Special Issue of L'Esprit Créateur on "Sanctity"From Eulalie to Derrida, sanctity performs a series of crucial and complicated functions for French literature and philosophy. This issue addresses the figure of the saint as it gets deployed in contexts sacred and profane, and as it embodies ongoing concerns with materiality and transcendence, exclusion and belonging. This terms is to be understood as widely as possible: as a name for the kinds of sharing or belonging that sanctity at once names and enables; as the ensemble of gestures, liturgical and otherwise, through which these kinds of sharing take place; as the barest thinking of material togetherness. Radically heterogeneous and radically constitutive of communities, in this world and beyond this world, saints condense especially powerful wishes and anxieties about where we're going – and who ‘we' are, in the first place and the last.
To propose a contribution to this issue, contact Professor Cary Howie (Cornell University), csh34@cornell.edu