Nonidentity: Current Configurations in Critical Theories & Poetics

On Thursday and Friday, April 28th-29th, in the Great Room of 19 University Place and at Deutsches Haus, the Departments of German and Comparative Literature will host Nonidentity: Current Configurations in Critical Theories & Poetics! 

Organized by Alexander Braunegg, Ioanna Kostopoulou, Julia Landmann of NYU German

Guest Speakers: Mark Christian Thompson (Johns Hopkins University), Romy Opperman (The New School), Anna Parkinson (Northwestern University), and Robert J.C. Young (New York University).

CLICK HERE FOR THE CONFERENCE PROGRAM

CHECK OUT THE NONIDENTITY READER

Only current NYU students (including IUDC), faculty, and staff may join this conference in-person. RSVP is required for in-person attendance. All others are invited to join on Zoom:

Join Day 1 on Zoom

Join Day 2 on Zoom

Can we mobilize concepts of nonidentity as resources for current configurations of resistance and  disfiguration in critical theories and poetics? Our conference traces this question by connecting the  emergence of nonidentity in the Frankfurt School with Postcolonial, Indigenous, and Black  Studies. Focusing on contemporary entanglements of critical theories and poetics, we seek to  provide answers on how postcolonial theories and the Frankfurt School enunciate concepts liminal to conceptualization.  

According to Adorno/Horkheimer, the identity principle serves to dominate nature by subsuming  particulars under universal concepts. An “ur-form of ideology”, the identity principle correlates with the compulsion towards identification with authority. In continuations of the normative and historically contextualized reflection of critical theory throughout the last decades however, certain  notions of identity have been discussed as political tools to counter structural violence: identity  politics started with analyses of forms of oppression of particularities by the governing concepts  to reclaim the previously stigmatized accounts of social groups (Combahee River Collective) and has been critically reconfigured in postcolonial theorems like the third space (Bhabha). For both, the Frankfurt School and postcolonial theories, the relation between identity and nonidentity was  intricately mediated.

The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School deployed the term identity ambiguously within reflections on philosophical, economical, and social discourses. Identity thus figures as a nexus highlighting how structures of thought are sedimented in and carried on by social and economic operations. Click HERE for the full conference abstract.