Love as Thinking, Thinking as Love
Description
In “Shattered Love,” Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “Love in its singularity, when it is grasped absolutely, is itself perhaps nothing but the indefinite abundance of all possible loves, and an abandonment to their dissemination, indeed to the disorder of these explosions. The thinking of love should learn to yield to this abandon: to receive the prodigality, the collisions, and the contradictions of love, without submitting them to an order that they essentially defy” (Nancy, 83).
Love is over-written yet undertheorized. We all can name countless love stories, but how do we describe the function of a love story? What would it mean to take love between a mother and child, between a believer and a divine figure, or between a revolutionary and the movement not as sub-species of love, but as themselves genres of knowledge? What critical language can we use to explore the forms of knowledge opened up by love? How do we take love seriously as a form of thinking rather than just content for thought? Inspired by philosophers and writers like Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes, and Anne Carson, this panel invites papers that explore the theoretical implications of love. Paper topics may include an extended engagement of love within a philosophical tradition, close reading of aesthetic works that open up new paradigms for thinking love, and/or more experimental works of theory. In yielding to the abandon of love, this seminar aims to explore the relevance of love to our contemporary world, opening up new pathways for scholarship that think with love as a critical method.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Mara González González is a direct entry doctoral candidate at the Centre for Theory and Criticism at Western University. She graduated Cum Laude from Universidad de Monterrey with a Bachelor's in Philosophy in 2020. In October 2025, her paper “Feminicide in Mexico as an event: A Trauma Studies perspective” was chosen as the Honorable Mention for the category of “Best Submission by a Graduate Student” by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.
Speaker Bio
Jonathan C. Williams is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bilient University (Ankara, Turkey). He is the author of Melancholic Life: Literary Expression and the Experience of History from Burton to Keats (forthcoming from Bloomsbury, 2025).
Speaker Bio
Alfredo Walls earned a BA in Philosophy from Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City, and an MA in Comparative Literature from King’s College, London. His research work is oriented towards the intersection of philosophical thought and literary discourse. His current research examines the inscription of queerness in four contemporary Mexican poets, exploring their depictions of queer bodies as flesh: violently slashed and ripped apart, but also promiscuously entangled through erotic desire.
Speaker Bio
Moya (Moyang) Li is an Assistant Prof who works at the intersections of literary form, aesthetics, mathematics, and computing. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming at Textual Practice, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She received her BA in Mathematics and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, her PhD in Literatures in English from Rutgers University, and was a Fellow at NYU’s Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Vasantha Sambamurti is a writer, editor, translator and PhD student in English at Tufts University. Her research interests include 20th and 21st cent. Global Anglophone and Francophone literatures and cinema, translation theory, comparative ethnic literatures, and affect theory. She is the Senior Editor for Transition Magazine, founded in Uganda in 1961 by Rajat Neogy, now based at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research
Speaker Bio
Associate Professor of World Literature at Simon Fraser University
Speaker Bio
Kat Matson is a graduate student at Boston College. She researches representations of gender in 20th and 21st century literature and literary theory.