Ecstasy (ACLA 2015)
American Comparative Literature Association
Seattle, March 26-29, 2015
Seminar Organizers: Adam Ahmed (UC Berkeley) and Seulghee Lee (Williams College)
Elizabeth Freeman has recently asked, "Why is it that even in queer theory, only pain seems so socially and theoretically generative?" At the conclusion of his landmark book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Muñoz matches the incredulity of Freeman's question with an enthusiastic declaration: "We must take ecstasy together." Muñoz's insistence that we collectively possess an ephemeral bliss comes in stark contrast to what he perceives as "the dominance of an affective world, a present, full of anxiousness and fear." Responding to identitarian theorizations of queer, racial, and gender identities marked by the anxiety, fear, melancholy, and pain of abjection, Muñoz asks us to believe in the "ecstasy" of a future collectivity enclosed within the present.
Muñoz's use of "ecstasy" to describe a rupture within the present hearkens back to its ancient Greek etymological root ekstasis—an irrational state associated with lovers and poets—literally meaning "to stand beside oneself." More than opposing a regime of rationality, ecstasy here suggests an alternative to the double consciousness of standing against the conditions of one's abjection. If "straight time is a self-naturalizing temporality," which renders the structure of social intelligibility timeless, "queerness's ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world." Following Muñoz's call, this seminar proposes that standing beside the conditions of the present retains the immanent content of faith so necessary for critique as well as the potential for more and better forms of collectivity.
This seminar seeks to explore the implications for ecstasy as a utopian hermeneutic, a potentially naïve affect associated with religious and aesthetic experience, as well as a regulated substance that conjures frictionless feelings of collectivity. Papers might approach these topics through sustained treatments of literary-aesthetic, religious, and/or theoretical materials, by describing scenes of ecstatic experience in variously skeptical or affirmative terms.
Possible paper topics include:
Ecstatic relations in queer and/or minority works
The secular or religious status of ecstasy
The time of ecstasy (within a phenomenological or historical register)
Pedagogies of ecstasy (particularly within non-Western religious traditions)
Aesthetic dimension of ecstasy, pop art, aesthetic encounters with the present
The body in/on ecstasy
Comparative ecstasies (across aesthetic or religious traditions)
Ecstasy, dependency, and abjection
Please submit an abstract (250 words max) and brief bio to the ACLA portal (http://www.acla.org/ecstasy) by
- October 15
.