Contact

The Lacanian concept of the „phallic signifier”
stands for the desire of the other and its multiple forms of
association. In attaching itself to the (m)other, the infant
constantly endeavors to find out where the desire of the other
located. This attempt to identify the locus of desire is conditioned
by existential necessity, because, in order for the infant to survive,
it inevitably has to figure out what motivates the (m)other.
By pursuing a systemic approach, as propounded by Hellinger’s Systemic
Phenomenological Family Constellations, the most widespread form of
therapy in Europe nowadays, it will be possible to redefine the
„phallic signifier“ in Lacanian theory and ascribe concrete dynamics
to it. Hellinger argues that existential happenings, which had
occurred as far back as three generations, may still affect the
present system. If the past resurfaces in one way or another, and
singles out particular family members to commemorate it, then, from a
systemic perspective, the formation of attachments to the caretaker is
highly interesting. In fact, it will be argued that such formations
might be held accountable for the transmission of existential
happenings, which had happened a long time ago, yet
which still structure the psychic field of the caretaker, to explain
why there are repetitive patterns in a family history (genogram). Concretely, the formation of attachments suggests the occurrence of certain movements in the family system by which the infant incorporates issues, which clearly
transcend the present system, thereby pointing to existential nodes
located elsewhere in the genealogy. Hence, the phallic signifier does
not have to remain unfinished, incomplete and unnameable.

- Greg Bowden –

Sociology Department, Faculty of Arts,
University of Alberta.

Working at the Limit: Indoor Rowing and the Agony of Ecstacy

'Technologies of the self,' a concept developed by Michel Foucault,
refers to practices that bring about a certain mode of existence, a
certain form of subjectivity. Sport constitutes one domain of
technologies of the self, inasmuch as in sport athletes are brought to
work on their bodies and their selves in particular, disciplined ways,
in order to bring about certain transformations in their way of being
in the world. To illustrate this point, I will draw on the apparently
banal instance of 'indoor rowing.'
This activity appears at first glance to be a simple exercise of
physical labour, a sporting task exempt from elevated theoretical
concerns. However, I argue that the participants in this activity are
not merely performing a physical task, but in fact may be conducting
substantial work on their selves. Because of the taxing nature of this
activity, participants work at the limit of their capacities. While
those capacities are alternatively limited or transcended by such
subjective phenomena as drive, determination, or will, there is little
analysis or consideration given to how these characteristics
contribute to what is otherwise held to be a physical performance.
Taking up the Greek agônia, meaning 'mental contest,' and existanai,
meaning 'displacement from oneself,' I look at how the challenge of
indoor rowing can produce an 'agony of ecstasy:'indoor rowing is one
technology of the self where one can become who one is, and in which
one can become other than who one is, not merely in physical terms,
but via radical work
on one's subjectivity. However, such transformations are not
necessarily liberatory, a caveat to be discussed in detail with
reference to the dangers of objectification of the subject in sport.

- Leilei Chen –

Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
A Caged Spectator: The Traveling Self as a Bestiary of Modernity

While modern travel writers appear to enjoy the privilege of a mobile
observer, traveling around and reporting strange lands and exotic
cultures to their targeted domestic readership, they construct,
authenticate and naturalize a discourse of the Other as different,
alien, and oppositional to their home culture with which they identify
and affiliate themselves. My presentation aims to challenge the
authority of not only the traveling Self but also a myriad of texts
produced under the traveler’s gaze in terms of their consistent
codification of the binaries of Self and Other, Orient and Occident. I
argue that the authority of travel writers, just like the alleged
authority of the discourse they create, is nothing but an imagined
one. As travel writers, they seem to have access to the cultures they
travel to, yet their gaze – or the lens through which they gaze – has
been distorted by the preexistent system of knowledge on the Other, so
that modern travelers prove to be bestiary spectators who see behind
the bars of the
western epistemological and ideological cage. The travel discourse as
a textual corollary of such caged gazes, though participates in
solidifying the binary and hierarchical oppositions that are essential
to modern epistemology, inevitably documents the limitations of the
solidification: the discourse articulates dialectically modern travel
writers as confined observers whose writings cannot remain free from
but predicated upon the predominant western system of knowledge in
terms of Self and Other, and proves to be an architect of the
builders’ predicament. Contemporary travel literature on China will be
given special attention in making the above argument compelling.

- Frederick Cullum –
University of Northern British Columbia

The Great Chain of Refuse: Capitalist Allegories in the Insect Kingdom

The way capitalism creates social class distinctions based on who
produces in a society and who benefits from the production of the workers
is often constructed into allegories that compare human beings modes of
production and consumption to supposedly lower creatures such as social
insects whose drones also produce for the benefit of their queen. In
Neo-Victorian novels these allegories that compare humans to social
insects or other animals are designed to write against the theory of the
great chain of being that designates all life to a predestined position
within societies of humans and larger ecological scales as well. The
allegories that present middle and lower class humans as comparable to
ant drones serving their fattening queen illustrate the reality of how
goods and services were consumed in the Victorian era and still are
consumed today in excess by the literally or metaphorically fattening
rulers of our economic world. The roles of women as inequal beings even
in positions of higher social and economic power are expressed within the
allegories, an example being the queen insect’s sole function is to
produce children. Postcolonial issues of race are also addressed within
these allegories, providing images of insect races that invade, displace
or assimilate each other and how that affects the behavior and the
livelihood of the insect. These allegories challenge our hegemonic
beliefs that we are superior over the other animals as well as the Other
within our own societies such as people of different sexes, genders,
sexualities and races.

- James Czank –

Department of Political Science
University of Alberta

Of Fetishes, Identity, and Substance: What We Can Learn from
Horkheimer and Adorno

This is a look at one of the ways in which the character of
contemporary society has led to the decay of the individual; which is
to say, how the contemporary focus on identity has undermined the
substance of individuality. It is accomplished by looking at how it is
diagnosed by T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer; by extrapolating from some
of their texts/articles I believe that I can identify what is at
issue, and address what I feel is a very ‘obscure’ solution. I will
also be asking whether there is any positing of a necessary
substantive ethic that would counter this self-destructive trend of
contemporary society. Maybe I can best explain the approach I am
taking as a look at the non-substantive element informing the identity
of the modern individual - as explored by two of the prominent
frankfurters.

