Please submit abstracts (500-750 words) on any topic related to the work of Julia Kristeva, to kristevacircle@gmail.com.

We welcome submissions from across all disciplines. Abstracts should be suitable for blind review; include a separate document with name, paper title, affiliation, and contact information. The deadline for abstracts is March 15, 2012.

The%20Kristeva%20Circle%20-%20Call%20For%20Abstracts.

• In addition to essays doing historical work, we are looking for essays taking a systematic approach or a practical approach (i.e., using or applying the phenomenological method). Final essays should be approximately 7000 words long, including notes.
• The tentative working title of the volume is Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics. We anticipate the volume being published through Continuum International Publishing Group as part of the series, Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics (co-edited by one of the volume’s editors).
• Dates: Extended abstract (400-800 words) or completed paper due January 6, 2012. If accepted, your final essay will be due in July, 2012.

Send your abstract or essay in one file, accompanied by a second file with your name, affiliation, and contact information as well as a brief list of publications (suitable for a “notes on contributors” page) to the editors: Kevin Hermberg (kevin.hermberg@dc.edu) and Paul Gyllenhammer (gyllenhp@stjohns.edu). All files should be sent in .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .pdf format as email attachments. Please address any questions to Kevin or Paul at the email addresses provided.

June 15-­16, 2012 Ryerson University Toronto, Canada

We invite submissions from scholars and graduate students based in Canada and abroad on the topic of Continental Thought and Religion. The general theme of the conference is meant to reflect the variety of articulations of religion that have emerged in contemporary European thought. While the focus of the conference is continental thought, we nonetheless conceive the latter in an interdisciplinary manner (including literary theory, social and political thought, psychoanalysis,  and religious studies). We also encourage submissions from people interested in exploring possible connections with analytic philosophy.

Confirmed Speakers: John Caputo (Syracuse U.), Bettina Bergo (U. de Montréal), more to be announced in the near

future.

In addition  to our keynote  speaker,  John Caputo,  we will have  four commissioned  workshops  comprised  of two papers and a response, and a series of themed panels. We invite submissions of three-­?page  proposals for essays for the following themed panels with included possible topics:

Phenomenology of Religion

•     The thought of Chrétien, Henry, Lacoste, Levinas, Marion, and Ricoeur

•     Topics: the gift; the work of art; appearance and transcendence; call and response

Religion and Politics

•     The thought of Agamben, Asad, Connolly, Derrida, de Vries, Girard, Habermas, Schmitt, and Taylor

•     Topics: political theology; the post-­?secular; sovereignty; religion and violence; pluralism

Religion and Speculative Realism

•     The thought of Brassier, Harman, Laruelle, and Meillassoux

•     Topics: materialism; correlationism; nihilism; the things themselves; divine inexistence; ‘future Christ’

Beyond Theism and Atheism

•     The thought of Caputo, Kearney, Kristeva, Milbank, Vattimo

•     Topics: kenosis; anatheism; weak theology; a/theology; radical orthodoxy

Continental Thought, Religion, and Aesthetics

•     The artwork of Bresson, Caravaggio, Celan, Chagall, Dostoyevsky, Dumont, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kahlo, Kapoor, Kiarostami, Kiefer, Malick, Newman, O’Keefe, and Stevens

•     The thought of Cavell, Cixous, Critchley, Irigaray, Marion, Nancy, and Rancière

•     Topics: transcendence in art; image and icon; creativity and creation; representation and idolatry

Immanentism and Religion

•     Agamben, Badiou, Bergson, Deleuze, James, Foucault, Keller, and Žižek

•     Topics: self-­?organization; the event; plurality; bio-­?power; polydoxy

History of Continental Thought and Religion

•     Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger

•     Topics: death of God; reason and faith; scripture and philosophy; religion and fantasy; onto-­?theology

Please  send  only  one  three-­?page  (double-­?spaced)  proposal  on  one  of  the  above  themes  and  any  questions  to

varieties2012@gmail.com  by  December  31,  2011.  We  intend  to  notify  authors  about  our  decisions  by  February  28, 2012.  Other  conference  details  (registration  fee,  preliminary  program,  etc.)  will  be  announced  in  new  year.

The VCTR Conference is organized by John Caruana (Philosophy, Ryerson University) and Mark Cauchi (Humanities, York University).

