Conference Title:
Negation and Negativity: Theory, Form, and Representation

Conference Date and Location:
Friday, June 3, 2011
University of California, Los Angeles

Keynote Speakers:
Sianne Ngai and Joseph Bristow, UCLA Department of English

                                                                         “Do
                     “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
                     “Nothing?”
                          I remember
                      Those are pearls that were his eyes.
                     “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
                                                         -T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Un-situated voices in arguably the most canonical poem of the twentieth century tell us everything and nothing: a proliferation of “no’s” and negations that compel us to read but also derail our desire for meaning.  Yet, however obscure, we can agree that this “nothing” continues to signify, that despite connoting a lack of knowledge or existence it persists in living, that despite being part of a “waste land” it still constitutes material waste.

Articulations of negation and the negative always threaten to produce their own non-existence.  How do we even theorize that which appears untheorizable?  Negation has been formative to dominant critical discourses from the Hegelian dialectic to the Freudian unconscious, and in recent years has reemerged as the subject of texts considering queer theory and the death drive (Edelman), ideology and capitalism (Zizek), denial and affect (Ver Eacke, Ngai), and politicized bodies (Butler, Agamben).  Each of these critical engagements with negation grapples with the unsayable, absent, or at times shapeless nature of the subject but also prompts productive questions.  How can negativity be enabling, reified, of further undone?  Indeed, is our contemporary cultural life saturated with negativity?  For instance, how do gendered and racial acts of erasure from nationalist sentiment to ethnic cleansing function?  How does new media negate traditional boundaries and hierarchies?  Yet, in what ways is negativity a trans-temporal or trans-historical phenomenon?

Papers may address any aspect of literary and cultural negation including, but not limited to, the following:

• Absence and productivity: authorship, “death of the author,” erasure of authority
• Negative feelings: affect, anxiety, depression, melancholy, the sublime
• Genre and form: the gothic, banned books, partial manuscripts, literary waste, the fragment
• Literature and math: nullification, neutrality, negative numbers
• Human bodies: ability and disability, transgression, manipulation and mutilation, trauma
• Negative subjectivity, blankness, and death: deanimation, reanimation, abortion, loss; what substantiates or negates a subject?
• Negative theology
• Self-consuming economies: commodity fetishism, the literary marketplace, the labor of reading
• Negative language: the “unsayable,” denials, evasions, negative tropes, silences, voids
• Eroticism: negative or excessive desires, the forbidden, the taboo and the fetish, dissonance
• Aesthetic mappings of negativity: photography, film, visual arts
• “Inoperative communities”: political alterity and absence
• Technologies of the discipline: acts of inscription or erasure, paying homage, critical disavowals