- Jean-Jacques Defert –

Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
University of Alberta

Nation Building – Network Metaphors in Social Discourse

- Michael Ethen –

Department of Musicology
McGill University

Existing in Subordination: Popular Music, Midgets, and a Vicious Cycle
of Identity

The diminutive size of midgets casts them into a permanent state of
public visual otherness. In the entertainment business, where such uniquely ‘other’ qualities become distinguishing trademarks, some midgets aspiring to
that lifestyle have advantageously used their size disparity in
marketing schemes. While these midgets seem to be the primary agents
of their career trajectory, powerful personalities in popular music
accrue even more status by exploiting both actual and hypothetical
midgets. This paper explores the complexities of midgets in popular
music from both sides of the issue.
Those with minority physical traits frequently employ various
types of humor tactics in order to disarm the potentially
uncomfortable situation that obtains at meeting situations. Midgets
who perform on stage, then, strategically and intentionally magnify
this humor by focusing attention on the visual difference. As
situational and methodological groundwork, this paper describes some
of the means with which contemporary musical impersonators ironically
portray themselves. Results of humor-as-disarmament, however, assume a more
foreboding tone when in the hands of non-midgets. Developing theories
proffered by Homi Bhabha, this paper examines some of the multifarious
uses of stereotypes in the representation of midgets with case studies
of extremely recognizable industry names: Snoop Dogg, Ludacris, and R.
Kelly. Brand-name acts such as these rely on what Judith Butler calls
the “the production and maintenance of those socially dead,” a theory,
expounded upon here, which exposes the dehumanizing qualities inherent
in the deployment of such pernicious stereotypes. At bottom, the
model of consumption that results offers an ominous analog to the
relationship between industry executives and consumers. This paper
seeks to enrich the collective understanding of the predatory nature
foundational to this facet of the American popular music industry.

- Rui Feng –
University of Alberta

Graphomaniac Revelation: Chinese Subculture via Online Writing

A language can be viewed as a key to the cultural past as well as
present of a society (Salzmann, 2004), especially when online
graphomania renders almost everybody into a writer (Kundera, 1996).
Stilus virum arguit, and each writer has a linguistic ‘thumb-print’
collectively betraying a subculture transmitted from one generation to
the next. To study the subculture revealed via online writing, we
isolated and characterised several Chinese forums and analysed
interactions between surfers using principles based on Transactional
Analysis, linguistic anthropology, positive psychology, and
stylistics. Supported with genre analysis and corpus linguistics, we
recorded online interactions from some specific writers, and also
randomly selected some general interactions without tracing writers.
When our pilot data is analysed we found that online writing, hidden
behind a mask or masks, reveals more of the ugly side than ‘the good,
the true, and the beautiful’. Our findings confirmed that language,
genetically endowed, is a mirror of reality, while reality is also a
mirror of language. Reality, especially social reality, from which a
culture is formed, is approximated by the language that mirrors the
culture or subculture. Our study concludes that masked online writing
in Chinese language revealed vividly a subculture Geremie R. Barmé
(1992; 1999) termed Liumang Subculture, also supported by literature
published very recently. For further studies, more examples need to be
collected to understand deeply the root of the subculture and its various
behavioural dynamics.

- Alzira Guesdes –
Université de Coimbra, Portugal

Baudelaire et Flaubert, précurseurs de la modernité...

Les principaux vecteurs de travail visent à établir un
parallélisme entre les affinités et les divergences de Baudelaire afin
de prendre conscience que la modernité est surtout une question de
langages, complexes et ambigus, c'est aussi la représentation du
présent. L'abordage théorique de la modernité nous conduit au concept
qui, apparemment, lui est opposé: la tradition. La nécessité de faire
référence à «la tradition moderne» surgit alors. Le recours à la
pluralité permet la fusion entre la tradition et la modernité.
Cependant, la modernité est surtout rupture de l'horizon d'attente,
d'où la dialectique et les paradoxes de la modernité ou l'art et la
vie qui donnent naissance à une nouvelle écriture de la modernité.
Nous essayerons de suivre trois lignes thématiques identiques
pour l'éxégèse du corpus choisi, à partir les oeuvres de Baudelaire et
Flaubert .
Le premier thème exprime la modernité - l'héroïsme de la vie moderne
(pour Baudelaire) et la satire, la bêtise, la niaiserie et les autres
manifestations du "gueuloir" flaubertien. Le deuxième rôde autour des
antinomies et paradoxes baudelairiens et flaubertiens...La référence
aux styles des auteurs (troisième thème) est inévitable. Ces auteurs
sont à la fois proches et distants, l'émotion est là mais tout n'est
pas dit...Dans la conclusion, nous rappelerons les principales
caractéristiques de la modernité, nous vérifierons à quel point
Baudelaire et Flaubert sont encore modernes.

- Adnen Jdey –

Département de Philosophie
Université de Tunis, Tunisie

Esthétique de la violence originaire : acéphalité de la pensée ou
exigence d'affect?

Mon travail se basera sur l'examen du concept de
violence d'un point de vue esthétique, à partir d'une double
interrogation dont le paradigme est une pratique artistique
contemporaine (David Nebrada) qui se laisse lire à la lumière de la
pensée de Georges Bataille.
Cette interrogation vise dans un premier temps la mise en immanence
du rapport
Violence-Affect,en déjouant les possibilités risquées qu'a l'art
contemporain en propre de (se) violenter pour "faire de l'art";elle
entend saisir dans un second temps la teneur esthétique dont se tisse
toute violence artiste qui fonde son acéphalité,sa démesure et son
pathos de transgression en raturant la loi (le système) qui la
soutient. L'hypothèse de ma recherche est de reconnaitre à la
violence,aussi bien présente dans la pratique de l'art qu'inscrite
fonçièrement dans tout exercice de pensée, une légitimité esthétique
et donc existentielle .La violence originaire,qui nous sous-tend en
même temps qu'elle nous suscite, est par définition une violence
artiste dont il n'est possible que de témoigner.Car en ce sens, faite
ou subie, cette violence module le réel en en témoignant d'une part,et
récupère ses traces en les élevant à l'affect d'autre part. A la
limite, et à y consentir, l'exercice esthétique d'une telle violence
ne peut s'interdire de véhiculer le réel méme du témoignage : bref, l'intémoignable. C'est
à étre identifiée et égale à l'affect qui supporte le témoignage que
la violence originaire est strictement l'évenement en propre -
évenement qui n'a de sens que dans la mesure où on en témoigne
violemment et charnellement.

- Ahmed Kaboub–

ERILILIUM - groupe de recherche en Litterature et Linguistique de l'Universite du Maine

"Les Amours jaunes" de Tristan Corbière ou la révolte d'un "Maître-philosophe cynique".

A partir du recueil de poèmes intitulé "Les Amours jaunes" de Tristan
Corbière, poète de la seconde moitié du 19 ème siècle, nous allons
démontrer comment avec Corbière l'angoisse liée à la modernité est
mise en scène à travers des poèmes où il s'interroge sur la portée du
langage et la valeur du mot. Corbière nous invite à voir des analogies
avec le questionnement de Rmibaud dans la lettre dite du Voyant et
nous rappelle les réflexions mallarméennes sur le "Mot total". Le
théâtre de la poésie de Corbière s'appuie une typographie toute
particulière qui mime le désenchantement et l'angoisse d'un exil
forcé. L'écriture de la déconstruction acquiert chez l'auteur des
"Amours jaunes" la portée d'une révolte et anticipe sur la vision du
néant que projette Le coup de dès de Mallarmé.
Nous soulignerons à travers divers exemples comment "Les Amours
jaunes" traitent de manière originale la question de la liberté et
de la réclusion, et particulièrement dans un poème aussi paradoxal que
"Libertà". Par ailleurs nous notre montrerons que la polyphonie
corbiérienne faisant altérner les voix de l'ironie et du lyrisme
dramatique,nous livre le spectacle d'un monde terrible où la douleur
et la misère du peuple sont dépeintes par petites touches réalistes.
En outre nous révélerons comment le réalisme conduit à l"irrationnel
dans le tourbillon des visions hallucinnées qui se manifestent dans de
nombreux poèmes tel que "Cris d'aveugle".

- Khadija Khalife –

Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures
Portland State University, Oregon

L'homme moderne entre tendances de bestialité et espérance de divinité
La question des rapports entre l’homme et le monde – ou le Sujet et
l’Objet –, s’est posée depuis la présence de l’homme sur terre quand,
d’après la Bible, Dieu demanda à Adam et Eve d’exploiter la terre afin
de survivre. Au cours de l’histoire, la question de l’individualité
et de la subjectivité humaine a revêtu d’importance au XVIe siècle
grâce à une position intellectuelle humaniste qui s’opposait à la
mentalité médiévale. Plutôt que d’un conflit entre le Moi et le Monde,
l’Humanisme proposait une « réconciliation de l’homme avec le monde
présent» . Dans nos temps modernes, les rapports entre le Moi et le
Monde extérieur sont tellement diverses qu’ils ne peuvent pas être
définis dans une formule unique. D’une part, nous assistons à la
maîtrise par l’homme des codes scientifiques ainsi qu’à la propagation des droits et des
libertés (théoriques) de l’homme, et, d’autre part, nous assistons à
cette image de l’homme asservi par d’autres codes imposés dans les
milieux où il vit. Les progrès de la science dans tous les domaines
(médical, militaire, architectural, spatial, informatique, etc.)
s’avèrent tous les jours et n’ont pas besoin d’être ici vérifiés.
Notre préoccupation porte sur la servitude de l’homme. En effet, de
nos jours, le Sujet humain, s’il veut paraître ‘moderne’, ne peut pas
se contenter d’avoir été professionnellement impeccable ; il devrait
participer à un minimum d’activités collectives et posséder certains
articles matériels devenus pour lui nécessaires. Autrement dit, il y a
de si fortes pressions sur le sujet ‘moderne’ que celui-ci risque, à
défaut de se conformer aux attentes des autres, de se faire attribuer
la schizophrénie ou bien je ne sais quelle tare psychologique.

- Salvador Leetoy –

Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
University of Alberta

Alternative Public Spheres and Democratic Participation in Mexico: The
Neozapatista Dilemma.

The purpose of this presentation is to analyze to what extent the
indigenous insurrection of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional (EZLN) has renovated a number of debates around the public
sphere in Mexico. Some of the EZLN’s neuralgic claims have been
addressed in the urgent necessity of the unconditional and factual
integration in the national agenda of the indigenous peoples. Namely,
the (neo)zapatismo reacts not only against political and economical
inequalities and historical injustices that have condemned them to
extreme poverty conditions, but against an hegemonic system which does
not recognize the potentiality of these peoples to decide about their
own communitarian aspirations. Legislative recognition of indigenous
practices and an active participation of these communities in a
constitutional system able to avoid discriminatory practices
are some of the quintessential demands of this indigenous movement.
Jurgen Habermas’ concept of public sphere will be the
dialectical departing point to this discussion. It will provide the
framework to debate about the importance of the opening of alternative
spheres and its possibilities as spaces of resistance and debate in
Mexico. Despite of the difficulties of the habermasian theory to solve
complex cultural and historical structures out of a Eurocentric
perspective, its contribution is quite useful in order to understand
power relations between the State and the citizen in a democracy.
According to this, a series of reconsiderations will be made in terms
of the integration of non-privilege groups –i.e. the indigenous
peoples in Mexico- in alternative public spheres, and its potentiality
as a source of agency in the competition for political spaces. Hence,
this analysis intends to remark the necessity of a more
inclusive democratic perspective (i.e. deliberative and radical) where
different voices belonging to the most diverse groups of the civil
society have complete access to public discussions in order to build a
more egalitarian national system.

- Nicolas L’hermitte –

Département de Philosophie
Université Paris IV – La Sorbonne

Un sujet pour le Sujet

Moi, sujet moderne, suis-je en état de déborder ma propre forme
discursive, de me représenter comme au dehors d’une dimension symbolique ? Ou bien –
m’est-il encore possible de faire entrer, au sein même du discursif,
un mode oral qui rende possible d’assumer ce poids de la disparition
du cogito ? Il me vient à l’esprit qu’un des paradigmes d’expression
du Sujet moderne pourrait être celui de l’autobiographie et de tous
ses avatars. Ils marquent à eux seuls l’exploration
des différents champs de l’autoréflexivité du sujet moderne. Partant,
de cette nécessité du signifiant comme seul mode de communication du
Sujet moderne (et comme constitutif de celui-ci), comment dépasser
l’aporie suivante : si le sujet n’est pas cause du langage mais son effet, il n’en reste pas
moins toujours brisé dans la mesure où « la parole est le meurtre de
la chose » (Lacan) et le Sujet de l’énonciation toujours séparé de
celui de l’énoncé. Les voies traditionnelles de représentation du
Sujet, ses modes de pensée, telle que l’autobiographie, ont été
remplacés par de nouvelles expérimentations narratives. Comme si
l’enseignement psychanalytique avait eu un direct effet sur la
littérature, vivier de l’expression subjectivale, les auteurs ont eu
ce commun désir de matérialiser la thèse lacanienne selon laquelle
seul le discours brisé est adéquat au sujet brisé. Ainsi, Moi, sujet
moderne, je me propose de voir chez quelques auteurs littéraires
(Roth, Doubrovsky, Gary) par quelles ruses littéraires ils ont tenté
de rendre compte et de contourner les difficultés inhérentes à dire
son Sujet. Voir comment chez ces écrivains (et Derrida, de façon
posthume, dans L’animal que donc je suis) la brisure du sujet a été
mise au carré, aussi bien par le dédoublement de l’autobiographe (sa
déclinaison jusqu’en dans l’Autre) que par un discours devenu à la
fois fictif et factuel ; au total, voir comment l’expérience la plus intime par définition (se dire soi-même) ne trouve, avec l’émergence du sujet moderne, une réponse
satisfaisante - un sujet au Sujet - que dans le regard de l’Autre et
l’abandon d’une stricte adéquation au réel.

- Lynn Lunde -

Anthropology
University of Alberta

Mummers, Janneys and Naluyuks of Newfoundland and Labrador

Masked and costumed figures carrying sticks, moving in groups through
communities at night, banging on doors, gaining entrance to homes -
unidentifiable figures known for erratic, unconventional and often
violent behaviour, the mummers, janneys and naluyuks move through the
physical and social landscape during the mid-winter period. Each
tradition contains elements from northern Europe, with the naluyuk
tradition also displaying Inuit influences. The similarities and
differences of the mummering, janneying and naluyuk traditions can be
viewed from a number of vantage points: the visual elements (masking,
costuming, behaviour), the intent of participant anonymity, separate
historical contexts, as a means of social control within and
re-commitment to their communities, as platforms for resistance to
governing authority, as components of cultural identity, and
as entertainment.

- Graham Lyons –
Simon Fraser University, BC

Which Walter? Staging the Self as Dialectic in Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary

While Walter Benjamin is perhaps best known as a prominent Marxist
critic and theorist of art and translation, his autobiographical works
deserve a renewed level of attention—both as theoretical texts and as
works of literature. Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, my example for the
purposes of this presentation, is an important literary work in its
own right, but it also engages and enacts the theoretical concerns
that run through much of his other work. Ostensibly a personal
account of a six-week stay in Moscow in 1926-27 upon the invitation of
actress and lover Asja Lacis, the Diary in fact works through
contradictions of theory and practice—the contest between Benjamin’s
Marxist methodological bias (particularly historical materialism) and
his distaste for “mass[es] of bulkily clad people” on the Moscow
streets, in the centre of Marxist-Leninist activity. Indeed, though
self-indulgently epistolary, Benjamin’s voice in the text shifts
surprisingly quickly from political analyst to erudite allegorist to
contrite poet-lover. The narrative trades off between engaged political
activity (mostly in-depth discussion with prominent politicos and
attendance at communist theatre productions) and bourgeois tourism
(bartering for and buying toys and trinkets, touring cathedrals and
Jewish temples, wandering the Moscow streets, etc.)— ultimately ending
in heartbreak and abandonment. Is the Walter Benjamin we encounter in
the Moscow Diary a failed Marxist, wedded to an elitism, an
individualism, or an indecisiveness he cannot escape? Or
alternatively, is the Walter Benjamin we encounter a carefully
constructed dialectic, working through contradictions to demonstrate
the complexity of literary and political association in a city of both abject poverty
and potentially revolutionary Marxism? In my paper, I would like to explore the ways
in which Benjamin’s Moscow Diary is a surprisingly multivocal text that reveals, most
acutely, Benjamin’s complex sense of self by
staging his various crises of subjectivity in a contradictory locale.
This is not to judge Benjamin, per se, but to acknowledge the subtlety
of his self-portrait—less as proletarian martyr and more as site for
contestation (political, personal, and sexual).

- Hector MacIntyre –

Department of Philosophy
University of Alberta

Professor Zwicky on the Priority of the Spatial

To the organizers' list of modern dichotomies I would add that of
dimensional space and time. The association of human understanding
with temporality, rather than spatiality, has achieved dogmatic status
in Continental thought. Heidegger has left us with a robust distinction
between time and originary temporality, on which basis it is argued that
human being as human understanding is essentially temporal. Time as a
metric idea is wholly derived from a more basic temporality that
existentially grounds understanding as a transcendental horizon of the
possible. Professor Zwicky has noted that Heidegger employs purely
spatial terms to characterize this horizon and the ecstatic unity
which opens on this region. In her works Lyric Philosophy (1992) and
Wisdom & Metaphor (2003), she makes clear the priority of spatiality
for understanding. There is a certain affinity between her
designation of the priority of spatiality and Heidegger's account of
the priority of the possible. My session will explore this affinity
and its implications for our understanding of/as space, time and
temporality. Key questions for my enquiry concern our ability to
achieve clarity on the question of temporality, our preoccupation with
the dichotomous relation between dimensional space and time, and the
importance of Zwicky's work in establishing the priority of spatiality for an account of understanding. Possibility as a fundamental meaning shared by both spatiality and
temporality entails a questioning of this traditional dichotomy.

- Kristy McKay –

Department of Comparative Literature
University of Alberta

Anarcho-Indigenism and the Arche of the Story

'Anarcho-Indigenism' is expressed by Mohawk philosopher Taiaiake
Alfred as an ethical framework through which to re-approach a Native
cultural and political resurgence within Canada. This involves a
steadfast commitment to the rejuvenation of cultural and spiritual
foundations. Change is actively pursued, through a radical insistence
on non-compliance with institutions that currently dominate
Indigenous-State relations.
This movement requires the cooperation of individuals on an intensely
personal level: "The theory of change is the lived experience of the
people... Their lives are a dynamic of power generated by creative
energy flowing from their heritage through their courageous and unwavering determination
to recreate themselves and act together to meet the challenges of the
day"(Alfred, 22). From a preliminary reading of Alfred's recent work,
"Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom", the following
question comes to mind: what is the ability of an indigenous
expressive mode,storytelling, operating within the domain of English
Canadian Literature, to further the aims represented by the
Anarcho-indigenist movement? To address this question, I look toward
the transformative potential of storytelling as it is represented by
Thomas King in his 2003 Massey Lecture Series, "The Truth About
Stories: A Native Narrative".

- James Martell de la Torre –

Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Kansas

Hamlet’s Rest (of silence): The Telos of a Declension.

“The rest is silence” Hamlet, V, II

The last words of Hamlet point to the depths of the play insofar as
they call our attention to the depths of Language itself. The sentence recreates an
analogy between ‘Rest’ and ‘Silence’, showing us that all that remains
after all-has-been-said is the background and the fundament of any
word, written or spoken. This background is not a dark abysm, or a
total Absence, but the deferral that prevents us – necessarily – from
distinguishing Absence and Presence. In this sense, Hamlet’s discourse
–what he says and what remains unsaid- can illustrate and expand the
Derridian notion of différance. La différance, being the notion that
allows us to envision the differences as traces, prior to the
Heideggerian lost difference between Being and the beings (as that one
of Presence and present), points also to the reign of Consciousness
and Self. But at the same time, it calls our attention to the
difference between these last two elements.
Within both of them, the realm of the Proper appears as the house
(Oikos) that binds them in regard to the greek telos. But it is
precisely in the ambiguity of the telos, of ending, where we can
discern a gap illustrated by the notions of ending (goal) and
mortality. It is through Hamlet’s (almost) inhuman consciousness where
we can discern this division, this deferral, as the moment when the
oblivion of Consciousness separates the conscious-subject from the
self, while at the same time –as H. Bloom points out-, allowing the
proliferation of multiple selves.
I propose that in Hamlet we see this limitless Consciousness that
reminds us of the (necessary) oblivion of the limits of the self. It
is a necessary oversight of a (“lost”) difference that, as la
différance, works silently in the spaces through which the words play
(within the play).

- David Martin –

Department of English
University of Alberta

Wittgenstein’s Ordinary Language Rules and Thirteen Ways of Looking at
Birds in Ulysses

In James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, birds are a
complex symbol for Stephen Daedalus’ new sense of freedom, his power
as an artist to see beauty in the world, and the potential for art to
act as a transcendent force. However, in Joyce’s Ulysses birds are not
as clearly symbolic or as simple to categorize. After creating an
index of all the bird words in Ulysses, I chose several examples of
birds in an attempt to explore their interpretive possibilities using
both Wittgenstein’s ordinary language rules and his “use” theory of
meaning, as well as using Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird” as a bird counter-text.
According to Wittgenstein, one can investigate the rules or
usages of language without constructing an absolute theory that holds
for all usages of language. Wittgenstein’s belief that one must
“break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always
serves the same purpose” can be used to explain my approach to bird
words: there are many ways that bird words work within Ulysses
(including the symbolic), but there is not necessarily a unifying
theory that will explain their overall place within the text.
Stevens’ poem acts as a launch for bird ideas and possible readings of
birds in Ulysses, but it also reveals the limits of arbitrarily
bringing together two texts for analysis.
Bird words are best understood using Wittgenstein’s ordinary language
rules: the rule or meaning of a bird word will hold for its specific
application in a passage of the text, but it will not necessarily
apply to all instances of that particular word. His theory allows for
interpretation of texts to be based on the analysis of small elements,
such as single words.

- Vicky Moufawad-Paul –

MFA in Film and Video, Production Stream, York University
Toronto Arab Film Festival, Executive Director

"Remembering the Dismembered: The Fragment as the Emblem of Diasporic
Identity in Autoethnographic Filmmaking"

Remembering the Dismembered is a 20 minute autoethnographic video
project incorporating Mini-dv, Super-8 and 16mm archival footage. As
an autoethnographic documentary, the work weaves family interviews
conducted in Canada with archival footage and the filmmaker’s return
to her grandmother’s village, Al-Bassa, in the North of Palestine. The video juxtaposes the passing down of history between generations in the diaspora through an oral tradition
that includes the reciting of poetry and song, with the filmmaker’s
experience of looking for and looking at their historical roots in the
homeland. Ultimately about memorialization, loss and salvage, the
filmmaker uses the technique and the concept of the fragment as the
emblem of diasporic identity. Remembering the Dismembered is
influenced by Catherine Russell’s theory of experimental
ethnography, the concept of postcolonial autobiography and the practice of
autoethnographic filmmaking pioneered by Jonas Mekas, Mona Hatoum and
Richard Fung. As such, this work is an emotive personal documentary
that aims to work through the anxieties around political memory and
the incompleteness of the archive.

- Sandra Navarro –

Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
University of Alberta

Beyond the Binaries: an Alternative Reading of Paso de Dos

This paper seeks to revisit the controversy surrounding the Eduardo
Pavlovsky play Paso de Dos. It explores the ways in which both this
particular play and its reception in Argentina highlight some
important notions in relation to subject formation, experience and
agency. By utilizing some of the questions posed by post-structuralist
feminist theory my paper attempts to analyze the conflicting
perspectives relating to the concepts above in order to analyze and
determine the kind of subjectivities were constituted through the
dictatorship and subsequent trauma associated with it.

- Robert Lee Nichols –

Department of Political Philosophy
University of Toronto

Genealogy’s Relationship to Hermeneutics on the Question of the Self

Foucaultian genealogy has been traditionally interpreted as hostile to
the intellectual tradition called hermeneutics. It has been posited
that hermeneutics seeks to engage in an interpretive dialogue with the
self and that Foucaultian genealogy dismisses this
interpretive-questioning since (a) such dialogue is engaging merely
with the object-effect of practices of governance and (b) it
presumably relies upon a cognitive thesis (i.e., that to understand
selfhood, one must interpret its underlying meaning, contained in some
general theory or picture of the world held by agents either
implicitly or explicitly). Foucaultian genealogy has been best know
for its positing of a theory in which power relations materially
penetrate the body without the mediation of the self’s own
representations.
This paper argues that the prevailing interpretation of Foucault’s
relationship to hermeneutics, which is shared by his defenders and critiques alike, is a
misinterpretation. First, in his later work Foucault came to accept
the irreducibly hermeneutic dimension of genealogy. He came to this
conclusion by acknowledging that without finding room for the
importance of self-understanding to agency, genealogy either undercut
its own status as a practice of freedom on the self or placed the
genealogist in a position of privilege that could not be defended.
Second, the problem has also been constructed by a misinterpretation
of hermeneutics. Modern hermeneutics after Heidegger has always
included an aspect of self-formation that cannot be reduced to the
self-understandings of agents—best evidenced by Heidegger’s concept of
the Vorhabe. Therefore, hermeneutic inquiry requires a not only an
interpretive dialogue with the subject’s representations, but also a
genealogy of practices that will map the non-conceptual patterns of
acting and being which the self can give no theoretical account of,
for there is no theory or deeper meaning behind such practices. We
can conclude therefore that Foucaultian genealogy and modern
hermeneutics do not take mutually exclusive stances on the status of
self-understanding.

- Andrea Pinheiro –
University of Alberta

The photosensitive self and intangible light of radioactivity: bearing
witness to the space between.

The use and development of radioactivity has changed certain boundaries, or has at least made evident the illusion of such boundaries between the self and the
corporeal world and has likewise infected the metaphysical foundation
of our conceptions of the self in the world. In this paper I use
examples of encounters between radioactivity and photosensitive film
as a means of approaching some aspects of the unsayable, the
unthinkable, the unimaginable that surround and constitute the modern
subject. These encounters offer examples of what Zizek calls ruptures
of the real, when the real dislodges the function
of the modes in which we attempt to symbolize and represent the real.
However when our expectations of how a photographic image ought to
function breaks down we often find our most poignant glimpses of the
real. A discussion of the structure of the photographic emulsion, the
emulsified subject and the world becoming photographic surface lead to
further questions regarding the interstitial space that allows the
images to “sit” upon the surface of the film in relation to
discussions of the chora. These questions are elaborated through
Deleuze’s description of images that create affects like “radioactive
fossils” and ways in which the structure that makes the image
physically possible are reflected and affect the witnessing of the
image.

- Monica Rettig –

Program of Comparative Literature
University of Western Ontario

Stunts and Graphica: Contemporary Hunger Artists?

