Thinking about feminine finitude

Transdisciplinary symposium organized by Université de Montréal, bringing together researchers and practitioners in literature and psychology in a perspective of dialogue and crossover of knowledge.

Finitude is one of the foundations of human experience. To live is to move forward in awareness of our limits - bodily, temporal, relational, performative. It means facing up to the inescapable: death, loss, lack, otherness, contingency, the irreversible. If this confrontation appears as a brutal existential given, it also opens the way to forms of creation, narrative, symbolization - so many ways of giving meaning to this reality that we would initially say is unbearable, ineffable, invisible.

Themes addressed at the symposium include:

• Experiences of the threshold, finitude, the ultimate: illness, end of life, pain, trauma, bereavement, pregnancy, abortion, care, palliative care, medical aid in dying.
• Thinking about one's own end: accounts of illness or end of life, staging one's death or suicide, inheritance, wills, funeral rituals.
• The "work" of finitude: psychic work, the work of mourning, the work of writing in the context of illness or the end of life, the work of dying, the work of connecting with the dead.
• Dialogue between literature and psychology: roles of literature in thinking about experience and being in the world, relationships between self-writing and care/therapy, functions of the life story, the literary work as an object of mediation in psychology.

For more information:
https://www.fabula.org/actualites/130313/penser-la-finitude-au-feminin…