[ecrea] Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference: "Love and Death"

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

**

*Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference: **“**Love and Death**”*

**

*York University*

*Toronto, Canada*

*May 12-**13, 201**7*

/The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not 
even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they 
only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world 
which looks to us like a bad film.///

—Gilles Deleuze, /Cinema 2/

One of the few North American events specifically devoted to exploring 
the intersections of film, media and philosophy, the Spiral Collective 
seeks submissions for its second annual conference, organized, this 
year, around the theme of “Love and Death.”

Can the much-discussed and debated “death of cinema” introduce, through 
its very negation of a future of/for cinema, a renewed love for the 
cinematic? Can cinema bring us into an encounter —perhaps an amorous one 
—with something beyond human experience, and by extension, beyond 
mortality and death? Love and death have been primary concerns in 
philosophy, from its pre-classical origins to the present, finding a 
multitude of complex and contradictory sets of interrelations. Indeed, 
the fraught, and perhaps integral, relationship between love and death 
has been a recurrent, even obsessive feature of both philosophical 
reflection and cinematic representation that shows no signs of letting 
up. From romantic, existential, metaphysical, and phenomenological 
meditations on morality, mourning and grief to transgressive depictions 
of the erotics of violence or the aesthetic formalization of sexuality 
and mortality, philosophy and cinema have both passionately and coldly 
considered the deep ties and bubbling surfaces between the two highly 
suggestive terms.

In taking on the cognition of death — that of others and of one’s own — 
and the affective and emotive intensity of love, or, alternatively, the 
affective charge of morbidity and the rationality of commitment 
(romantic, political, or otherwise), philosophy and cinema both find and 
construct a vital zone of encounter and confrontation. To this end, 
contemporary developments in cinema and media respond to transformations 
in the political and cultural meanings of love and death just as 
philosophy maintains its relevance, or not, in relation to how it 
approaches both timely and timeless issues of life, love and death 
relative to other concepts like truth, morality, world, and community. 
Influential philosophical traditions persist in theoretical debates on 
the concepts of love and death, some arguing for pure affirmation and 
difference and others for negativity and nothingness. Cinema inscribes 
mortality into its very images: it reanimates and creates in the same 
gestures of disappearance and destruction. Digital cinema and media 
further complicate the dynamics of love and death.

We seek papers for 20 minute presentations on, but not limited to, any 
of the following topics, themes and concepts:

•existentialism, nihilism, death drive;

•romanticism, the sublime, morbidity, the gothic;

•materialism, decay, death;

•negativity and negation;

•mourning and melancholy;

•vitalism, difference, life;

•phenomenology of love and death;

•religion, theology, sacrifice and ritual;

•intimacy, sexuality, infatuation;

•pornography and eroticism;

•affect and affect theory;

•psychoanalytic approaches to love and death;

•suicide, martyrdom, end-of-life issues;

•terror, horror, shock, delirium;

•biopolitics, immunization and wounds;

•femininity and feminist approaches to love and death;

•queer theory and love and death;

•cultural reproduction, transmission and survival;

•cinephilia and the death (and/or afterlife) of cinema;

•the aesthetics of love and death;

•cinematic bodies, cinematic deaths, cinematic loves;

•media and morbidity

We welcome papers that engage with the work of specific philosophers and 
theorists who think about love and death from any variety of 
perspectives and further relate them to questions of cinema and media 
studies. We also welcome filmmakers, media practitioners, and activists 
to present and discuss their work.

The confirmed Keynote Speaker for “Love and Death”is Eugenie Brinkema, 
Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of /The Forms 
of the Affects/, published with Duke University Press in 2014. Her 
articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including 
/Angelaki/, /Camera Obscura/, /Criticism/, /differences/, /Discourse/, 
/The Journal of Speculative Philosophy/, /The Journal of Visual 
Culture/, /Qui Parle/, and /World Picture/.

“Love and Death” will be held at York University, Toronto, Canada May 
12-13, 2017.

Please send a 350 word abstract, brief bibliographyand bio (with 
institutional affiliation, if applicable) in a single document to 
(yorkfilmphilosophy /at/ gmail.com) by January 28, 2017.

*Conference Registration Fee:*

Conference Attendance: $100 (Canadian)

Graduate Students and Underemployed: $50 (Canadian)

Conference website: https://yorkfilmphilosphy.wordpress.com/

Organized by the Spiral Film and Philosophy Collective in collaboration 
with the department of Cinema and Media Studies, York University.


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