In considering the subtitle of this conference's topic, 'A Bestiary of
Modernity', I propose a paper on contemporary interpretations of Franz
Kafka's ‘The Hunger Artist.’ The short prose piece tells us of an
unappreciated performer whose art is to starve himself in a cage in a
public space. As Kafka tells us though, popular interest in the art of
hungering has waned, and the Hunger Artist is forced to find work with
a circus, competing for attention with the not-so-subtle spectacles of
wild and ferocious beasts. Unnoticed, he fades away to nothing, his
last haunting words seeming to forsake his art: weil ich hungern muss,
ich kann nicht anders ... weil ich nicht die Speise finden konnte, die
mir schmeckt [because I have to fast, I can't help it ... because I
couldn't find the food that I liked (my translation)]. Anyone with an
interest in pop culture cannot help but think of David Blaine, a
performer who similarly pushes his body to unthinkable extremes in
dramatic spectacles. For example, in London in 2003, Blaine spent 44
days in a Plexiglas box suspended above the Thames River, supposedly
inspired by Kafka's tale. Can there be parallels drawn between these
two performers? What does the 'Art of Hunger' imply, especially for
the society that produces it and stands in awe of it (or not) ? Next,
I will look to the graphic novel Give it up! and other stories,
illustrated by Peter Kuper and published in 1995. This rendition of
The Hunger Artist has not received critical attention, yet especially
with the recent upsurge of interest in graphic novels, it is due. What
can Kuper's representation of the Hunger Artist tell us about
contemporary reception of the story? Looking to both Scott McCloud and
David Carrier's analysis of the genre of comic art, I will closely
interrogate Kuper's creative choices.

- Nico Rogers -
University of Alberta

The Island Within: Newfoundland Belonging Through Intergenerational Narrative

- Rodah Sechele-Nthapelelang–

Laboratoire de Recherche CTEL
Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, FR

L’homme moderne nous semble obsédé par sa propre personne.

Aujourd’hui la creation artistique est de plus en plus proche de son créateur, c’est-à-dire
que les artistes fouille leurs entrailles et leurs mémoires en quête
de soi. Nombreux sont des écrivains qui écrivent à partir de leurs
expériences personnelles pour aller vers l’universel Se replier sur
soi- même pour s’ouvrir aux autres en quête d’une identité « fuyante
», insaisissable, avec le but de la saisir, de lui accorder un espace,
un lieu spécifique, telle est la tendance actuelle. Nous nous
intéresserons à cette nouvelle forme d’écriture de soi en Afrique; une
écriture qui semble jaillir d’un sentiment de « non- existence »,
d’exil en cherchant à se tracer un espace identitaire par le biais de
l’écriture. Dans une Afrique traditionnellement communautaire où
l’individu avait tendance à s’effacer
derrière la famille, le groupe social ou le clan, comment ce mouvement
s’impose-t-il ? Témoigne-t-il d’un changement dans la mentalité et
l’organisation de la société ou est-ce une adaptation à la
mondialisation ? Entre le devoir envers la société et le narcissisme,
quels sont les apports de cette littérature ? Ce nouveau mode
d’imagination traduit un mouvement permanent, qui va du dedans vers le
dehors. Le motif semble encore le même ; se chercher en partant du «
je » tout en passant par un « nous » car ce dernier nous semble
indissociable du « je ». Enfin, pouvons-nous prétendre que toutes les
créations artistiques oscillent autour de cette problématique du « je
» ?

- Trevor Tchir –

Department of Political Science
University of Alberta

Judging the Political Performance: Self-Disclosure and the Spectator
in Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt, in an echo of Aristotle, once compared the political
deed to musical performance. She writes that when an instrument is
played, and the melody is complete, there is nothing outside the
performance that is left. The performance contains its own end. But
what occurs after the final note?
Through this analogy, I propose to examine a series of questions
concerning Arendt’s treatment of political action, the phenomenon of
the self’s public appearance, and the role of judgment and imagination
in historical narrative. Many questions arise from this strange
musical comparison: What purpose drove the musician to perform the
piece in the first place, or the political agent to act? What is the
role of the spectator in the audience, or the judging citizen and
historian who witnesses a political deed? What is disclosed about the
performer to the audience, and how much control over this disclosure
does the performer have, especially if he performs in concert with
others? When the audience or historian accounts for what the performer
discloses of himself, by what criteria is the judgment made? In
pondering these questions, we recast fundamental issues of politics,
selfhood, and history making. I hope to not only develop Arendt’s
musical analogy, but also demonstrate what I see to be some key
elements of her relationship to the Socratic school, St. Augustine,
Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger.

- Angela Thachuk –
University of Alberta

Attending to the Chaos: Bringing Justice to Narratives of the Unspeakable

In January of this year, I began a full-time residency in clinical
ethics. This shift in institutional context, from a university
department to a teaching hospital, has deeply affected my inability to
articulate (or be satisfied with) neatly defined abstract conclusions.
In many ways, this relocation has engendered a deepening sense of
moral distress, as I have lost the ability to rely on forms of ethical
reasoning that previously grounded my normative commitments. Consider
the following: At 20 weeks gestation, a young woman is presented with
the results of prenatal screening indicating a series of fetal
anomalies. Prior to conception the woman and her partner had agreed
that if diagnostic testing revealed disabling conditions, she would
terminate the pregnancy. After much struggle, she affirms the decision
to abort. Their grief and anguish is palpable. Preparations for their
first child are halted. The woman says she will tell others she has
miscarried.
For many women, such decisions seemingly wrap them in a shroud of
silence beyond the walls of the clinic. In North America, prenatal
testing and the assumed outcomes of positive results are becoming
further entrenched and clinically normalized. Yet despite this implied
social acceptance, open discussions surrounding selective terminations
remain taboo. Women are socially isolated, their experiences kept
secret, and their grief disenfranchised. It is in the space where such
narratives fall silent that my discourse begins to take shape. In this
paper, my intention is not to engage in the broader debate surrounding
genetic testing and selective abortions. Rather, I employ my clinical
encounters with these practices to illustrate the absence of an
ethical language, accessible to all, that might do justice to the
experiences such practices construct. In
drawing from the literature base of narrative ethics, I will explore
new avenues of ethical expression and responsiveness in hope that our
technological advances do not continue to abandon us in the realms of
the unspeakable.

- Mavis Chia-Chieh Tseng –

Graduate Institute of Foreign Literature
and Linguistics,National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.

The Remains of the Clones: The Uncanny Otherness within Ourselves
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

As the latest novel written by Booker Prize Receiver Kazuo Ishiguro,
Never Let Me Go vividly reveals the dark reality behind what appears
to be a tranquil British boarding school, Hailsham. Narrated by one
student Kathy H, who is now thirty-one, the story starts with her
reminiscence of innocent childhood in seemingly idyllic Hailsham as
she reconnects with former classmates, Ruth and Tommy. As the story
unfolds inch by inch, the chilling fact is uncannily exposed:
characters are all clones, raised solely for the purpose of medical
harvesting of organs. The main part of the story concentrates on
three clones’ root-seeking journey (though it is destined to be one
without a destination) to look for their subjectivity and origin,
struggling to find out who they really are and where their sweet home
locates. Focusing on the bonds among three friends and the
exceptional fragility of their situation with dramatic intensity and
sensitivity, Never Let Me Go proves to be Ishiguro’s another tour de
force after The Remains of the Day. In Never Let Me Go, the knotted
tension between human beings and clones is manifested from the clones’
perspective. Sensitive as Kathy and her companions are, they are
suspicious of human guardians’ overcautious attitude toward certain
issues, and there is an outsider called Madame who is always
unreasonably wary of them. In this essay, I would like to argue that
clones in the fiction simultaneously give rise to the sense of
strangeness and familiarity (unhomely/homely) for guardians and human
beings outside Hailsham, as what Sigmund Freud recognizes as “the
uncanny.” Along with Julia Kristeva’s elaboration on the uncanny
strangeness, I propose these clones are uncanny others to ourselves.
After analyzing humans’ reactions while confronting uncanny others in
the story, I aim to discuss the nebulous self-other relation in terms
of Jacques Derrida’s notion of "hospitality,” trying to answer the
question that is understated in Ishiguro’s
novel: in an epoch in which no distinct self-other definition or
boundary could be validated, how can we deal with the estranged
selfness and the internal otherness?

