Prof. Alan Blum

HuGSA and the Humanities Department at York University is proud to present Professor Alan Blum as our Friday keynote speaker.

Dr Alan Blum will be presenting a keynote address entitled “Life, Death and the InBetween: Hunting for the Grey Zone between Living Forever and Never Having Lived at All.”

Blum’s Keynote addresses ways in which the aura of death haunts everyday life as a tacit, unsettling but forceful awareness of mortality that pervades lived experience as an implicit source of anxiety, neither simply bodily nor cognitive. It is affective at its core, linked to a sense of the fundamental ambiguity of human existence in time and the persistent lure of melancholy evoked by an apprehension of the abandonment of meaning. He uses an analytic approach to the collective representation of death developed over years from influences in the humanities and social sciences around classical philosophy, hermeneutics, phenomenology and the dialectic of interpretation.

The resonance of death itself is reflected in various illustrations—both mundane and dramatic. For example, in debates over issues such as organ donation, the death penalty, informed consent, care giving in dementia, and the attribution of responsibility for crimes and atrocities that recur in typical representations of both survivors and perpetrators, unease is implicit in many guises considered ‘normal’: loneliness, demoralization, desperation, settings of rehabilitation, and propensities for acting-out. The talk is directed to laying out such mundane (dis)guises of anxiety over mortality in several different cases including both these ‘normal’ situations, and the issues and debates mentioned here, and additionally, on occasion in films depicting characters ‘falling apart,’ and in works of selected novelists.

After framing the numerous problematic ways the aura and fear of death recur as a constant premonition in life, this talk also explores how people try to deal with this uneasiness. Applying this focus to particular problems, first in depression and the conventions for representing it, then in the notion of affect that has a new and fascinating currency in the discourse of the university (in the example of alarm over dementia and care for it in a climate ruled by the biomedical imaginary), the Keynote explores cases illustrating the personal experiences of those who feel their lives are ‘falling apart.’ Finally, in a recurrent concern through the discourse for the ways in which the doing of art in the present is conceived, the Keynote will focus on the relation to past and future.

Biography:

Professor Blum is Executive Director of the Culture of Cities Centre in Toronto; Senior Professor in Sociology, Social and Political Thought, and Communication and Culture at York University, Toronto; and Adjunct Professor at St. Jerome’s University at the University of Waterloo. The author of numerous books, Professor Blum’s current teaching and research is informed by his work developed over the years on theorizing and methods for the analysis of social forms, most recently in studies on the city, materialism and idealism in everyday life, on institutions such as law, medicine, and the university, on affect, particularly disease and suffering, and on voice, humor, aesthetics and ethics as resources for inquiry. This research is reflected in a number of papers on the urban way of life, on aging and dementia, on death and desperation, and most recently in The Ethics of Care : Moral Knowledge, Communication and the Art of Caregiving (co-edited with Professor Stuart Murray). His CV has several publications concerning the topic of the current theme of death death, including “Life, Death and the In-Between: The Duck/Rabbit and the Face of the Clown” in Tristanne Connolly, editor. Spectacular Death, Intellect, The University Chicago Press 2011, and also Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life.

As a visiting Professor, he has taught at universities in the US and the UK, including the University of Wales, the Institute of Social Change at the University of California at Berkeley, the Virginia Commonwealth University, and the New College of the University of South Florida, and he has been the recipient of research fellowships from foundations such as Leverhulme and the MacArthur, among others.