Posthuman Antiquities
November 14-14, New York, New York
Hemmerdinger Hall, The Silver Center for Arts & Sciences
New York University

http://posthumanantiquities.wordpress.com/

What can an inquiry into antiquity offer posthumanist thinking on the body, on nature and its relationship with technology, and on the fundamental interrelatedness of the physical, the biological, the psychical, the social and the artifactual?

Greek and Roman literary, philosophical, and medical texts are resplendent with sites in which “materiality” and “embodiment” (in current parlance) erupt into a field of questioning, deliberation, care, and experimentation. A return to antiquity is particularly pertinent in the wake of the philosophical demise of the sovereignty of the modern individual human subject and the rise not only of discourses such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and feminism, but also recent turns to chaos theory, complexity theory, vitalism, affect theory, environmental philosophy, and animal studies. As with these contemporary discourses, classical thinking displaces and complicates the modern notion of subjectivity, and finds movement and life inherently at work in both organic and inorganic phenomena.

This international conference seeks to foster conversation and cross-pollination between these vastly different periods positioned, as they both are, as transitional zones. We propose that through an encounter with “the Greeks,” we can not only re-imagine the trajectories and potentialities of contemporary posthumanist theorizing, but also interrogate narratives of origin, legacy, and linear temporality.

Keynote speakers: Claudia Baracchi (Milan-Bicocca) and Adriana Cavarero (Verona).

Speakers: Emanuela Bianchi (NYU), Sara Brill (Fairfield), Rebecca Hill (RMIT), Brooke Holmes (Princeton), Miriam Leonard (UCL), Michael Naas (DePaul), Ramona Naddaff (UC Berkeley), Mark Payne (Chicago), John Protevi (Louisiana State), Kristin Sampson (Bergen), Giulia Sissa (UCLA).

Conference organized by Emanuela Bianchi, Sara Brill and Brooke Holmes.