Nonidentity: Current Configurations in Critical Theories & Poetics

This conference is a hybrid event. Presenters, faculty, students, and staff from the NYU and IUDC communities may attend in-person with prior registration via this RSVP link. Daily Screeners will be required for attendance. 

Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the Department of German, NYU (April 28-29, 2022) in cooperation with the Department of Comparative Literature, NYU  

*IN-PERSON REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED. We welcome you to join virtually via Zoom and to register here for Conference Day I, and for Conference Day II*

Organized by Alexander Braunegg, Ioanna Kostopoulou, Julia Landmann (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)

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. Please click here for the full conference abstract.  

For the Conference Program, please click here. For the Nonidentity Reader, please click here.