"Giving an overview of the phenomenon of incest-as-adult sexuality, my paper will establish a model of incest based on a daughter's desire for her father through such examples as the tale of Myrrha (Ovid, 'Metamorphoses') and Kathryn Harrison's 'The Kiss' (1997). With emphasis on the biological relation between the incesting couple and the notion of genetic sexual attraction, I shall explore the impact of this 'forbidden love' on the family in terms of law, literature and life."

"Giving a brief and general outline of our music heritage, my paper will highlight the changing face of music from Ancient Greece to the present day. How has it been, and still is, a ceaseless source for expression socially, politically and aesthetically? With emphasis given to 17th and late 19th /early 20th century French literature, these various uses of music have often run concurrently; composers and authors have worked together using music as the voice for their specific needs. Through literature, opera and later through film, I would like to look at these specific needs. Music has been used to disguise and, at the same time, expose class distinction. How has this affected the community?"

 Marie NDiaye

"It's an examination of the representation of the unhappiness of marriage and the authors' exploration of same-sex desire and states of bliss as an alternative. At the end of the paper I explore how these are echoed in recent intimacy theory by Bersani and Phillips. There's no need forthe audience to know the work of the writers in advance."

"BRAKC looks at how bonds between humans are represented and conceptualised and how they have mutated across time and space. The family lawyer looks at bonds that attract “family” recognition and importantly, those that do not.  For the individuals involved this has important practical implications but of equal importance is the effect of the normative force of law: family forms once deemed “unnatural” or subversive can gain societal acceptance once accorded legal status.

This paper will focus on a particular type of kinship - that of  same-sex parenthood -  which  although recognised legally in many European countries (including the UK) does not attract legal recognition in France. This paper will firstly examine the latest legal developments in this area and will then  reflect upon the reasons that could explain why France,  one of the first countries to introduce civil partnerships (PACS) for same-sex couples in the late 90s, lags behind its neighbours in granting legal status to same- sex parents.

Two broad themes can be discerned running through the debates on same-sex parenthood in France. The first is that parenthood must be founded on a “biological truth”.  There are two strands to this argument; that a child must have two parents of a different sex and that the child must be linked genetically to both.  The second is that to grant legal recognition to same-sex parents would be to run contrary to a founding principle of the French Republic, that of universalism and equality before the law. The former line of argument is not peculiar to France, the second, of course is. I argue that it is the combination of these two themes, one in its appeal to a “natural order”, and the other to French universalism that has proved to be a powerful and effective weapon in countering claims for recognition of same sex parenthood."

Start time: 6pm
Location: Room 421, Malet Street, Bloomsbury

"Can mainstream romantic fiction be used to re-examine the legacies of transatlantic enslavement, and suggest that the ‘slave-owners’ condemned their descendents to trans-generational trauma?"

Jenny Mitchell

"There now is a broad consensus, amongst war ethicists, that military intervention into the internal affairs of a sovereign state is sometimes morally permissible, in particular as a means to stop and prevent crimes which, in the now standard phrase, shock ‘the conscience of mankind’. The issue is particularly salient at the moment, in the light of the intervention in Lybia. Yet, defending the right to intervene from an ethical point of view is surprisingly difficult if one bears in mind that an intervention consists in killing some (many?) individuals, not all of whom are in fact responsible for the egregious wrongdoings which trigger the war. My aim, in this talk, is to try and do precisely that. I first offer an argument in favour of intervention. I end with some remarks about rules of conduct in such wars - particularly as pertain conduct vis a vis innocent civilians."

In recent years, philosophers, cultural historians and critical theorists as well as artists and literary critics have been preoccupied by the urgent need to reinvent the concept of ‘community’. Postcolonial thinkers have questioned the very idea of collective identities; queer/new feminist theorists have radically rethought ideas about sexual ‘belonging’; poststructuralist philosophers have argued for the dissolution of the subject and his/her ties to any groupings. Artists and writers have posed these same questions within the context of their work: the films of Arnaud Desplechin, the novels of Marie NDiaye, the sculptures of Murat Brierre, for example, are all witness to the current concern with the notion of community, for some an impossible ideal, for others a dangerously conservative notion which threatens the development of newer, better forms of human interaction.

In this conference, we hope both to show the variety of contemporary ways in which this notion has been explored, and to give a sense of how the interest in ‘visions of community’ has in fact been a perennial concern, present throughout French history.

 Incendies de Wajdi Mouawad © Lino. Courtesy of the Artist.


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Le sang des promesses: Liens et lignages dans Incendies de Wajdi Mouawad.

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Networked

 Franz Kafka, Das Schloss (München: K. Wolff 1926)

"Studies have over recent years revealed a strong interrelationship between Kafka’s writing and the polemical-ideological setting of early twentieth century Prague.  Most compellingly, Kafka’s writing has been shown to resonate with the ideological preoccupations of the city’s Zionist movement, which enjoined assimilated Jews to look towards the traditional social structures of the Hassidic Ostjuden as a means of re-imagining their own identity.  This resonance in turn raises the question of how Kafka’s writing relates more generally to the period’s increasingly suspicious stance towards modernity, in which the cult of Gemeinschaft often appeared to eclipse Enlightenment ideals of citizenship.

In this seminar, I will attempt to demonstrate how aspects of this discourse emerge in Kafka’s Castle: a novel which often derives narrative force from the mismatch of K., a seemingly modern protagonist, and his pre-industrial village setting.  I hope to show the manner in which the terminology of the early sociological discourse, where the term Gemeinschaft was explicitly defined and popularised, can be usefully employed to describe the ensuing social dynamics between K. and the villagers.  In so doing, I aim to demonstrate the manner in which The Castle plays out many of the paradoxes inherent within the surrounding discourse, predicated upon critiquing modernity, yet reliant upon a fundamentally modern outlook."