Zaal Andronikashvili, current committee member, is co-hosting an international conference on Evald Ilyenkov’s (1924–1979) intellectual legacy. The conference focuses on a central concern of Ilyenkov’s work: the concept of the ideal. What are ideals? What is the relation of the ideal to images and imagination? What are the radical and utopian potentialities of the ideal today? And what place does the ideal hold in materialist dialectics? The conference, co-organised with Matthias Schwartz, Isabel Jacobs and Martin Küpper, will take place on 15-17 May 2024 at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin.

More information about the conference and the full programme can be found HERE.

Anne Duprat, member of the ICLA theory committee, has co-edited, with Fiona McIntosh Varjabédian and Anne-Gaëlle Weber, a volume on Figures of Chance I Chance in Literature and the Arts (16th–21st Centuries) (Routledge). Offering a transhistorical approach, the book will serve as a reference work on the evolution of literary and artistic representations of chance and contingency. Alongside its multidisciplinary companion volume (Figures of Chance II), it considers how the projective and predictive capacity of societies is shaped by representations and cultural models of a reality that is understood, to varying degrees, to be contingent, unpredictable, or chaotic. Giving special emphasis to the French context while also developing broad cross-cultural comparisons, this volume examines the dialogue between evolving conceptions and changing representations of chance, from Renaissance figures of Fortune to the data-driven world of the present. Written by recognized specialists of each of the periods studied, it identifies and historicizes the main fictional and factual modes of portraying, narrating, and comprehending chance in the West.