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Conference
"What Is Enchantment?"
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December 2-3, 2005
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Venue: Heyman Center for the
Humanities, East Campus (Common Room, 2nd floor). Directions:
http://www.heymancenter.org/visit.php
Organizer: Gauri Viswanathan, Class of 1933 Professor
in the Humanities. Department of English and Comparative
Literature
Co-organizer: Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian Professor
of Philosophy and Director, Heyman Center for the Humanities
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Mimicking Kant's famous
question "What is Enlightenment?" in the context
of challenges to Enlightenment rationalism in post-romantic
culture, the conference refocuses attention on practices
of enchantment and occult philosophies in the constitution
of modernity and modern disciplines, including anthropology,
history, comparative literature, philology, psychoanalysis,
religion, philosophy, science, and postcolonial studies.
If Weber's notion of disenchantment can be understood as
a general point of departure for understanding the relation
between science and religion, we hope to rethink such standard
terms of disenchantment as compensation, charisma, devaluation,
rationalization, and routinization. Do the discrete forms
of re-enchantment break with earlier traditions of esotericism
in posing a challenge to the disenchanted worldview of science?
Or are there points of continuity and overlap with older
forms? Is occultism an instrument of re-enchantment, or
does it instead produce the opposite effect? What is the
place of science in enchantment? To what extent can it be
said that the decline of religion precipitates the re-enchantment
of the world? From what place, and by what means, is the
world enchanted? Is the occult turn a compensation for what
Freud called "the lost appeal of life on this earth"?
Or is it ultimately a privileging of the irrational in a
world dominated by reason? Is art a substitute for religion
in a rationalized world? Can we understand intellectual
formations by revisiting the processes of enchantment and
disenchantment?
By raising these and other questions, we intend to look
closely at the occult phenomena about which the distinguished
speakers at the conference have written so engagingly and
illuminatingly, and also explore the scope of the phenomena's
intellectual and broadly political subversiveness. Participants
include Simon During, Dilwyn Knox, Roger Luckhurst, Alex
Owen, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Michael Taussig, Marina Warner,
Alison Winter.
PROGRAM
Friday, 2 December
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| 9:15 |
Coffee and Breakfast
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| 9:45 |
Introduction by:
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Gauri Viswanathan,
English and Comparative Literature |
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Akeel Bilgrami, Philosophy;
Director of the Heyman Center |
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| 10:00-12:30 |
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| Chair: |
Akeel Bilgrami |
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Simon
During, English, Johns Hopkins University
"William Beckford in Hell" |
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Respondent:
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Jenny Davidson, English
and Comparative Literature |
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Dilwyn
Knox, Italian, University College (London)
"Disenchantment and Platonism" |
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Respondent:
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Lisabeth During,
Philosophy, Pratt Institute |
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| 12:30 - 2:00
LUNCH BREAK |
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| 2:00-5:30 |
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| Chair: |
Gauri Viswanathan
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Michael
Taussig, Anthropology
"What Color is the Sacred?" |
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Respondent:
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Jonathan Crary, Art
History |
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Sumathi
Ramaswamy, History, University of Michigan
"Enchanted Places, Disenchanting Disciplines,
and Off-Modern Cartographies" |
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Respondent:
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Partha Chatterjee,
Anthropology |
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Roger
Luckhurst, English, Birkbeck College (London)
"The Curse of the Mummy: An Economy of Enchantment" |
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Respondent:
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Elliott Colla, Comparative
Literature, Brown University |
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Saturday, 3 December
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| 9:30 |
Coffee and Breakfast
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| 10:00-11:30 Plenary |
| Chair: |
Akeel Bilgrami |
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Marina
Warner, Literature and Film, University
of Essex
"Phantasmagoria: Spirits and Modern Media" |
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Respondent:
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Stefan Andriopoulos,
Germanic Languages |
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| 11:35-1:15 |
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| Chair: |
Eileen Gillooly,
Associate Director, Heyman Center |
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Alex
Owen, History, Northwestern University
"Spirit, Consciousness, and the Impossibility
of Religion: Bloomsbury and Others after the Great
War" |
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Respondent:
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Gauri Viswanathan
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About the Speakers
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Simon During
is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University.
He previously taught at the University of Melbourne
in Australia where he has been a fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities since 2000. He has published
numerous essays on cultural studies, postcolonialism,
globalization, postmodernism, and British literature
from 1760 to 1900. These include "Globalising
postcolonialism," (Cultural Studies, 2000); "Nationalism:
Literature's Other?," (in Nation and Narration,
ed. Homi Bhabha, 1990); and "Post-Foucauldian
Criticism," (in Genealogy and Literature, ed.
Lee Quinby, 1995). His most recent book is Cultural
Studies: a Critical Introduction (2005). He is also
author of Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power
of Secular Magic (2002) which examines the broad cultural
effects of magic in modern life, influencing entertainment,
advertising, and fiction making. His previous books
include Foucault and Literature (1993), and Patrick
White (1998). In 2003, he was awarded the Centenary
Medal for Services to the Humanities by the Australian
Government.
