ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

According to one etymology, the English word “man” shares a root with the Latin word for hand (manus.) Handiness is not first of all a definition of the human. Rather it functions as a gesture; the hand points to the human. Yet the hand that allows the human to be pointed out by pointing toward the ability to gesture also points away from the human (and from hands). Not only do apes’ gestures ape the human, but human gesture, when it imitates the non-signifying movements of nature, poses so grave a threat to human reason that Plato has to exclude the mimetic dancer, along with the poet, from the polis. This suggests what is at stake when theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Max Kommerell, Theodore Adorno, and recently Giorgio Agamben, turn to gesture as a mode of literary criticism, or even as the emblem of criticism itself. This seminar will address the question of gesture. Is gesture a sign of the human, or does it ask the human finally to sign off? Is the living being that gestures distinct from the zōon logon exon, the living being with language? And finally, what promise does gesture hold as a figure for literary criticism, or even for thought itself?

Friday, March 24

Michael LeMahieu, Clemson University
Missing the Point: Wittgenstein’s Ostensive Investigations”
Juliane Prade, J. W. Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main
“Organs for grasping language. Walter Benjamin’s Inquiry into the Ground for and Power of Naming”
Anthony Adler, Loyola University Chicago
“The Intermedial Gesture: Agamben and Kommerell”

Saturday, March 25

Paul North, Northwestern University
“Agamben’s Critical Gestures”
Christian Hite, University of Southern California
“One-Handed Reading (An Owner’s Manual?)”
John Reuland, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“You Shall Have the Body: Tropes, Gesture, and Ontological Parabasis in the Writings of Aristotle and Paul de Man”

Sunday, March 26

Melissa Geppert, University of Minnesota
“Cinematic Gesture in Teching Hsieh’s “One Year Performance”
Verena Kuzmany, University of Washington
“The mimetic gesture of puppetry”
Anthony Abiragi, New York University
“Prehistoric and Modernist Art in Nancy and Bataille”