ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

The seminar interrogates the notion of “being at the threshold” as an ontologically scripted open (non)-place in conjunction with Agamben’s (2004:92) suggestion that “in our culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation of the animal and the human, in which one of the terms of the operation was also at stake in it. To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new - more effective or more authentic - articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that - within man – separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.” Papers address historical, theoretical, (bio)political, ethical and practical issues arising from various instantiations of the “open” in a zone of indistinction.

Friday, March 24

Paolo Bartoloni, The University of Sydney
“Renunciation: Heidegger, Agamben, Blanchot”
Ulrike Kistner, University of South Africa
“Allegories, Daemons, and Things – The (In)Human Between Messiah and Sovereign”
Matthew Hadley, University of Minnesota
“The Living and the Dead: Time and Agamben’s ‘Anthropological Machine’ in Late Capitalism”
Nathan Brown, University of California at Los Angeles
“[actual] entities, [inorganic] openings”

Saturday, March 25

Karin Hoepker, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg
“‘Intimate Caesurae’: Constructions and Transience of ‘Humanity’ in Recent Fiction”
Reingard Nethersole, Univ. of the Witwatersrand and Univ. of
Richmond
“Figuring Agamben’s Concept of the Threshold as Rupture of the Anthropological Machine”
Andrea Righi, Cornell University
“The Open and the Opening. A Dialogue on Biopolitics Between Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito”
Scott DeShong, Quinebaug Valley Community College
“Metaphysics of Ability: The Performative Threshold of Articulation”

Sunday, March 26

Hermann Herlinghaus, University of Pittsburgh
“The Concept of the Sacred at the Threshold”
Joshua Schuster, University of Pennsylvania
“Agamben, ‘Body Worlds’, and Intimate Uncanny Biology”
Matthew Stoddard, University of Minnesota
“Cellulose Humanitas: Nature,Vision, and Corporeality”
Djelal Kadir, Pennsylvania State University
“Responding”