ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

In this seminar we will explore different conceptualizations of the relation between “affect” and “the body” as a translational mechanism crucial for establishing, producing and articulating the entities generally labeled as “human.” This seminar therefore aims at establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between traditional notions used to describe this crucially “human” dialectic, belonging primarily to different strands of psychoanalytic theory, and aesthetics, with other alternative ways of conceptualizing the nature of affect emerging within contemporary post-structuralist critical thinking, cultural studies and film theory. A key objective of the seminar will be to incorporate translation theory to the theoretical constellation at stake here in our attempt to discuss the mechanics of affect between particular “bodies,” since a process of “translatio” seems to take place not only in the production of affect, but most evidently in the different attempts to provide particular interpretations/readings of different modes of affect. Finally, and within this context, we will pose key questions concerning the very category of the “human” as the exclusive realm in which “affects” might be able to operate and thus investigate the possibilities for a more or less technologically sophisticated realm where “affects” manage to translate into their post-human or inhuman form(s).

Friday, March 24

Nicholas Balaisis, York University, Canada,
“Affect and Apparatus Theory”
Marija Cetinic, University of Southern California
“Memorial Sensation: Bodily Indeterminacy in the Archive”
Ann Gardiner, Philadelphia University
“Germaine de Stael and the Business of Translation”
Guilan Siassi, UCLA
“Dreaming the Body into Words: Translating Affect between Cultures in Khatibi’s Amour Bilingue”

Saturday, March 25

Carolyn Betensky, University of Rhode Island
“Affective Conversion in Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels”
Valerie Karno, University of Rhode Island
“Shame on the Human”
Homay King, Bryn Mawr College
“Empire of Signs: Enigma and Translation in Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain”
Gabriele Schwab, University California, Irvine
“Deadly Intimacy: The Psychology of Torture”