Fiction(s) of the Human: The Reinvention of Man Since the Enlightenment (Conference)

Basic data for this project

Description

"The Human" is not merely a descriptive category, but also a normative one. It serves as a critique of - or defense against - what is excluded from the human, what is posited as inadequate and must be overcome. The idea of the human comes to be articulated in historically and aesthetically specific ways by means of fiction: narratives, myths, mises-en-scène, and scientific visions. Instead of multiplying attempts to define what is human, it seems necessary to investigate the conditions under which the discourse on the human has emerged and mutated since the Enlightenment, and to analyze the imaginaries and representations of the human in the modern age. The conference seeks to clarify, from interdisciplinary perspectives, the concept of the human in its historical contexts and, in so doing, to determine its status in the present. The questions to be asked include: What models or fictions of the human are there since the eighteenth century? What functions do they perform? What scientific, biopolitical, ethical, or aesthetic discourses and practices are intertwined with these fictions of the human? How do these fictions of the human impinge on the arts and media, and vice versa? What historical continuities and ruptures can be identified? This was a Berkeley-Munich-Cooperation, sponsored bei LMU-excellent and by severel departments and divisions of the University of California, Berkeley, organized in cooperation with Porf. Chenxi Tang. Anthropologists, philosophs, linguists and scientists of german, american, romanistic and anglistic literature took part. Conference language was English.