The Experience of (Dis)Location: Knowledge, Identity, and the Question of Ethics

a workshop with

Corey D. B. Walker

Thursday, February 16, 2006
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center
4:00-6:00 PM

Respondent: Sarah Lagrotteria, Graduate Student, Department of English, Stanford University

Professor Walker's paper will be distributed in advance of the workshop to regular workshop participants. For an electronic copy of the reading, please contact Julie Minich at jminich@stanford.edu.

Abstract: What are the possibilities for thinking identity in light of the collapse of traditional, (post)modern, and theological forms of thought? How can we reconstruct a form of thinking about the notion of identity that gains critical intellectual purchase in the wake of this crisis? This paper wrestles with these questions without the guarantees offered by (neo)empiricist forms of thought. Instead, I proceed by way of an elliptical engagement with knowledge, identity, and ethics in sketching a theoretical framework that may assist us in properly interrogating these questions. Specifically, I argue for a dialogical relationship between epistemology and ethics that turns on a particular production of the notions of the grotesque and the opaque. It is in the space of this (dis)location that I suggest we are able to critically think the issue of identity.

Corey D. B. Walker is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Africana philosophy, critical theology, contemporary theory, and cultural studies. Prior to joining the faculty of Religious Studies, Professor Walker was Director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge at the University of Virginia and Visiting Professor at the Historisches Institut at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. He is the author of the forthcoming study, “The Freemasonry of the Race”: The Cultural Politics of Association and the Struggle for Democracy in America, and is now working on a new book project entitled Between Transcendence and History: Theology, Critical Theory and the Politics of Liberation.

Sarah Lagrotteria is a 2nd-year graduate student in the Department of English. Her interests are literature of the nineteenth century and ethical criticism.