CALL FOR PAPERS
THE NEIGHBOR AND THE STRANGER
July 4th – 8th, 2016, University Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France
Please note: Submission of proposals extended to February 29th, 2016
An international conference under the auspices of the North American Levinas Society (NALS) & Société internationale de Recherche Emmanuel Levinas (SIREL)
Conference organizing committee: Flora Bastiani (France), Erik Garrett (USA), Dara Hill (USA), Nelson Lerias (France), Diogo Villas Bôas Aguiar (Brasil)
“Beyond the axiology of inter-estedness, beyond the appetite for being, beyond the restlessness of each for his restfulness, for his being-there, for his share in existing, beyond the concern for that which has so admirably been called Da-sein, the concern that decipher in the needs that money can satisfy – but as much in the possible cruelties of the ‘struggle for life’ – is not man also the astonishing possibility – exception to the edict of all modes of being! – of giving his place, the Da, to sacrifice himself for the other, to die for the stranger?” Emmanuel Levinas “Sociality and Money”. Trans. F. Bouchetoux and C. Jones (2007)
As the seventh year is the year of fallow land, this seventh edition of the SIREL Toulouse International Conference tends to take place somewhere else than in the foothold in the land, somewhere else than in the autochthony, taking under consideration the landless, the undocumented, the migrant that each human being conceals, those that through their misery oblige to reconfigure the rules of living together. Current affairs have (and for some time now) imposed the ethical problem of thinking about our responsibility in front of the call of the stranger. Even though this symposium is obviously influenced by recent events, it does not constitute simply one reaction. As a matter of fact, the gesture of Levinassian studies that we carry on tends to bring to light the ever-present risk of reducing the other to our own concepts. Hence it is not at all a matter of producing prescriptions.