The International Journal for Badiou Studies is an international, peer-reviewed, open-source journal dedicated to the philosophy and thought of, and surrounding, the French philosopher Alain Badiou.

The IJBS is dedicated to original and critical arguments that directly engage the works of Badiou, as well as pertinent intellectual colleagues and related concepts.  The aim of the IJBS is to develop a clear and transparent site for Badiou scholars, and those interested in his ideas, to come together from around the world to share their research and develop productive dialogues.  In line with the ethos of the IJBS, we will accept articles in supported world languages, although an English abstract is required for all submissions.  In this and other regards, we share similar aspirations and are partnered together with the International Journal of Žižek Studies.

The inaugural issue of the IJBS will be dedicated to the idea of ‘Badiou Now!’  Why?  Because Badiou’s philosophical interest is fundamentally contemporary and political.  The notion of Badiou Now! captures the urgency that Badiou sees in combating the ‘Thermidorian’ spirit, reactive and obscurantist subjects that deny the necessity of rupture, events, acts, new truths, who replace action with political apathy, and radical democracy with a return to ‘pure’ transcendental notions.  In contrast to the Evental-negating/denying subject, Badiou is concerned with the question of how to maintain fidelity to the event, though he is brutally aware of competing subjective forces and of the materialist dialectical need for endless events, for perpetual breaks and splits, which promote the present as future.  The first issue then, will seek proposals that address the role of Badiou’s thought in building a 21st century conception of human organization.

Prospective articles should be in the range of 6,000-8,000 words, prepared for blind review, and accompanied by an abstract of not more than 250 words. Authors should follow the standard guidelines for online submission. Articles should be submitted no later than the 29th of February 2012.

via The International Journal of Badiou Studies.

“There is a power inherent in the false: the positive power of ruse, the power to gain a strategic advantage by masking one’s life force.”

(Brian Massumi, REALER THAN REAL, The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari)

This two-day symposium addresses the complex ethics of the manipulation of real people and events in documentary, fact-fiction hybrid cinema and artists’ moving image.  Through close readings and screenings of contemporary and historical films that deliberately falsify actuality, the Powers of the False symposium will ask, can there be an ethic of falsification in the encounter between filmmaker and subject? How can we document something whose truth has many sides or may be inscrutable? Is the act of documenting always inevitably performative?  The symposium will also examine instances where the subjects of films have deliberately deceived filmmakers. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s theories of minor cinema and his term ‘powers of the false’, the symposium will turn to other philosophers too, to approach its central conceptual and ethical questions, including Levinas’ philosophy of alterity.

Academic research methods regard most filmmaking practices as unethical, particularly documentary filmmaking because of its direct encounter with actuality. The principles of consent for sociological research are anathema to factual film production, because total editorial control can never be given to the subjects. Instead, prior-consent is necessary. Moving image artists tend to disregard contributor consent forms and often freely intervene in the lives of their subjects. The activity of filmmaking is clearly predisposed to manipulation, and film productions inexorably produce alteration and change. Powers of the False looks at filmmaking as a site for performing difference and as a manipulative and coercive agency. When and for what reason is forgery, manipulation and deception conceptually motivated, even ethically necessary? How are we as human subjects changed by filming and by being filmed?

Topics may include:

* Inventing the past and fictionalising the present in the factual film; ethno-fiction.

* Staged events and re-enactments.

* Instances where filmmakers have deliberately delayed, intervened in, or given testimony in legal proceedings, or have broken the law.

* Films that have to come to light as true/false over time; film hoaxes.

* Films where authorship has been shared with, or passed over to, a subject.

* Films where the subject has manipulated the filmmaker.

* Films that have significantly altered personal or historical events, whether positively or negatively.

* Directionless films guided by an encounter with a subject.

* The docudrama, the drama-documentary, the mock-documentary and the cinematic essay.

* Iterations of subjectivity within the factual frame, recollection images, use of free indirect discourse.

Suggested artists and filmmakers for consideration as topics of discussion include Jean Rouch, Chantal Ackerman, Werner Herzog, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Chris Marker, Abbas Kiarostami, Errol Morris, Nick Broomfield, Ulrich Seidl, Andrew Kötting, Ben Hopkins, Clio Barnard. This list is by no means exhaustive.

The papers and short film/video works presented over the weekend will be edited into a published collection of essays (accompanied by a DVD).

