ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

The metaphysical view of the human involves, it has often been argued, a conceptual division between the sensible and the intelligible. If a new understanding of the human implies putting this conceptual scheme into question, it would mean that the senses–traditionally relegated to one part of this division–would have to be reconceived. How are we to understand the senses in a non-metaphysical way, how are we to conceive of the relationship they entertain between them, and how can we think the fact of their multiplicity–the (surprising?) fact that there are several senses? These are some of the questions that guide this panel on the conceptual revolution of the senses, a revolution that we assume contemporary thought is undergoing. Topics include: towards a new empiricism; skepticism and the misconception of the senses; metaphysics and the senses; a politics of the senses; the “outside” of the senses; the privation of the senses, e.g. blindness, deafness, callousness; anesthesia, synesthesia; the question of total art; the relationship between the multiplicity of the arts and the multiplicity of the senses. We welcome work on any historical period and linguistic tradition and in the disciplines of literature, philosophy, film, art history, political theory, psychoanalysis, and music.

Friday, March 24

Ulrich Baer, New York University
“Reading Rilke’s Sutures”
J. Chimene Bateman, University of Illinois at Chicago
“An Ethics of the Senses in Boccaccio’s Decameron”
Herschel Farbman, Harvard University
“Sense of Injustice”
Emily Sun, Colgate University
“Agee’s Ear”

Saturday, March 25

Lance Duerfahrd, Amherst College
“The Double Take: James Nachtwey’s Anti-War Photography”
Sara Guyer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“The Senses of Commemoration: Anthropomorphism and Memorialization in Rwanda”
Eyal Peretz, Harvard University
“Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses: A Reading of ‘Blow Out’”
Jared Stark, Eckerd College
“Spectacles of Death”