CORP-ARCH 2018 - 2018 Corporeal Archives

Technological advances have enabled a vast array of archives, satisfying our insatiable need to collect, store and preserve, and, further, allowing us to go beyond the institutional repositories of information. Derrida’s claim that “nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive’” has proven to be accurate and convincing in present-day societies. The bio-cultural record which engages both data production and accumulation has established the body as a crucial “artefact” within a discourse of individual/micro/macro archives.
To think the body is to undo the thinking itself, to approach the body from the border point of the corporeality of thinking. Having stated that, we are to think the body, or bodies, from the archival perspective, from various and multiple “starting” points of imaginary of the body. The normative and normalized “ending” points of bodily archives should be, therefore, thoroughly interrogated. The body has often been represented as a mere footnote to the vast scripture of the mind, reason, soul, spirit, nous, nomos and the like. To think the body from the archival perspective is to re-write and to re-member – it is not to commence but to suspend, to defer closure, and to safeguard the openness of the questions of/on the body. Our aim is to graft on to the “aggregates of knowledge” (in Hegel’s terms), understood as normative epistemic body-productions, and to re-question obsessive archiving of knowledge on the „body“ by following Derrida's critical concept of “paleonymy” and „archive fever“. In accordance to Derridian philosophy of différance, we invite you to trace the catalogue of the body, a corpus, an to dwell on immense discourse of the body and its failures as discussed in Jean-Luc Nancy’s accounts on „exscribing“ and „ectopic“ body.
The conference sets out to disrupt the everpresent corpuses of knowledge (biological, medical, anthropometric, cultural, ethnographic, political, historical and etc.), and further to imagine alternative productions of new epistemologies of corpus, new “aggregates” of non-normative knowledge, i.e. to invent different bodily registries. Our aim is to probe the subversive tendencies within corporeal archives (in literature, film and media studies, (bio)art, performance studies, etc.), and to engage in the re-evaluation of the notions of (de)construction, (re)organization and bio-thanato-political control of bodily matter. Therefore, we plan to address various and cultural politics and practices that are reshaping our understanding of the body, as well as to examine the new forms of the archival inscriptions and erasures. We invite contributors to critically evaluate the ambiguity of access to the corporeal caches. In addition to academic papers and presentations, we also welcome creative submissions across all genres and forms, from independent scholars, cultural workers and artists.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Biopolitical and Necropolitical Corporeal Archives
• Political bodyscape
• Docile bodies and biopolitics
• Thanatopolitical bodies
• Body as thanatopolitical fiction
• Vulnerability and precarity
• Immunitary communal body
• Anti-tech humanism
• Histories and Epistemologies of/on the Body
• Cartesian diagram of the body
• Bodies of memory
• Gendered body
• Racialized, sexualized and normalized body
• Monstrous corpus
• Human-cyborg divide
• Body phenomenology
• Body Forensics and Death Studies
• Mass(ive)-body
• Bodily mournings
• Abject bodies (undead, fragmented, body waste, disability)
• Mute witnesses/silence of corpses
• Bioart and Performative Body Archives
• Doll-body – figurines of immobility
• Cinematic corporealities
• Bodily humour and travesty
• Written/writing bodies
• Bodily choreographies
• Wearable Technologies and BioDigital Bodies
• Surface bodies
• Engravings on the skin
• Cell archives
• Subversive anatomical catalogues
• Multiplying data in desire synapses
• Quilted bodies – bodily patchwork
• “Fashtech” & “tech couture”
Proposals of 300 words should be submitted, along with a short bionote at corporeal.archives-AT-fmk.edu.rs
The official language of the conference will be English.