>
>From: "Rei Terada" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: CFP: The Thinkability of Despair (3/1/07; journal issue)
>
>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:  [log in to unmask], or to
>[log in to unmask]
>
>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).

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