VISIONS OF THE 'COMING COMMUNITY'

In recent years, philosophers, cultural historians and critical theorists as well as artists and literary critics have been preoccupied by the urgent need to reinvent the concept of ‘community’. Postcolonial thinkers have questioned the very idea of collective identities; queer/new feminist theorists have radically rethought ideas about sexual ‘belonging’; poststructuralist philosophers have argued for the dissolution of the subject and his/her ties to any groupings. Artists and writers have posed these same questions within the context of their work: the films of Arnaud Desplechin, the novels of Marie NDiaye, the sculptures of Murat Brierre, for example, are all witness to the current concern with the notion of community, for some an impossible ideal, for others a dangerously conservative notion which threatens the development of newer, better forms of human interaction.

In this conference, we hope both to show the variety of contemporary ways in which this notion has been explored, and to give a sense of how the interest in ‘visions of community’ has in fact been a perennial concern, present throughout French history. We call for papers from across the disciplines and periods, as our aim is to demonstrate how the notion of ‘community’ translates across the centuries, and how moments of social and political crisis, such as the French Revolution, may have resulted in hopes and fears for visions of ‘the coming community’ (Agamben) which are relevant to our contemporary concerns. Issues upon which papers are welcome include but are not limited to: