The UCLA Humanities Seminar
Thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Seminar brings three post-doctoral scholars to the campus for a two year term. During the first year, they participate in the topical seminar. During the second, they teach courses of their own design through which they share the results of their research and experience in the seminar with University of California undergraduates.
Seminar Series
Central to the work of this year's seminar and fellows Thomas Albrecht (UC Irvine), Charlene Villasenor Black (Univ. of Michigan) and Daniel Gross (UC Berkeley) is a definition of the passions as "any mental or emotional state that exceeds the boundaries of rational discourse." This includes inquiry into the traditional problems of desire and suffering, violence, intoxication and the aesthetic sublime, but could also include examination of more mundane forces in social life-from nationalism to communalism to virulent racism--that often tend to exceed the limitations that rational political structures impose upon them. It is also appropriate to consider the question of how does the unreasonable and the ungovernable become an object of knowledge and manipulation, if knowledge and manipulation imply control or containment?
Conference : The Politics of Passion
Friday, April 30 – Saturday, May 1, 1999
University of California, Los Angeles
306 Royce Hall
Political passions are deeply suspect in an age haunted by Nazi irrationalism and organized ethnic hate. The politics of apathy — enlightened or postmodern — seems no more promising. Whether passions have a role in politics is a classical dilemma that has once again gained the attention of scholars working in philosophy, literature, cultural and gender studies. The conference will construct a genealogy of this problematic by investigating some of its historical and theoretical conditions. Panels are organized around three chronological themes: religious passions, social passions, passions and the ethics of the subject. Speakers will address topics including the representation of Christ’s Passion, the incorporation of passion in political bodies, the relevance of “the passions” outside western contexts, and the ethical relationships between forms of passion and forms of subjectivity.
Abstracts for the papers ( Click here )
Program
Friday, April 30, 306 Royce Hall
12:30–1:30 p.m. Registration and Coffee
1:30–4:00 p.m. Religious Passions
Introductory Remarks: Henry Ansgar Kelly, Director,
UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Convener: Charlene Villaseņor Black, Mellon
Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA Humanities Consortium
Caliban, Creature of Passion
Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine
Passionlessness in Aztec Sacrificial Imagery
Cecelia F. Klein, University of California, Los Angeles
Burning Down the House: Face to Face with Mortality
Charles Merewether, Getty Research Institute
4:30 p.m. Introductory Remarks: Vincent P. Pecora, Director,
UCLA Humanities Consortium
Keynote Address: Passions Performatives Proust
J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
6:00 p.m. Reception
Saturday, May 1, 306 Royce Hall
9:30–10:00 a.m. Registration and Coffee
10:00 a.m.– Social Passions
Convener: Daniel M. Gross, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow UCLA Humanities Consortium
Passions and Pessimism in Hobbes’ Political Psychology
Nancy S. Struever, Johns Hopkins University
Politics and the Passions in the Aftermath of the English Civil War: The Case of Royalist Romance
Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley
The Will to Possess: Aristotle and Early Modern Slavery
Page duBois, University of California, San Diego
2:00–4:30 p.m. Passions and the Ethics of the Subject
Convenor: Thomas Albrecht, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA Humanities Consortium
Thinking of the Other in Romantic Love
Adela Pinch, University of Michigan
Allegories of Emotion
Rei Terada, University of Michigan
Except Us: Despair with Kierkegaard
Thomas Pepper, University of Minnesota
4:30 p.m. Closing Reception in Honor of Nancy S. Struever
For inquiries, please contact Corie Goodloe, Program Corordinator, cgoodloe@humnet.ucla.edu
(310) 825-9581
Humanities Consortium
Vincent P. Pecora, Director
310 Royce Hall Box 951404
University of California
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1404
(310) 825-9581
Conference sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the UCLA Humanities Consortium, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, and the Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies
