EPTC Montreal 2010
Call for Papers

The society for the study of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC) invites papers discussing any aspects of existential or phenomenological theory or culture. For example, papers dealing with theoretical or cultural issues in relation to authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, Levinas, Malraux, Marcel, Buber, Frankl, Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Irigaray, or Laing are all welcome. Submissions from all disciplines are welcome. EPTC will meet at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, in conjunction with the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities of Canada, from May 31 to June 3, 2010. The Congress will bring together some 100 learned associations and more than 9000 scholars from Canada and the international community for approximately 10 days of interdisciplinary symposia, cultural events, and public discussions. For more information, see: http://www.fedcan.ca/.

I. Interested authors should submit the following electronically in Rich Text Format:

1. A copy of your paper, not more than 4500 words, and prepared for anonymous review (identifiable by paper title only).
2. A separate abstract, not more than 100 words, also listing the paper’s title, author’s name, complete mailing address, institutional affiliation, and e-mail address.

II. If you are interested in either presenting a commentary (of not more than 1000 words) on a paper, or chairing a session, please submit a brief e-mail note indicating as much, including your name, complete mailing address, institutional affiliation, e-mail address, and relevant areas of interest.

EPTC is able to waive Congress fees for a few delegates each year. Such awards will be made according to criteria of financial need and quality of paper at the discretion of the conference program coordinator. Non-tenure-stream delegates interested in this award should append a note indicating as much to their submission materials.

The submission deadline for the above materials is Monday, February 1, 2010.

Submissions should be sent to: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

In addition to the general call, papers are requested for the following panels.  

Doing Phenomenology: Back to the Things Themselves! 2010

Back to the Things Themselves! (BTTTT!) is an attempt to temporarily liberate ourselves from textual exegesis, and return to the lived world to divine the essential structures of experience through rigorous phenomenological description. Husserl's call to return zu der Sachen selbst has only been intermittently heeded by subsequent generations of phenomenologists, the majority of which have generally focused on contributing to and elaborating on the enormous critical apparatus issuing from the founding texts of the movement. BTTTT! proposes to build on the important contributions of such scholarship by using them to guide our reflections on phenomena in the lifeworld.
As always, BTTTT! is explicitly interested in the application of phenomenology’s insights and the generation of detailed, rigorous, extended descriptions of the lived world, which can be expressed in terms of essences or manifold matrices of meaning. As always, we are interested in textual exegesis only to the extent that it complements a given description. As always, our aim is to stay close to the phenomenon itself in order to be faithful to it and describe it vividly to others. Descriptions may arise from phenomenological reflection broadly construed, so long as the phenomenon remains the chief focus of the paper.

Papers for the 2010 panel should therefore bear these general commitments in mind, but also call attention to the phenomenological method the author has employed in generating his or her description. This might be done in a variety of ways, but the goal should be to show the audience how a description was generated. Explications of method should be stated in broad terms, and overly-detailed textual exegesis should be avoided in order to preserve the "flow" of a description. We are not interested in extended retellings of how the major figures of the phenomenological canon have explained their “method,” but rather in how authors have learned from, applied, adjusted, merged, questioned, subverted or otherwise deployed these methods in the development of their own phenomenological practice. Our intention is for these methodological reflections to contribute directly to our half-day workshop, in which we will focus explicitly on participants’ divergent experiences of “doing phenomenology.”
In sum, papers submitted to this panel must contain both:

2. An explication of the method used to generate this description.

In the spirit of collaborative phenomenology, paper commentators for BTTTT! 2010 will view these descriptions in light of their rigor, originality, and the application of method. In other words, commentators in this panel will act less as critics of scholarly exegesis and more as collaborators helping to extend, refine and deepen a paper’s description. Criticisms of textual interpretation are welcome so long as they further the aim of collaborative inquiry into phenomenological method.

Papers should be submitted to David Koukal by RTF or Word email attachment at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it by January 5, 2010. Papers should take no longer than 30 minutes to read (generally less than 4000 words), should be prepared for anonymous review (identifiable by paper title only), and include a separate abstract not exceeding 100 words. The cover sheet should also list the paper's title, the author's name, institutional affiliation, and e-mail address. Please note that papers will be initially reviewed by the panel organizers, and suitable papers will then be forwarded to EPTC for anonymous review.

Sharing the World…  with Luce Irigaray

Panel Organizers: Bronwyn Singleton and Andrew Robinson

ETPC – Existential Theory, Phenomenology and Culture

Conference: May 31 – June 3, 2010

Concordia University, Montréal, Canada

Irigaray argues that her mature thought is a natural continuation of her early project of a philosophically relevant re-awakening and articulation of a lost sense of sexual difference. However, Irigaray scholars often struggle with her later work.  Although, there is a general agreement that Irigaray’s writing has developed over time, there is some dispute as to the significance of this change. Further, her critics point to a lack of robust framework for dealing with issues of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.  There is concern that Irigaray’s recent ethical and political project is no longer relevant. For these reasons some commentators have dismissed Irigaray’s later writing as naïve, while others defend the continuity of her oeuvre and the positive project of her mature work.

This panel will offer an opportunity for focused engagement with Irigaray’s later work, including the question of continuity in her thought. This CFP invites papers that critically examine Irigaray’s evolving ethical and political vision for a shared world that both reflects and does justice to the reality of sexual difference. Possible topics for discussion include, but are not limited to:

• sexuate rights
• nature, environmentalism and ecology
• the human and non-human
• race, ethnicity and/or culture
• education
• maternity, the couple and the family
• queer, trans and intersex
• the future

ETPC mandate:

Participants will have thirty minutes in which to present their paper.  This will be followed by a short commentary of approximately 10 minutes, leaving time for a 20-minute question period.

Please submit:

• a copy of your paper (4500 word maximum; prepared for blind review in .doc or .rtf format)
• an abstract of your paper  (not to exceed 150 words)
• an information sheet, including: your name, contact information (including email and telephone), institutional affiliation and status, and the title and word count of your paper
  

Submission deadline: January 1, 2010

Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

 * Le français suit à la page suivante.

Throughout his 20 years of activity, Friedrich Nietzsche continuously positioned himself within the European literary and philosophical tradition that he read and commented upon. His readings were diverse, and his philosophical and rhetorical positions towards these were manifold. While he praised his intellectual guides, he also expressed a few diatribes aimed at writers whom he saw as intellectual opponents or as offering philosophical challenges. While his early essays referred to authors useful for his academic lectures (Homer, the pre-Socratics, Lange), his 1880s writings turned to different preoccupations and new writers (Stendhal, Emerson, Chamfort). As for his contemporaries, although they were often criticized with irony (Strauss, Hartmann, Düring), some nevertheless won his admiration (Taine, Brandes, Burckhardt). Over the past 100 years, readers and commentators have sought to locate Nietzsche within the European philosophical tradition: thus the reception of Nietzschean thought often tackles the topic of Nietzsche’s readings. Reading Nietzsche as a reader would therefore mean to question his sources, while keeping in sight the reception process that is ever ongoing.

In regards to this general topic, we invite paper submissions dealing, e.g., with Nietzsche’s sources, the reception of Nietzsche’s works, Nietzsche’s readings, or Nietzsche’s relationship to European philosophy and/or literature.

This bilingual panel will take place in late May/early June at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) as part of EPTC’s annual meeting at the 2010 Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences congress.

Submission Deadline

Complete texts (in English or in French) must be submitted by email to the organizer no

later than Monday, January 4^th, 2010

Submissions…      

1.  Must be double-spaced, with no indication of the author’s                      identity.               

2.  Must be written for an approximately 30 min. time-slot.

3.  Must be accompanied by a separate document indicating the date, the author’s name,

     address, academic affiliation, as well as the paper’s title and a 10-line max. abstract.

Organizer Martine Béland, CCÉAE

martine.beland[a]videotron.ca

 Panel 4

Asubjectivité et création chez Jan Patočka

Société de Théorie et culture existentialistes et phénoménologiques (TCEP/EPTC)
Congrès de la Fédération canadienne des sciences humaines et sociales
Université Concordia de Montréal, du 31 mai au 3 juin 2010

Dans Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie ?, le phénoménologue tchèque Jan Patočka affirme que l’étant « qui est sur le mode de l’ego, [… qui vit] dans des possibilités, [qui se saisit] de ses possibilités et s’identifie avec elles, [projette] le schème de tout étant possible, non pas en le combinant à partir de ses propres vécus, mais à la manière du peintre ou de l’écrivain qui projettent un tableau ou l’intrigue d’un roman, c’est-à-dire avec la même objectivité » —autrement dit, non-subjectivement.

Ce qu’affirme ici Patočka, c’est que le mode de création de soi ou, autrement dit, la manière par laquelle l’existant en première personne devient une véritable ipséité – la manière par laquelle l’être humain « se crée en vérité » – est analogue au mode de la création artistique. En effet, ce qui rapproche la création (réalisation) de soi,  la création littéraire, la création picturale et même la création sur le plan de l’histoire semble être ce qui est devenu le concept-phare de la phénoménologie patočkienne : l’« asubjectivité ».

Lors de cette table ronde, il s’agirait de proposer une définition de la création selon Patočka, sachant que certains commentateurs considèrent que la problématique de l’« apparaître en tant que tel » et le motif de la répétition empêchent Patočka de penser la création du nouveau. N’est-il pas possible cependant de penser avec Patočka un mode paradoxal de création nourrie de la répétition et marquée par la nécessité, de sorte qu’à un niveau fondamental de réflexion, créer ne serait pas d’abord inventer, mais répéter en des guises nouvelles et donc « re-nouveler » ? Il s’agirait ensuite d’analyser la façon dont Patočka pense le subjectif et l’objectif au sein du mouvement de l’existence afin de proposer quelque définition du concept d’« asubjectivité phénoménologique ». Cela permettrait de mieux comprendre pourquoi et dans quelle mesure toute création est nécessairement, aux yeux de Patočka, une création asubjective.

Cette table ronde aura lieu dans le cadre de la réunion de la Société de Théorie et culture existentialistes et phénoménologiques (TCEP/EPTC) qui prend place, comme chaque année, dans le Congrès de la Fédération des sciences humaines et sociales du Canada. Cette réunion se déroulera à l’Université Concordia de Montréal, du 31 mai au 3 juin 2010.

La table ronde est prévue pour seulement trois intervenants sur le modèle suivant : exposé de 30 minutes (soit de 4000 à 4500 mots) + répondant (10 minutes) + discussion de 20 minutes. Les propositions de communication sont à envoyer par e-mail à Clélia Van Lerberghe This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , au plus tard le 11 janvier 2010, sous format Word (intitulé de l’email : TCEP Patočka). Les propositions prendront la forme d’un résumé bien argumenté écrit en français et d’une longueur comprise entre 1500 et 2000 mots. Elles comprendront les coordonnées complètes du candidat. L’acceptation des propositions sera envoyée aux intéressés au plus tard le 15 février 2010. 

Clélia Van Lerberghe

Université catholique de Louvain

Institut supérieur de philosophie

Place Cardinal Mercier, 14

B -1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgique)

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