A New Existentialism
Description
This panel seeks to probe the contemporary “return” of existential themes and topics, both in the academy and in the wider culture. Concepts like freedom, agency, authenticity, commitment, and selfhood are appearing once again, alongside a renewed interest in phenomenology. In literature and elsewhere, existentialist modes of critique counter both a resurgence of essentialism and the perceived failures of liberalism, and rearticulate forms of meaning and value in an age of AI. Post-secular critique and the so-called “turn to religion” also now appear part of a broader, often inchoate desire to ask again the unfashionable questions that were once important to humanistic inquiry: what makes for a good life? What are your commitments? What kind of person do you want to be?
To be sure, some of our popular culture coarsens and distorts these existential impulses, often via what Kierkegaard called a “false immediacy”: memoir and autobiography dominate the best-seller lists, Netflix and Hulu churn out formulaic documentaries, and digressive long-form podcasts rule the streaming services. Meanwhile, platforms like Patreon, Tik-Tok, and YouTube promise a connection, however fleeting or manufactured, with something real. Yet other cultural products transcend these conditions while nevertheless deploying a recognizable existential vocabulary: for example, the hybrid lyric forms of Claudia Rankine, the ontologically-ambitious films of Terrence Malick, the existential storytelling of Kendrick Lamar, the opaque portraits of Amy Sherald, and the various fictional experiments of Annie Ernaux, Karl Ove Knasugaard, Rachel Cusk, and others.
This panel invites appraisals, both critical and appreciative (or both) of what seems to us a significant turn both in intellectual and popular culture. In what ways are the earlier existentialist thinkers relevant to this moment? What intellectual histories should we be telling?
Paper topics may include:
Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, and their contemporary influence or uptake.
Legacies of Frantz Fanon on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Existentialism as humanism / as religion
Philosophy as literature / literature as philosophy
Phenomenology/ phenomenological criticism
Contemporary memoir, autobiography, autofiction, and autotheory (Maggie Nelson, Annie Ernaux, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, etc.)
Immediacy: the now, the present tense, the first person
“Reality hunger” (David Shields)
Black Existentialism, Critical Phenomenology
Phenomenology in Sound Studies/ Affect Studies (Rey Chow, Nina Sun Eidsheim)
An “existential turn” (Toril Moi) in contemporary fiction?
Selfhood versus subjectivity/subjectification
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Yi-Ping Ong is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her book The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2018) examines authority, freedom, and self-knowledge in the history and theory of the novel and in existentialist thought. Her current project explores the power of literary form to illuminate structures of oppression, inauthenticity, and dehumanization.
Speaker Bio
Alicia Badea is a PhD student in German and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and holds a Masters in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Their research spans nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and philosophy, with a focus on modernism and an emphasis on the German and French traditions. They are especially interested in questions regarding existentialism, normativity, and the connection between ethics and aesthetics.
Speaker Bio
Dante J. Clementi is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame
Speaker Bio
Ruochen is an Assistant Professor in Communication and Design at Bilkent University. She received her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto, and has previously taught as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film Studies at UNC Wilmington. In 2022-23, she was a Hou Family Predoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Her work, situated between film and philosophy, can be found in Film Quarterly, Conversations: Journal of Cavellian Studies, Asian Ethnicities, and elsewhere.
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am the John Nuveen Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, author of The Figural Jew: politics and identity in postwar French Thought (2010), Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (2016), and co-author with Constance Furey and Amy Hollywood of Devotion:Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature and Political Imagination (2021). I have recently completed an edition of Susan Taubes's philosophical writings for Stanford.
Speaker Bio
Amy Hollywood is Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School, where she writes and teaches on the history and philosophy of Christian mysticism, feminist and queer theory, religion and literature, and other topics. She is currently working on two manuscripts, one about power, the other about death in Henry James.
Speaker Bio
Colin Jager is Professor of English and the former Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. He is the author of two academic monographs, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He has been Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Lancaster University and is currently a visiting faculty fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Nasrin Olla is a South African scholar specializing in African and African diasporic literature, postcolonial theory, and feminist philosophy. Nasrin completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town and her Ph.D. in the Literatures in English Department at Cornell University. Currently, Nasrin is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in English and Africana Studies at the University of Virginia.
Speaker Bio
Rachel Greenwald Smith is a Professor of English at Saint Louis University and author, most recently, of On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal (Graywolf Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in journals including Novel: A Forum on Fiction, American Literary History, American Literature, Mediations, and Post45. She is currently working on an autotheoretical project on authoritarianism and complicity, tentatively titled Kapo: Parables of Complicity and Survival.