The Kendall College of Arts & Sciences’ School of Language & Literature will host Acts of Reading: Non-Philosophy and Humanities, an NEH International Symposium on Feb. 23-24. Non-philosophy, inaugurated in the 1990s by François Laruelle, is an experimental mode of thinking that revisits the connections between philosophy and reality, while questioning the way philosophy has influenced and supervised our artistic and scholarly practices.
Organized by Associate Professor of French & Comparative Literature Karl Pollin-Dubois, this event will be open to other disciplines that involve the act of reading. Contributions to this interdisciplinary symposium will include communications about ethics, political science, world literature, religion, gender studies, music, and visual arts.
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the symposium will consist of 40-minute presentations over two days given by a host of international scholars. Presentation topics will include “Transcendental and musical experience in Laruelle’s work,” “Non-Philosophy and the death of University,” “Sexuality of Strangers,” and “Painting’s Immanent Hypothesis: reading Paolini.”
The symposium begins at 9:15 a.m. Feb. 23, 2024 in the Adelson Auditorium of Tyrrell Hall. This event is free and open to the public.