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.