Dilwyn Knox is Reader in Renaissance Studies
at University College, London. He has written extensively
on Renaissance philosophy, especially Giardano Bruno's
Italian dialogues. His most recent publications are
Ironia: Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony, "Disciplina:
The Monastic and Clerical Origins of European Civility,"
"Ficino, Copernicus, and Bruno on the 'Motion
of the Earth,'" "Erasmus' De Civilitatei
and the Religious Origins of Civility in Protestant
Europe. His book Renaissance Thought is forthcoming
from Basil Blackwell in April 2006.
Roger Luckhurst is Senior Lecturer in English
at Birkbeck College, London. He is the author of "The
Angle Between Two Walls": The Fiction of J G
Ballard, Liverpool (1997), The Invention of Telepathy
(2002), and Science Fiction (2005). Luckhurst's work
in progress is on The Egyptian Gothic, a cultural
history of the late Victorian/Edwardian period of
Egyptomania that focuses on the origin of particular
Mummy Curse stories, a reading of the Egyptianised
Gothic stories in the 1890s and beyond, and a look
at the revival of Egyptian Magic. He has edited Literature
and the Contemporary (1999), The Fin-de-Siecle (with
Sally Ledger) (2000), and Late Victorian Gothic Tales
(2005) . His published articles include: "Horror
and Beauty in Rare Combination": The Miscegenate
Fictions of Octavia Butler" (Women: A Cultural
Review, 1996); "The Science-Fictionalisation
of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction,"
(Science Fiction Studies, 1998); "Passages in
the Invention of the Psyche: Mind-Reading in London,
1881-4," (in Transactions and Encounters: Science
and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Luckhurst
and Josephine McDonagh, 2002); and "Demon-Haunted
Darwinism," (New Formations, 2003).
Alex Owen is Professor of History and Gender
Studies at Northwestern University, specializing in
19th and 20th century Britain. Her research interests
include interdisciplinary approaches to questions
of gender and sexuality, as well as the history of
medicine and psychology. Her new work focuses increasingly
on issues of subjectivity and cultural modernity.
A leading historian of modern spiritualism, she is
the author of The Darkened Room: Women, Power and
Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (1990) and,
most recently, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism
and the Culture of the Modern (2004), which is a groundbreaking
study of the centrality of occult pursuits in late
Victorian and Edwardian England. She has published
numerous articles on questions of magic, gender and
power. At present she is working on a new project
on the emergence of new understandings and experience
of the self in the modern period. The recipient of
Rockefeller, Fulbright, and National Endowment for
the Humanities fellowships, she has been a research
fellow at Harvard University and the National Humanities
Center.
Sumathi Ramaswamy is Professor of History at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor specializing
in colonial and modern South Asia and ancient India.
After receiving her PhD from the University of California,
Berkley in 1992, Ramaswamy went on to publish Passions
of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970
(1997) and The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies,
Catastrophic Histories (2004), both groundbreaking
works that re-theorize narratives of nation and language
and the relationship between geography and history,
respectively. She has also edited Beyond Appearances?:
Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (2003).
Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology
at Columbia University. He graduated in Medicine from
the University of Sydney, Australia, before completing
a Master's degree in Sociology at the London School
of Economics followed by a PhD at the University of
London. A distinguished anthropologist, Taussig has
published numerous articles and books on such topics
as slavery, hunger, the popular manifestations of
the working of commodity fetishism, the impact of
colonialism (historical and contemporary) on "shamanism"
and folk healing, and the relevance of modernism and
post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of
ritual. His books include Devil and Commodity Fetishism
in South America (1983), Shamanism, Colonialism, and
the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987),
The Nervous System (1991), Mimesis and Alterity (1992),
The Magic of the State (1997), Defacement (1999),
and My Cocaine Museum (2004). He has also written
and publicly performed two scripts, and has been awarded
many honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Marina Warner is Professor in the Department
of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University
of Essex. A prize-winning novelist, critic, and mythographer,
Warner was elected a Fellow of the British Academy
in 2005. Her works include novels and short stories
as well as studies of female myths and symbols such
as Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of
Telling the Self (2004), Signs & Wonders: Essays
on Literature and Culture (2003), and The Leto Bundle
(2001). Warner has given the Reith Lectures (BBC,
1994); the Tanner Lectures (Yale, 1999); and the Clarendon
Lectures (Oxford, 2001). Warner has received several
awards and distinctions, including among others: Young
Writer of the Year (Daily Telegraph Award), l971;
Daily Express Award, l972; Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature, 1985; Mythopoeic Scholarship Award
1996; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres,
France, 2000; President of the Virgil Society, 2004;
and Commendatore dell’Ordine della Stella di
Solidareità, Italy, 2005. She has received
honorary degrees from the University of Exeter, the
Royal College of Art and others.
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