CFP: Sanctity

by J J Cohen

Posted on behalf of favorite ITM love object Cary Howie.

Call for Submissions
L'Esprit Créateur
Special Issue: Sanctity

From Eulalie to Derrida, sanctity performs a series of crucial and complicated functions for French literature and philosophy. This special issue will address the figure of the saint as it gets deployed in contexts sacred and profane, and as it embodies ongoing concerns with materiality and transcendence, exclusion and belonging. The "communion of saints" should be understood, in this way, as widely as possible: as a name for the kinds of sharing or belonging that sanctity at once names and enables; as the ensemble of gestures, liturgical and otherwise, through which these kinds of sharing take place; as the barest thinking of material togetherness. Radically heterogeneous and radically constitutive of communities, in this world and beyond this world, saints condense especially powerful wishes and anxieties about where we’re going—and who "we" are, in the first place and the last.

Deadline for submissions: 1 July 2009. Maximum length: 6000 words. Please address all inquiries to Cary Howie, csh34@cornell.edu.