"Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions" — Nietzsche

"Thought is creation, not will to rush" — Deleuze and Guattari

Can anything further be said about truth? While contemporary worries about a post-truth world reinforce both ordinary and traditional senses of the word, a philosophical tradition that for centuries has not failed to put truth into question or critique finds itself in a situation echoing that faced by the Greeks at the dawn of philosophy. 

Few would have dreamt, only a few years ago, that we would once again have such a compelling concern with the facts, with truth. But today’s authoritarian populism has returned us to questions of the fragility of truth. These questions have cast deep divisions in contemporary life. Tensions between truth and falsity, between the fictional and the fictitious, and between reality and illusion haunt contemporary experience. Social and cultural thought have for a long period questioned assumptions of ‘objective’ experience, but such assumptions continue to predominate in the homo economicusof today’s neoclassicism and neoliberalism.  As prevalent is the fragmentation into worlds, subjective worlds, national worlds, the worlds of human and nonhuman beings. Such worlds are at the same time territories, digital platforms, communities, indeed in some cases commons. To what extent are such worlds themselves constituted through truths or fictions, through narratives? To what extent does this mean a break with representation altogether, whether in art, in literature, in politics? Or to what extent does it entail a radical rethinking of what representation is?

Tracing a line of thought from Nietzsche to Deleuze and beyond, one discovers in the objection to a pervasive “will to truth” the demand that thought be regarded instead as a form of creation. The oppositions through which truth has traditionally been understood (true and false, truth and error) do not apply, for instance, when one considers the literary text, where the question of whether there exists a natural or necessary correspondence with the world event remains a matter of conjecture. 

The Association for Philosophy and Literature invites proposals for papers and panels for its conference that will be held at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, 29 May — 2 June 2019. The conference theme is, “Truth Fiction Illusion: Worlds and Experience.” Proposals may address any one of the given terms or explore those terms in their possible interrelatedness – with respect to philosophy, literature, theory, music, media, geography, film, culture, art, architecture, etc.  

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Truth regimes
  • Relativism, perspectivism, standpoint theory
  • Truth as illusion
  • Truth, non-truth, and fake news
  • Truth in times of the spectacle
  • Truth after the deconstruction of truth
  • Time and the question of the truth of being
  • Logic, grammar and rhetoric (the trivium)
  • Relativism, perspectivism, standpoint theory
  • Correspondence
  • Black reason
  • Analogy 
  • The truth of fiction, the fiction of truth
  • “How the true world became a fable”
  • Film, regimes of art and truth events
  • Autofiction and biographical truth
  • Historical fiction and historical truth
  • Narrative and visual fictions
  • Narrative and time
  • Art as creation of illusions 
  • Image beyond representation?
  • Ethics and aesthetics of algorithm 
  • Bios 
  • Scholarly apparatus 
  • Geosocial formations and Anthropocene
  • The imagination
  • Mythos and logos
  • Infrastructure
  • Platform capitalism
  • Acceleration and speed
  • Waste
  • Affordances
  • Sovereignty 
  • The religious 
  • Economy and the political 
  • Relational space
  • Pharmacopornography
  • Territory
  • (Beyond) ontology 
  • Immunity
  • The Ecological impulse
  • The gift, the Hau, excess

Panel proposals should include the details of up to 4 speakers:

  • Title
  • Organizer(s): Names and affiliations of the organizers and participants 
  • A short overview of the topic and abstracts for each paper: maximum 300 words each
  • Moderation: indicate the name of an APL member who has agreed to moderate the panel or request a moderator to be assigned by the programme committee
  • Special requests/equipment needs

Proposals of 300 words and should include:

  • Title
  • Name and affiliation
  • 300 word abstract 
  • Special requests/equipment needs