Cfp: "Writing Upon the Limit: Writing in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy," Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee, May 13, 2011.

This one-day workshop is intended to bring together academics and nonacademics from philosophy, French studies, and cultural studies interested in discussing post-Derridean ideas about writing.

Writing is a recurring theme in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, for whom, writing “has its place at the limit.” Nancy coins the term exscription to describe a form of inscription that can be traced outside the text. This means that he pushes our understanding of writing into extended and external bodies. The conference aims to explore Nancy's ideas further, for instance in critical thoughts concerning the circumscribing of texts even in the extended domain of exscription and in relation to current interest in ideas of the extended mind.

Submission of papers exploring these issues are invited. Papers should have a reading time of 20 minutes. Postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers are encouraged to act as respondents to present brief replies to open the question and discussion sessions.

We are pleased to announce confirmed speakers include:
Ian James (Downing college, Cambridge)
Chris Watkin, (Murray Edwards College, Cambridge)
Martin Crowley, (Queen’s College, Cambridge).

The deadline for receipt of submissions is February 28, 2011.

Abstracts and inquiries should be sent to c.giunta@dundee.ac.uk.

Terezakis, Katie. "Review of Jean-Luc Nancy's DISCOURSE OF THE SYNCOPE." NDPR (October 2008).

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Le Discours de la syncope. I. Logodaedalus. Paris: Flammarion, 1975. The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus. Trans. Saul Anton. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Jean-Luc Nancy published Le Discours de la syncope: I. Logodaedalus in 1976, the same year Derrida published Glas and Foucault brought out the first volume of The History of Sexuality. "French theory" was not yet a rhetorically circumscribed approach to reading and writing or an academic sub-discipline; the conference event now famous for confirming Derrida's international status -- 'Les fins de l'homme' in Cerisy-la-Salle -- which Nancy was to organize with his long-term collaborator, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, was still four years away. This context is worth mentioning in reference to the 2008 publication of Saul Anton's translation of Logodaedalus because even as Nancy's book insistently raises the question of genre, it presents both its findings and itself in a self-conscious form indicative of an emergent intellectual milieu, albeit one still insufficiently characterized thirty years later with the tags of "deconstructive" or "post-structuralist." Nancy's book is about Kant, or about Kant insofar as Kant's circumscription of the limits of reason exposes the problem, for Nancy, of how to write philosophy. Kant's attempt to create the blueprint or architectural outline appropriate for the presentation of his system, his attempt to remove his own inflections and present the critical project in a "style without style", are taken as seriously by Nancy as Kant's comments, generally reserved for prefaces and parenthetical asides, about the regrettable necessity of excising illustrations and examples from his texts or about printing errors. Likewise, the fact that, according to Nancy, no other philosopher has been appropriated by so many works of literature must be considered together with Kant's literary self-mortification. The nonhierarchical weaving of such different elements of Nancy's guiding question -- how to present philosophy? -- makes for both an extraordinary book and a disobliging one. Nancy is hyperbolic and deeply resourceful. In turns he is annoyingly elusive and genuinely effective in his identification of the way that ontology's transformation into exposition, in the critical turn, creates an ethos of presentation itself, rendering Darstellung one of Kant's underlying concerns, as well as the issue over which his system "syncopates" or blacks out. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14446.