A Relational Turn
In a recent interview, Judith Butler suggested that over the past two decades, intellectual thought has witnessed a relational turn, a shift towards frameworks that understand the self as fundamentally constituted through relations with others. “There is a turn to what we might call relational perspectives, relational psychology, relational frameworks, relational ethics," Butler notes, "which stems from a critique of ego psychology and other approaches that place the ego at the center of our understanding of psychic life.” If this is true, what are the causes and effects of such a turn? A relational turn could, for example, have contributed to accelerating the rise of affect theory, with its understanding of bodily borders as porous and continuously shaped by their surroundings; it could illuminate the emergence of genres like autotheory, which, as Maggie Nelson describes in The Argonauts (2015), arises from the conception that “We are for another, or by virtue of another”; or it could account for the newfound popularity of such psychoanalysts as Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein, whose school of Object Relations peaked in Europe decades ago.
As a field that at once privileges and depends on relationality as fundamental to its very methodology, comparative literature raises a range of questions about the political potentiality of a relational turn. If such a move is indeed in the making, what is driving it? To what extent does it arise in resistance to late-stage capitalism, neoliberalism, and/or Protestant traditions? To what extent is the intensifying interest in relationality a global phenomenon in contrast to long overdue in the U.S., where the dominant model of self-sufficiency has cast a shadow over alternative understandings of social dependency that have been central elsewhere for centuries? What are the distinctive geopolitics and biopolitics of a relational turn? How is this turn reflected in literary forms and new theoretical frameworks? And what ethical and political consequences may arise from such a relational turn? In this seminar, participants explore these questions and collectively consider: can we relate? And if so, how, why, and to what effects?
This seminar welcomes topics that may include but are not limited to:
Literary genres of relationality
Intersubjective psychoanalysis in the humanities
Social psychology and/in literature
Neuroscience, neurodivergence, and relationality
The ethics and politics of relationality
Subject/object relations;
Intertextuality and/as relationality
Relational theories of the subject/subjectivity
Relationality in/and decolonial critique
Queer and trans relationalities
Digital relationality
Relationality across species
In a recent interview, Judith Butler suggested that over the past two decades, intellectual thought has witnessed a relational turn, a shift towards frameworks that understand the self as fundamentally constituted through relations with others. “There is a turn to what we might call relational perspectives, relational psychology, relational frameworks, relational ethics," Butler notes, "which stems from a critique of ego psychology and other approaches that place the ego at the center of our understanding of psychic life.” If this is true, what are the causes and effects of such a turn? A relational turn could, for example, have contributed to accelerating the rise of affect theory, with its understanding of bodily borders as porous and continuously shaped by their surroundings; it could illuminate the emergence of genres like autotheory, which, as Maggie Nelson describes in The Argonauts (2015), arises from the conception that “We are for another, or by virtue of another”; or it could account for the newfound popularity of such psychoanalysts as Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein, whose school of Object Relations peaked in Europe decades ago.
As a field that at once privileges and depends on relationality as fundamental to its very methodology, comparative literature raises a range of questions about the political potentiality of a relational turn. If such a move is indeed in the making, what is driving it? To what extent does it arise in resistance to late-stage capitalism, neoliberalism, and/or Protestant traditions? To what extent is the intensifying interest in relationality a global phenomenon in contrast to long overdue in the U.S., where the dominant model of self-sufficiency has cast a shadow over alternative understandings of social dependency that have been central elsewhere for centuries? What are the distinctive geopolitics and biopolitics of a relational turn? How is this turn reflected in literary forms and new theoretical frameworks? And what ethical and political consequences may arise from such a relational turn? In this seminar, participants explore these questions and collectively consider: can we relate? And if so, how, why, and to what effects?
This seminar welcomes topics that may include but are not limited to:
Literary genres of relationality
Intersubjective psychoanalysis in the humanities
Social psychology and/in literature
Neuroscience, neurodivergence, and relationality
The ethics and politics of relationality
Subject/object relations;
Intertextuality and/as relationality
Relational theories of the subject/subjectivity
Relationality in/and decolonial critique
Queer and trans relationalities
Digital relationality
Relationality across species