3rd Global Conference
Monday 17th September - Wednesday 19th September
2007 Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers |
Session 6: Hope: From Here to Modernity
Chair: David Feldman
Post Apocalyptic Culture
Teresa
Heffernan
Department of English, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, NS, Canada
A
year before Frank Kermode’s influential The
Sense of an Ending (1967) appeared, which insisted that we
must hold onto the idea of the end or risk succumbing to the “intolerable
idea that we live within an order of events between which there
is no relation, pattern, mutability, or intelligible progression,” Jacques
Derrida suggested abandoning the idea of the end for an understanding “which
is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries
to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of
that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology-in
other words, through the history of all of his history-has dreamed
of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the
end of the game.” The source of this rupture--this
apocalyptic event that shifts us from the dream of an origin and
end to a dream where there is no foundation and no end to the game--is,
according to Derrida, when “language invaded the universal
problematic.” What comes forth from this tear
or this shift, however, is: “the as yet unnameable which
is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever
a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species,
in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.”
Offering a reading Michel Houllebecq’s controversial novel Elementary
Particles that posits a future that passes “beyond
man,” this
paper will explore what in 1966 Derrida could refer to only as the “yet
unnameable.” What does a world that has abandoned a “sense
of an ending” look like? Is it about ruins and ghosts? Is
it about possibility and plurality? What does it mean to be
stuck in the game? And
what does it mean to violently resurrect the sense of the end as
this novel does in its conclusion?
Theatre and Counselling: Factories of Hope and Resilliance
Edgar
Rodríguez Sánchez
Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico
Some people
live in a land of opportunities, whereas some other people just dream
of a land of possibilities. Richness, poverty, health, illness, discrimination,
pain, lack of education, injustice, trauma... These are some of the
issues people have to deal with in their lives. What depends on the
strength which someone face unpleasant things in his/her life?
In
this essay, I aboard how resilience, a powerful strength that takes
the anxiety out of hard times, can be an engine of change, a clearer
window in which we can see a different reality. But resilience is
understood not only as an inner strength, but also as a skill that
can be developed.
Related to Theatre of the Oppressed, this kind of
theatre created for generating dialogue among societies and cultures
that have spent their last resort, it is explained how theatrical
techniques used in the process of Counseling can be beneficial for
post-traumatic stress disorder, treatment of depression, multicultural
counseling, development of social skills or labor or group counseling
in order to generate a more resilient personality.
Based on Stanislavski’s, Brecht’s, Boal’s, and
Ionesco’s works, for instance, some exercises, games and activities
are explained, suggestions in which theatre is understood as a way
of learning to act (in both senses: acting and taking action) not
only talk, to hope and create new realities; beautiful and wonderful
realities, all with the power of theatre, counseling, love and hope.
Open-Ended Hope for Eco-Social Transformations
Whitney
Bauman
Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, USA
No abstract is presently available