Appel à communication : « Visibility of the Invisible » (Boston, 5-8 mars 2020)

From its rudimentary manifestations as smoke and fire and footprint, to theological significations of the image of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin, the trace, as a visible marker of an absent presence, generates a compelling milieu to meditate on the proliferation of meaning in text and image. Mostly confined to image studies and linguistics, and widely characterized as an interplay between presence and absence, the trace famously received (theoretical) attention from Jacques Derrida and occupied a central place in his body of work, not least in Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and, in his seminal essay “Différance.” In Of Grammatology —as his translator Gayatri Spivak observes— he formulates the condition of the trace as “the mark of the absence of presence” (XVII), and deploys it to argue against the fixed meanings of texts, a position that stems from Martin Heidegger’s concept of writing under erasure, (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1930); The Question of Being (1956)), which means crossing out a word within a text while printing the word as crossed out, thus displaying both the absence and the presence of the word and exhibiting the multitude of meanings in a text. In “Différance”, Derrida also resists the conceptualization of the trace and recourses to the method of negative theology, where God is refused definite descriptions of existence, but contemplated through negative statements to acknowledge his superior existence. On the other hand, outside the realm of –or on the margins of— these theoretical reflections, Georges Didi-Huberman, in his book Aperçues (2018) treats the trace in the realm of visual arts and literature, as a kind of relic of life (survivance) and adds the idea of survival to the vocabulary of the trace.

Aided by such reflections, this panel invites proposals to examine the notion, theory, idea and ontology of trace and the ways in which it can be deployed in literature, image studies, visual arts, film, art history and theory, and seeks to discuss: how can we or can we conceptualize the trace? How can it be (or can it be) used as a critical tool to analyse works of art and literature? Can we speak of the ontology of the trace? What role does art, textual practices and images play in our understanding of the trace?

Submissions should include:
– the name, email address, institutional affiliation
– title of the proposal
– a proposal of 300 words maximum
– a brief biography (150 words maximum)

Please use the submission form available at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18247

This panel of the 51st Northeast Modern Language Association invites proposals to examine the notion, theory, idea, and ontology of the trace and the ways in which it can be deployed in literature, image studies, art, film, and other media and disciplines.

Organizer: Busra Copuroglu (bcopurog@uwo.ca), Western University.