L.O.V.E, and Other Disaffections
The London Postgraduate French Conference
Saturday 4 November 2017
Senate House, London
Call for papers [- appel en anglais mais langues de travail : anglais/français , NDLR]
Keynote speaker: Dr Amaleena Damlé (University of Cambridge)
“The heart is not broken, in the sense that it does not exist before the break. But it is the break itself that makes the heart. The heart is not an organ, and neither is it a faculty. It is: that I is broken and traversed by the other where its presence is most intimate and its life most open. The beating of the heart – rhythm of the partition of being, syncope of the sharing of singularity – cuts across presence, life, consciousness. That is why thinking – which is nothing other than the weighing or testing of the limits, the ends, of presence, of life, of consciousness – thinking itself is love.”
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community
The subject of love is not new to critical debate. In Aristophanes’ myth in Plato’s Symposium, love is the striving to return to a prior wholeness from which we have been severed. In Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, love is a virtue that, alongside faith and hope, allows for human participation in divinity. In Schopenhauer’s “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” in The World as Will and Representation, love derives from the urge to procreate shared by all human beings, and is ideally expressed as the union between a man and a woman who, complimentary opposites of each other, combine to form a neutral product. For Spinoza in The Ethics, love is the affect of joy focused on the particular object that we believe brings us this joy. For Freud, taking inspiration for his psychoanalytic conception of love from Aristophanes’ myth in Plato’s Symposium, love is a compulsion to re-merge with the lost primordial maternal body. Jean-Luc Nancy theorizes love in opposition to wholeness, arguing that to love is to shatter the sanctity of the enclosed self, exceeding it and opening it up to alterity.
What’s love got to do with it? The field of love studies has enjoyed a reinvigoration in recent years, whilst love has been increasingly emphasized as a political necessity. Campaigns surrounding the migrant crisis, as well as attempts to halt the rise of fascism in the Western world, for example Hilary Clinton’s ultimately defeated #LoveTrumpsHate campaign, propose love as political healing, advocating open borders, tolerance and equality. Scholars from diverse disciplines are again approaching the question of how to define love, and how to engage with it from a critical perspective. What is the psychology of love? Are some people incapable of love, and is the inability to feel love a definable pathology? What is the neurology of love: can love be reduced to a finite set of chemical and synaptic impulses in response to a suitable object? What would an effective politics of love look like? What are -philias and are they constructed or are they essential? What does the erotic have to do with love? What does it mean to love in a digital age, or in an age of pornography and disaffection? Is there a cure for love? How is love gendered? How is love colonized, reappropriated and even weaponized in socio-political economies? What would a post-love world look like, has it already been imagined, or is it already here?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Erotic love and pornography
- Desire
- Queer love
- Kinship/Community
- (Hetero)normativity
- Hate
- (Para)philias
- The affective structures of love
- Pathologies of love / love as pathology
- Love as psychological or neurological phenomenon
- Love in a digital age
- Love as a response to politics, violence, and terrorism
- Memory, mourning and trauma
We invite postgraduates working in any area across French studies to submit abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers in English or in French at loveconference2017@gmail.com by the 1st of September 2017.
Organisers: Ben Dalton (KCL) and Adina Stroia (KCL)