A Graduate Student Conference on Heidegger and modernity sponsored by the Committee on Social Thought (University of Chicago): May 2021.
CfP – Heidegger: Politics, History, Modernity
Deadline on March 14
The organizers are pleased to announce a Graduate Student Conference on Heidegger and modernity sponsored by the Committee on Social Thought (University of Chicago). The event will be held via Zoom on May 28-29, 2021. Keynotes will be delivered by Prof. Judith Wolfe (University of St Andrews) and Prof. Ryan Coyne (University of Chicago).
Martin Heidegger continues to scandalize. His influence on 20th-century Continental thought is unrivaled. The works of Arendt, Derrida, Levinas, Marcuse, to name but a few, would be unthinkable without him. For just this reason, the questions of how to deal with his nefarious politics, his reactionary stance on modernity, and his apocalypticist vision of history have always greatly exercised his readers. For most academic readers of Heidegger, it has been a question of how to salvage what is valuable in Heidegger’s thought, how to extract it from that which is toxic. The recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks has initiated a new phase in these debates. Outside of the academy, Heidegger has been a constant source of inspiration for authoritarian regimes abroad, as well as far-right and alt-right movements at home. In times of heightened awareness of the political and ecological fragility of the modern democratic world, their challenges have taken on a new urgency.
This conference seeks contributions from every strand of Heidegger’s reception including, but not limited to, German phenomenology and hermeneutics, French post-structuralism, analytic philosophy, intellectual history, and theology. It aims to offer an occasion for dialogue between all these approaches around the question, How to think with Heidegger against Heidegger (and his authoritarian usage) on the topics of politics, history, and modernity?
Possible topics include:
- Concepts, contexts, critiques of Heidegger’s political thought
- History, apocalypse, eschatology in Heidegger
- Heidegger’s critique of modernity: dwelling, technology, poetry
- Heidegger in the Anthropocene; Heidegger as a thinker of the planetary
- Heidegger in Russia, China, Iran
- Heidegger’s reception by far-right and alt-right movements
- Theological critiques of Heidegger’s religious thought
- Heidegger and Catholic anti-modernism: affinities and differences
- Critical assessments of previous attempts to address these challenges and questions
Submissions
Graduate students, postdocs, and young scholars from all universities are invited to submit a 500-word anonymized abstract for a 20-minute presentation to [email protected] by March 14, 2021. Indicate your name, institutional affiliation and contact information in the email and attach your abstract as a separate .doc or .pdf file.
Organisation:
Mat Messerschmidt, David Kretz & Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire
More information: https://heideggermodernity.wordpress.com/