Graduate Student Conference at the University of Toronto.
What, when & where
Negativity, Pessimisms, and Sad Affects in the Study of Religion
University of Toronto
April 18-19, 2019
Keynote Speakers: Rinaldo Walcott (Toronto), Anthony Paul Smith (La Salle)
The Graduate Student Association at the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion invites graduate students from all disciplines to participate in a symposium that explores the significance and relevance of forms of theoretical negativity for the study of religion. We invite contributions that consider negativity from a number of different angles.
First: a recurrent feature of materials and movements marked as ‘religious’ is negativity towards the present order of this world. White Evangelical conservatism, global Pentecostalism, and Islamic piety movements of various political stripes—to name just a few examples—are all marked, to vastly different ends, by antagonism toward ‘worldly’ powers and influences. Whether indexed by themes like hope and optimism in the face of the present, expectations of apocalypse, or forms of world-denial, postures and habits of negativity—of saying ‘no’ to the current order of things—can be found across politically, geographically, and historically disparate contexts.
Second: the 17th-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza famously claimed that all negation was merely “imaginary:” a failure to grasp the real order and connection of ideas. In recent decades, this idea has undergone something of a renaissance. As a result, there has emerged a tendency to explain the habits of negativity and ‘sad affects’ scholars find in cases like those above in terms of their positive causes and effects. Theorists and philosophers have turned to concepts like ‘process,’ ‘network,’ ‘assemblage,’ ‘affect,’ ‘action,’ and ‘becoming’ in an attempt to build a conceptual grammar adequate to the ontological and epistemological critique of negation.
Finally: a number of significant but disparate developments across the humanities have again placed forms of negation and negativity at the center of theoretical concern, rather than simply locating negativity in the materials theorized. In queer theory, moves to recenter the negative are visible in turns toward antisociality and the refusal of futurity (Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman). In critical race theory and black study, we find black feminist refusals of whitened figures of ‘being’ and ‘the human’ (Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter) and turns toward Afro-Pessimism and its call to ‘end the world’ (David Marriott, Jared Sexton, Calvin Warren, Frank Wilderson III). Elsewhere, projects exploring logics of ‘no’ or ’non,’ including François Laruelle’s non-philosophy, transform philosophy and theory themselves into objects of negation.
Deadline & how to apply
Please submit a 250-word abstract outlining the topic and main arguments of the paper by January 20th, 2019. Proposals should include all contact information and institutional affiliation. Please send proposals, as well as any questions, to dsrsymposium19@gmail.com.
_____________