Enthusiasm: A Political Affect?
Enthusiasm: A Political Affect?
Keynote Speaker: Avital Ronell
24-25 April 2025
Enthused, enthusing; inspiring, inspired by a god or demon who alternately fills or empties the subject-turned-vessel—in ancient Greek, enthusiasm connotes an excess of presence as much as it points to expropriation. Its different historical guises have inspired ecstatic and even anxious modes of thinking influence. Charged with dictating poetic outpouring, the ideologies and philosophical programs of the West have sought to contain, cordon, or transcend it from the start. In the more and less sobering works of Luther, Müntzer, Shaftesbury, Locke, Kant and others it is possible to read the ways the poetic frenzy of Enthusiasmus tempts invasive, intoxicating breakdown in the form of Schwärmerei. For Kant it threatens the autonomous maturity of Enlightenment thought, whereas for Luther Schwärmerei risks rallying militant swarms.
Fanaticism and terrorism are two modes of enthusiasm’s overdrive. Both fan revolutionary and reactionary excesses, phantasms of dissolution and binding, and absolutist dogmas. A torrid, boom and bust cycle of enthusiasm’s inflation and depletion, for instance, runs through the ambivalent history of Romanticism. From its radical beginnings as a francophile collective (or fan club) in Jena to its reactionary bureaucratic nationalism, the mature Romantic writers (those who survive) capitulate to the violence of nation-building and identarian logics as if the utopian promise(s) of the late 18th century were exhausted. Is this betrayal on the order of the exhaustion of enthusiasm or its investment in the imperial logics of nation-building? Must enthusiasm always slip into fanaticism and terrorism? Or can enthusiasm spur the transvaluation of these categories? This conference will investigate the fervor that animates political contestation both within and against imperial epistemologies and their disciplinary, racializing regimes.
In this vein, we will also ask: if fanaticism lurks within political logics and movements, how does it force a (Schmittian) distinction between extremists and enlightened supporters in a given historical context? How might “terrorist assemblages” (Puar) mark incendiary crises of enthusiasm that set the metaphysical structures of thinking and collective life ablaze? Linked with the danger of identitarian foreclosures, the politics of enthusiasm also invites reflection on a psychoanalytic register. How does nationalist fanaticism and its borders shape the world that we share? Beyond these conscious limits, can enthusiasm mobilize thought beyond the hegemony of the self-same? Furthermore, what are the political stakes of apathy, mourning, and melancholy considered as antidotes to or symptoms of (lost) enthusiasm? If there is a relationship between the emptying vicissitudes of mourning disorders and enthusiasm, how might the pathos of enthusiasm affect the political unconscious?
We welcome breathless as well as measured contributions on but not limited to the following inquiries:
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How do different political regimes and movements distinguish fanatics from enthusiasts? How do thinkers like Martin Luther, Gustav Landauer, Rosa Luxemburg, and Vladimir Lenin stoke political enthusiasm while attempting to stave off fanaticism?
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How do texts like Büchner’s Danton’s Death as well as Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Penthesilea trace the emergence of fanaticism out of revolutionary enthusiasm?
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In the works of German Idealism and its critics, how is Geist (as spirit, ghost, and mind) understood to inhabit enthusiasm (Begeisterung)?
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How is enthusiasm imprinted in the literature of Empfindsamkeit (sentimentality)? (E.g. Klopstock, La Roche, Lessing.)
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What problems, answers, and polemics arise in the study of enthusiasm when it is grouped and defined as an affect? (For instance, in the work of Lacan and other psychoanalysts, or in works of affect theory whose approach seeks to counter a psychoanalytic one.)
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How does the “pop” virality of enthusiasm override or write culture in the digital age?
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If, as Benjamin argues in The Origins of German Tragic Drama, the melancholic allows himself only one pleasure, that of allegory, how can allegory be thought of as an enthusiastic mode or even response to death?
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How do medieval nuns and mystics enthusiastically inscribe themselves in a canon from which they would otherwise be excluded by imbuing their texts with divine presence? (For instance, in but not limited to John of the Cross, Anna Katharina Emmerich/Clemens Brentano, Thérèse Lisieux?)
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How does enthusiasm bind distinct historical moments, cultures and languages? Over which periods and cultures do theorists enthuse? (E.g. the classical ages of France, Greece and Rome in Nietzsche; the young Marx’s France; Barthes’ “Japan”; the French Revolution in the Athenäum; the Haitian Revolution in Hegel and Marx; Benjamin’s sovietism; Tel Quel’s Chinas/the Mao of soixante-huit; Lu Xun’s Nietzsche.)
We invite papers from a range of disciplines/areas of inquiry, in particular: Classics, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Religious Studies, Visual Arts and Art History, Political Science, Geography, History of Science, Film and Media Studies, Anthropology, Music/Sound Studies, and Comparative Literature.
Please submit 250-word abstracts by Feb. 28th.