Society for Critical Exchange

THEORY INSTITUTE

March 9-12, 2023

FIFTEEN DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS FROM THE U.S. AND EUROPE IN THREE DAYS OF ENGAGING DISCUSSION.

About SCE The Society for Critical Exchange is North America’s oldest scholarly organization devoted to theory. Our various interdisciplinary projects, conferences, and symposia serve to advance the role of theory in academic and intellectual arenas. Our projects encompass a broad spectrum of disciplines, most prominently literary and cultural studies, legal studies and practices, economics, philosophy, and ped agogy.

The 2023 Institute The Society for Critical Exchange (SCE), this year co-sponsored by the University of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences and Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, is pleased to announce the topic of its fourteenth annual Theory Institute:

The Death Drive

María del Rosario Acosta López

María del Rosario Acosta López is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her most recent publications are devoted to the aesthetics of resistance in Latin American art, and decolonial perspectives on memory and history. Her next book is entitled Grammars of Listening.

“Trauma as the Breakdown of all Grammar: Grammars of lo inaudito in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

María del Rosario Acosta López

Brian O' Keeffe

Brian O’Keeffe is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of French at Barnard College.

“The Cruelty Drive”

Brian O' Keeffe

Emanuela Bianchi

Emanuela Bianchi is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University with aliations in Classics and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos, La naturaleza en disputa. Physis y eros en el pensamiento antiguo, and co-editor of Antiquities Beyond Humanism.

“The Splitting of Eros in Aristotle”

Emanuela Bianchi

Sara Lindheim

Sara Lindheim is Professor of Classics at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides and Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire. She is currently co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory.

“Doing the Same Thing Over and Over and Not Expecting Different Results”

Sara Lindheim

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is completing a project on visual infrastructures and published a blue-print for it entitled “Visuality as Infrastructure.” Recently she has published “In-São-Paulo-Visible,” “Excess of Visibility/Scarcity of Water,” and “An Expanse of Water.”

“Repetition-Accumulation”

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson

Paul Allen Miller

Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina. He has held visiting appointments in Bochum, Paris, and Beijing. He has published ten books, fifteen edited volumes, and many articles. His latest book is Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth.

“Take it to the Limit: Ontology Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

Paul Allen Miller

Penelope Deutscher

Penelope Deutscher is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University and Associate Director of Northwestern’s Critical Theory Cluster. Her most recent book is Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason. She is the author of number of books and articles on twentieth century and contemporary French, and feminist philosophy.

“Derrida’s Freud, and The Future of Life's Auto-Repugnancy”

Penelope Deutscher

Shannon M. Mussett

Shannon M. Mussett is Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University. She specializes in existentialism, German idealism, feminism, and philosophy of literature. She is author of Entropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and Creation.

“Death’s Drive in Hegel and Freud”

Shannon M. Mussett

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is founder and editor of symploke and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Theory Institute. His recent books include Catastrophe and Higher Education, Vinyl Theory, and Happiness.

“Baudrillard on the Death Drive”

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Nicole Simek

Nicole Simek is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College. Her publications include Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life and Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation. She is the translator of Maryse Condé’s The Belle Créole and co-editor of Francophone Literature as World Literature.

“Paraontology and the Death Drive”

Nicole Simek

Peter Hitchcock

Peter Hitchcock is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of CUNY. He is also on the faculty of the Film Studies and Women’s Studies Certificate Programs. He is currently Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the GC. Recent publications include work on paranoia, migrant fiction, Black Mirror, and the ethics of architecture.

“Labor and Desire”

Peter Hitchcock

Mario Telò

Mario Telò is Professor of Rhetoric, Classics, and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis, and Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading Through Pandemic Times.

“Freud’s Antigone, Butler’s Death Drive”

Mario Telò

David Greven

David Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His books include The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender and Intimate Violence: Hitchcock, Sex, and Queer Theory. He is the co-editor of Ryan Murphy’s Queer America. His current book project is called All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and the Influence of Shakespeare and Milton.

“Sex and the Death Drive: Rereading Late Henry James”

David Greven

Zahi Zalloua

Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College and Editor of The Comparatist. He is the co-author of Universal Politics, and the author of Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause, Being Posthuman, Žižek on Race, Theory’s Autoimmunity, Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question, and Reading Unruly.

“Black Ressentiment and the Politics of the Death Drive: A Fanonian Meditation”

Zahi Zalloua

Daniel T. O’Hara

Daniel T. O’Hara, Emeritus Professor of English and Humanities at Temple University, is the author and an editor of sixteen books. Yeats and Revisionism is his latest authored book. An advisory editor of symploke and a contributing editor to American Book Review, he continues as an editor of Journal of Modern Literature.

“On Reading Beyond the Death Drive: Living Phantasms”

Daniel T. O’Hara

The Institute will take place from Thursday, March 9 to Sunday, March 12 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the University of South Carolina. Additional details regarding the Society for Critical Exchange or the upcoming Theory Institute can be found at the Society for Critical Exchange’s website (http://societyforcriticalexchange.org/) or by contacting Executive Director Jeffrey R. Di Leo (dileo@symploke.org).