Borders / Dialectics / Civility

The APL conference will take place from 20th-22nd August 2025 at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main.

In 1966, Adorno opened his magnum opus by claiming that “Hegel’s dialectics constituted the unsuccessful attempt to use philosophical concepts for coping with all that is heterogeneous to those concepts.” Since, according to Adorno, Hegel’s efforts ended in failure, “the relationship to dialectics [was] due for an accounting.” But we might wonder, today (60 years later), where such an accounting stands? Our present is defined by ever more contentious border violations and contestations, anxieties about their permeability and about whatever is on the other side, of drawing and redrawing boundaries both in the world and in its cultural representations. Nationalisms and fascistic movements are resurgent, walls and fences emerge in physical form and in metaphor both. Border skirmishes increasingly define humanities departments, even as those very departments struggle to reassert their relevance and/as their ability to ameliorate sectarian thinking about race, gender, nationality, and politics. Literary study is increasingly unwilling to escape the silos of genre or the paranoia of critical approaches that merely and mendaciously “mine” the textual other. Likewise, philosophy has only broadened the no-man’s land between the trenches of the analytic and the continental, the phenomenological and the (neo)material. But if dialectics were, at least at one time, about crossing the border of concepts and “coping with all that is heterogenous to those concepts,” then (on some level) dialectics have always been invested in the potential of civility, of sustaining while overcoming the hostility of oppositional spaces, oppositional forces—of communicating across, while nevertheless sustaining, borders of difference.

In other words, dialectics are once again “due for an accounting.” It is this very accounting that will define our work at the 2025 conference of the Association for Philosophy and Literature, relative to two of the most urgent concerns in academia today: borders and civility. Apropos of such work, the meeting will be held in the shadow of the Frankfurt School—the very place where, a hundred years ago, Adorno and the rest anxiously watched and critically reflected upon the last rise of fascism.

More broadly, Borders / Dialectics / Civility asks participants to reflect on the myriad ways in which the drawing, policing, establishing, and thinking about borders impacts human and nonhuman life; on the uses of dialectical thinking in the contemporary; on the meaning and uses of civility, and especially about the links between the three concepts. Amidst the clamor for walls and fences and the host of anti-gay and anti-trans legislation being passed throughout parts of the United States and Europe, with civic life becoming increasingly gentrified and the borders between the haves and the have-nots and between the Global North and the Global South wider than they have previously been, with the space between the literary and mere “content production” (or between authority and mere opinion) paradoxically ossifying in the process of dissolving, this call for papers asks after the ways philosophy and literature interlink in coming to terms with these problems. Among the questions it asks are following: What does the malleability of the concept of the border mean for notions of identity, its stability, and the relationship between borders and civil being, and how are such issues picked up in cultural productions? How do literary representations involve borders and boundaries? To what extent should our understanding of “rights” be tied to notions of citizenship? In effacing notions of identity, might we in fact risk, echoing Levinas, eclipsing genuine differences between groups and communities, thereby reducing the infinite alterity of the Other to our own categories, and ultimately imposing a new hegemonic uniformity on them? How do we engage meaningfully these pressing and fundamental questions amid the ubiquity of our social (and algorithmically controlled) media silos, which have only deepened political hostilities, dividing families, friends and communities? How can these political “borders” be crossed so we might engage freely yet civilly with each other?

Papers can be proposed on any and all of the triad of concepts in the title, and focusing on both (or either) the philosophical and the literary (in the widest of senses).

Suggested questions and topics include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

• The nature and purposes of geographical borders

• Sources of past and current repressive nationalisms

• The history and types of dialectics

• The separation of the human and the non-human

• Developments in artificial intelligence

• Race, culture, and community

• The relationship between borders and citizenship

• Crossing borders—the (un)freedom of immigration

• Transgression and forgiveness

• Global Capitalism with/out borders

• Marxism today / the legacy of the Frankfurt School

• The creation and movement of borders and their impact on indigenous peoples

• The meaning of Empire today

• Media silos and echo chambers—and/as the deterioration of public discourse

• Borders between human, nature, machines

• Civility vs. appeasement

• Civility vs. violence and hatred

• Civil society and public agency

• Gender categories and their fluidity

• Deconstructive approaches to citizenship

• Religious identity and toleration

• Lines between the secular and the sacred

• Artistic representations of identity and belonging

• Relations between the natural and the monstrous

• Bordering on life and death

• Invocations of wokeness, freedom, and civility

Proposals will be accepted for individual papers, panels (of 3-4 participants), or roundtables (of 4-6 participants). Proposals can be submitted by following the submission link on our website. For individual submissions, abstracts are restricted to no more than 300 words. For panels or roundtables, submit a single proposal, consisting of a 300-word panel abstract along with titles for all included papers. You will also be asked to supply a short biography for each participant. Proposals are Due Dec 1, 2024.