- Zuzanna Vasko –

Department of Arts Education
Simon Fraser University

The issue of personal identity plays a powerful and somewhat
double-edged role for those engaged in the practice the arts. The
arts provide us with so many opportunities to get to know ourselves
and each other better - whether we are exploring our own minds,
sensations and psyches through the process of making art, appreciating
a work and resonating with it on our own, or, coming to understand
ourselves as well as our companions through discussion around a
particular work. Yet while one’s identity and sense of self is
certainly affected by engagement in art, it can also be a significant
stumbling block, since art is not only something we do - it is closely
connected to who we are.
A personal sense of aesthetic plays a significant role in all of this,
influencing our choices not only in the making and appreciation of
art, but also in other aspects of life, including the relationships we
engage in. Working with Charles Taylor’s notion of personal
authenticity, which holds that the pursuit of an inner path is a
powerful moral ideal that connects us not only with ourselves but also
with our peers and the greater concerns of our world, I explore the
area where personal authenticity and aesthetic sensibility come
together. When young artists or art students are encouraged to look
within themselves while working within a supportive social framework,
the solitary pursuit of something ‘original’ or ‘socially relevant’
can give way to something more personally and perhaps universally
meaningful. This paper explores notions of originality versus
authenticity, and while it is presented from the point of view of a
visual artist, I believe the ideas apply to all the fine arts.

- Lisa Villareal –

Department of Comparative Literature
Stanford University

A Lesson in Narration: Representations of Otherness and the Rational
Project in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello

“There is first of all the problem of the opening...how to get us from
where we are...to the far bank...[B]ridging...People solve such
problems every day.” J.M. Coetzee begins his novel Elizabeth Costello
with this metaphor inscribing narration within the task of “problem
solving.” The narrative is linked to a rationalizing project; the
narration’s object is a problem to be solved, a puzzle to be
deciphered, so that meaning can be fixed. Latent in Adorno and
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is just such a claim: we
began, with myths, to tell stories about nature to bleed it of its
power over us, to make it comprehensible and, therefore, manageable.
To submit the natural world to our understanding, and thereby achieve
its submission to our control, was the goal of reason and narrative
became its tool. In his novel, Coetzee seeks to explore the nature of
rational discourse, which he invokes explicitly, but also to
illuminate the status of narrative within this discourse through his
use of narrative structure; my essay analyses this structure,
beginning with the movement of the narrative’s focalization between
Elizabeth Costello and her son John, and Costello’s concomitant
changes in behavior, as well as the changes in the manner in which the
narration characterizes her. I argue that the novel sets up a
correlation between the position of narrative agency and the
acceptance of/engagement in a rational and rationalizing project.
Coetzee weaves together discussions of Enlightenment philosophy,
animalia, Négritude, Catholicism, each laying claim to its place in
(or outside) the discourse of reason. Drawing on Adorno, as well as
Levinas, I read the novel as a narrative about narration—its place
within rational discourse, and its function as a record of an
encounter with otherness—and look, in Coetzee’s portrayal of writing,
for alternative ways of understanding narrative representation.

- Johanna Rossi Wagner –

Department of Italian
Rutgers University, NJ, US

In the Eye of the ‘I’: Visual Perception as Self Perception in Massimo
Bontempelli’s Minnie la Candida (Minnie the Innocent)

In Lacan’s Mirror Phase, a subject identifies its reflection in a
mirror, and thereafter constructs an image of self. Vision, therefore,
is inextricably linked to the formation of identity. For the modern
subject, natural vision failed in the face of the First World War,
which necessitated the development of mechanical sight enhancers. This
mechanization of sight also brought an identity crisis, as normal
vision was no longer able, without the help of science, to accurately
interpret reality. Massimo Bontempelli, in his 1927 drama Minnie la
Candida, places this dialectic of sight at center stage. The play
introduces a naïve young women, Minnie, who, tricked into believing
that mechanical beings coexist indistinguishable from humans,
questions her ability to perceive the truth
through her own eyes. Her fear of not discerning the difference
between humans and robots, leads to an uncertainty of her own identity, which, in turn
results in an act of suicide. This paper traces the protagonist’s
evolution from spectator to spectacle. She begins the drama as the
sole spectator looking upon the world from a known position. When an
alternative reality presents itself, the existence of fabricated
humans, Minnie suddenly perceives a gaze directed toward her, thus
becoming a spectacle herself. Minnie is imprisoned by the fear of
meeting this other gaze. Just before her suicide she looks at her
reflection and concludes that she is a robot. This study explores
Minnie’s final role as both spectacle and spectator and her
self-imprisonment caused by the inability to reconcile her vision with
reality. I incorporate Lacan’s Ecrits, justifying the existence
of an unknown gaze and also Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and
Space to pinpoint particular inventions related to sight and their
psychological implications for human subjects.

- Ian Watts –

Faculty of Physical Education and recreation
University of Alberta

“Playing True”, Playing Pure: Another (Re)thinking: Performance
Enhancing Drugs and repression and Liberation in Marcuse’s Eros and
Civilization

The subject in contemporary society is one of action, which is
decidedly self-production and produced-self. The notion of the self in
Western philosophy as immediately both subject and object must always
be considered a constitutive theoretical factor within any
onceptualization of a concept of being; and, consequently, individual
thought and action viewed as emanating solely from the individual must
be extricated from colloquail notions of personal liberty and the
freedom to act. Sport, and the athletes who perform the myriad forms
of labour that fall under this rubric, is not immune from this
constitutive process. The practice of sport is not the practice of
something pure, but rather, is fully imbibed into the struggle between
life and death, identified by Herbert Marcuse in
Eros and Civilization that marks the movement from a state of liberty
to one of increasing industrial, techno-social organization in which human
beings are dispossessed of their freedom to act. As athletic
performance is increasingly attached to techno-scientific and
capitalistic domains, as means to accommodate Enlightenment’s beast –
progress – the freedom for athletes to choose the technology that
unlocks human nature and, as such, what it means to be human. In this
paper, I propose that, as Marcuse argues, we have reached the point
where the current technology and scientific rationality permits a
reconsideration of the conceptualisation of repression and liberatioon
of the self in light of the existence and widespread use of
performance enhancing drugs. Furthermore, through this investigation I
aim to establish how contemporary issues concerning the of performing
enhancing substances bolsters the essential subject/object
relationship and reveals the contradictory, which is to say
simultaneous existence, of repression and liberation of the body that
is not only biological, yet socio-historical

- Dan Webb –

Department of Political Science
University of Alberta

"If Adorno isn't the Devil, it's because He's a Jew: Lyotard's
Mis-reading of Adorno's Aesthetics through Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus."

When JF Lyotard parted ways with Marxism in favour of libidinal
economy, he did so with a damning attack on ‘critique’ in an attempt
to demonstrate its untenability. In the realm of aesthetics he
pointed to the importance of two forms of the Kantian sublime – the
melancholic and novatio – as categories that can differentiate between
modern and postmodern articulations of art. While he champions the
latter form, which suspends the sublime at the moment that reason is
overwhelmed by its unpresentability, he condemns the former for its
desire for good form/subject/community. In a relatively obscure piece
“Adorno as the Devil”, Lyotard applies this argument to Adorno’s
aesthetics as manifested, in particular, in the character of Wendell
Kretzschmar in Thomas Mann’s novel Dr. Faustus. It is widely
understood that the figure of Kretzschmar is based on Adorno.
Long story short: with this paper I aim to defend or, at least,
re-read Adorno in an attempt to demonstrate that Lyotard’s analysis is
flawed because he reads Adorno as a Christian within his overall,
totalising, construction of the category of ‘theology.’ Specifically,
I will explore Jewish vs. Christian approaches to understanding the
Bilderverbot, or the Second Commandment against images – that which
Kant referred to as the most sublime passage in the Bible. I want to
ask the question: if we read Adorno as an (albeit, secularised) Jewish
philosopher, can we identify a mode of modern thinking that defies
Lyotards’s monolithic construction of the modern, and problematises
his charges of melancholia in Adorno’s work?

- Kendall, A. Whitney –

Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Kansas, US

The Twilight Zone and the Paranoid Android: Declension at the Border
in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

Set mainly on the United States-Mexico border, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,
his last novel posthumously published in 2003, represents a colossal
investigation into globalization and its effects on the world
illustrating the desperation of a working class that is helpless in
this new era’s intrusion, and the idea of migratory workers that find
themselves in a state of declension that defines twenty-first century
reality as a bestiary in which they are dehumanized and debased. The
five separate yet autonomous parts that comprise the novel focus on
different themes but the brutal murders of women in the borderland
maquiladora city of Santa Teresa, a fictional transcription of Ciudad
Juárez, are central in Bolaño’s description of a new world order. One
character in the novels affirms that behind these crimes lies the
secret of the world. In this paper, I plan to demonstrate how the
murders not only epitomize a disturbed border relationship defined by
enormous socioeconomic differences, but also serve as harbingers of
this world order. Just as los desaparecidos, the thousands of South
American citizens murdered by totalitarian regimes, exemplify the
innocent victims of the
Cold War era, the mystery of these women who are murdered, raped and
left to rest in the Sonoran desert symbolizes the era of globalization
representing a savage demonstration against the changes that this era
has brought about. What stands out in Bolaño’s depiction of the events
is the blend of life and literature that creates a mythic space that
alludes to the immediacy of the events in relation to
the changing world that we live in; he depicts the border as a no
(wo)man’s land, a twilight zone in which the migratory worker becomes
a paranoid android, a dehumanized tool of society that incarnates the
relationship between the individual and the nation-state in a horrific
world order that invades both nightmares and realities. This paper
will explore the consequences – both on a macro and micro level – of
the Juárez murders while using the fictional Santa Teresa as a
starting point to explore the metaphysical ramifications of the events.

- Liu Xinhiu –
University of Alberta

Cultural Tags for the Implied Reader in Ha Jin’s Waiting

“Implied reader” is a term most closely associated with the German
critic Wolfgang Iser to describe a hypothetical reader of a text. This
“implied reader” as a concept has its roots firmly planted in the
structure of the text, shaping its rhetorical actions and creating an
area in-between the real reader and the text. Reader-response critic
Gerald Prince has specified seven “signals” of the “implied reader” in
persuasive discourse: “direct references, indirect references,
demonstra-tives, questions, negations, over-justifications, and
comparisons or analo-gies”. In the case of Ha Jin’s Waiting, I prefer
to add one more signal: cultural tags, which refers to verbal
discourses or physical items in the novel used purposefully to
transmit a cultural message. These tags are not necessarily
indispensable from a semantic or rhetorical point of view, yet they
function as signifiers for the formulation of a cultural identity. The
existence of these
cultural tags is necessitated through the presupposition of the
implied reader, who is supposed to posses a cultural code different
from the author’s. Thus, the cultural tags, which are originally
labelled as something of add-on are, in fact, integral to a complete
comprehension of the written discourse. In Waiting, these cultural
tags demonstrate themselves as 1) names of places or titles of books,
songs and films; 2) adjective modifiers; and 3) cultural phenomenon
explanations.
While realism remains the dominant mode in Waiting, the frequent use
of cultural tags provide the implied reader as well as the real
reader, with a new hermeneutic method to understand the political,
religious and social connotations, which otherwise might be neglected
or misunderstood due to the real reader’s lack of cultural knowledge
caused by different territories, ethnographies or traditions.

- Magdalena Zolkos –

Department of Political Science
University of Alberta

Questioning the Imperative of Forgiveness: “Theologies of Justice”
seen through the Prism of Jean Améry’s “Resenting Subject”

Recently, the questions of forgiveness and political justice have been tightly
intertwined within the project of the so-called “transitional
justice,” which deals with coming to terms with past human rights
violations in transitional democracies. This paper re-names the
transitional justice project as a “theology of justice.” This is
because that project seems center upon unitary discourses of
historical closure, well as be inflamed by the theological vocabulary
of the redemptive end. In order to demonstrate that the question of
justice requires instead a profound reflection of political nature,
this paper introduces Jean Améry’s perspective of the “resenting
subject.” It shows that Améry attempted to conduct a transvaluation of
resentment, which countered the Nietzschean derogative imagery of
ressentiment, in that he depicted resentment as central for the
restoration of victims’ social status of dignity and for the
validation of their (inter-)subjective experience. On the basis of
Améry’s conceptualizations, this paper problematizes the relation of
ethics and politics (that the “transitional justice” project takes for
given) along the lines of Jacques Derrida’s “hiatus,” and “forgiveness
as impossibility.” It suggests that in order to be able to theorize on
the topic of justice, one needs to parenthesize the moral imagery of
forgiveness and problematize rather thirdness (or plurality) within
which the identities of “victims” and “perpetrators” are being
established, dichotomized and played out.