ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar will explore the following issues:

1. the institutionalization of revolutionary individualism as a function of the novel and other narrative and political forms (17th-18th century novels, Declaration of the Rights of Man)
2. the theorization of group psychology (and authoritarianism) provided by Sigmund Freud and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their studies of totemic religions and mass culture
3. the description of the multiplicity as a function of Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s account of power.

This panel will provide historical, literary and theoretical dimension to the debates on the shifting site of sovereignty and domination in debates about the ”Human.” It will insist that this understanding is vital to our work in humanities.

Friday, March 24

Philip Broadbent, University College, London
“The City and Its Bodies”
Gregory Flaxman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“Group Psychology and the Annihilation of the Eg”
Catherine Liu, University of California, Irvine
“Cultural Revolutions, Bourgeois Revolutions: Chinese Humanists and the Melodramatic Imagination”
Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania
“The Invention of Africa”

Saturday, March 25

Peter Gaffney, University of Pennsylvania
“Rise of the Demiurgic Machines: The ‘Human’ Through the Lens of Deleuzian Mechanics
Yun Peng, University of Minnesota
“Rethink the Individual: Lessons from Socialist Collectivism”
Eleanor Kaufman, University of California, Los Angeles
“Sartre, Deleuze, and the Series”