DEUTSCH |  ENGLISH |  FRANÇAIS |

The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

The Autobiography of the Other: powers of literary transference

Chair of the section/Suggestions, Abstracts, Contributions to:
Email: Fatima Festic (Los Angeles)
Section language: English

ABSTRACT: The section will explore the narrative possibilities of conveying the knowledge of the Other through our experience of ourselves. Considering the borders between self-representation and representation, the concept of "sameness" as it appears in recent theory (i.e. in Badiou's Ethics) and the persistent refusal to employ it in the current pragmatic issues (i.e. concerning refugees, immigrants, war etc.), we shall ask: can the literary aspects of transference give us the access to the actual world structure and can the grounds of its ideological (and economic) values be challenged from within?

Since the culture of peace implies by definition also a deep understanding of and the respect for traumatic points in the others and their experiences of horrors, we shall ask: is literature a necessary dynamics of purification of that culture of peace, a point of affect, identification, mirroring and reflection of the self and the other? Can the culture of peace, utopian or not, be thought of or established if we refuse our "sameness" in the way that the metaphysical thought was once refusing the concept of "difference?"

Participants are invited to submit their abstracts that are related to the topic of writing, self-representation and transference in relation to power structures and current developments and/or to extend the topic to the analyses of some literary/theoretical works.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES