This seminar wishes to explore the negative overlap of thought and feeling in nonsense. This overlap is confused: for “sense,” already, is marked by a split.
Sense may speak of the understanding which thinking is said to produce – the thinking that “makes sense” – in which case sense’s negative, nonsense, would be the lack of rational meaning or logic. Yet sense is also sensation, a feeling, and thereby the touchstone of experience, of which nonsense would be the most
radical absence.
The proposition, “nothing in the world is without sense,” may be true. Yet perhaps it invites us less to dismiss the occurrence of nonsense than to question the lurking particle “is,” and to follow the invitation of nonsense away from the world “as is” and toward a world “as as” – a world that merely appears to be a world; a sense not for what is, but for what is like.
ACLA invites papers that investigate such nonsense in its many theatres – literary, philosophical, or otherwise.
To submit an abstract, please click here.
The deadline for submissions is September 30th, 2023.
