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Conference Announcement Theme: The Neighbor and the Stranger Type: 7th SIREL International Conference Institution: North American Levinas Society (NALS) Société internationale de Recherche Emmanuel Levinas (SIREL) University Jean Jaurès Location: Toulouse (France) Date: 4.–8.7.2016 __________________________________________________ As the seventh year is the year of fallow land, this seventh edition of the SIREL International Conference in Toulouse (France) tends to take place somewhere else than in the foothold in the land, somewhere else than in the autochthony, taking under consideration the landless, the undocumented, the migrant that each human being conceals, those that through their misery oblige to reconfigure the rules of living together. Current affairs have (and for some time now) imposed the ethical problem of thinking about our responsibility in front of the call of the stranger. Even though this symposium is obviously influenced by recent events, it does not constitute simply one reaction. As a matter of fact, the gesture of Levinassian studies that we carry on tends to bring to light the ever-present risk of reducing the other to our own concepts. Hence it is not at all a matter of producing prescriptions. Our proposal, studying the place of the stranger in Levinas’ thought, amounts rather to turn one’s self to that which the human has as most unsettling and somehow most deviant: his difference — which is at the same time unpredictable and inexhaustible. If the evidence of daily life drags us to see plastic resemblances in the Other’s face and to see in the sufferings of one’s existence the possibility of a threat to the self, Levinas on the contrary observes throughout his work the significance of the difference that overcomes these aesthetic approaches and the concern for self-preservation. As a matter of fact, the doubt, the concern, and the making available of one’s self to the other, to which I can be subjected by surprise, are not based on the already seen and known but on that which disrupts what is expected and disturbs our points of reference. Alterity, precisely, foils predictions and comes back to the division between the possible and impossible, the border between the known and unknown. This alterity described by Levinas transforms our way of viewing by overturning acquired positions – the neighbor and the stranger do not look any longer like they can be separated. The paradoxical presence of the pair neighbor and stranger can therefore be found in any intersubjective relationship whatsoever: no matter the degree of proximity I nurture with an individual, this proximity is always permeated by the distance that difference imposes. In Levinas’ texts, the shadow of the stranger often brings to mind those of the widow and the orphan. The stranger appears in Levinas not as the stranger according to visible, identity, bureaucratic criteria (those strangers to this land, this culture, this language) but beyond visibility, his strangeness lays on that which is elusive in the very nature of proximity: there where the identity documents seem to say everything, they do not say anything at all. The Other can even speak my own language without my listening. The neighbor is at the same time the stranger, the ‘first comer’ [le premier venu], which I never know, and the familiar or relative, is the one who addresses himself to me personally. He is that one who is never there where we expect him to be and that one whose vulnerability reminds the subject of his own responsibility. More than fifty speakers (plenary and parralel sessions) will participate in the conference. The topics that will be addressed include: Philosophy of religion ; Political philosophy and philosophy of law ; The first comer [le premier venu] ; Art and images ; Human sciences. Conference organizing committee Flora Bastiani (France) Erik Garrett (USA) Dara Hill (USA) Nelson Lerias (France) Diogo Villas Bôas Aguiar (Brasil) Questions: colloque.philo.toulo...@gmail.com More details on the conference websites: http://nalssirel.wordpress.com http://www.sirel-levinas.org __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org InterPhil List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/interphil@list.polylog.org/ __________________________________________________
