FRIDAY, APRIL 10 &
SATURDAY, APRIL 11, 2009
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
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CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION
While contemporary theoretical discourse – political, juridical, and economic as well as media and literary studies – has increasingly turned
its focus toward the global networks of empire and colonialism as well as to transnational economic and juridical nexuses, it has nonetheless been reluctant to pose a corollary question: what, exactly, is a world? Despite Martin Heidegger’s definition of the animal as “poor in world,” or Hannah Arendt’s claim that the “human condition of work is worldliness” or, more recently, Jean-Luc Nancy’s distinction between “world” and “globe” in his Creation of the World or Globalization, the question of the world has been virtually ignored in modern scholarship. This interdisciplinary conference, “Worldmaking,” seeks to resuscitate, historically and across various disciplinary registers, the question of the “world” and its historical relation to labor, production and, more generally, the processes of making. The impetus of the conference is to ask, given the historical permutations of the term “world,” why has it failed to resonate in an era of saturated by a discourse of the globe. If the modern fascination with the global emerges, at least in part, from among the detritus of failed worldmaking discourses – aesthetic, economic, philosophical as well as political – this conference hopes to bring the discourse of the world and its various constructions back within view.
This conference is made possible through the generous support of the Bernard Wiessbourd Memorial Fund.
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