Workshop: Canon and Critque in the Humanities

Organisation: Rivka Feldhay (Tel Aviv) and Prof. Dr. Andreas Kilcher (ETH Zurich)

Datum: 7-8 March 2016

Venue: ETH Zürich, registration is mandatory (no fee)
Contact and registration:

For modern readers, intellectuals and some scholars the pair "canon" and "critique" seems to invoke opposite meanings. A canon – whether of religious, literary or legal writings – is associated with following the rule of tradition, orthodoxy and authority. It implies exclusion. "Critique" in the modern sense is a "habitus" of questioning the rules of tradition and authority, presumably in search for the "rationally new". Thus "opening the canon" through critique is regarded as an act of liberation and inclusion. Nevertheless, as the Greek and Latin original terms indicate, there had been a close relationship between canon and criticism, with κανών/canon being the criterion according to which something might be judged, and κριτής/κριτικός/criticus being the one judging according to the criterion.

Our main aim in this workshop is to examine the intersection of "canon and critique" in the religious, literary philosophical, psychoanalytical and legal contexts in modernity. Thus we want to combine theological, aesthetical and political aspects in our understanding of the shaping of bodies of knowledge in different contexts. Previous work on this field at Tel Aviv University has focused on the religious, mainly Middle Eastern contexts of the canon/critique encounter with the result, that such encounters have produced new forms of knowledge in other contexts too, especially the literary and legal ones. We now aspire to enlarge this extension to the field to European contexts, following the main question of the interplay of canon and critique in the shaping of knowledge.

Speakers:

Caroline Jessen, Daniel Strassberg, Noah Gerber, Muhammad Abu Samra, Vered Sakal, Gal Hertz, Daniel Weidner, Eve Marie-Becker, Christian Jany, Matthias Mahlmann, Rivka Feldhay, Andreas Kilcher

Further information is comming soon.