Baudelaire and Philosophy: A Conference sponsored by the 糖心视频
5-6 June 2019, Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London and the Institut Fran莽ais
CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline for submissions: 21 March 2019
INVITED SPEAKERS
Isabelle Alfandary (Paris 3/CIPh)
Jennifer Bajorek (Hampshire)
Patrick ffrench (King鈥檚 College London)
Elissa Marder (Emory)
Adrian Rifkin (Goldsmiths)
Richard Rand (Paris)
DESCRIPTION
Charles Baudelaire is a pivotal reference for debates on modernity, criticism and poetics, though in the domains of philosophy and critical theory his work is often approached solely through the prism of contemporary commentary. Baudelaire鈥檚 own engagement with the philosophical – for instance in his pairing of Joseph de Maistre and Edgar Allan Poe as critics of the metaphysics of 鈥減rogress鈥� – has also been insufficiently mined. Yet Baudelaire has been key for thinking about the transformations of the very conditions of aesthetic experience since the 19th century; his writings on the dandy and the poetic significance of intoxication, as well as his work as a critic of fine art and music, have arguably expanded notions of what counts as aesthetic experience, opening it up beyond questions of taste, value, or didactic ends. For Nietzsche, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Luk谩cs, Benjamin, Lacan and others, Baudelaire reimagined the poet and the poetic as inseparable from their relations to the social, psychological, material and sexual and, as such, as figures through which such relations may be reevaluated. After Baudelaire, the urban and the technological are no longer mere themes but the very element in which aesthetic experience and poetic production take shape; after Baudelaire, the poem assumes the form of a crucible for new and altered states of 鈥渆xperience.鈥� This had led to Baudelaire often being made synonymous with the notion of modernity, and in particular with the idea that novelty becomes a (or even the) key category for aesthetic experience and artistic production from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Taking Baudelaire’s own references to philosophy seriously, this conference will also explore the complexity of the relation between the received understanding of Baudelaire as a prophet of modernity and his opposition to any idea of progress that would reduce poetic beauty to a vehicle for social and moral development.
The conference will alternate between delving into specific poetic and critical texts by Baudelaire and tackling some of the key interpretations and uses of his work within philosophy and critical theory, from Georges Bataille to Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin to Jacques Ranci猫re. The conference aims to do justice to the richness, complexity and ambiguity of Baudelaire鈥檚 critical and poetic writing, to explore his relation to philosophy and the philosophical, and to interrogate his place as a synonym for a certain conception of modernity.
Selected papers will be published as an edited collection or special journal issue.
PAPERS
Proposals for 20 minute papers are invited in all areas pertaining to Baudelaire鈥檚 relation to philosophical aesthetics and related areas (e.g. ethics and political philosophy, metaphysics, theology, philosophy of mind, critical theory). Please send abstracts of not more than 250 words together with a brief (50-100 word) biographical statement including affiliation, status (student or not) and contact details to: j.ng [at] gold.ac.uk and a.toscano [at] gold.ac.uk. Please also direct any questions to these addresses.
CONFERENCE ORGANISERS
Julia Ng and Alberto Toscano, CPCT, Goldsmiths, University of London