CFPs by Rachel Gardner
In the past fifteen years, so-called new materialisms have radically reshaped our way of thinking... more In the past fifteen years, so-called new materialisms have radically reshaped our way of thinking about matter by pointing to an excessiveness that determines the very materiality of matter. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost have argued: " materiality is always something more than 'mere' matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable. " At a time where not only the humanities and the social sciences face a renewed interest in materialism, but also where economies around the globe are facing crises brought on by their own excesses, this conference seeks to interrogate the resources that new materialisms might provide for reflecting upon the ways in which economy might attest, even in its failures, to the co-implication of matter and excess.
Invited Talks by Rachel Gardner
Selected Conference Papers by Rachel Gardner
Can we give an account of H.D.’s feminism that is both non-dialectizing and non-dilectizable—that... more Can we give an account of H.D.’s feminism that is both non-dialectizing and non-dilectizable—that is, one that neither reduces her work to its feminist dimensions nor subsumes these dimensions in the service of a larger project? I would like to suggest that this is, in fact, possible and to sketch one path such a thinking might take. To do so, I turn to the work of Jacques Derrida. While this is an odd gesture insofar as Derrida has always had a relatively uneasy relationship with feminism, one would be hard pressed to find a better thinker of non-dialectical possibility. And, indeed, Derrida has, in fact, written explicitly (albeit not uncontroversially) on a non-dialectical thinking of femininity in a short text called Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles.
Near the beginning of “Violence and Metaphysics” Derrida asks the question that I will take as my... more Near the beginning of “Violence and Metaphysics” Derrida asks the question that I will take as my reference point for the duration of this paper. “Can one,” he asks, “feign to speak a language?” An odd question to be sure. Is there a difference between speaking and feigning to speak? Can we ever tell if its one or the other? Indeed, if slightly rephrased, we might understand Derrida’s question as asking after the possibility not of speaking a secret language, but of secretly speaking a language. Shifting our attention to this other type of “secret language,” this paper asks not about code breaks or keys, but, rather, about a certain attunement that might do justice to this peculiar figure. More concretely, this paper looks at Derrida’s reading of Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” to argue that in counter-signing Levinas’s text with the figure of the feint, Derrida, activates Levinas’s thinking of alterity in a way that the text itself is unable to do.
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CFPs by Rachel Gardner
Invited Talks by Rachel Gardner
Selected Conference Papers by Rachel Gardner