Repetition with Change: The Intellectual Legacies of Dominick LaCapra
September 25-26, 2009
A. D. White House
For almost four decades, Dominick LaCapra has challenged the disciplinary and normative
assumptions of scholars throughout the humanities. He helped to inaugurate and interpret the
“linguistic turn” in the historical profession, exploring the relevance of literary theory for historical
inquiry, while simultaneously making a case for careful historical study within literary and critical
theory. This conference will gather together LaCapra’s former students and intellectual interlocutors
who have taken up in their own work one or more of the theoretical challenges he has posed over
the years. Papers will be grouped according to some of LaCapra’s chief preoccupations that have
persisted through the decades: historiography and critical theory, secularization, trauma and
repetition, excess and normative limits, and animal-human relations. Together the papers will
illustrate the vast range of work that LaCapra’s theoretical reflections have inspired in European
intellectual history and beyond.
Schedule:
Friday, September 25:
1:00 Opening Remarks: Tim Murray and Jonathan Culler
1:30 Trauma and Affect
Federico Finchelstein, The New School, “The Holocaust as Ideology: Borges, Trauma and the
Fascist Unconscious”
Anna Parkinson, Northwestern University, “What a Difference Repetition Makes: Recent
Fantasies of the Silver Screen”
Tracie Matysik, University of Texas, Austin, “Blumenberg, Spinoza, and Self-Preservation”
Chair: Jeremy Varon, The New School
3:00 Break
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3:30 Sacred and Secular
Richard Schaefer, State University of New York at Plattsburgh, “New Perspectives on Catholicism,
Secularization and the Post-Secular: The View from the 19th Century”
Samuel Moyn, Columbia University, “Bearing Witness: Theological Sources of a Secular Moral
Imperative”
Harold Mah, Queen’s University, “The Sacralization of the Secular: Barthes's Mythologies”
Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University, “In/finite Time: Tracing Transcendence to Emmanuel
Levinas’s Talmudic Lectures”
Chair: Peter Gilgen, Cornell University
5:30 Reception
Saturday, September 26:
8:45-9:30 Breakfast
9:30-11:00 History and Psychoanalysis
Scott Spector, University of Michigan, “Two Vultures: Freud Between German-Jewish Science and
Humanism”
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Brown University, “Little Hans and Dogs”
Camille Robcis, Cornell University, “French Psychoanalysis and the Names-of-the-Father”
Chair: Carolyn Dean, Brown University
11:00-11:30 Break
11:30-1:00 Violence, Law, Memory
Ben Brower, Texas A&M University, “Conceptions of War in Colonial Algeria: Just War, Jihad, and
the ‘Good War’”
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Judith Surkis, Harvard University, “Hymenal Politics: Marriage, Secularism, and Sovereignty”
Gary Wilder, CUNY, “From Historical Memory to the History of Time”
Chair: Isabel Hull, Cornell University
1:00-2:00 Lunch
2:00-3:30 Historiography
Jeremy Telman, Valparaiso University, “Originalism and Its Discontents”
Rebecca Spang, Indiana University, Bloomington, “On the Use and Abuse of Historiography for
Life”
Jonathan Judaken, University of Memphis, “A New Synthesis? Toward the Cultural History of
Ideas.”
Chair: Michael Steinberg, Brown University
3:30-4:00 Break
4:00 Roundtable
Kate Horning, Taran Kang, Emma Kuby, Peter Staudenmeier, Emma Willoughby, Franz Hofer
Comments by Lloyd Kramer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This event is free and open to the public.
Funding provided by Society for the Humanities, Institute for German Studies, French Studies,
History Department, English Department, Government Department, Department of German
Studies, Theater, Film & Dance Department, Dean’s Office of the College of Arts & Science.
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