Organizer: David Seamans
Contact the Seminar OrganizersAuthenticity can be understood as a substance or point, no matter how apparently marginal, that persists universally and ahistorically. It takes only one such point to stake an ontology and a stable sense of order, self, or being. Across modernity broadly theorized, writers and thinkers have responded to historically specific absences of authenticity by speculating new authenticity and then writing, acting, and/or reasoning as if their speculated authenticity were actual.
The prototypical speculative authenticity might be Pascal’s wager, where the solution to the absence of divinity is to behave as if it were present. But this panel seeks to explore speculative authenticity as a distinctive form manifesting within and beyond the imperial core, from the enlightenment to the present, in literature, film, and theory.
What particular authenticities are experienced as absent by different writers in different historical situations? Why? What material conditions and historical processes shaped those absences? In what particular ways are new authenticities speculated and performed? And how are modes of speculation linked to historically specific absences?
One might think of John Milton speculating that divine authority can be communicated through the mortal word, and writing as if this were true.
One might also think of Fred Moten’s theory of Black performance, which speculates Blackness as an anti-/ante-ontological substance communicated by artists who perform as if it were actually materially communicated.
Or in post-reform 80s China, how the influential root-seeking writer Ah Cheng locates hope for a modern Chinese identity not in tradition, which Maoism and global capitalism have forever negated, but in the process of tracing out tradition’s absence: a speculated identity performed through fruitless seeking.
Papers are especially welcome that examine the nuanced ways that individual works speculate authenticity while situating those works historically. Purely theoretical papers addressing the issue of authenticity in modernity are also welcome. Other excellent contributions to the discussion might consider what drives or determines the desire for authenticity (such as Adorno’s “ontological need”), whether that drive is specific to modernity, and how that drive itself might differ across historical situations. Hegelian takes on the speculative/dialectical logic of authenticity in modernity are also relevant.
The prototypical speculative authenticity might be Pascal’s wager, where the solution to the absence of divinity is to behave as if it were present. But this panel seeks to explore speculative authenticity as a distinctive form manifesting within and beyond the imperial core, from the enlightenment to the present, in literature, film, and theory.
What particular authenticities are experienced as absent by different writers in different historical situations? Why? What material conditions and historical processes shaped those absences? In what particular ways are new authenticities speculated and performed? And how are modes of speculation linked to historically specific absences?
One might think of John Milton speculating that divine authority can be communicated through the mortal word, and writing as if this were true.
One might also think of Fred Moten’s theory of Black performance, which speculates Blackness as an anti-/ante-ontological substance communicated by artists who perform as if it were actually materially communicated.
Or in post-reform 80s China, how the influential root-seeking writer Ah Cheng locates hope for a modern Chinese identity not in tradition, which Maoism and global capitalism have forever negated, but in the process of tracing out tradition’s absence: a speculated identity performed through fruitless seeking.
Papers are especially welcome that examine the nuanced ways that individual works speculate authenticity while situating those works historically. Purely theoretical papers addressing the issue of authenticity in modernity are also welcome. Other excellent contributions to the discussion might consider what drives or determines the desire for authenticity (such as Adorno’s “ontological need”), whether that drive is specific to modernity, and how that drive itself might differ across historical situations. Hegelian takes on the speculative/dialectical logic of authenticity in modernity are also relevant.