Panels

Gender, Kinship, and the Body

In this panel, issues of violence and its relationship to gender, kinship structures, and iterability of the body will be worked through in the examination of a diverse set of texts. Themes raised include the mythologizing of taboo, the aestheticization of rape and mutilation, identity politics, feminism, and psychoanalysis.

Legacies of Domination, Colonialism, and Slavery

This panel will address the way that legacies of slavery, domination, and colonialism are engaged in narrative form and imagery. Panelists will address topics such as pedagogy, institutionalized violence, discourses of normativity, the juridical, nationalism, capitalism, lynching and other performances of racial violence, the cultural misuse of force, and the subaltern.

The Politics of Reconfiguring Discourse(s) of Violence: Problematics in the Dynamics of War and Gaming

Panelists Annette Rubado- Mejia, Matthew Lee Schilleman, and Mia L. McIver approach questions that require us to rethink our theoretical models of contestation in the forms of war and gaming. Mediating the challenges to these discursive bodies of theoretical knowledge with regard to the shifting relations and traveling forms of violence in their areas, panelists will draw on diverse objects of study to illustrate the exigency of reimagining our theoretical frameworks. Rubado- Mejia reads the film City of God to show that liberal political theory starting with Aristotle's split between the polis and the barbarous/natural obscures the ways that the polis produces the barbarous by naturalizing or ontologizing violence and war as imminent to certain locales and peoples and by ejecting those elements from the political. Schilleman examines the implicit structures of violence in military strategist John Boydıs theory of the game to suggest a reading of the game as an open, aporetic configuration in which the intersubjective relations of players are inextricably entangled. McIver offers a reading of Brechtıs Mother Courage and Her Children that troubles Foucaultıs theory of perpetual social war and that suggests the importance of reading the lines of differentiation between war and peace in all their ambiguity.

Recuperating Revolution and History

This panel will investigate the intersections of critiques of revolutions, and re-readings of historical discourses. How might critiques of revolution and revolutionary violence be used to re-think the notion of revolution and ideology? How might critiques of revolutions be steps towards a recuperation of such texts and histories? How can the tensions in the intimate relationship between violence and revolution be negotiated, and perhaps re-aligned?

Violence in Representation and Spectation

From the technological advancements in the representation of violence in film, to the conventions of mainstream horror, to the disruption of traditional narrative structures in post-dramatic theater, this panel explores the relationship between the rhetorical structures that allow the representation of violence and the effect of those structures on the media that produce them. At the same time, papers will treat the relationship between the representation of violence and its spectators.

Violence and the Performativity of Language

Initially, the topics of these three papers look somewhat disparate, a paper on Heidegger, one discussing the relationship between newspaper editorial material and riots in response to them, and a third discussing structures of legitimizing retribution in modern drama. However, there is an interesting common thread, the relationship between the performative quality of language and material acts of violence. All of them recognize a linkage between the two categories, but the way that linkage works cannot be reduced to causal or expressive linkage. Instead, this connection is fraught and contradictory.

Traumatic Histories

Through readings of histories of South Korea, Dresden, and American slavery, all of which can be variously, if not unproblematically, situated as "traumatic", this panel seeks to investigate the role of violence, both fracturing and formative, in the construction of collectivities, and to explore how the subjective "experience" of violence both conditions and disrupts the writing of shared pasts.

Legitimizing Violence

The legitimization of violence and the violence of legitimization will be the central concerns of this panel. In a reading of Augusta Weber's "The Sentence", Peter Leman analyzes the nineteenth century conflict between notions of natural law and positive law, that is, between a law that would stem from divine law and one that would be authorized by the sovereign. Tim Wong, beginning with Butler and Foucault and concluding with a reading of Genet's "The Maids", interrogates the complex relationship between narrativization and culpability. Finally, Rebecca Schuman, via Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and Robert Walser's "Jakob von Gunten", looks at the way in which violence, in the very attempt to legitimize it, necessarily annihilates itself.

Spinoza and the Vicissitudes of Violence

This panel seeks to come to terms with the question of violence by turning to 17th Century Dutch philosopher and heretic Benedict de Spinoza. Has violence an ontology? If so, what are the myriad forms violence assumes under this ontological banner? Or, if it is precisely that which annihilates ontological bearings, should we think of violence as something necessarily without being? What are the ethics of violence? Is violence simply universally reprehensible? Or are ethics themselves always already violent, thus rendering moot the very question? Exploring these and other fundamental questions our panel turns more specifically to interrogate a set of interrelated contemporary themes: affective responses to representational violence in horror film; racial difference and vulnerability; the politics of revolutionary violence; the ethics of hermeneutic practice; and the ³flesh² of the theologico-political. Spinoza, we maintain, offers a provocative idiom when approaching such themes. Where proponents of the Frankfurt school and of Poststructuralism have recently dominated the debate over the violence question, we hold that a sustained engagement with Spinoza yields tremendous potential to broaden and perhaps even confound that debate.