The Theory Reading Group at Cornell University invites submissions for its fifth annual interdisciplinary spring conference:
“Particularity, Exemplarity, Singularity”
Featuring keynote speaker Ian Balfour (York University)
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
April 17^th -18^th , 2009
The place of the particular, the exemplary, or the singular in contemporary philosophical practice has yet to be decided. While much of the critical thought of the last fifty years has focused on affirming the rights of ephemeral experience or the singular instance by refusing grand narratives or universal systems, more recent years have seen the rebirth of a rationalism that, at least in one of its forms, again relegates particularity to the debased realm of illusion, solipsism, and doxa. At stake in the tension between these two positions is the possibility that there exists some form of specifically artistic or empirical truth, or even a non- phenomenalizable reality of the singular, even if this truth or this reality are not of the order of propositional knowledge.
This conference is guided by the following question: what is the role of the particular, the exemplary, or the singular in critical thought today? Alternatively, how might these terms mark an impasse within systematic knowledge? We understand these questions to accommodate and encourage original reflection on a wide range of topics within philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theory. We invite participants to consider such issues as the relation between literature and philosophy, the status of history or materiality with regard to aesthetic objects, and the contemporary inheritance of the critique of representation as it has been elaborated in continental philosophy since Kant.
Suggested paper topics include (but are not limited to):
Singularity and Event
Literature and its Outside
The Persistence of the Dialectic: Particularity and Universality
The Sublime Limits of Representation
Rhetoric and Philosophy
The Rebirth of Rationalism
The Future of the Linguistic Turn
Taste and Community
Poetics and Aesthetics
Literature and Epistemology, Literary Ways of Knowing
The Literary Absolute
Example, Instance, Case, Sample
Genre, Archetype, Paradigm
Origin, Originality
The Concept of Criticism
Literature and Disenchantment
The Transcendental and the Empirical
The Literal and the Figurative
Problems of Inscription
Symptomatic Reading
Bad Examples
The Genesis of the Singular
Please limit the length of abstracts to no more than 250 words. The deadline for submission of 250-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations is February 28, 2009. Please include your name, e-mail address, and phone number. Abstracts should be e-mailed to theory@cornell.edu Notices of acceptance will be sent no later than March 5, 2009. For more information about the Cornell Theory Reading Group, visit http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg .
Perverse Egalitarianism 
This is the same group that put on the “Badiou vs. Kant” conference last year, right? It could be interesting.
I think last year it was “Substance of Thought” with Critchley and Toscano – http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg/conf2008.html – I suppose it could be read as Kant vs. Badiou… It’s also at the same time as that Syracuse gathering on Postmodernism, Religion and Culture, so I’m conflicted here.