ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Animal Symbolicum — Homo Sapiens — Barbarian — Human — Woman — Overman — Counter-Human — Fellow-Human — Inhuman — Subhuman — Being-There — Being-With — Human Rights — Bare Life — Singularity — Immanent — Silence —

“The ‘I’ is a placeholder for the human voice.” This list, which could be expanded, testifies to the struggle we face as we try to assert ourselves in and through language. We find words for ourselves or for others. And we act on those words. Therefore, we also again and again need to free ourselves from those words, rebel against and reject them, extricate themselves from the languages to which they belong. Through language we negotiate our differences, assert what is important to us. We express and mask our respects and contempts, and we claim and reclaim our dignity. The “human” is a value in the sense of Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral — a value subject to constant and multiple re-valuations, as difficult to surrender, as it is to assert. Any use of that term today requires a rigorous examination and awareness of the field of struggles surrounding the place of the “human” in language. We seek submissions, which explore instances of this struggle of the “human” as a value, and the search for alternatives. How have writers, philosophers, artists or human rights advocates grappled with this problem? We look for a variety of perspectives and media in the arenas of discourse, culture, postcolonialism, race, gender, and nationality.

Friday, March 24

Thomas Reinert, University of North Carolina
“Video Games and the Human”
Louis-Georges Schwartz, University of Iowa
“A-Cinematic Life - Moving Images and the Philosophy to Come”
Sabine I. Gölz, University of Iowa
“‘The I is the Placeholder of the Human Voice’ - Text and Life in Bachmann, Benjamin, and Agamben”
Martin Crowley, University of Cambridge
“Humanism Without”

Saturday, March 25

Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Binghamton University
“‘All in two, two in one, one in All’ - Lou Andreas-Salome’s Re/valuing the Human”
Chung-min Tu, University of Delaware
“Becoming Woman is Becoming Human: Love and Trauma in Eileen Zhang’s Novels”
Barbara Agnese, University of Vienna, Austria
“Humanity’s and Inhumanity’s Paradigms - Folktale Elements in Ingeborg Bachmann’s and Elfriede Jelinek’s Gender Reconfiguration”

Sunday, March 26

Astrid Oesmann, University of Iowa
“The Mask and Human Multitude”
Maria Boletsi, Leiden University
“Renegotiating the Human and the Barbarian in C.P. Cavafy’s and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians”
Roger Cook, University of Missouri
“Lost (and Found) in Translation, Linguistic and Cultural Disorientation and the Reconfiguration of the Human Subject”
Aud Sissel Hoel, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
“The Spectacle of Deviancy: Reflections on a 19th Century Police Album.”