Welcome to the webpage of Survival, the University of Toronto’s 25th international conference of the Centre for Comparative Literature, taking place on March 12-15.
Our conference schedule is now live! Please click the link below to view it. Updates to the schedule may still occur between now and our conference and will be posted here. We invite you to come–it is absolutely free to the general public.
Our keynote speakers this year will be Christopher Fynsk, Elizabeth Rottenberg and Eric Cazdyn.
Christopher Fynsk is a Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen. He has translated works by Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Maurice Blanchot. Fynsk’s work is closely involved with the writings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Lévinas, and several contemporary artists. In his critical studies, which breach the barriers separating philosophy, literary theory, and art criticism, Fynsk is deeply engaged with the question of the possibility of language and how the human relation to Being is sketched out through literary and philosophical texts and art works. He is the author of Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (Fordham, 2013), The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minnesota, 2004), Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford, 2000), Language and Relation: …that there is language (Stanford, 1996), and Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Cornell, 1986).
Elizabeth Rottenberg was educated at The Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and the Albert-Ludwigs- Universität in Freiburg. She teaches courses in philosophy and comparative literature and conducts research in the areas of contemporary French philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. She is one of six founding members of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project. Her published work includes translations of Jean-François Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Stanford, 1993), Maurice Blanchot’s Friendship (Stanford, 1997), Maurice Blanchot’s and Jacques Derrida’s The Instant of my Death/Demeure (Stanford, 2000), Jacques Derrida’s The Death Penalty II (Chicago, 2015). She is the editor and translator of Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews (1971-2001) by Jacques Derrida (Stanford, 2001) as well as the co-editor and translator (with Peggy Kamuf) of the two-volume edition of Jacques Derrida’s Psyche: Inventions of the Other (Stanford, 2007/2008). She is the author of Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert (Stanford, 2005) and the forthcoming For the Love of Psychoanalysis. She has published many articles on themes in late modern and contemporary philosophy in such journals as Kant-Studien, Mosaic, Modern Language Notes, Philosophy Today, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, theory@buffalo, and The Oxford Literary Review. Elizabeth is also a practicing psychoanalyst in Chicago.
Eric Cazdyn: “THE BLINDSPOT OF SURVIVAL.” Eric Cazdyn, our Linda Hutcheon and J. Edward Chamberlin Speaker this year, is Distinguished Professor Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Centre for Comparative Literature. His publications include The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness (Duke, 2012), After Globalization (Blackwell, 2011, with Imre Szeman), Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi (Duke, 2010), The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan(Duke, 2002) and the forthcoming Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015, with Marcus Boon and Timothy Morton).
We hope to see you soon!
Survival 2015 Conference Committee: Baharak Beizaei, Keegan Goodman, Natasha Hay, Irina Sadovina, Fan Wu