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The Secret in Contemporary Theory, Society, and Culture

University of Kent, Canterbury

Friday 30th May – Grimond Building, GLT3

13:30-14:00 Welcome Coffee and Registration

14:00-16:00 Panel 1: Secrets and Philosophy:

• Florian Hadler: Undercover Investigations: Secrets as Individual Negativities
• Faith Fulbright: Index Sui: Keeping the Secret
• Guillaume Collett: “The secret is that there is no secret”: Sense and Nonsense in Hyppolite and Deleuze

16:00-16:30 Coffee Break

16:30-18:30 Panel 2: Public/Private:

• Andrew McKenzie-McHarg: Secrecy and Privacy: Where does the Dividing Line Lie?
• Emma Deeks: Blogging in Private: The Difficulty of Telling Two Billion People to ‘Ssshhhhh’
• Michel Weber: Secrecy from Liberation to Oppression

20:00 Conference Dinner

Saturday 31st May – Grimond Building, GLT3

9:00-9:30 Welcome Coffee

9:30-11:00 Panel 3: Dreams and Thresholds

• Alex Wilkinson: The Secret inside the Form: The Matter of Dreams
• Michiko Oki: Threshold – A Place of Secret and Violence: Open Doors in Magritte and Kafka

11:00-11:30 Coffee Break

11:30-13:00 Panel 4: Espionage:

• Keith Scott: Dark Gnostics: Secrets, Mysteries, and OCCINT
• Toby Manning: Secrets in John Le Carré’s Cold War Fiction

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:30 Panel 5: Secrets and Literature:

• Gero Bauer: Paranoid Masculine Secrecy: Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White
• Krista Bonello R. Giappone: Excessive Textual Weaves and the Unreadable in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

15:30-16:00 Coffee break

16:00-17:30 Keynote Address: Professor David Vincent: Prying and Privacy in the Nineteenth Century

17:30- Wine reception

30th-31st May
University of Kent, Canterbury
Grimond Building, GLT3
Keynote Speaker: Prof. David Vincent (Open University)

With WikiLeaks and the Snowden case, the international newsreel has recently been increasingly concerned with revelations of secrets, allowing the confidential, private sphere to mix with the public, popular domain. In revealing the governmental practice of spying on millions of conversations, the Snowden case triggered a sudden upheaval in the definition of public and private spheres. It has also prompted us to question what constitutes a secret, and what function secrets have in society today.

This conference wishes to explore the structure and the conditions of the creation of a secret as reflected in contemporary theory and culture, as well as the role secrets play in society and in texts. Some of the questions in which we are interested include: How is a secret created? Which protagonists does a secret involve? Is there such thing as an absolute, as opposed to a relative, secret – in other words do secrets exist if others are unaware of them? Or do secrets only exist once they have taken on their structural position in relation to those who do and those who don’t know? How does the formation of a secret inform, and how is it informed by, the boundary separating the private from the public sphere? What ethical issues are involved in questions of transparency, concealment, and revelation? Does the conventional understanding of the secret – rightly or wrongly – presuppose a hidden ‘truth’ buried beneath the lack of meaning at the level of language? Is the secret itself a function of something like Derrida’s ‘différance’, and therefore an illusion or mere surface-effect of language?

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following and their interrelations:

• Power relationships: what kinds of power relationships can exist between a secret holder and those who do not, or wish to, know it? Who does a secret alienate?
• Sociological and anthropological approaches to secrets: collective and individual secrets and the question of surveillance; how secrets vary across cultures.
• Language and communication: does interpreting a text reveal its secret(s)? Or is there a semantic void within any text, the lack of a fixed signified or ‘secret’, which nonetheless generates its apparent meaning(s)? What is a coded language?
• Secrets in Literature, and in the Visual and Plastic Arts.
• Secret Histories: subaltern and other marginalised histories; Nationalism, identity, and concealing or reinventing the past; the role of State secrets in history; how the definition and function of the secret has changed in history.
• Philosophical approaches to secrets (analytic and continental): do secrets exist? Are they logically possible? What relations are maintained between secrets, language, and intersubjectivity, and between secrets and the unconscious?
• Psychological and psychoanalytic perspectives on the structure and function of secrets. Emotional responses (guilt, shame, etc.).

Papers should last for 20 minutes and will be followed by 10 minutes of questions.

Abstracts (300 words) should be sent as a Word attachment to the conference organising committee at: skepsi@kent.ac.uk

The email should include the name of the author, institution, and brief biographical details. You should also indicate in your proposal any audiovisual requirements you may have.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 31st March 2014.

Funded by University of Kent, School of European Culture and Languages, and by K.I.A.S.H.

Friday 24th May

9.00 -9.30: Welcome coffee and registration

9.30 -11.00 Panel 1 The other ghost: walking, talking deadchair: Nina Rolland

– Lucy Arnold ‘Mother always said that she would haunt’

– Veronica Frigeni ‘Dead man walking’

– Maria Dada ‘Tempo di Materiality’

11.00 -11.20: Coffee break

11.20 -12.30: Panel 2 Performance, Representation and Imagechair: Adina Stroia

– Alicia Spencer-Hall : “Spiritual Ghosts in the Digital Flesh? 13th Century Mystical Resurrection and the Modern “Spectre” of Tupac Shakur”

– Jack Webb ‘The Spectre of Haiti in Late Victorian Britain’

12.30 – 13.30: Lunch

13.30 -15.00: Panel 3 Ghosts and Literature. I chair: Mathilde Poizat-Amar

– Jeffrey Knaack ‘Ghosts as we are: Authenticity, Romanticism, and Books as relics in 19th century American Literature’ [in absentia]

– Doreen Bauschke ‘Solid Ghosts and Phantom Persons: The Notion of Somatic Hauntings in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl’

– Christopher Bond ‘Ghosts in the literature of War’

15.00 -15.30: Coffee break

15.30 – 17.00: Panel 4 Ghosts and Literature. IIchair: Krista Bonello

– Beatrijs Brouwer ‘Desire – divine or deadly? The Supernatural in Imperial Chinese Literature’

– Melanie Foehn ‘Out of joint’: The spectre of incommunicability in Hamlet, La Chute, and Beckett’s short plays’.

– Aaron Aquilina ‘Writing Afterlife – The Exhibitionism of the Dead’

17.00 – 18.00 Wine Reception

19.30: Dinner in town, everyone is welcome to join

Saturday 25^th May:

10.00 -11.30: Panel 5 Physical Spaceschair: Titu Chakraborty

– John Sabol ‘The Ghosts of Place: The Acoustemology of Situated Past Presence’

– James Geary ‘The Holy Ghost made Manifest: How Bernini pinned down the Holy Ghost in Rome’

– Michał Sowiński and Katarzyna Trzeciak ‘Gdynia – city with(out) ghosts’

11.30 – 11.45: Coffee break

11.45 – 12.45: Keynote speaker: Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam, ‘Fleshing out the Spectral metaphor’ chair: Guilaume Collett

12.45 – 14.00: Lunch

Skepsi is inviting proposals for papers for its upcoming sixth conference, Ghosts in the Flesh.

Read the full Call for Papers at THIS ADDRESS.

We are delighted to announce the publication of Skepsi Volume V Issue 1, entitled (De)Parsing Bodies. Read the issue at THIS ADDRESS.