Pausing Time/Timing the Pause: sayability in the arts, philosophy, and politics
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in literature Jon Fosse only half jokingly referred to himself as the master of silence: how else, he asked, can we bring the unsayable out in language than through “long pause, short pause, or, simply, pause.”
This year’s Ereignis conference seeks to bring the relation between speech and silence into further focus. Our key questions are:
- What kind of speech, or speech event, enables the silent to come forward?
- How can that which cannot be said be alluded or referred to in speech?
- How is the relation between speech and silence challenged by the an increasing awareness of non-human speech?
- What are the socio-political ramifications of these relations?
The 4th interdisciplinary Ereignis conference will take place on August 10 and 11, 2024 at Hotel Nadmorski in Gdynia, Poland, with a hybrid option for those unable to attend in person. Registration will be required.
Image by Holger Feulner. Used by permission.
Read about our terms.
Confirmed keynote speakers
Matthew Goulish, dramaturg, writer, and scholar with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The author of 39 microlectures – in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2001) and many other books and articles on art and drama. Matthew is widely recognised as a groundbreaking thinker and practitioner in the performing arts.
- Watch Matthew Goulish’s staging of the poem The Presentable Art of Reading Absence by Jay Wright, and listen to Goulish’s discussion of what it means to stage poetry: https://www.mancc.org/artists/lin-hixson-andbrmatthew-goulish/.
Chris Norris is Professor Emeritus at the University of Cardiff, Wales. Best known for his important introduction to Derrida (Harvard, 1982) Chris has published books on many aspects of philosophy, literary theory and the history of ideas; also, more recently, several volumes of poetry on philosophical and literary topics.
- Watch Chris’s keynote to the 2022 Ereignis Conference on Kierkegaard on our Vimeo channel.
Anda Pleniceanu is an independent researcher, translator, and editor. She has held the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Fellowship at Western University, Canada, and was Editor-in-Chief for the Comparative Literature journal the Scattered Pelican. She is currently Section Editor of Academic Articles for Inscriptions. Dr Pleniceanu’s interdisciplinary research connects critical philosophy, aesthetics, and memory studies, with a focus on negative thought in 20th-century and contemporary philosophy. Her recent publications include “Carving Out the Absence Within: Negative Rilievo as a Strategy of Concept-Building” (2023) and “The Gift of Chains: Atopic Violence and Embodied Community in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound” (2021).
Further keynotes TBA.
Details
Sessions: Papers are timed to 20 minutes and followed by a Q&A with the audience. Each session is moderated.
Deadline for submission: Submit abstracts by June 1, 2024 through our online submission engine. We will return to you promptly with a notification on acceptance.
Deadline for registration: Registration is required by July 1, 2024.
Conference fee
- General attendance: €150 (standard fee);
- Reduced fee: €100 (students and the unwaged).
Scholastic committee
- Prof. Rick Dolphijn, Utrecht University and the University of Gdańsk
- Dr. Torgeir Fjeld, Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts (chair)
- Dr Jytte Holmqvist, University of Melbourne
- Prof. Lucy Huskinson, Bangor University, UK.
- Prof. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Wild Studios Consulting and University of Hong Kong
- Prof. Dror Pimentel, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem
Organisers: This event is hosted by Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts and Inscriptions — a journal for contemporary thinking on art, philosophy and psycho-analysis.
More information about travelling to Gdynia, Poland, visa requirements, accommodation, and some information for those travelling with families.
Read the full Call for Abstracts.