The Association for Philosophy and Literature has chosen Imagination, Temporality, Desire as the theme of its 2027 conference, to be held in Granada, Spain, June 2-4, 2027.

Papers may be proposed in English or Spanish on any aspect of the conference theme, focusing on the philosophical and/or the literary (broadly defined). A list of suggested topics and questions appears below.

Proposals will be accepted for individual papers, panels (of 3-4 participants), or roundtables (of 4-6 participants). For individual submissions, abstracts are restricted to no more than 300 words. For panels or roundtables, submit a single proposal consisting of a 300-word panel abstract along with titles for all included papers. You will also be asked to supply a short biography for each participant.

To propose a paper or panel, please fill out the linked Google Form below, reading each question carefully before completing the fields. Depending on your proposal type, the form may contain more or fewer pages and may skip ahead several pages; this is normal.

Please submit only one proposal per participant.

Finally: To forestall programming uncertainties and unnecessary labor as we approach the conference dates, the APL asks all potential participants to consider forgoing a proposal submission unless they are certain they have the means (financial and/or physical and/or legal) to attend the conference in person. The APL cannot accommodate requests for hybrid participation.

Proposals are due December 15, 2026.

Access the Google proposal from the APL directly here.

Context & Additional Details

Via this relatively broad theme (or set of thematics), the APL hopes to provide its members yet another way to approach the dynamic relationship between literature and philosophy. If imagination is inseparable from possibility, temporality from historical consciousness, and desire from both ethical and political life, then philosophy and the narrative arts remain the most important sites through which these concepts are explored and tested… and transformed. At a moment when the conditions of experience themselves appear increasingly unstable, how might literary and philosophical inquiry help us understand how human beings inhabit time, imagine worlds, and transform desire into effective political engagements?

It is in view of these pressing questions that we invite participants to consider these concepts individually or in relation to one another, attending to their aesthetic, philosophical, political, ethical, and historical dimensions. How do imagination, temporality, and desire shape contemporary literary production and interpretation? What new forms do they assume under contemporary conditions of technological mediation, socioeconomic acceleration, ecological anxiety, and political uncertainty?

And what power might literary and philosophical thought retain to reconfigure the horizons of experience today?

These questions are all the more pressing when placed in light of the major scholarly shifts we’ve witnessed these past few decades. Less than six years ago, Mark Fisher’s final lectures were finally published under the title Postcapitalist Desire (2021). In this series of lectures, Fisher warned of the trap capitalism sets for desire, monopolizing the notions of pleasure, happiness, and individuality; his closing refrain is then deceptively and tragically simple: “there is no alternative.” Then, a year later, in Surplus Enjoyment (2022), Žižek positioned “love” as a revolutionary force that opens to (or activates) performative imagination—even if contemporary society remains trapped in a destructive cycle of constant dissatisfaction in which desire imposes itself as an obligation. And just this past year, Emanuele Coccia, in Traité de l’amour moderne (2026), embraced a similar position: love, for Coccia, is a form of resistance and a political force that ontologically constitutes human identity and communal relations. For this reason alone, Coccia argues, love cannot be completely alienated by neoliberal forces. And, of course, such a take on love (contra market-regulated desire) carries us further down a path first navigated and mapped by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their trilogy (Empire [2000], Multitude [2004], and Commonwealth [2009]) and then again by Hardt in The Procedures of Love (2012).

These various returns to the sincerity or even naiveté of affect—and the radical potential of love itself, especially—have enabled a critique of neoliberal ways of life by defining us, in Judith Butler’s terms, as subjects of desire and, therefore, outlined a way to resist capitalist forms of subjection. These authors agree on the need to diagnose and critically analyze how reflection on desire—which has traditionally been defined as a vital force (eros)—could serve as a pathway to envisioning a way out of capitalism. This has been explored along two fundamental axes: on the one hand, this vital or erotic force is presented as imaginative and/or artistic in nature. On the other hand, love is cast as a non-alienated temporal dimension of experience.

More specifically, within what we might call these “times of desire,” the works of Jacques Rancière and Hartmut Rosa most usefully connect temporality, politics, and fiction. For Rancière, time is not a disinterested or objective category; rather, the distribution of the sensible determines who has free time to rule and who must work. Politics and art disrupt the normal order of time by allowing bodies to occupy unexpected places. In this way, anachronism reveals that diverse times coexist within a single historical moment (i.e., heterogeneous times). For his part, in Unverfügbarkeit (2019), Rosa diagnoses the temporal alienation of capitalism as the attempt to make the entirety of the world available.

And so, at a moment when the conditions of experience themselves appear increasingly unstable, how might literary and philosophical inquiry help us understand how human beings inhabit time, imagine worlds, and transform desire into effective political engagements? And what power might literary and philosophical thought retain to reconfigure the horizons of experience today?

Suggested Topics and Questions

More specific questions and topics include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

• What is the relationship between imagination and political possibility in the affective turn in literary studies?

• How might we distinguish desire from love—and then, also, effectively sustain and exploit the tension between the two?

• How do literary texts produce, sustain, frustrate, or transform desire?

• Is reading a form of love? Is literary criticism?

• What temporal forms dominate contemporary literature, film, and narrative media?

• How might present-day experiences of acceleration reshape narrative, reading, and aesthetic attention?

• What becomes of imagination and artistic desire under conditions increasingly structured by predictive algorithms and generative AI?

• How are memory, anticipation, nostalgia, and futurity represented in contemporary literature?

• Has the future become more difficult to imagine? If so, why?

• How do ecological crises and climate change transform literary and philosophical understandings of time?

• Can literature still function as a space for utopian thought?

• What is the relationship between reading and love?

• What role does desire play in political mobilization, collective action, and social transformation?

• How might contemporary theories of care, vulnerability, and interdependence reshape our understanding of desire?

• What are the relationships between imagination, empathy, and ethical responsibility?

• How do literary forms cultivate experiences of resonance, attachment, or meaningful connection in increasingly accelerated societies?

• How have new media altered the temporal experience of storytelling and interpretation?

• What becomes of narrative duration in the age of streaming platforms, social media, and endless digital circulation?

• How does philosophy itself rely upon imaginative practices?

• What is the role of fiction in the production of knowledge?

• How might decolonial, Indigenous, or non-Western conceptions of time challenge dominant literary and philosophical paradigms?

• How have feminist theories reconfigured the relations among imagination, temporality, embodiment, and desire?

• What can psychoanalysis still contribute (or what has it contributed) to contemporary understandings of desire and literary experience?

• How are contemporary literary and philosophical works responding to experiences of exhaustion, precarity, and uncertainty?

• What forms of collective imagination are emerging in response to contemporary social and ecological crises?

• How might literature and philosophy help us rethink the relationship between individual experience and historical time?

• How does generative AI transform our understanding of imagination, creativity, authorship, and aesthetic value? And how should we respond to such transformations?

Proposals will be accepted for individual papers, panels (of 3-4 participants), or roundtables (of 4-6 participants). Proposals can be submitted in English, or Spanish by following the submission link. For individual submissions, abstracts are restricted to no more than 300 words. For panels or roundtables, submit a single proposal, consisting of a 300-word panel abstract along with titles for all included papers. You will also be asked to supply a short biography for each participant. Proposals are Due Dec 15, 2026.

Starting Sept 1