Call for Papers for the Forthcoming Colloquium: A Breath for Nothing…  Approaching the Limit. Tuesday , 26th June, 2012. Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London.

Martin Heidegger describes the poetic instance when the artist and thinker acts through “a breath for nothing…”  This one day colloquium will investigate critical responses to performance through gesture and its arrest.  Can theoretical or linguistic terms, such as ‘separation’ and ‘division‘, be applied to a state when the body approaches a limit of creating and thinking?

The first in this series of workshops was hosted by The University of Dundee took place in May, 2011, entitled ‘Jean-Luc Nancy: Writing Upon the Limit’. This, the second, will extend from Nancy’s notion of ‘exscription’, a mode of inscribing the limit of writing traced outside the text.  The aim now is to explore this ‘outside’ beyond writing and language.  Considering how for Nancy the experience of space is felt and thought within as much as without the body suggests an internal and non-representational condition, or ‘spanne’.  Could this notion be elaborated, or critically presented through performative interventions, which do not necessarily presuppose the primacy of text and image?

Bearing in mind Maurice Blanchot’s claim that conventional forms of writing cannot represent the limit as a literary ‘trace’, even by inscribing/drawing it literally, we can also consider this as a proposition for alternative approaches to representing the limit.

A Breath For Nothing… will give both art and philosophy a platform to pose further questions around these areas. We are pleased to announce that the following guest speakers will contribute:

During the workshop postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers are encouraged to act as respondents by presenting brief replies, and to open question and discussion sessions.