Turku 2019

The second workshop will be held at the University of Turku in 2019. It will focus on “The Hermeneutics of Violence,” implying both the violent annulment of personhood sometimes inherent in interpretive acts themselves and the processes of interpreting narratives representing violence. In “Violence and Metaphysics,” Jacques Derrida proposed that language itself violently arrests fluid meaning making. In part, this claim was a response to Emmanuel Levinas´s claim that we are, fundamentally, bound in networks of responsibility to known and unknown others whose vulnerability bids us not to commit violence. Some scholars still contend that the attribution and modification involved in naming or categorizing the other always involves violence, but this claim reads differently in the context of violence against the body. By foregrounding the tension between philosophical violence and embodied violence as well as their complex entanglements, scholars contributing to this workshop will explore the relationship between these different forms of violence. Is narrative, like other forms of language, inherently violent? Can stories direct our attention to that within the human that evades designation but nevertheless calls for protection? Is violence constitutive of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and, if yes, how should we conceptualize this? Is there non-violent interpretation and how should we theorize this possibiity? Scholars will discuss phenomenological-hermeneutic and other contemporary conceptualizations of knowledge that escapes naming and that call for new reconfigurations of intersubjectivity to address these questions in new ways. Participants in this workshop include literary scholars, philosophers, intellectual historians, film and theatre scholars, theologians and psychologists.