Varieties of the Impersonal (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: Elias Kleinbock

Co-Organizer: Joseph Henry

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Impersonality has long been invoked as a marker of modernity and of its literary-aesthetic correlate in modernism: anonymity and ennui appear as symptoms of urbanization and bureaucracy; modern science announces the reign of objectivity; social and productive relations are mechanized under capital’s regime of impersonal domination; cultural forms marked by fragmentation, estrangement, and detachment proliferate; and psychoanalysis proffers a theory of the subject structured by unconscious, impersonal drives. The language of impersonality casts a wide net, denoting cold, robotic, or deadpan affects; qualities of abstraction, collectivity, and universality; and elements of language itself, as in impersonal pronouns, verbs, voice, or grammatical gender. Across all these uses, impersonality signals the absence or privation of something that registers personhood—expressivity, warmth, intimacy, specificity, organicism, agency, intention, and more—while being perched ambivalently between trans-individual sociality and inanimate objecthood.

This seminar will investigate the forms, figures, and valences of impersonality across their literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and psychoanalytic articulations, making sense of them at once formally and historically. We hope to rethink the classical constructions of modernist impersonality and trace its shifting incarnations into the present. What problems or processes are registered by the language or aesthetics of impersonality? What makes something—an act, a phenomenon, a style—impersonal, and what conceptions of personhood, personality, and the personal does each instance of impersonality invoke or rely on? What could a poetics of impersonality (to borrow Maud Ellmann’s formulation) illuminate? How have contemporary forms of impersonality evolved in the wake of novel technological paradigms, relations of production, or social conditions? Our seminar will look for mediations and links between formal, grammatical, stylistic, psychic, political, and other modes of impersonality; we welcome contributions that think through impersonality’s conceptual and aesthetic thickets across historical periods, media, and disciplinary approaches. 

• Impersonal style


• Impersonality and form; “poetics of impersonality” 


• Impersonal affects


• Impersonality and abstraction 


• Impersonality and universalism


• Impersonal domination


• Theoretical anti-humanism


• Collective individuation, the ‘dividual’


• Gesture, expression, technological reproduction, automation


• Impersonality in media: cinematic subjectivity, operational images, machine aesthetics


• Grammars of impersonality: impersonal pronouns, impersonal passive and middle voice, etc.


• The impersonality of desire, the drives, the id (das Es)


• Classical, medieval, or early modern figures of impersonality


• Contemporary articulations of impersonality: anonymity, avatars, AI, brainrot, bed rotting, burnout, etc.