Location: room 7000, SFU Harbour Centre. Both the building and room (via elevator) are wheelchair accessible.

Co-sponsored by Modern Horizons Journal & SFU's Institute for the Humanities.

Conference is FREE and open to the public. No registration required.

On either side of life and underlying the meaningful forms we inhabit and live as individuals is – what? –something? –nothing? This basic and enduring question may be thickened for us through the temporal and metaphysical inquiries of nihilism and utopianism—intellectual and spiritual stances that critically engage with the ways we affirm or gainsay our familiar yet different worlds. Through a variety of papers and perspectives at our conference, we aim to address different positive and negative approaches to these two themes.

Noting how easy it is to become wholly critical of notions of nihilism and utopianism, we want to stress that these two ideas are not merely forms of resignation, absence, or spiritual frustration; they may also be seen as ideals—absolutes, guiding ideas—which, rather than simply shut down the present, may offer new or different and potentially productive grounds for contemporary thought; both nihilism and utopianism may be considered as forms of resistance to a purported finality of meaning—of ultimate determination of a person’s or thing’s identity and purpose. This is to see in nihilism and utopianism a freeing element; to see them as conditions for saying something. To have this in mind is to admit that although by and large utopia is a transfiguration of form and nihilism a disfiguration of form, each term is rich enough in implication and application to warrant serious and sustained thought.

SCHEDULE:

Friday, October 28th
Room 7000, SFU Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street

9:00am–9:30am | Andrew Bingham, Welcome address and Conference Introduction

9:30am–10:15am | Aaron Eldridge, “The Ethos of Telos: Form-of-life, the Divine Image, and the Violence of Law in Brothers Karamazov”

10:15am–11:00am | Russell Stephens, “Charles Fourier’s Utopia as the Childhood of Modernism In Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project”

11:00am–11:15am | Break

11:15am–12:00pm | Nicholas Hauck, “Decoding the Architecture of Art in Wajdi Mouawad’s Ciels”

12:00pm–1:15pm | Ian Angus, “Not Nothing Again!”

1:15pm–2:00pm | Lunch

2:00pm–3:15pm | Jerry Zaslove, “The Nihilism Salon – From Stavrogin in The Possessed to Some Provisional Psychoanalytic Thoughts on Time, Language and the Search for Origins”: “A Creative Desire is a Destructive Desire” – Bakunin”

3:15pm–4:00pm | Andrew Bingham, “Papadiamantis' Story of Love Without Hope in the Shadow of the Holy Mountain”

4:00–4:15pm | Break

4:15pm–5:00pm | Michael Bourke, “Scientism and the Post-modern State”

5:00pm–6:00pm | Discussion and Closing Remarks

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Ian Angus received his Ph.D. (1980) from the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University and is currently Professor of Humanities at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Recent books include "Identity and Justice" (2008) and "The Undiscovered Country: Essays in Canadian Intellectual Culture" (2013). "Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment" (2009) has been widely excerpted and reviewed on the Internet. He is currently writing a manuscript on Husserl and Marx.

Jerry Zaslove, Professor Emeritus, is the Simon's Chair in Graduate Liberal Studies at SFU who studied Comparative Literature at Western Reserve University and the University of Washington. He specializes in Comparative Literature and Social History of Art influenced but not limited by the traditions of the radical and individual implications of critical theory and the arts, European literature, psychoanalysis and aesthetics, anarchism.