[Commlist] CFP - Special Journal Issue: Gaston Bachelard's Material Imagination

Call for Papers: Special Issue - Gaston Bachelard's Material Imagination

We invite papers for a proposed journal issue, in English, that 
critically engage Gaston Bachelard’s work on the material imagination 
from a variety of disciplines and across disparate fields. We hope to 
produce a focused, rigorous, and holistic assessment of the relevance of 
Bachelard’s work. The collected abstracts will be incorporated into a 
submittedproposal for an upcoming special issue of /Angelaki/.


Many of Bachelard’s best-known works—on water, air, fire, inhabited 
space—try to understand how the elements, or the substances we encounter 
and investigate as part of the “world” as such, come to take on psychic 
significance, and how that psychic significance—that relationship to the 
self—informs the intellect and its processes. In drawing our attention 
to the intimate relationship between matterand the imaginary, his work 
would seem to align rather neatly with psychoanalytic discourse. Yet 
Bachelard’s theories, despite their continued significance for 
historians of science, have never quite found their place in the 
analytic canon, and his own commitment to analysis—for example, his 
attitudes towards the works of Freud and Jung—shifts across his body of 
work.


His exploration of poetic images in elemental matter and inhabited space 
reveal the centrality of psychoanalytic concerns around the self. At 
once an ecopoetics of matter, a repository of elemental images, and a 
theorization of materialist phenomenology, they reveal Bachelard’s 
penchant for the power of the human experience and imagination in the 
face of the rational mind. For example, his “psychoanalysis of fire” – 
from the book of this very title –  is nothing but a “problem in which 
objectivity has never held sway, where the initial seduction is so 
compelling that it deforms the most rational minds and leads them to the 
cradle of poetry, where daydreams are thought, where poems hide 
theorems.” Images of elemental matter and inhabited space are understood 
as intimate and essential embodiments of human emotions and experiences, 
whether they reflect and house feelings of fascination and fear, 
memories of childhood, our deepest desires and complexes, a sense of 
growth or even death.


This productive tension between the poetic and the rational anticipates 
new materialist and ecological discourses today in which 
non-anthropocentric and posthuman sensibility displaces the centrality 
of the sense of self and reorients the human relationship to our 
environment in the face of global ecological crises. It is significant 
to note, however, that Bachelard engages primarily with literary texts 
by 19-20th century male European writers, like Mallermé, Baudelaire, or 
Poe. How might we reconcile with, or appropriate, Bachelard’s 
reorientation of the human-nonhuman relationship for today’s ecological 
crisis and discourse today? The question of the “human” also leads us 
back to that of psychoanalysis, of the ego and the self. How might 
Bachelard’s exploration of the imagination and psychoanalysis relate to 
the non-anthropocentric sensibility of the more-than-human world today?


On a different note, such questions on Bachelardian imagination, 
psychoanalysis, and phenomenology call for an exploration of their 
relationship to cinema, although Bachelard never prominently discussed 
the medium. Not only do his elemental and oneiric images seem to mimic 
cinematic experiences, he also conceptualizes temporality in a 
remarkably cinematic approach: Bachelard’s time is a continuous flow of 
horizontal clock-time and vertical burst of rhythmic force, united in 
poetic imagination. What is the relationship between Bachelardian 
imagination and cinema? How does his writing compare to his 
contemporaries who did write of cinema, like Bergson or Epstein? What 
would a Bachelardian poetics of cinema look like?

For this special issue, we welcome essays that explore the significance 
and the relevance of Bachelard’s work in three distinct – but related – 
areas.


 1.

    We welcome papers that take up Bachelard’s relationship to
    psychoanalysis, both in terms of his place in the history of the
    discipline and his usefulness for contemporary applications of
    psychoanalysis. One of Bachelard’s best-known provocations, in The
    Poetics of Space, is that the daydream, rather than the dream, is a
    worthy site of investigation, both in its content and its form. Is
    his psychoanalysis, then, merely a Freudian project displaced, or is
    it something else entirely? What might his conviction that
    “psychoanalysis…would form a useful basis for all objective studies”
    have to offer psychoanalysis as it stands in relation to psychiatry,
    for example? Is there a consistent sense of the “human” or the
    “subject” to be found in his body of work whatsoever?


 2.

    We invite papers that address Bachelardian imaginations in relation
    to the ecological. His repositories of the four matters reorient how
    we consider the continuum between the human and the non-human world.
    What kind of Bachelardien imagination of matter can we conjure in
    today’s images, fictional texts and otherwise, when our
    psychosensory experience of the world is vastly different from that
    of Bachelard’s time? What is at stake when we do so?


 3.

    While we are open to papers that explore texts regardless of medium,
    we are particularly interested in papers that explore the cinematic
    significance of Bachelard’s theories. We welcome essays that
    directly engage with specific films or directors, or discussions of
    a specific theoretical orientation or sensibility that is cinematic.
    Papers may explore cinematic elements in Bachelard’s work even in
    absence of specific film texts: for example, how might we think
    about his notions of “vertical time,” “instant,” “duration,” in
    relation to cinematic conceptualizations of time? In what ways does
    Bachelard’s imagination of matter and bodies reveal cinematic matter
    and bodies anew?


Please send a 300 word abstract of your paper and a brief bio, or any 
questions, to bachelardspecialissue2023@gmail.comby Monday, August 
14. No payment from the authors will be required.

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