[csaa-forum] CFP: Wandering with Spinoza

[Dimitris Vardoulakis]

'Wandering with Spinoza'

www.conferences.unimelb.edu.au/spinoza/

The Conference will be held at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia from 13 – 15 September 2006.

The conference aims to bring together philosophers, theorists and visual and performing artists to celebrate this most influential of philosophers.

Keynote Speakers include Alain Badiou, Mieke Bal, Thomas Hirschhorn, Genevieve Lloyd, and Christopher Norris 

There are at least two senses in which “wandering” can be taken as a productive category to approach Spinoza’s thought.  First, it could designate Spinoza’s image of the human as the “little worm in the blood” which wanders around the cosmic circulation system.  To follow this “worm” is to follow Spinoza’s thought, from the impassioned geometrical writings to the personal epistolary exchanges.  But, like the “worm” that the human is, one’s thought will not be allowed to rest at one particular point, instead one wanders on with Spinoza.  The second meaning of the “wandering” could refer to the divergent routes and detours that the explications of Spinoza’s work has taken.  >From materialist to rationalist, from political philosopher to metaphysician, from heretic to theologian – the import of Spinoza’s thinking also eludes a single trajectory.

At the same time, if both of the above senses are retained, then a third one will also come into light. Namely, that as one confronts Spinoza’s thought and its reception, then that confrontation itself will become nomadic, passing on and through various spheres.  A wandering that goes from the purity and eternality of philosophical thinking to the particularity and heterogeneity of art and politics – and then back again.  Thus, Spinoza raises a challenge to the disciplines that approach questions of what it means to be human.

The conference “Wandering with Spinoza” will respond to those movements, not by remaining faithful to Spinoza himself.  Rather, the conference calls on the responsibility to “wander with” as an enterprise which can be reduced neither to an individual, nor to determinate boundaries.  This call for papers is extended to everyone who likes to take on this responsibility.

The CFP has been extended to June 30.

Abstracts of around 100 words should be sent to Dimitrios.Vardoulakis at arts.monash.edu.au

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

Dimitris Vardoulakis
Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Building 11
Monash University
Clayton, Vic 3800
Australia

tel: +61 3 9905 9009
fax: +61 3 9905 5593
email: Dimitrios.Vardoulakis at arts.monash.edu.au

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