humanities," held at Jaqiellonian University from June 4 - 9, 2009 in Krakow, Poland. Her work combines literary interests with theoretical and creative aspects of writing and teaching. Her book-length publications include Derrida's Writing and Difference: A Reader's Guide (Continuum, 2009), Rules of Engagement: Blue Guitar with Jonathan Tiplady (Artwords Press, 2007), and Robert Browning: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2001). She has also edited two special editions of Angelaki titled Hotel Psychoanalysis (2004) and Home and Family (1995). Counted among her articles are "Centre-piece" Theory and Event (2009), "A New International, or What You Will" Oxford Literary Review (2008), "Dream-hole" Journal of European Studies (2008), and "Beauty and Admiration in Learning: Louise Bourgeois and Paul de Man" Parallax (2006). Her next book is a study of the sound of writing.
Keynote 4
Faculty of Architecture, McGill University
Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics
This paper seeks to open a space to meditate on what might be an appropriate architecture for our world, for a global civilization that continues to actualize a crisis that has been brewing since the European industrial and political revolutions of the eighteenth century. My wager is that architecture has indeed something specific to contribute: beauty matters and coincides with the common good, but this equation has to be understood properly and modulated by a sense of responsibility that goes far beyond global planning, gestural formal innovations resulting from sophisticated computations, and the notion of merely serving a client through codes of professional deontology. Ethics cannot be tabulated and made into a rigid code: it is not a matter of correct versus incorrect. Equally relevant, beauty cannot be assessed by philosophical logic; it is a question of emotion and longing - venustas (Latin) in architecture, the quality of Venus, or thaumata, according to the Greeks, a quality both seductive and terrifying - perhaps resonant at some levels with Freud’s uncanny.
Alberto Pérez-Gómez was born in Mexico City in 1949, where he studied and practiced architecture, receiving his Professional Degree in Architecture, Escuela Superior de Ingenieria y Arquitectura, from the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City (1971).
After doing postgraduate work at Cornell University, he was awarded an M.A. and a Ph.D. by the University of Essex (England). He has taught at universities in Mexico, Houston, Syracuse, Toronto, and at London’s Architectural Association. In 1983, he became Director of Carleton University’s School of Architecture. In January 1987, he was appointed Bronfman Professor of Architectural History at McGill University, where he chairs the History and Theory Post-Professional (Master’s and Doctoral) Programs. Alberto Pérez-Gómez has lectured extensively around the world and is the author of numerous articles published in major periodicals and books. He is also co-editor of a well-known series of books entitled Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture.
His book Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 1983) won the Hitchcock Award in 1984. Later books include the erotic narrative theory Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (1992); Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (co-authored with Louise Pelletier, MIT 1997), which traces the history and theory of modern European architectural representation, and which won a 1998 Association of American University Presses design award; and most recently, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (MIT 2006). In this last book, Dr. Pérez-Gómez examines points of convergence between ethics and poetics in architectural history and philosophy, and draws important conclusions for contemporary practice. Other of his recent contributions include: “The Glass Architecture of Fra Luca Pacioli,” Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture,Vol.4 (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press 2004); Architektur - Sprache: Buchstäblichkeit, Versprachlichung, Interpretation (Waxmann Verlag GmbH, 1998); Modernidad y Arquitectura en México (Gustavo Gilli, 1998); Paper Palaces (Yale University Press, 1998). Journals that have featured his work include Perspecta, AA Files, Design Issues, El Croquis, Arquitecturas Bis, ARQ, Intersight, Harvard Architectural Review, SKALA, VIA, The Fifth Column, Architectural Design, Journal of Architectural Education, Design Book Review. He has contributed entries to catalogues on the work of such artists as Geoffrey Smedley and Richard Henriquez, and to numerous exhibitions of architectural work, most recently to a new edition of the catalogue of The Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture’s exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art (New York).
Keynote 5
Department of English, State University of New York, Albany
Order Catastrophically Unknown
The ostensible point of departure of my paper is Derrida's "claim" from the "Envois" (The Post Card) that his "post card naïvely overturns everything [. . .] one begins no longer to understand what to come, to come before, to come after, to foresee, to come back all mean." That claim will be "tested" in relation to two principal hesitations in Freud, namely telepathy and the oceanic feeling, which can be interpreted as fault lines that run through certain architectonic structures of his theory (e.g., castration, repression). My analysis will draw on work by Nicholas Royle, Derrida's late work on animality, and ideas I have developed explicitly elsewhere (Prosthesis, Dorsality), in order to advance (again) the hypothesis of a psychic life, which, in its contrived rearrangements of energies, has always first had to reckon with functions of the inanimate.
David Wills is currently Joint Professor of French and English in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the Department of English at the University of Albany (SUNY). There, he is also Graduate Director of French Studies. He teaches courses on twentieth century literature, literary theory, and film. Prior to his appointment at SUNY in 1998, he was Chair of the French and Italian Department at Louisiana State University. Recently, Dr. Wills served as a keynote speaker at "The Post/Human Condition," the Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) held at the University of Auckland on December 3 - 5, 2008. His book-length publications include Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction (Stanford University Press, 2005), Prosthesis (Stanford, 1995), Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis with Alec McHoul (University of Illinois Press, 1990), Screen Play: Derrida and Film Theory with Peter Brunette (Princeton University Press, 1989), and Self De(con)struct: Writing and Surrealist Poetry (James Cook University Press, 1985). Counted among his articles are "Full Dorsal: Derrida's Politics of Friendship" Postmodern Culture (2005) and "Designs on the Body: Film/Architecture/Writing" Assemblage (1992). In addition to this, he has translated many of Derrida's works including The Gift of Death, Right of Inspections, and The Animal That Therefore I Am.