ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar seeks to explore the effects of reaching the limits of Western epistemological and ontological discourses. The effects we have in mind encompass the storytelling function at work across the Western humanities: history, literature, philosophy, linguistics, film, etc. Our theoretical aim would be to collapse the various disciplines of the Western humanities into the same, which is to say, into the spacing of Derridean differance. We seek papers that solicit and disturb the epistemological privilege that the Western Academy, through its institutional authority, grants to the various disciplines in the Humanities. Thinking also of John Nash’s Equilibrium, our intention is that if no disciplines insist on epistemological privilege, a more open and intense dialogue can take place in the space of the same, which, we would insist, is a radical alterity. The notion of radical alterity we are operationalizing here outstrips the definition of the linguistic sign while at the same time giving rise to specific theoretical practices, in the Althusserian sense of this indexical expression. What kinds of positions do these theoretical practices enunciate in such disciplines as literary, cultural, and film studies? History, Philosophy, Linguistics? We look for papers that make increasingly explicit the global illocutionary force of deconstruction, the absent-present work of the erasure of the Western Humanities’ most precious concepts.

Friday, March 24

Peter Bornedal, American University of Beirut
“Will-to-Power and Reality-Principle — Understanding Nietzsche’s ‘Will-to-Power’ within the Context of Freud’s Neurological Writings”
John Drabinski, Hampshire College
“The Problem of Alterity in Godard’s Comment ça va?”
Danizete Martinez, University of New Mexico
“Ugly Scapegoats and the Weights on Their Backs: Deconstructing the Hunchbacks of Walter Benjamin Gunter Grass”
Justin Parks, University of New Mexico
“Midrash, Shibboleth, Date: Reading Alterity in Borges’s ‘The Secret Miracle’”

Saturday, March 25

Lauren Serotoff, Hofstra University
“The Human God: Assessing the Fabrication of a God Constructed Through Language”
Andrew Opitz, University of Minnesota
“Passionate Sarcasm and the Content of Human Aspirations: Interpreting Antonio Gramsci’s Reflections on the Politics of Irony”
Nels Olson, Independent Scholar
“What Kind of Man Are You?: Ed Crane as Post-Modern Man in The Man Who Wasn’t There”
Randall Gann, University of New Mexico
“Deconstruction and the Tramp: Marxism, Capitalism, and the Trace”

Sunday, March 26

Martine Tharp, University of New Mexico
“Hearing Stories: The Myth of the Inner Voice”
Stephane Symons, New School University
“Ruins and Ghosts, Rendering Representation into its Spectral Form”
Robin Runia, University of New Mexico
“Samuel Richardson’s Familiar Letters: Iterating the Call to Responsibility”
Hector A. Torres, University of New Mexico
“On Linguistics as a Postmodern Science: A Post-Structuralist Question”