CFP: "Corporeity and Affectivity: in Celebration of Merleau-Ponty's 100th Birthday," Charles University, Prague, September 28-October 2, 2008.

In an article written in 1959, in commemoration of Husserl’s 100th anniversary, Merleau-Ponty writes that “with regard to a philosopher whose venture has awakened so many echoes, and at such an apparent distance from the point where he himself stood, any commemoration is also a betrayal” (“The Philosopher and His Shadow”). These words, however, are not meant to prevent us from commemorating a philosopher and his work. Quite the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty this “betrayal” seems to have a positive meaning. In fact it means that, in order to do justice to a philosopher’s work we should not – or perhaps, we could not – merely repeat it. To keep the work of thought alive we should trace and conjure up its “unthoughts”, and the greater the work of a philosopher, the richer the unthought elements in that work. Commemorating Merleau-Ponty’s 100th day of birth in 2008, nearly 50 years after his dead, his work is still alive. Not because his work was unfinished by his sudden death, but because his work was meant to be open and interrogative and thus not to be closed off, it left us with many elements yet to think. This conference aims at bringing into play the topicality of this work with respect to various debates in contemporary philosophy. . . . The rest of the CFP is here: http://www.phenomenology.ro/newsletter/pages/corporeity&affectivity.html.