UC Irvine Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference 2025 

Conference Date: April 3 & 4, 2025

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Tracy McNulty (Cornell)

What could go wrong with a “cure”? For whatever therapeutic maneuver—medical, political, philosophical—the figure of the “cure” sets up a particularly crude teleology. For example, a “cure” might name the permanent isolation, suspension and cessation of whatever is deemed ‘the problem.’ Genuine “cures,” then, would be both self-cancelling and irreversibly effective: if closure can be achieved without remainder, the curative action would itself cease to function while its consequence would indefinitely persist. Limitations to the cure’s relief then become resistances, and resistances become what was always already destined to be annihilated. And while the successful cure resolves what counts as the problem at hand, it never guarantees health, survival, or remediation in general, at least in itself: the indefinite effectiveness of the cure is thus paradoxically ephemeral, dissipating in the wake of ever-renewed concerns external to it.

But however problematic, “curative” figures and logics are not easily rejected without being reproduced under a different name. Even psychoanalytic theorists, traditionally rejecting “curative” imperatives, remain preoccupied with questions of the “termination,” narration and aim(s) of analysis. In politics, even ideas of reform or revolution that claim to avoid totalizing frameworks nevertheless require the “necessary” dismantling of an existing condition. In medicine and ecology, the comparatively open horizons of the “holistic”—so often figured as what’s preferable to limited, local “cures”—threaten to naturalize a telos that would engulf all modes of perceived deviation, and remediation, into one aspirational ideal of total health, a kind of carceral “cure-All.” And while critical theorists from a variety of perspectives have often powerfully scrutinized any valuation of sufficiency or resolution, pointing to the inevitable (racializing, gendered, otherwise marginalizing) collateral, would the positive presentation of an irremediable or incurable condition risk reinforcing the logic of cure, negatively?

Our 2025 UCI Comparative Literature Graduate Conference CURE—BEYOND REMEDY aims to open a space to interrogate the function andlimits of particular “cures,” “cure” as meta-logic, as well as remediation and (in)sufficiency more broadly. We welcome and encourage a diversity of archival backgrounds, and critical discussions: of the (in)stability of the thought of “cure” and its vanishing points, as well as the rhetorical, psychic, and political functions of various “curative” figures. What, or who, enables the conceivability and desirability of a cure, and for whom? What (if anything) separates the cure from other conceptions of cessation and remediation? Can the cure be defended as a benign frame for necessary relief, or is unacceptable fallout always waiting on its other side? And in a global situation in which the unbearable is everywhere and so much ought to cease, does a logic of the cure remain “interminable”? Must livable reality (psychic, historical, or otherwise) be conceived as the haunted graveyard of actualized cures and annihilated resistances to them? And if not, how is it possible to conceive of injustices and that which needs to cease? Are other conceptions of cessation available, beyond remedy? 

We imagine contributors bridging discussions of cure, remission, closure and their contraries across arenas as diverse as, but certainly not limited to: medical humanities, psychoanalysis, environmental humanities and critical ecologies, Black studies, history and philosophy of science, political theology, postcolonial and subaltern studies, comparative metaphysics, literary theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and political aesthetics. Potential topics might include: cure and (in)sufficiency; critiques and genealogies of curative frameworks; ends and aims in political rhetoric(s); critical accounts of cure in medicine; narratives of suffering and relief; “prognosis”; irreversibility and afterlives; cessation and foreclosure; marginalization and racialization; colonial “cures” and their resistances; historicity and dialectical thought; teleology; relief and complicity; auto-immunity; holistics, wholes, totality; impermanence, emptiness and persistence; competing conceptions of resolution; temporalities of remediation; conceptions of the event; mourning and melancholia; negativity; sexuality and non-relation; futurity and “no future”; criteria and justification; finitude and infinity; therapeutic vs. non-therapeutic conceptions of theory and philosophy; homologies of clinical and political space; revolutionary temporalities; reform vs. revolution; power/knowledge; “curation” and systematization; truth and reconciliation; failure, disappointment; etymological considerations of cure and sufficiency; “openings” and otherwise-worlds; psychic damage; agency and working-through; coercive structures of institutional remedy; capacity and incapacity; necessity; non-being; fecundity; passivity; acceptance; end; the non-political; the incurable and “too late”; apocalypse; remainder; anthropocene and extinction; Blackness and afro-pessimism; biopolitics; decoloniality; postcritique; “after—”.

Please send abstracts (300 words) to ucicomplit2025conference@gmail.com by February 15, 2025.