Polemos: The Art of Theory
Description
“Fully constructed theories are complicated formations. In a sense they are works of art” (Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory 253). We deduce from this statement not only that works of art are themselves “complicated formations” but also that this judgment applies primarily to “fully constructed theories.” Consistent with his vast project in systems sociology, Luhmann’s polemical edge reveals itself in this stealth mode of expression. In other words, Polemos covertly accompanies the unveiling of theory as art. With this allegorical image in mind, we invite papers that address one of the following questions:
How central is creative strife – passing through or bypassing the conflict of interpretations – to theorizing and to the art of theory?
Does theory become art only when the rhetorical mastery of staging intellectual-affective debates is combined with the flair for witnessing the constant struggle between episteme and doxa, between philosophy and the lifeworld?
What role does polemos play in theories that refuse to be directly polemical and to theorists that avoid encounters with potential antagonists?
If polemos – in its multiple meanings, as debate and dispute, struggle and contestation – stands for theory in its artful form, we want to suggest, it is not merely because one’s thinking and rhetorical style are often sharpened by disagreement. Is it also because one is aware of the “burden” of one’s argument? Should the theorist-artist learn how to carry a polemic towards one’s own argument?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Evelyn Burg is professor of English at LaGuardia Community College. She holds a PhD in History from CUNY . Her interests are modern intellectual history and American philosophy, and she has published and presented papers on Kenneth Burke, George Santayana, William James, Herman Melville, Louis Hartz, photography, feminism, and academic freedom, in journals such as: Modern Intellectual History; The Journal for the Study of Radicalism; Philosophy Today; Limbo/Teorema and others.
Speaker Bio
He is the author of The Underside of Politics: Global Fictions in the Fog of the Cold War published by Fordham UP (2013). He co-edited a special issue of The Journal of World Literature (Dec. 2022) with Shuang Shen (Penn State University).
Speaker Bio
Dan Jacobson holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY. He specializes in the conflicting literary techniques of European and American Modernisms, the interaction of literature and music, ethics and aesthetics, mass art and popular culture. Dan teaches in the Comparative Literature and English departments at Baruch College and is Director of Marketing and Communications for the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences. He writes, records, and performs with his band Roomtones.
Speaker Bio
Cameron Sparling (he/they) is a PhD student in the Department of English and Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His dissertation focuses on migration, narrative form, and the development of the migrant narrative genre in the late twentieth century. He is a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a Junior Fellow at Massey College. In his spare time, he competes in and teaches Irish dance.
Papers
Speaker Bio
John Brenkman, distinguished professor emeritus of comparative literature and English, CUNY, is the author most recently of Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect (2020) and James the Minimalist: An Essay on the Late Novels (2026). More information at johnbrenkman.com.
Speaker Bio
Jason Ciaccio holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center, where he worked under John Brenkman. His academic work addresses various topics in the field of literary modernity including intoxication, irony, dreams, and synesthesia. He has held a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship in the Berlin Program at the Freie Universität Berlin, and currently teaches in the English and German Departments at Hunter College.
Speaker Bio
Roland Végső is Department Head and Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture (Fordham UP, 2013) and Worldlessness After Heidegger: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction (Edinburgh UP, 2020), and The Dialectical Screen: Walter Benjamin on Television (Northwestern UP, 2026).
Speaker Bio
Jin Chang received her PhD in comparative literature from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work focuses on the novel and aesthetic theory. She has taught at Brooklyn College, the Fashion Institute of Technology, the New York Institute of Technology, and Reed College. She has written on Dostoevsky and Beckett. Currently, her research interests center around a Kantian theory of the ugly.
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am associate professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University and author of Skin of the System. I am currently working on the topic of indication, from its emergence in 19th century logic to the prevalence of indicators in all facets of contemporary life.
Speaker Bio
Drisha (she/her, they/them) is an LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan. Her specializations include theories of authoritarianism, postcolonial Affect Theory, Modern and Contemporary South Asian Literature, Cinema and Visual Politics, with a special focus on Dalit or anti-caste social movements.
Speaker Bio
Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. Specialist of Francophone African literature and author of Narratives of Catastrophe: Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi and articles on north and sub-Saharan African literature in French and Arabic. She has also published articles on contemporary Persian literature from Afghanistan.