Please email abstracts for papers or films no more than 20 minutes in length by Dec 1st 2011, attn of:

Steven Eastwood  (University of East London): eastwood@uel.ac.uk

Catherine Wheatley (Kings College London): catherine.wheatley@kcl.ac.uk

Powers of the False symposium supported by The University of East London and Kings College London

June 29th – July 1st 2012 Liverpool Hope University, UK

An international conference of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion

Keynote Speakers: Ray Brassier, Levi Bryant, Iain Hamilton Grant and Catherine Malabou

‘The contemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being sceptical, could only be a religious end of metaphysics.’ Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008)

Meillassoux identifies the ‘turn to religion’ in contemporary continental philosophy with a failure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticism about reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism’, the decision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond. According to Meillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice of irrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolute in its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or upon language and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinking religion (exemplified by Meillassoux’s own Divine Inexistence) are emerging.

This conference invites proposals which critically consider this speculative turn in philosophy and its implications for thinking about religion. To what ‘end’ is speculation leading? Does it simply announce the closure of religion and its subordination to a philosophy of the absolute, nature or the ‘All’? Can it open new lines for a philosophy of religion which is not wedded to the Kantian horizon? Is speculation itself open to Kierkegaardian critique as yet another move to position and reduce ethical and religious claims, sacrificing the future on the altar of abstract possibility? Does renewed attention to the canon of speculative idealism offer a way beyond the impasse between relativism and dogmatism?

The organisers welcome proposals which examine the roots and extensity of recent speculative thinking, and which critically consider its impact – direct and indirect – on philosophy of religion. Relevant thinkers and themes might include Quentin Meillassoux on God and the absolute, Alain Badiou’s ontology, Catherine Malabou on Hegel and plasticity, Francois Laruelle’s ‘future Christ’, Iain Hamilton Grant on Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and the thinking of the All, Ray Brassier’s nihilism. However, we are particularly looking for contributions which creatively use or depart from the speculative turn to offer original insights into the nature and content of the field.

Abstracts of 300 words for 20 minute papers to shakess@hope.ac.uk or haynesp@hope.ac.uk by end of February 2012.

via Call for papers - Liverpool Hope University.

The Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC) is looking for submissions for the Second ETPC Incubator. This event will be a collaborative workshop with presentations of work-in-progress as well as paper presentations on this year’s theme: Philosophy and/as Biopolitics.

Some of the most important thinkers from the past century and many of the most innovative philosophers working today have been focused on the rather diffuse question of biopolitics. While the very meaning of this term may remain open to interpretation, it is nevertheless becoming one of the most important philosophical horizons moving into the twenty-first century. What is biopolitics? Looking back on the past century, why is it possible to count so many philosophers as biopolitical thinkers? Which issues and problems can biopolitics address? And what does the turn to biopolitics mean for philosophy as it advances into the next millennium?

Discussion may involve theoretical questions or applied work. Possible figures for consideration include Foucault, Agamben, Arendt, Derrida, Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, Haraway, Nancy, Butler, Schmitt, Rancière, Habermas, Zizek, Grosz, and Nikolas Rose.

This workshop lets presenters bring problems, questions, and concerns about work-in-progress for discussion in a roundtable setting. It is appropriate to bring a project in its nascent stages, specific passages of a work that are causing difficulties or trouble for the author, or work that is at a crossroad and requires more reflection before it can advance. Suitable projects may include journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, lectures, or perhaps doctoral thesis work. Our aim is to incubate and nurture these projects so participants can take them to the next level. The WIP sessions will be bookended by two formal paper presentations to situate and inspire the conversation.

The workshop will be conducted during EPTC’s annual meeting at Canadian Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which will be held May 29 –June 1, 2012 in Waterloo, ON.

We seek two types of work:

i) Work in Progress

- 500-750 word proposal outlining the project you would present at the workshop

- 10-15 minute presentation will be followed by 30-minute roundtable discussion

ii) Conference papers

- 4500 word maximum, plus 150-word abstract

- 30 minute paper will be followed by a brief commentary and 20-minute discussion period

** Please prepare submissions for anonymous review in Word format. On a separate sheet include the title of project, author name, institutional affiliation, and contact information.

Note that the workshop will be open so that all conference delegates can take part. Short précis (approx. 500 words) prepared by participants will be made available on the EPTC/TCEP web site prior to the event. It is preferred that participants discuss their projects extemporaneously so conversation remains colloquial and collegial.

