University of California, Irvine
Friday, April 3-Saturday April 4, 2009

In *Transcritique*, Karatani Kojin defines crisis as “a chronic disease inherent in the capitalist economy, yet also a solution to its internal defects. In other words, capitalism makes temporary repairs to its innate problem by crises, thus it will never collapse because of it” (157). This conference hopes to critically explore the concept and figure of crisis as a disruption and/or confirmation of a particular structural ideology, where the possibility and the inevitability of crisis are created by the system against which the crisis occurs. Does crisis then foreclose upon the possibility of change? In this context, what kind of work does crisis perform?

This conference hopes to examine crisis by bringing together perspectives of various fields of study. We ask to what extent can crisis be a crucial point of engagement in the fields of critical theory, literary studies, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and political science? In what ways can an analysis of crisis inform our critiques of politics, culture and society?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

--crisis in the legitimacy of the sovereign, state of emergency, exploitation of executive power
--nuclear crisis, terrorism
--neuroses, hysteria, compromise formation
--eschatological crisis, endtimes and redemption, the Event
--marxist eschatology, capitalist crisis, "disaster capitalism"
--predicting crisis/prediction technology, risk management
--double binds, undecidability
--crisis in narratives, dramatic conflict
--representational crisis
--prophesies, ghosts, clairvoyance
--decadence
--crisis as means of continuation
--bodily crisis
--memory and forgetting, trauma
--culture wars
--Malthusian catastrophe, contagious diseases, biological terrorism
--state of the field, perpetual crises...

The deadline for the submission of a 250-word abstract is January 15, 2009. Presentations are to be 20 minutes in length. Send proposals to uci.crisis@gmail.com. Please include your name, email address, departmental affiliation, institution and phone number with the abstract.