{"id":500,"date":"2013-01-04T10:28:45","date_gmt":"2013-01-04T10:28:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/?p=500"},"modified":"2013-08-31T14:50:12","modified_gmt":"2013-08-31T14:50:12","slug":"skepsi-conference-call-for-papers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/2013\/01\/04\/skepsi-conference-call-for-papers\/","title":{"rendered":"SKEPSI Conference – Call for papers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Skepsi is inviting proposals for papers for its\u00a0upcoming sixth conference,\u00a0Ghosts in the Flesh<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Please send abstracts (350 words) and a short bio-bibliographic note to skepsi@kent.ac.uk<\/a> by 22\u00a0February 2013<\/p>\n

Skepsi<\/em> is a peer-reviewed online journal based in the School of European Culture and Languages. Skepsi<\/em> is run\u00a0by PhD\/MA students, with the support of established and early career academics, and commits to publishing the work of postgraduate students and emerging scholars.<\/p>\n

Please see call for papers below:<\/p>\n

Ghosts in the Flesh<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A Skepsi<\/em> Conference<\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Kent, Canterbury \u2013 24-25\u00a0May 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

Keynote Speaker: Dr Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam<\/strong><\/p>\n

While ghosts in the dominant Western tradition have often been associated with other-wordliness or liminality, the aim of this conference is to critically examine discourses and texts which emphasise the corporeality and physicality of ghosts and the ghostly. Allowing ghosts to occupy the centre rather than the periphery challenges \u2013 and allows us to reconsider anew \u2013 a number of key oppositions such as: life and death, inside and outside, corporeality and incorporeality, self and other, present reality and past memory, and so on.<\/p>\n

This commitment to thinking the reality of the incorporeal can be clearly identified, for example, in the Stoic turn in twentieth century French thought. The ancient Stoics developed a form of materialism which admitted four ‘incorporeals’ into their ontology \u2013 place, time, the void, and ‘expressibles’ (linguistic sense or meaning). While being the proximate surface-effects of material or corporeal causes, ‘incorporeals’ were seen as filling out the dimensions of the cosmos, itself a single surface expanding and contracting to the rhythm of bodily actions and passions. These incorporeals were considered as having almost zero being or substance, yet they were required to complete<\/em> the Stoics\u2019 materialism. For Deleuze, the Stoics were thus the first to ‘reverse’ Platonism \u2013 the ideal world of Forms no longer seen as transcendent and as now nothing more than an incorporeal lining co-extensive with the sensible world \u2013 with the corporeal and the incorporeal neither simply the cause nor the effect of the other.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is psychoanalysis which develops this hypothesis the furthest. Psychoanalysis considers castration \u2013 the infant\u2019s awareness of the mother\u2019s lack of a penis \u2013 as constituting a deadlock in the infant\u2019s reality. This deadlock is displaced in part thanks to the development of the phantasm<\/em> \u2013 literally a ghost \u2013 a psychical structure composed of de-personalised memories, a kind of death through which the infant must pass in order to further its psychical development, and thanks to which the infant can re-connect with the materiality of reality.<\/p>\n

Psychoanalysis emphasises the importance of memory in the present, and we should consider memory as a privileged site of the ghostly. More generally, Derrida\u2019s concept of ‘hauntology’ \u2013 which refers to the state of the spectre as neither being nor non-being \u2013 argues for the existence of the ‘present’ as inseparable from that of the ‘past’, an individual or society\u2019s past as both revenant and out-of-joint, and as essential to one\u2019s continued survival in the present.<\/p>\n

Bearing in mind lines of argumentation such as these, we wish to explore questions of ghostliness and in\/corporeality in a number of fields, including but not limited to the following:<\/p>\n