Deadline: January 15, 2012

Submissions and/or questions should be sent to Bronwyn Singleton (bronwynsingleton@gmail.com)

Guest editor, Heidi Bostic

For Luce Irigaray, topics such as dialogue, love, and the relation between two are not merely personal matters, but may form the basis of a new social order. This special issue represents the diversity of themes linked to Irigaray’s thought, ranging from ontology, subjectivity, and language, to yoga, spirituality, and the body, to education, law, and politics.

Submission deadline for articles, in English or French, 6,000 words maximum, is December 1, 2011.

Initial inquiries welcome.

Contact: Heidi_Bostic@baylor.edu

Venue: University of California, Irvine, USA.

Host: Professor Stephen Barker (UCI)

Date: 11th -13th July, 2012

Keynotes:

David Wills

Penelope Deutscher

Tom Cohen

Élisabeth Roudinesco

Due dates for Abstracts and Panel Proposals: 21st November 2011

Call for Papers: The Derrida Today Conference will focus on the ongoing value of Derrida’s work to the political-ethical, cultural, artistic and public debates and philosophical futures that confront us.

The conference will be broadly interdisciplinary and invites contributions from a range of academic, disciplinary and cultural contexts. We will accept papers and panel proposals on any aspect of Derrida’s work or deconstruction in relation to various topics and contemporary issues, such as: philosophy, phenomenology and other theoretical/philosophical thinkers, literature, psychoanalysis, architecture and design, law, film and visual studies, haptic technologies, photography, art, music, dance, embodiment, feminism, race and whiteness studies, politics, ethics, sociology, cultural studies, queer theory, sexuality, education, science (physics, biology, medicine, chemistry), IT and multimedia, technology, etc.

Individual Participants: submit 300 words abstract for a 20 minute paper. Please include a bio (no more than 100 words), affiliation and contact details.

Panel Proposals: Panels will consist of 3 papers of 20 minutes delivery and 10 minutes discussion time each. Panel organizers should submit an overall panel proposal of 100 -200 words, plus individual abstracts of 300 words for each paper, along with personal bios and contact details (email, address and phone), and their university affiliation, of each member of the panel. The panel organiser should also supply their bio and contact details and affiliation.

Due Date for Abstracts and Panel Proposals: 21st November 2011.

Individual Abstracts & Panel Proposals should be sent as an attachment to:

derridatodayconference@gmail.com

All enquiries about the conference ONLY, to this email address.

The conference is based on the journal Derrida Today (general editors: Nicole Anderson & Nick Mansfield, reviews editor: Martin McQuillan, Associate Editor: Simon Morgan Wortham). The journal is published by Edinburgh University Press, ISSN: 1754-8500).

EUP Journal Website: http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/drt

Derrida Today Journal email: dteditors@gmail.com

Enquiries about the journal and submissions should be sent to this address ONLY.

Participants will be invited to submit article length versions of their papers for consideration for publication in the journal.

Executive Conference Organising Committee: Nicole Anderson (Macquarie University), Stephen Barker (University of California, Irvine), Nick Mansfield (Macquarie University), Martin McQuillan (Kingston University), Simon Morgan Wortham (Kingston University).

via Derrida Today.

CALL FOR PAPERS

ISUD Ninth World Congress

Democratic Culture: Historical Reflections and Modern Transformations

22 – 27 June 2012

Olympia, Greece

The ISUD is an international association of philosophers and scholars from a range of other disciplines devoted to promoting the discussion of such fundamental issues as world peace, social justice, human rights, and dialogical interrelations of diverse cultures. Through this congress the Society hopes to stimulate philosophical reflection and discussion on topics related to the central theme of dialogue among cultures. Topics on philosophy of culture and politics, democratic culture, cultural diversity and universality, globalization, ethics of peace, social equality, justice, and harmony are welcome, and so are respectively varied philosophical perspectives.

Papers presented at the congress will be published in the ISUD bi-annual proceedings under the title: OLYMPIAN DIALOGUES.

The deadline for abstracts is August 10, 2011.  Please send a 300-500 words abstract in English by regular post or e-mail attachment in Word to:

Dr. Panos Eliopoulos

Pallantiou 44

22100 Tripoli

Greece

E-mail: ksatriya@tri.forthnet.gr

For more information on the congress please visit our web site: http://www.isud.org/

It will provide the conference participants with details about transportation and hotel reservations, as well as with a list of additional cultural tours after the conference.