Special Issue: On Corpses
Guest Editors: Natalie Alvarez, Athena Colman, Rajiv Kaushik
The body has become a site of active critical inquiry in a variety of disciplines. For some thinkers, the body is a discursively inscribed locus of materialities. For others, however, the body has an originary presence that exceeds its discursivity. For this special issue of Janus Head, we wish to investigate the ways in which the corpse articulates, challenges, or limits current theories of embodiment. We are looking for papers that investigate such questions as: Is a corpse still implicated in the same nexus as a material body or has it in some way slipped outside of its everydayness? What does the corpse show or reveal anew to us? How do we encounter the corpse? Does the encounter with the corpse present to me the death of an-other or, acting as a memento mori, does it force my own death upon me? What is the body's relationship to its own death? What is the status of scientific and medical discourses in relation to the corpse? We are particularly interested in the following themes as they relate to the corpse: performativity, the uncanny, in-visibility, anxiety, disgust, the abject, decay, decrepitude, temporality, narrative, metaphor, etc. We welcome papers that investigate these themes from the perspective of various backgrounds: critical theory, psychoanalysis, comparative literature, medical sciences, performance theory, phenomenology, art history, etc.
Deadline for submissions is June 1, 2009. Articles can be sent by email to Rajiv Kaushik at rkaushik@brocku.ca or mailed to:
Rajiv Kaushik
Department of Philosophy
Brock University
500 Glenridge Avenue
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
L2S 3A1
