May 27–29, 2015

Dis/Appearing Prague International Conference

An international conference organized by the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) Weimar and the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University Prague under the patronage of the Rector of the Charles University Prof. MUDr. Tomáš Zima, Dr.Sc. - May 27–29, 2015, Prague, Czech Republic.

Western philosophy and culture in general have, as it were, always been more concerned with appearance than with disappearance: Aesthetic, epistemic, religious, or technical practices are supposed to make something appear and, thus, intelligible, perceptible, or imaginable. This bias parallels the ontological preference given to coming into being and becoming present by neglecting the processes of disintegration, dissolution and destabilization of formations and relations. This notwithstanding, disappearing has always kept a somewhat less apparent, but highly important key place in Western thought. Religious and political institutions for instance, as well as logics have always worked on making anything that formed a contradiction disappear - not to mention the practice of totalitarian regimes of making people disappear. Neverthe­less, references to dis­appearance within the humanities are traditionally accompanied by the restorative rhetoric of loss and endangerment. Especially, the conditions of highly technological media societies were too easily held responsible for dramatic disap­pearances (of body, reality, distance, etc.), virtualization and dematerialization.

The conference will examine disappearing and its relation­ship to appearing by drawing on the concept of «operative ontologies». Leaving behind a concept of being as a primordial and reliable ontological realm, «operative ontologies» seek to document and unfold different «modes of existence», «ontological regimes», or «dispositions of being» (Haudricourt, Viveiros de Castro, Descola, Latour following Souriau). In dialogue with plural and regional ontologies, the concept focuses on the media technological constitution of the relation of humans and things: Neither subjects nor objects are understood as essential entities given in advance and as a basis of relations, but rather as metastable results of generative operations which produce realities, distinctions, collectives and realms of being in the first place (and which we wish to address as «media»).

Drawing on «operative ontologies», the conference aims to explore two concrete operations: appearing and disappear­ing, with particular regard to the second. In line with the pluralization of beings, it is necessary to investigate differ­ent modes of going out of existence and out of sight and, thus, the ontological and aesthetic dimensions of disappearing. Obviously, disappearing can be a matter of passing, of destruction as well as of becoming invisible or infinitesimally small, of hiding, banishment, or of displacement. It is thus virtually impossible to think of both operations as independent from each other. Both are characterized by a liminality, raising questions of tempora­l­ity as well as spatiality: Where does something disappear to and where does it ap­pear from? Does dis/appearance unfold gradually, suddenly or tiltingly?

Conference Venues

Karolinum
Ovocný trh 3–5
Praha 1, 116 36

Kino PONREPO
Bartolomějská 11
Praha 1, 110 00

Program

Wednesday, May 27

04:30pm

KEYNOTE Que ce qui apparaît seulement s'aperçoit. In English.

Georges Didi-Huberman (Paris)

07:00pm

Welcome Reception

Thursday, May 28

10:00am - 01:30pm

PANEL I

Chair: Karel Thein (Prague)

Appearing and Exiting, Stage and Offstage.

Bettine Menke (Erfurt)

«That which has disappeared ‹returns› »: On the Mediality of Grief.

Josef Vojvodík (Prague)

Forgetfulness at Work: Film as a Site of Oblivion.

Jacques Aumont (Paris)

01:30pm – 03:00pm

Lunch

03:00pm – 06:30pm

PANEL II

Chair: Zdeňka Kalnická (Ostrava)

Managing the Limits of Representation.

James Elkins (Chicago)

Fallen out of the World. A Geographical Fantasy.

Wolfgang Struck (Erfurt)

Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish: The Disposal of Unwanted Objects in Ancient Greece.

Astrid Lindenlauf (Bryn Mawr)

Friday, May 29

10:00am - 01:30pm

PANEL III

Chair: Kateřina Krtilová (Weimar)

Trembling of the Non-identical in Appearing.

Miroslav Petříček (Prague)

Operativity. Ontologies. Speculations.

Dieter Mersch (Zürich)

On the Primacy of Dis-Appearance: The Operative Ontologies of Topological Media.

Mark Hansen (Durham)

01:30pm – 03:00pm

Lunch

03:00pm – 06:30pm

PANEL IV

Chair: Martin Pokorný (Prague)

Méliès and the Materiality of Modern Magic.

Matthew Solomon (Ann Arbor)

Disapparition: On Phantom Departures.

Akira Mizuta Lippit (Los Angeles)

Behind the Curtain. Dis/Appearing in Surrealist Art.

Claudia Blümle (Berlin)

08:00pm

Introduction

Lucie Česálková, National Film Archive (Prague)

FILM SCREENING Decasia (67’, 2002)

Bill Morrison (New York)

10:00pm

Closing Remarks + Wine & Cheese