Sisterliness Graduate Conference

The NYU German Department‘s graduate students and Deutsches Haus at NYU present the “Sisterliness” Conference, with a keynote from Laurence Rickels.

As a paradigmatic sister-figure in literary history, Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, defies the law of the state in order to bury her brother. Her behavior can be read as an act of political resistance and transgression. Slavoj Žižek, for example, interprets her defiance as the radical act par excellence. According to Judith Butler she represents a “deformation and displacement” of kinship that destabilizes a normative symbolic order from within. At the same time, the figure of Antigone can be used to challenge a number of assumptions put forward by Freudian psychoanalysis. The latter, still the dominant framework for thinking family relationships and structures, is based on a triadic model which centers on the male subject – Oedipus and his relationship to his mother and father. This vertical model, however, harbors a twofold blind spot: female subjectivity and horizontal structures. By reading Antigone’s provocation as acts of a sister, and thus analyzing family models and power dynamics from a sister’s perspective, it becomes possible to rethink kinship as an institution marked by a crisis of representation.

This graduate student conference seeks to explore a concept of “sisterliness” that is closely linked to notions of transgression and alternative forms of kinship. Through the lens of “sisterliness,” we will engage new and productive ways of understanding and/or criticizing concepts of identity and alterity. The destabilization of genealogical origin calls traditional concepts of subjectivity into question and makes it possible to think about alternative modes of (re-)production in and of literary texts. We are interested in the implications this would have for questions of authorship, genre, and mediality. Our conference seeks to take the first steps in developing an archive and poetics of “sisterliness.”

Conference organized by Marie-Luise Goldmann, Rahel von Minden, Endre M. Holéczy

Events at Deutsches Haus are free and open to the public. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. As space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event to ensure you get a good seat. Thank you!

The Frankfurt Book Fair New York’s new “Book of the Month” is out: “The Hour Between Dog and Wolf” by Silke Scheuermann. In this powerful, crepuscular novel about modern day disorientation, two sisters meet again in their hometown, Frankfurt am Main, after years of silence. For a chance to win a copy of this book, share this post on Facebook and write “shared” in the comments or tell us about the place where you grew up in via email: intern.newyork@book-fair.com or in a comment on Facebook.