Programme Le travail de l'Informe: formless as function University College Cork, June 21 -22

The idea of the informe (formless) can be traced to a variety of thinkers such as Augustine, Kant, and more recently, Jean Baudrillard, but is especially associated with the thought and work of Georges Bataille. Bataille’s notion of informe suggests that it operates within different forms in such a way as to destabilise the organising principle of form. In this way informe counters the fetish of form and is defined more by what it does than what it is. The informe has been at play (or is it work?) in art, architecture and literature, and has recently been extensively ‘worked through’ by Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois, in Formless: A User’s Guide (l’informe: mode d’emploi).
How the informe operates is the subject of the proposed conference. Questions we may be asking are: where is the informe? Can we talk of ‘the’ informe? How does it work, if indeed it does? What is ‘its’ relation to modernity and/or modernism (or what comes after)? Can there be a politics of the informe? What is its history/can it have one? Is that which challenges form gendered? Culturally located? Is it our friend? Does it worry us?

LE TRAVAIL DE L'INFORME: FUNCTIONS OF FORMLESS
University College Cork
June 21-22, 2002

Friday 21st
12.00-14.00 REGISTRATION (20 euro)
14.00-15.30
Stephen Walker Department of Architecture, University of Sheffield
Animate form

Douglas Smith Department of French, UCD
Disfigurements: Bacon, Deleuze, Lynch and the Formless

Deni Lejeune Département de Littérature comparée et générale, Paris III
Informe et hasard

15.45-17.00
Maria Scott Department of French, UCD
Shifting perspectives on the formless: the model of anamorphosis

Patrick Crowley Department of French, UCC
(De)generate forms: genre and the discontent of academics

17.15-18.15
Patricial Berney Department of French, University of Toronto
L'abbé C. Linguistic Strategies of the Formless

Jeremy Biles Divinity School, University of Chicago
Precis: The Sacrificial Operation

18.30 Reception: Staff Common Room

Saturday June 22nd
9.30-10.45
Sinéad Murphy Department of Philosophy, UCC
Forms of the "Avant Garde"

Graham Allen Department of English, UCC
Pedaling: as a ghost would have to do, even though...

11.15-12.45
Fiona Cox Department of French, UCC
The Formlessness of Hugo's Epic World

David Evans Department of French, University of Edinburgh
Rimbaud: the necessity of the informe to the poetic idea

Angela Ryan Department of French, UCC
" Des ombres sur un fond de nuages " : poétique de l'informe dans Un Hiver à Majorque de G. Sand.

12.45-14.00 Lunch: Staff Common Room

14.00-15.15
Tony O'Connor Department of Philosophy, UCC
"O my friends, there is no friend"

Dick Collins An Ghráig, Inse Geimhleach
The Second Child in his Stead: A Biblico-Depressive Account of the Phenomenological Ill-Logic of Beckettian Gemination.'

15.15-16.30
Paul Hegarty Department of French, UCC
General Ecology of Sound: Japanese Noise Music as Low Form

Douglas Morrey Dept. of French Studies, University of Warwick
Godard Bataille Darty

16.30 Tea/Coffee

17.00
Gary Genosko Dept. of Sociology, University of Lakehead, Ontario
Baudrillard's 9/11: The Spirit of Symbolic Exchange

Contact:Patrick Crowley or Paul Hegarty

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