Distinctions of time, class, nation, race, gender, religion, style, genre, knowledge: what functions do such delineations perform? Boundaries, as Cixous suggests, make thought possible. They help us define who we are, what we know, what we want. Yet as they help us organize ourselves and our worlds, boundaries also limit our capacity to know, to love, to create. How do boundaries both shape and shatter the individual, the social, and the political? This conference asks you to explore what the dissolution of boundaries might engender or eradicate. The range of possible topics is limitless . . . really.

Activity/passivity Sun/Moon Culture/Nature Day/Night Father/Mother Head/Heart Intelligible/Palpable Logos/Pathos . . . Man/Woman Always the same metaphor: we follow it, it carries us, beneath all its figures, wherever discourse is organized. If we read or speak, the same thread or double braid is leading us through literature, philosophy, criticism, centuries of representation and reflection. Thought has always worked through opposition.

-Hélène Cixous, Sorties

He who will one day teach men to fly will have displaced all boundary stones; the boundary stones themselves will fly up into the air to him, and he will rebaptize the earth—as “the weightless.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

-Charlie Parker