Conceptual Histories of Identity

funded by the LMU-NYU Research Cooperation Program, organized by Julia Landmann, Philipp Sperner, Robert Stockhammer and Robert Young

Fachbibliothek Philologicum, Ludwigstr. 25, 80539 München

Instead of proliferating the multiple discussions that focus on an alleged dichotomy between universalism and identity, the conference aims to uncover the multiple histories of the concept of identity and to explore the semantic spectrum that the term has acquired. The contributions will particularly examine the history of the term as applied to collectives and in how that shaped its broader adoption within scholarly and political debates, in very different parts of the world.

The conference is open to the public. Registration is not necessary.

Program

Thursday, June 26

• 16.00-16.30 - Welcome and Introduction
• 16.30-18.00 - Identity Politics – Collective Identity
  Marie Moran: No Identity Before Identity Politics: A Cultural Materialist History
  Robert Stockhammer: Collective Identity: An Origin in Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society?

Friday, June 27

• 9.30-11.00 - Long Histories of the Concept
  Jonathan Schmidt-Dominé: Logical, Metaphysical, and Moral Identity: Leibniz, Crusius, Kant
  Nikolaj Plotnikov: From Sameness to Identity: The History of the Concept of Identity in Russian Intellectual Tradition
  
• 11.30-13.00 - Positionalities
  Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky: Identity or Standpoint? On the Who of the What Between Positional Reflexivity and Positional Fundamentalism
  Robert Young: Identity and Tautology
• 14.30-16.00 - Black Atlantic and Identity
  Paul Edwards: Black Transfigurations Across the Interwar Atlantic
  Julia Landmann: "Confounded Identities": Conceptualization and Insurgency in the Writings of Hortense Spillers
• 16.30-18.00 - Identification
  Albrecht Koschorke: From Sympathy to Resentment. A Short History of Identification
  Susanne Lüdemann: Some Psychoanalytical Remarks on the Concept of Identification

Saturday, June 28

• 10.00-11.30 - Collective Identities – Self Description and Othering
  Mohinder Singh: From Reform to Reconversion: Arya Samaj in the Conceptual History of Collective Identity in Colonial South Asia
  Olga Reznikova: Concepts of Identity in the German Discipline of "Volkskunde" from the 1970s to the Present
• 11.45-13.15 - The State and Identity
  Philipp Sperner: Policing Identity – Identifying the Criminal Subject
  Lennie Hanson: Il / El / Israel: The Bible as Literature post-67