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