THE THINKABILITY OF DESPAIR: a special issue of Postmodern Culture
Abstracts for articles by 3/1/07; accepted articles due in full by 12/15/07 for publication in 2008. Please email abstracts to Rei Terada, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697: terada@uci.edu, or to pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu.
If trauma theory is an account of how things come to be unthinkable, how should we conceive positively the possibility and uses of thinking about those things that we least want to think about? What happens when what might well have been traumatic is thought, and when things that we might assume are “unthinkable” are considered? How might political, psychological, and/or philosophical thought build itself constructively around the experience and acknowledgment of despair?
Adorno, for example, struggles with this question in Negative Dialectics: he both comments on the “unthinkability of despair” for Kant and leaves room for its thinkability in general. Kantian reason, Adorno suggests, “hope[s] against reason” to correct the wrong of death (385); by this logic, Kant fails fully to tolerate his own knowledge. Writing on his own account, Adorno opines that despair is thinkable in a self-differential or dialectical form: “grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept of different colors” (377).
Articles may consider topics from a theoretical and/or cultural studies perspective that emphasizes the impact of their arguments on postmodern culture; they may explore writers such as Adorno, Blanchot, Klein, Nietzsche, and Weil; unblinking confrontations with violence, death, or genocide; the conditions of possibility of thinkability; giving up; “nihilism”; the philosophical genealogy of despair; dynamics of hope and despair in contemporary politics; psychoanalytic theories of working through, and their intersection with political theory; hegemony and totalitarianism; visual artists and filmm/07akers (L. Freud, Warhol).
Postmodern Culture is a peer-reviewed electronic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture.