SEPFEP_Panels-Abstracts_02-09-2014

Transcription

Philosophy After Nature
Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy Joint
Annual Conference
3-5 September 2014, Utrecht
Panels and Abstracts
Contents
Panel 1.1. “Dramatizing Nature” ............................................................................................................. 5
Tammy Castelein – Uniform Bodies .................................................................................................... 5
Marrigje Paijmans – Parrhesia in Terms of Dramatisation: Human Nature in Early Modern Tragedy 6
Tessa de Zeeuw – To Have Done With Natural Rights? ...................................................................... 7
Panel 1.2. “There is plenty of room at the bottom” ............................................................................... 9
Bart Karstens – Surface Science Analyzed in Depth............................................................................. 9
Lisanne Coenen – Nanotechnology and Its Implications for the Realism Debate ............................. 11
Jurriaan Sieben – How Nanoscience Shapes Our Thoughts about Living Systems ............................ 12
Panel 1.3. “Walter Benjamin” ............................................................................................................... 13
Damiano Roberi – Beyond Walter Benjamin: History as an Ecological Niche ................................... 13
Nathan Ross – On Walter Benjamin’s Critical Distinction between Art as Semblance of Nature and
Art as Interplay with Nature .............................................................................................................. 13
David Van Dusen – Divine Violence: A critique .................................................................................. 14
Panel 1.4. “Bruno Latour and Technology” ........................................................................................... 16
Shane Denson – We Have Never Been Natural: Towards a Postnatural Philosophy of Media......... 16
Rumen Rachev – The Call of Software: Matters of Care and Medianatures Interactions ................ 17
Moritz Gansen – Modes of Existence: From Bruno Latour To Étienne Souriau ................................. 18
Panel 1.5. “Between the Human and the Animal. Philosophy after Bioart” ......................................... 20
Robert Zwijnenberg – Biotechnology, Human Dignity and the Importance of Art ........................... 20
Piotrek Swiatkowski – Becoming-animal in Contemporary Eco-art .................................................. 20
Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko – Life after Nature. The Human Body under Art’s Experiment .............. 21
Panel 2.1. “American Philosophers and the Continental Tradition” ..................................................... 23
Sofia Simitzi – On The Edge of Experience-Pragmatism Reconsidered ............................................ 23
David Martínez – Public and Private Autonomy in Habermas and Rawls ......................................... 23
Alessandro Zir – Interactive Kinds, Indifferent Kinds and the Surface of Meaning: le sans fond de la
psychopathologie .............................................................................................................................. 24
Panel 2.2. “Performance and the Body” ............................................................................................... 26
Daniela de Paulis – Cogito Ergo Sum ................................................................................................. 26
Martin E. Rosenberg – From “Projective Apprehension” to “Proprio-Sentience”: Embodied AND
Distributed Cognition During Jazz Improvisation .............................................................................. 26
Fröydi Laszlo – Artistic Intuition in Visualization of Natural Processes, and as a Tool of Radical
Empirism ............................................................................................................................................ 28
SEP/FEP 2014 – Philosophy After Nature – Abstracts
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Kuhlken, Julie – Adorno and Ethical Self-Performance...................................................................... 29
Panel 2.3. Immanuel Kant ..................................................................................................................... 31
Steve Howard – Kantian ‘Nature’ and the Elision and Reappearance of ‘World’ ............................. 31
Claudia Mongini – On the Concept of Force in Kant's Opus Postumum ............................................ 31
Michael Lewis – Anthropology from Kant and Hegel to the Present Day ......................................... 33
Panel 2.4. Aesthetics after Nature ........................................................................................................ 34
Clive Cazeaux – The Aesthetics of Research After the End of Art ...................................................... 34
Bram Ieven – Economies of the Wild: Speculations on Constant’s New Babylon and the Architecture
of Capitalism ...................................................................................................................................... 34
Tanja Plešivčnik – Perceiving Nature and Environment Through Eyes of Environmentalists and
Aesthetics .......................................................................................................................................... 35
Sue Spaid – Rethinking Positive Aesthetics: How Nature's Fans Avoid Becoming its Foes ............... 36
Panel 2.5. “Michel Serres (1)” ............................................................................................................... 38
Eugenie Brinkema – Horror After Nature After Love: from Serres to Pontypool............................... 38
Vera Bühlmann – Cosmoliteracy – the Alphabetization of the Nature of Thought ........................... 39
Lucie K. Mercier – Between Abstraction and Analogy: Translation as Method ................................ 39
Oxana Timofeeva – Living in a Parasite: Marx, Serres, Platonov and the Animal Kingdom ............. 40
Panel 2.6. “Politics, Modernity, Art, Institutions” ................................................................................. 42
Julia Ng – Body, Force, Right: figures of life after nature .................................................................. 42
Nathan Widder – State Philosophy and the War Machine ............................................................... 43
Anna Hickey-Moody – The Art of Refusing the Capitalist Bleed ....................................................... 43
Aislinn O’Donnell – What is Made Possible by the Space of an Institution? ..................................... 44
Panel 2.7. “Biopoliticis” ......................................................................................................................... 46
Rose-Anne Sophia Gush – Feminist Actionism: Anti-Art and the Philosophy of Contemporary Art.. 46
Olga Cielemęcka and Monika Rogowska-Stangret – Time and Space of Stigmergic Politics ............ 46
Severin Staalesen – Naturalising Phenomenology: Phenomenology Meets Philosophy of Biology.. 47
Nathanja Van den Heuvel – Towards a Corporeal Sport Feminism, Embodiment, Situatedness and
the Problematics of Change .............................................................................................................. 48
Panel 2.8. “Phenomenology” ................................................................................................................ 50
Rachel Paine – The Affective-Narrative View of the Self ................................................................... 50
Christian Skirke – Reflection and its Place in Nature ......................................................................... 51
Naomi Van Steenbergen – The Limits of Direct Attention: a Phenomenological Account ................ 52
Martin Möhlmann – Do you have the time? Not now! ..................................................................... 53
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Panel 2.9. “Gilles Deleuze” .................................................................................................................... 54
Iain Campbell – Experimental Methodology and the Problematic in Gilles Deleuze and John Cage 54
Mark Jackson – Image of Life ............................................................................................................ 55
André Reichert – Diagrammatic Crystallizations in Deleuze's Later Works ...................................... 55
James Williams – Nature and the Process Philosophy of Signs ......................................................... 56
Panel 2.10. “Michel Serres (2)” ............................................................................................................. 57
Georgios Tsagdis – Revolutionary Parasitology: The (st)age of the Plague ...................................... 57
Chris Watkin – Michel Serres’ 'Great Story': From Biosemiotics to Econarratology ......................... 58
David Webb – On the Milieu and Nature: from Canguilhem to Serres ............................................. 59
Panel 3.1. “Technology and Humanity” ................................................................................................ 61
Tista Bagchi – Philosophy after Human Reproductive Technologies ................................................. 61
Ashley Woodward – Economy, Ecology, Organology........................................................................ 62
Renato Silva Guimarães – Surmounting the Crisis of Man-to-Nature Relations with Oswald de
Andrade and Vicente Ferreira da Silva .............................................................................................. 63
Chantal Bax – Levinas and Nancy on Social Identity After Technology ............................................. 64
Panel 3.2. “Rationalism” ........................................................................................................................ 65
Max Schaefer – Phenomenology as Radical Critique of Reason – From Kant to Henry .................... 65
Will Stronge – Nature Qua Exception: Caught in the Nets of Reason ............................................... 65
Michael C. Cifone – Call of Nature; Science in Despair to Become a Self. A Propaedeutic on the
Possibility of a New Science of Nature .............................................................................................. 66
Panel 3.3. “New Materialism” ............................................................................................................... 69
Pamela Mackenzie – The Fourth Kingdom: Ascension of the Plastisphere ....................................... 69
Katharina D. Martin – The Digital Milieus and Their Material Entanglement................................... 70
Paul Rekret – Material Entanglements and the Question of Separation .......................................... 70
Petra Klusmeyer – Sound and Time................................................................................................... 71
Panel 3.4. “Derrida and Nancy on Politics” ........................................................................................... 74
Simon Glendinning – Derrida and the Question of Religion Today ................................................... 74
Richard Iveson – Being without Life: Fully-Populated, Worlds Beyond the Organic ......................... 74
Leda Channer – The Resistant Monarch; Jean-Luc Nancy on Hegel’s Sovereign .............................. 75
Jacob Bittner – Nancy's L'Intrus: Testimony to the Disappearance of Biopower in the Excess of Life
........................................................................................................................................................... 76
Panel 3.5. “Spinoza (1): Self-determination in Spinoza: Interdisciplinary Approaches” ....................... 78
Peg Rawes – Spinoza's Geometric Thinking and Housing Rights ...................................................... 78
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Christopher Thomas – Spinoza’s Problem of Indeterminacy and Melville’s Bartleby ....................... 79
Caroline Williams – Thinking Nature after Spinoza: Towards a Morphology of Subjectivity ............ 79
Panel 3.6. “Posthumanisms” ................................................................................................................. 81
David Roden – On Reason and Spectral Machines: an Anti-Normativist Response to Bounded
Posthumanism ................................................................................................................................... 81
Danielle Sands – Returning to Text: Deconstructive Paradigms and Posthumanism........................ 81
Nathalie Trussart – Foucault’s Notion of Knowledge-Power: Towards Speculative Critique ............ 82
Panel 3.7. “Realism” .............................................................................................................................. 84
Alexandros Alexandropoulos – Being at Home: Nature in the Work of Nietzsche and Freud .......... 84
Tom Giesbers – Today’s Realists Viewed from the Perspective Historical Realism around 1800:
Three Forms of Belief ......................................................................................................................... 85
Sidra Shahid – Transcendental Conditions: Norm, Nature, and Objectivity ...................................... 86
Angela Kun – Mythology and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy ........................................................ 87
Panel 3.8. “The Other Side of Matter” .................................................................................................. 88
Felicity Colman – Natural's Not in It: Materialist Informatics ........................................................... 88
Erin K Stapleton – The Activity of Dark Matter ................................................................................. 88
Joanna Hodge – Of the Event: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference, Historical Difference ...... 89
Panel 3.9. “Continental naturalism”...................................................................................................... 91
David W. Johnson – Nature as Unity, Heterogeneity, Productivity: Merleau-Ponty on the Vertical
Genesis of Sense ................................................................................................................................ 91
Tsutomu Ben Yagi – From Nature to Fūdo; Revisiting Watsuji’s Thought at the Spatial Turn .......... 92
Yogev Zusman – The Aleatory Limits of Naturalism .......................................................................... 93
Panel 3.10. “Spinoza (2): Spinoza’s Relational Autonomy: Past and Present”...................................... 95
Matthew J. Kisner – Spinoza’s Activities............................................................................................ 96
Keith Green – Suicide and Self-hatred in light of Spinoza’s Account of Activity................................ 96
Andrea Sangiacomo – Paternalism and Autonomy in Light of Spinoza’s Account of Action ............ 97
Keren Mock – Baruch Spinoza’s Hebrew « Naturae Nominis » : Modification, Conservation and
Degeneration ..................................................................................................................................... 98
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Panel 1.1. “Dramatizing Nature”
This panel is prompted by the idea that it is problematic to approach the concept of nature
through an essentialist discourse. Instead we will address this concept through the notion of
dramatization. For Gilles Deleuze the method of dramatization is to map the manners in which a
particular concept works. By exploring nature in different fashions of its potentiality we will
examine how this idea ‘incarnates or actualises itself, differenciates itself’ (The Method of
Dramatisation). Rather than asking questions concerning the nature of nature, its essence or
meaning, we will ask ‘how’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ the concept of nature manifests itself, and,
perhaps more importantly, what this concept is capable of, what it entails to invoke this
powerful trope.
Tammy Castelein – Uniform Bodies
There is no such thing as a ‘natural’ body. One of the fundamental characteristics of being human
is that we spend the majority of our time being dressed, clothed, covered in cloth. We are
essentially and ultimately clad bodies. I would like to present an analysis of the human body as a
clothed body. Philosophy thinks the clothed subject, even when the subject becomes
subjectivized, endowed with the characteristics of an individual as opposed the general human
being, it takes for granted – or rather it doesn’t consider the fact - that this subject is clothed,
covered in cloth. That means that when thinking about the subject there is always already a
measure of covering up that has taken place prior to the conceptualization of the subject. The
subject is essentially (ontologically) marked (characterized, shaped) by the materiality of its
condition of being clothed. I would argue that this implies that the ontological state of being of
the human being is a covered one. Nakedness seems more like an exceptional condition to be in,
and being clothed the ‘normal’ one. The human body is a clothed body before it is a naked – or a
natural - one.
I would like to propose the idea that the essence of clothing is the uniform. Uniform/uniformity
is a paradoxical concept: despite the fact that it means one-ness, a single form, it is a deeply
divided concept. Uniform(ity) is both the singular and its opposite, it is sameness and difference,
both conformity and distinction, both static and constantly moving in a rhythm of stand to and at
ease, it is at the same time a celebration of the past and tradition, and a continual move toward
renewal. I will argue that uniform(ity) acts like deleuzian repetition: like a simulacrum ‘it
produces the effect of an original, producing new selves and originals with each performance’.
(Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 100)
Jünger, in Der Arbeiter (1932), presents an exemplary case of the body as a uniformed body. He
describes a new ‘Typus’ or type of person that he would like to rise from and above the masses.
He develops this idea through the concepts of ‘Eindeutichkeit’ and ‘Gleichförmigkeit’, but also in
‘das Maskenhafte’, the ‘masklike’ condition of the human body. The uniformed Worker-type that
Jünger describes is a heideggerian ‘Bestandstück’ in the material battles of fashion. However, not
even the face escapes uniformation in Der Arbeiter: the face is incorporated within the
‘Gleichförmighkeit’ through the concept of the ‘masklike’ (‘das Maskenhafte’). Moreover, the
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masklike, does not remain limited to the face, it expands over the entire body, and the clothes it
wears. Jünger is an extreme case of what uniform/uniformity means, but, precisely because it is
such an extreme case it offers a valuable insight in the way uniform(ity) functions.
I will look into the way the clothed body can be thought through the concept of uniform(ity), and
what this implies.
Tammy Castelein, Independent scholar, Doctor in Philosophy, University of Amsterdam
Marrigje Paijmans – Parrhesia in Terms of Dramatisation: Human
Nature in Early Modern Tragedy
This paper investigates the epistemological boundaries of ‘human nature’ through an analysis of
Hercules in Trachin (1668), a seventeenth-century tragedy by the famous Dutch poet Joost van
den Vondel, from the Foucauldian perspective of parrhesia (frank speech). Foucault developed
the concept of parrhesia in his lecture series of 1982-1983 and 1983-1984 for the College de
France, which were interrupted as a result of his illness and premature death, leaving the
concept of parrhesia partially unfinished – as far as a concept can be expected to be complete.
This paper will look into the outstanding question how parrhesia is communicated and affects
the audience. Foucault defines parrhesia as ‘a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his
personal relationship to truth’ (Free Speech, 19-20). This relationship between truth and ethics
is of specific interest to Foucault’s explorations beyond epistemological knowledge structures,
denoted by him as ‘alethurgy’, aiming for a broader understanding of truth that encompasses
practical and ethical knowledge in terms of a ‘care for the self’. From René Descartes’ division of
body and mind onwards, truth was increasingly seen in terms of epistemological knowledge,
based on clear and distinct ideas, which, to Foucault, implied a separation of truth from its
ethical component (CdF84 2-4).
In this paper I will examine how a rationalist Cartesian notion of human nature is confronted by
a more ethically oriented Spinozist notion in a tragedy that was published during Benedict de
Spinoza’s life and shortly after Descartes’. Both Descartes and Spinoza adhered to the classical
notion of human nature, defining man by its capacity to reason and its inclination to realize this
capacity. However, while Descartes based this capacity on a dualism of body and soul, Spinoza
understood it in monistic terms of an immanent ethics of affect. Spinoza considered the
imagination, which could be stimulated by rational thoughts as well as affects, the first and
fundamental stage for obtaining knowledge. Therefore, man’s capacity to be affected forms the
basis of all understanding, as a gate to true, rational knowledge.
During the late seventeenth century the Amsterdam theatre scene served as a magnet for
different views on human nature and the ways in which it could be affected. Especially the tragic
genre developed into a critical space where ethical theories literally ‘dramatized’, in the sense of
an experiment with the imagination in which yet inconceivable ideas might be actualized. I will
demonstrates how the conflict of Cartesian and Spinozist notions of human nature is brought to
a head in Vondel’s tragedy, precisely where it concerns the communication of parrhesia.
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Vondel’s Hercules in Trachin, comprising the story of Hercules’ horribly cruel and pointless
death, both thematizes and performs parrhesia. Hercules, before he expires, accuses God of his
indifference about human suffering, addressing one of the most poignant issues in Christian
faith. The manner in which Vondel’s tragedy confronts the audience with an inconvenient truth I
regard a dramatization, as it ‘counter-actualizes’ the theatrical tradition that offers
representations of society or model society (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 1969). Instead it
confronts the audience, through its capacity of being affected, with an image of life being
dramatic in itself. I argue that this method of dramatization is crucial to Vondel’s critical
enactments of parrhesia in tragedy, communicating ethical knowledge in a language of affect
that encompasses God and nature as well as human being.
Marrigje Paijmans, MA in Philosophy; PhD student Early Modern Literature. University of
Amsterdam.
Tessa de Zeeuw – To Have Done With Natural Rights?
Although the theory of natural law, or natural right, is often treated as if it were a mere curiosity
of legal theory, the concept of natural law is still in effect in legal orders. An essentialist and
rational conception of human nature continues to bear weight, invoked in national constitutions
as well as in so-called ‘common principles’ of international law. Clearly this conception begs for
critical assessment. The question that prompts this paper is: can we deal with the concept of
natural law/natural rights without falling into an essentialist discourse?
I want to start by reading Deleuze’s Spinozist/Hobbesian approach to the concept of natural
rights. Rights for Deleuze consist in an actualization or expression of power (puissance) in a
particular given situation. This implies that rights are created through their enactment; they are
“dramatized”. In my reading of one of Deleuze’s lectures that addresses this topic, the element of
‘natural’ only indicates the force expressed in these rights when they are enacted. Dramatization,
then, is a method by which we may understand the force of concepts and ideas by seeing how
they differentiate themselves through their “incarnation”, or actualization (see Deleuze’s The
Method of Dramatization). Rights or laws, understood through dramatization, have no
transcendental or essential meaning, but this does not mean that they do not exist; they have
effect through their actualization. This understanding of Deleuze’s concept of difference means
that we can only make chaos, or force, productive when there are laws, but these laws would be
of a different and differential character.
At this point I want to juxtapose Deleuze’s productive reading of natural rights with
Quentin Meillassoux’s response to the classic Humean problem of causality and his work on the
contingency of the laws of nature. Meillassoux claims that it is impossible to doubt the existence
of natural laws, but this does not mean that these laws are necessary (by which claim he does
away with the principle of sufficient reason). He posits that the laws of nature must be thought
to be contingent: they “could effectively change without any reason” (Meillassoux, ‘The
Contingency of the Laws of Nature’). Thereby a notion of chaos comes into the question that for
Meillassoux nevertheless does not disturb the possibility to reason about order. In this line of
reasoning lies Meillassoux’s critique of ‘dogmatic metaphysics’ and the fact that correlationism
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makes any belief equally legitimate; his philosophy targets the violence of dogmatic fanaticism. I
want to argue that the discourse of natural rights relies on the same metaphysical conception of
rational (human) nature as does the notion of natural laws, and that this discourse is
problematic because of its dogmatic structure. This implies that we can extrapolate
Meillassoux’s critique to the concept of natural law in the domain of law proper.
In my reading, both Meillassoux and Deleuze try to move away from an essentialist or
dogmatic, religious approach to necessity, nature, or laws. Both invoke a notion of becoming that
is, for Meillassoux, “at once logical and chaotic”, and for Deleuze equally consists between chaos
and law. Although both approaches are problematic in their own way, it may prove productive
to read them side-by-side for their critical potential vis-à-vis the natural rights discourse.
Tessa de Zeeuw, MA in Literary Studies; BA student Law. Utrecht University.
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Panel 1.2. “There is plenty of room at the bottom”
Half a century ago, Richard P. Feynman, prophetically announced that ‘there is plenty of room at
the bottom.’ Since then he has often been hailed as the founding father of nanoscience: the
manipulation of matter at the atomic scale. Discussions about the direction and promises of this
still relatively new discipline have been governed to an extraordinary degree by utopian and
dystopian images. On the one hand nanoscience would soon solve problems of food shortage and
energy supply and bring an end to all poverty. On the other hand nanoscience would seriously
threaten our health, the environment we live in and create self-replicating ‘nanobots’, capable of
destroying the world. In stark contrast, results of nanoscientific research have been quite
mundane. Nanoscience has led to a number of better products, enhancement of computability
and some medical improvements. This however does not mean that more far-reaching
applications are no longer in store and it would be foolish to stop reflecting on what is
happening in science on the nanoscale. The main reason why nanoscience provokes such strong
reactions is that nanoscientists are no longer just investigating nature but create new
phenomena, and possibly new entities, ‘at the bottom’. Further, utopian and dystopian images
continue to foster the public image and hence also funding policy, which introduces an
important social dimension to the development of nanoresearch. In the panel we aim to reduce
the confusion about nanoscience by addressing its conceptual foundations. First, it is clear that
nanoscience is not a monolithic structure. Disciplinary boundaries between chemistry, physics,
biology, computer science and cognitive science are crossed. There are many specialized
subfields such as bionanoscience, nanomedicine and quantumnanoscience. It is also possible to
discern between various types of nanoscience: incremental, evolutionary and radical (Wood,
Geldart and Jones 2008). How do these processes of discipline formation take place? Can we find
major differences between subdisciplines or not? Does the formation of the new field fit existing
modes of explanation in terms of hybridization (Galison 1987, Karstens 2012)? Second, we want
to investigate whether it is indeed necessary to speak of a new dawning era in scientific thought.
The fundamental shift from representation to intervention and creation has tentatively been
called the nanofacture (Daston and Galison 2007) and it would presumably change our views on
objectivity, the justification of knowledge, introduce new ways of seeing (‘haptic sight’) and
change the self-image of scientists and possibly even what it is to be human. Following this last
remark we can also interpret nanoscience as a vindication of posthumanism (Harraway, Latour,
Pickering), as nature and artifact merge before our own eyes. Finally nanoscience can be linked
to typical 21th century ‘Mode-2’ science, that is, scientific research in the context of its direct
application (Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001). Mode-2 science is marked by a fundamental
uncertainty and links to a view on modernity as liquid instead of solid (Bauman). From this
perspective, a reflection on moral and societal implications of nanoscience, such as an increase
in technological determinism, and the issue how far we may interfere with nature, is imperative.
Bart Karstens – Surface Science Analyzed in Depth
Perhaps nanoscience (or-technology) is no more than an umbrella term for a wide range of
technologies. Yet Roco and Bainbridge (2002) interpret nanoscience as a set of converging
technologies. Likewise Schmidt (2004) asserts that the aim of nanoscience is to find a
fundamental technology, ultimately linking all knowledge, action and application. These authors
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rightfully stress the interdisciplinary character of nanoscience but in order to understand the
many interdisciplinary relations, their focus is too much on technology alone. While I do not
deny that the role of technology in the development of nanoscience is extraordinarily important,
we should not downplay other factors such as theoretical and socio-cultural factors. We need a
perspective to account for the interaction between all these aspects in the process of discipline
formation. I propose to conceive of disciplines as dynamic hybrids (see Karstens 2012 and for a
related idea Galison 1997). I will use this idea to unravel all the elements that played a role in the
formation of surface science. Surface scientists study physical and chemical phenomena at the
interface of two phases. The first professional identity was shaped as a branch of vacuum science
in the 1950’s. The central problem became to locate atoms within various reconstructions. The
central test object became the 7x7 structure because of its size and complexity. Mody and Lynch
(2010) show that the structure was used both as a technical object, used to calibrate
instruments and test the skills of researchers and as an epistemic object for research on the
properties and structure on the thing itself. Vacuum research was backed by government finance
(NASA). However large companies such as IBM, Siemens and Texas Instruments also became
interested in surface science in the 1960’s and this drew the field closer to electron physics. This
meant that commercial conditions were set on ‘fundamental’ research. Yet it was vacuum
science that provided the field with an institutional structure when surface scientists basically
took over the society and journal of vacuum research in the 1970’s. This provided surface
scientists with a platform for the exchange of ideas, publication of results and education. The
breakthrough in determining the structure of the 7x7 came from yet another research project in
microscopy in which the Scanning Tunneling Miscroscope (STM) was developed that uses
electric currents to create an image of a surface. In order to understand the results of STM one
needs computer simulation and visualization techniques as well as metaphorical language. The
STM was developed for completely different purposes but proved to be highly effective in
surface science. We can see that a number of contingent factors have played a role in the
formation of surface science and that the professional identity was shaped by technological and
institutional resources stemming from a number of disciplines involving both commercial and
governmental interests. According to Schmidt (2003) the posthumanist approach to science can
capture such fusion processes quite well. Yet I believe with Mody and Lynch (2010) that a
number of Latourian notions such as ‘immutable mobiles’ or ‘inscriptions’ do not offer adequate
analytical grip on the formation of surface science. We thus need an even more dynamic, that is,
a hybridization perspective on the formation of disciplines. Nanoscience is still in rapid
development. The formation of surface science is one aspect of this complex development.
Perhaps the elements fail to constitute a successful hybrid. We will then either see nanoscience
fall apart in more than one discipline or a retreat to the mother disciplines. But this is for the
future to tell.
Bart Karstens, Institute of Philosophy, Leiden University, the Netherlands.
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Lisanne Coenen – Nanotechnology and Its Implications for the Realism
Debate
The notion of nanotechnology is familiar to everyone these days. Research groups pop out of the
ground, start-ups use the term nano – whether their company has something to do with it or not
– and governments are more than willing to fund nanotechnological work. The philosophical
community though has, up until now, shown the most interest in the ethics of nanotechnology.
But in the recent years, it has become clear that more implications of nanotechnology need to be
assessed. In this paper, the focus will be on the implication of nanotechnology on the realism
debate, a classical debate that is as old as the hills.
The realism debate has historically focused on the relation between the natural world and the
way humans perceive and represent it. A realist believes that our theories, and the entities we
postulate, correspond to actual state of affairs in the world. The history of science is a story of
convergence upon truth, that is, over time our representations of the world more closely match
the way the world actually is. An anti-realist questions this belief. He does not think science is
about retrieving the actual structure of the world but looks upon scientific theories as useful
instruments in understanding the world. The same goes for unobserved entities such as atoms
and electrons. We can speak of progress in science with respect to theoretical virtues such as
explanatory and predictive accuracy, but these are merely pragmatic constraints and have
nothing to with promoting truth.
In microscopy the dominant focus has been on representing nature as objectively as possible.
Microscopes were designed to ‘see’ the way nature was and behaved on the smaller scale. In
recent years, developments such as the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), a device that
uses small currents between the tip of the microscope and the sample to detect the structure of
the sample, changed this picture dramatically. Using an STM, you could not only get an image
(representation), but it was also possible to intervene and change objects and hence to produce
new images (presentation). This practice of intervention happens at the atomic scale. Moving
single atoms has become daily practice with an STM.
Daston and Galison (2007) have interpreted the shift from representation to presentation as a
fundamental one in thinking about science. Among other things they argue that the focus on
presentation has diminished the relevance of the realism debate, because that debate is mainly
about the proper interpretation of representation.
This is a provocative statement that gives rise to two questions, which will be addressed in this
paper. First, is it indeed true that nanotechnology changes the debate fundamentally in its shift
from representation to presentation or is there, after close inspection, nothing that is really new
about nanotechnology? In the first part of this paper I will argue the former: there is indeed a
fundamental change that requires a proper interpretation.
Secondly, following my standpoint on the first question, has the realism debate really become
irrelevant because of this? One can also question which position in the realism debate best fits
this ‘new science’. It seems that me that Ian Hacking’s entity realism provides a perfect match
with the shift caused by nanotechnology, because of the stress he puts on intervention next to
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representation. It will be investigated to what extent this is the case. The discussion includes
other positions as well, such as Nancy Cartwright’s account of entity realism.
Lisanne Coenen, research master student Philosophy of the Natural Sciences, Leiden University.
Jurriaan Sieben – How Nanoscience Shapes Our Thoughts about Living
Systems
It is no easy matter to say where life starts and where it ends. Although one might recognize
living things from the outside, what makes the thing actually living is thought to lay on the
inside. Advancements in technology make studying living systems on the inside possible, but it is
a great deal harder compared to observing living systems completely intact and moving around
in their natural habitat. Nowadays a lot of knowledge has been produced concerning the living,
but despite the enormous amount of research still no clear definition, that is, no list of properties
can be specified that make a generalized distinction between dead or alive possible.
However, ongoing technological improvements do make it easier to shape our thoughts about
what life is. Due to these technological improvements we have started moving away from the
false ‘either dead or alive’ dichotomy. Zooming in on living systems shows that some levels of
activity can be reduced to others. Nanotechnology makes this possible, but it doesn’t stop at
merely observation. Living systems can also be manipulated, they can be made to self-destruct,
to produce entirely new protein, harvest extracellular DNA and integrate it in their own genome
or express artificial genes. But still no total control of cellular behavior is possible, why is this? Is
there a gap in our knowledge about living systems? Or are we not justified in reducing certain
systems to others?
In manipulating genes we cross boundaries between nature and technology. What may be the
future prospects of these kind of small scale manipulations? Will we eventually be able to create
our own living systems from scratch? These are central questions in the field of bionanoscience.
As this promising field progresses, our knowledge about cellular dynamics, evolvability of living
systems, origins of life and prebiotic selection mechanisms significantly increases. But what is it
that we know now of living systems? And how has technology shaped our thoughts about the
everlasting questions of what life is? One way to start searching for answers is to gain
understanding about the transition from chemical origins to biological systems (P.L. Luisi, 2006),
(A. Pross, 2012). Next, basic knowledge has to be gained about the structural and functional
organization of cells (E. Klipp, W. Liebermeister et al. 2009). Furthermore, after understanding
and integrating biological systems, manipulation of these systems come in to play (J. Castillo,
2008), (D.G. Gibson et al. 2010) and this shines a different light on what life entails.
Jurriaan Sieben, research master student Philosophy of the Natural Sciences, Leiden University.
12
Panel 1.3. “Walter Benjamin”
Damiano Roberi – Beyond Walter Benjamin: History as an Ecological Niche
The philosophy of history is now experiencing a moment of profound crisis –with good reason it
would seem, according to Karl Löwith, who (as a result of its theological premises) has seen this
kind of reflection as the spurious offspringof modernity. Reinhart Koselleck, on the other hand,
has detected and delineated the horizon of expectations within which this discipline arose. The
accusations levelled, however, seem not to affect Walter Benjamin’s thinking: the way in which
the critic of progress interacts with the concept of Nature (revealing the consequences of this
relationship upon History and Man) represents a particular source of interest in his works. The
transiency of a nature deprived of its vitality makes it similar to the figure of the prostitute, one
of the most important characters of Baudelaire’s 18thcentury Paris which is the subject of the
unfinished Passagenwerk. Benjamin describes the dark side of the city, its risk of implosion. This
is due to the impossibility of a homeostatic relation with Nature, which is instead absorbed and
immediately expelled, just like damaging toxins for the same city, from the distribution chain of
goods. Benjamin harshly criticizes this kind of relation between Man and Nature, where the
former thinks that the latter exists gratis; however, he admits that a positive connection
between them still needs to be identified. The very structure of this author’s thinking,
nevertheless, seems to render this task even more difficult as, in the final analysis, it views the
historical dimension as more encompassing than Nature.
This impasse, however, finds a possible resolution by looking at the temporal, as opposed to
eternal, character of truth: it is necessary to move on, with Benjamin, beyond Benjamin.Full
comprehension of this point is decisive: the right question to ask ourselves is not “What are the
consequences of History upon Nature?”, but rather : “What are the consequences of Nature upon
History?”. Further lament on the destiny of environmental disasters looming for Mankind would
be useless. The point is rather to sketch out the connection of History and Nature in a new way,
looking at the former as an ecological niche built by Man within the latter. In this sense, it would
be fundamental to interpret the concept of original sin as an ecological fault; no longer to think
of nature as “fallen”, but rather as a deteriorated facies hippocratica. With this model I would like
to propose a vision marked by sustainability, which at the same time does notintend to be a
mere gloss to the scientific literature regarding the Man-earth relation. This is the only chance
for a reflection upon History that, without any loss of specificity, could prove itself able to
provide an original contribution to the great challenges of our new Axial Age.
Damiano Roberi, Ph.D. Student at Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy.
Nathan Ross – On Walter Benjamin’s Critical Distinction between Art as
Semblance of Nature and Art as Interplay with Nature
This paper considers the theory of mimesis and artistic truth in the works of Walter Benjamin as
the unfolding of a reflective relation to our interactions with nature. Benjamin’s aesthetic theory
is normative and critical to the extent that it distinguishes within art the possibility of a mimetic
13
production of truth content. I argue that Benjamin gives specificity to this mimetic theory of
truth in the second version of his essay On the Artwork in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility
when he distinguishes between two aspects of mimesis that are present in art in an increasingly
polarized way: art as the semblance (Schein) of nature and art as interplay (Zusammenspiel) with
nature. This distinction becomes the central way in which Benjamin discerns the difference
between regressive and progressive forms of aesthetics, between aesthetic falsity and truth. It
also demonstrates that the political value of art is closely tied to the way in which art rehearses a
relationship between society and nature, first within experience of artistic media, but then also
in relation to productive relations, forms of technology, and in the political relation between
subjects.
I demonstrate that there are a series of preliminary claims in Benjamin that allow him to
understand these two forms of mimesis as having such far reaching consequences: 1) In his
earlier writings on language and mimesis, Benjamin develops the view that artifice becomes true
not by reflecting the silent nature of things, but by translating in a critical way prior acts of
artifice. 2) Benjamin understands the history of art as the decay of the ‘aura’, a phenomenon that
is closely tied to semblance as a phenomenal aspect of nature. This phenomenon rests on a
distance between the subject and nature that is increasingly erased in new, artificial modes of
aesthetic experience. 3) Benjamin understands the evolution of society as the development of
technology that is primarily invasive of nature, and exploitive of human labor (first technology),
but also increasingly cooperative with nature (second technology), however he argues that the
capitalist forms of thought and culture stifle this second form of technology in a cultural and
political sense even when it is within reach. 4) Finally, Benjamin argues that aesthetic
experience stands before a choice: one in which technology is used to establish a fake form of
aura, and one in which technology allows perception to enter into a playful interplay with
nature. I examine this latter distinction as it relates to Benjamin’s conception of capitalism, as
well as his account of fascism as an aesthetic politics based on semblance. Additionally, I give an
account of modes of perception that Benjamin considers as inherently ‘playful’ through
examples from cinema, and show how such modes of perception have a socially critical
component.
Nathan Ross, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Oklahoma City University.
David Van Dusen – Divine Violence: A critique
In Zur Kritik der Gewalt, Benjamin introduces his cipher of a ‘divine violence’ with this sentence:
‘Just as in all spheres god opposes myth, so mythical violence is confronted by the divine (der
mythischen Gewalt die göttliche entgegen).’ This strikes me as a bizarre couplet, both in its claim
that ‘god opposes myth’, and in the corollary that ‘divine violence’ sets itself against ‘mythic
violence’. Benjamin would like to effect, here, a blank reversal of the decisive world-historic
senses of his chosen word, ‘Gott’, which (in Greek, at least) is classically linked to his other (very
Greek) word, ‘Mythos’. In no sphere, and least of all within Benjamin’s legal-juridical horizon, is
there an archaic opposition to be observed between ‘god’ and ‘myth’.
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To the contrary: what ‘in all spheres opposes mythos’ — and with it, mythic gods—is called
logos, from Heraclitus on. And the phenomenon of early Greek ‘law’ (nomos) signals this
revolutionary operation: classical law pre-decides the circulation of ‘force’ or ‘violence’ (bía) in a
city by means of logos, and not mythos.
Law is thus itself, for the Greeks, at least a half-initiated ‘critique of violence’. And paradoxically,
law (as a political instrument) is critical precisely because—as per Derrida— violence ‘founds’
law. By pre-deciding the channels of force, the force of law at once represents and effects a
reflection upon this condition of its own possibility—namely, force.
I will argue that Benjamin’s cipher of a ‘divine violence’ is, to the contrary, a reappearance of
what he calls ‘mythical violence’, and as such is constitutively inimical to critique. And I mean
this last phrase quite literally: Benjamin’s ‘divine violence’ names an enemy, a counter-force of
critique. Which is also to say this: in the course of his ‘critique’,
Benjamin summoned up his enemy. And this enemy, it goes without saying, is with us still. While
I have a particular interest in Benjamin’s use of ancient sources in the Kritik—and most
especially, in his references to ‘natural law’—Kant, Schmitt and Derrida will also be on the
horizon of my brief, critical reading of Benjamin’s still influential text.
David van Dusen, De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Mediaeval & Renaissance Philosophy,
Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
15
Panel 1.4. “Bruno Latour and Technology”
Shane Denson – We Have Never Been Natural: Towards a Postnatural
Philosophy of Media
In this presentation, I draw upon concepts and arguments put forward by Bernard Stiegler, Mark
B. N. Hansen, Niklas Luhmann, and Bruno Latour and put them into conversation with one
another in order to develop what I term a postnatural philosophy of media. Postnaturalism, as I
define the term, does not signal the end of nature but a particular manner of rethinking it.
Methodologically, postnaturalism marks an extension of rather than a break with (scientific and
epistemological) naturalism and its insistence on material evolution as the basis of
consciousness and all ideational, symbolic, or discursive realities. Substantively, however, this
extension implies a rethinking of nature because technical agencies are seen as not only
immanent to the natural but also crucially implicated in the transformative force of evolution.
Accordingly, postnaturalism implies that “we have never been natural” (and neither has nature,
for that matter). At the heart of this rethinking is what I call the “anthropotechnical interface”: a
sub-phenomenal, infra-empirical stratum of materiality, which forms the site of radical
transformation by means of the “unnatural selection” that results from the technical mediation
of embodied life. This view, which can be developed with the help of Bernard Stiegler’s
philosophy of technology, implies a special role for media; accordingly, as I argue, media serve as
nothing less than the “originary correlators” of the phenomenal and the noumenal.
My argument for this (seemingly extravagant) claim involves an adaptation of Niklas Luhmann’s
systems-theoretical conception of mediality, which (when subjected to a transformative
rethinking that abstracts media beyond the system-immanent position to which they are
relegated in Luhmann’s thought) provides a formal model for thinking media as the site of subphenomenological changes taking place at the very cusp between systemic enclosure and the
unmarked environment from which any and all systems emerge. Expanding on Mark B. N.
Hansen’s notion of media as the “environment for life” itself, my argument goes on to question
the cognitive or mnemotechnical bias of Stiegler’s philosophy of technology while also reversing
Hansen’s asymmetrical privileging of human embodiment in the transductive relation between
organic and inorganic agencies. Ultimately, the postnatural philosophy of media that results
from these encounters works to articulate together process-oriented and object-oriented
perspectives; besides (and beyond) empirically determinate manifestations in the form of
discrete apparatic entities, media play a wholly non-anthropic role in the production of the
empirical, in the constitution and maintenance of its spatio-temporal foundations. As a matter of
“distributed embodiment,” media play a literally central role in the transduction of materially
intersecting entities, each with their own form of embodiment, their own manner of marking the
boundary, embodying the membrane, between material flux and the emergent realm of discrete
objects.
Dr. Shane Denson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover, Englisches Seminar / American
Studies.
16
Rumen Rachev – The Call of Software: Matters of Care and Medianatures
Interactions
In this paper I would like to bring the ‘parliament of things’ (Latour, 1991) that makes software
actually software to the center of attention and establish the case for the thing-power of
software, exploring the call that it produces in relation to the writing of Jane Bennett (2010).
Furthermore, I would like to relate how software can be perceived as matters of care in the
context of Maria de la Bellacasa (2011) and how this notion of care is functioning within
medianatures (Parrika, 2012).
I. The Thing-Power of Software: Software can be perceived as vibrant matter, producing material
vibrations in the world. The concept of ‘vibrant matter’ comes from Jane Bennett and her 2010
book carrying the same title. In it, Bennett focuses upon vital materialism, stating that the flow of
energy matter should not be perceived as passive and fixed, but rather as a vibrant matter,
always in connection with other actants, having a thing-power (Bennett, 2010). By this thingpower, Bennett strives for giving a voice “to a vitality intrinsic to materiality” (Bennett, 2010,
p.xiii). For her, when things actualize this “thing-power” they make a certain “call”: “stuff
exhibited its thing-power: it issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying”
(ibid., 2010). Then, one might ask: what ‘call’ does software produce and can humans
understand it?
II. Matters of Care: Taking the notion of matters of care from Maria de la Bellacasa (2011), I will
argue that it is not only matters of concern (Latour, 2004) when it comes to software, but a step
further has to be made to matters of care. Her notion of ‘matters of care’ relates to asking “what
care can actually mean for the thinking of things” and how this notion involves doing and
intervening (de la Bellacasa, 2011, p.90). Transforming things into matter of care is a way of
relating to them, since consciously or not one becomes affected by them, and sees how things
can affect others and be affected back. That is to say: software becomings matters, not only as a
concern, but as well as care. To care about software becomings is to acknowledge how both
humans and non-humans are connected in a giant knot of relations and intra-actions evoking
“memories of exclusion and persistent objectifications that might not appear directly relevant in
certain gathering-things” (de la Bellacasa, 2011, p.95).
III. Medianatures: The software stream of matter moves, and to map it one has to take in account
the environment in which the movement is taking place, not as an isolated scenario, but rather
as an interconnected event. That is to say- software is intrinsically connected and participates in
what is coined as medianatures (Parrika, 2012), and functions within the larger scale of media
ecologies. Software becomes software through the environment in which it operates. Moreover,
software as still being perceived as immaterial medium by some public discourses (Manovich,
2013), leaves quite a material trace behind itself- from the minerals that has to be dig out for the
hardware to be made, to the data centers, which process constantly data information, marking
their physical presence by releasing emissions in the air. Through matters of care one can dig
into the medianatures within which software operates, in order to explore the intricate and
17
complex network between humans and non-human actors. The call of software is a call to all of
us. We just have to pick up and answer it.
Rumen Rachev, RMA student Media and Performance Studies Utrecht University.
Moritz Gansen – Modes of Existence: From Bruno Latour To Étienne Souriau
About two years ago, in October 2012, Bruno Latour and his colleagues formally launched their
project regarding An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, aiming to finally present An Anthropology of
the Moderns. According to Latour, the concept of a ‘mode of existence’ provides an alternative to
the classical question ‘What is…?’, instead dramatising existence and posing ethological
questions of various kinds: ‘the modes become variants, declensions and differentiations in
terms of the type of access to beings’. 1 Taking a step back from the socio-ontological survey
undertaken by the AIME project, the proposed paper will itself launch an inquiry, but one into
the conceptual history of the notion of ‘modes of existence’.
After all, as Latour has frequently acknowledged, he borrows the term from Étienne Souriau,
upon whom the greater part of this paper will focus. 2 In his book on The Different Modes of
Existence, first published in 1943, Souriau begins by posing the question of the multiplicity of
existence, of the ‘manners of being of the diverse beings as well as the diverse modulations of
the fact of existing’, 3 a question that is, insofar as there is indeed a ‘plurality of modes of
existence’, 4 immediately followed by two further questions: that of ‘the passages from one mode
of existence to another’, 5 and that of a possible unification of modes of existence, or, in fact, that
of the unification of such unifications by means of what he calls ‘superexistence (surexistence)’. 6
Deploying a virtually infinite number of different modes of existence located upon different
planes, Souriau’s book thus paints a picture of an emergent pluriverse – there is a continuous
and open-ended actualisation of new modes of existence. ‘By saying that, in order to exist, every
being must discover its mode of existence,’ he writes, ‘we ineluctably also say that there are
modes of existence that are still unnamed and unexplored, that must be discovered in order to
instaurate certain things which remain unnoticed as long as that mode has not been invented,
innovated’. 7
As the paper will show, Souriau’s ontology of modes of existence is hence ethological and
pragmatic on the one hand, and artistic and creative on the other. And although it ultimately
remains anthropological, although it ends upon a ‘construction of the realest human being’,
Entry on ‘Modes of Existence’ in the digital edition of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, online at
www.modesofexistence.org
2 See especially Latour, Bruno, ‘Reflections on Étienne Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence’, in: The Speculative
Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, Melbourne: repress, 2011, pp. 304-333.
3 Souriau, Étienne, Les différents modes d’existence, suivi de Du mode d'existence de l'æuvre à faire, Paris: PUF 2009, p.
88, translation MG.
4 Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence, p. 111.
5 Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence, p. 149.
6 Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence, p. 165-193.
7 Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence, p. 161, translation MG.
1
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which ‘involves not only the invention of its reality […] but perhaps the discovery of new modes
of existing […]: modes necessary for the harmony of the reality to which they contribute’, 8 it still
seems fair to extend, as Latour does, the creative tasks of this ontology to each and every being
within it in order to highlight the benefit it may provide for new kinds of ecological thinking. In
the final instance, everything comes down to the question of the ‘practice of the art of existing’, a
practice that serves to enrich the pluriverse as it contributes to its construction. 9
Moritz Gansen, MA in Philosophy from the Free University of Berlin, an MA in Critical and Creative
Analysis from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
8
9
Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence, pp. 191-192, translation MG.
Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence, p. 193, translation MG.
19
Panel 1.5. “Between the Human and the Animal. Philosophy after
Bioart”
Robert Zwijnenberg – Biotechnology, Human Dignity and the Importance of
Art
Contemporary biotechnological practices (such as genetic modification, cloning, tissue
engineering) that involve manipulation of living beings present a challenge to traditional notions
of nature and the human body. This is particularly true of synthetic biology, a form of
bioengineering which includes both the design and construction of new biological parts, devices,
and systems and the re-designing of existing natural biological systems. Using a combination of
molecular science and engineering, synthetic biology designs and creates new biological
components, functions and systems. The question is not only who has the right to re-design life,
which is ultimately a question of legal and moral ownership and the commodification of life and
nature, but also do we think it is necessary, and if so, how do we want to re-design nature and
the human body? What limits do we wish to impose on biotechnological innovation involving
nature and the human body? And what notion of ‘being human’ and of nature are these limits
based on?
In this paper, I want to show how the concept of what it means to be human and the associated
concept of human dignity are central to any reconsideration of our traditional notions of nature
and the human body. The questions of ‘what does it mean to be human’ and ‘what is human
dignity’ are particularly relevant in the debate on human enhancement and human cloning. I will
discuss the fact that, though human dignity almost defies definition, we need the concept for
practical and legal issues connected with life science research on the human body and nature.
New materialism, a recent strand of thinking, appears to be able to provide a more satisfactory
answer to the question of what attitude we should take to biotechnological developments.
However, as I shall show, new materialism cannot conclusively guide our decisions on urgent
legal issues in life sciences research that often have major societal implications. My conclusion is
that biotechnology is testing accepted ethical and aesthetic values concerning the human body
and nature to such an extent that we also need art as another necessary perspective in our
search for a theoretical and practical position on new biotechnological challenges and
developments. In my conclusion I will suggest that art that engages with biotechnology offers
the humanities an outlook on a new approach of biotechnological challenges that is
characterized by a hands-on engagement with the life sciences.
Robert Zwijnenberg, Professor of art history at Leiden University
Piotrek Swiatkowski – Becoming-animal in Contemporary Eco-art
Contemporary artists have frequently made use of animals in order to reveal our contemporary
relation towards nature. In her sculptures of abject but at the same time lovable and vulnerable
characters Picinini reveals the blurry nature of the separations between the various species.
Humans appear to be part of nature. They are capable of trans-species relationships. Her work is
20
nevertheless not only optimist in nature. It is also a warning against an extensive future
biotechnological experimentation that will inevitably produce new species capable of executing
specific kind of work. Picinini’s work is first of all a warning against our incapacity to object to
such experiments.
Similar double relation towards the experiments with nature seems to be present in the
performance of Art Orienté, called ‘May the horse live in me’. In the performance we see the
artist Marion Laval-Jeantet being injected with horse blood plasma. The artist reports about the
alteration of her psychic experience. The injection of the blood has had an impact on all the
major body functions, even the nervous system. "I had the feeling of being extrahuman," explained the artist. "I was not in my usual body. I was hyper-powerful, hyper-sensitive,
hyper-nervous and very diffident. The emotionalism of an herbivore. I could not sleep. I
probably felt a bit like a horse.' The horse was present during the performance. It made noise
and introduced a highly uncanny element into it. Just like in case of Picinini the technology does
not play a neutral role here. The artist is protected against an acute multi-system allergic
reaction and sudden death only because she is constantly monitored by the present technology.
We are directly warned that the interaction with another species is lethal. In the end only the
laboratory protects us against nature.
In my paper I will attempt to analyse the contemporary relation of humans towards as it is
revealed in contemporary bio art. Is bio-art only providing us with a romantic and utopian vision
of trans-species communication? Or is it criticising our naive trust in the possibilities of future
technology? In order to find a possible answer to those questions I will make use of concepts
developed both by Lacan and by Deleuze and Guattari. I will first critically evaluate the concept
of transversal communication developed by Guattari that has been frequently used to analyse
bioart. Secondly I will analyse the role of technology in bioart by means of the Lacanian
psychoanalysis. I will claim that the strict separation between nature and culture is hardly being
challenged in such performances. Finally I will make use of the concept of becoming-animal,
developed by Deleuze and Guattari, in order to understand the true nature of the ambivalent
affects generated by the performance.
Piotrek Swiatkowski, research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary European Philosophy at
Radboud University Nijmegen
Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko – Life after Nature. The Human Body under Art’s
Experiment
Many recent philosophers have pronounced nature to be dead. According to Timothy Morton
(2007), the concept of Nature has been used for the purposes of control, subordination and
commodification for so long that we need to abandon any fixed ideas about Nature if we are to
sustain a critical stance in environmental discourse. Slavoj Žižek (2008), for instance, has argued
that in view of the new biotechnology and biogenetics both human and non-human nature has
been “desubstantialized” because they construct and manipulate life to such a degree that
boundaries between the natural and the artificial have become meaningless. Unlike, however,
this catastrophic and sceptic analysis of nature that, paradoxically, presupposes its previous
21
undisturbed existence, a different analysis of nature emerged, one that maps its already
dynamic, modal and contingent character. Such approaches to nature, rather than pronouncing
its death from a theoretical and discursive distance, focuses on material engagement with its
already unfixed and dynamic character, posing ethical and political implications for human and
non-human relationality and co-existence. Within
this non-anthropocentric or postanthropocentric thinking, there is an aspiration to break with clear-cut boundaries between
human and non-human which would amount to redefinition of not only what it means to be
human today but also what the subjectivity, personhood and life currently may be.
Based on the ancient distinction of bios as human social domain of life and zoë as brutal, animal
prelinguistic life (Agamben, 1998), non-anthropocentrism maps life beyond bios/zoë dichotomy
allowing for egalitarian (Braidotti, 2006) transindividual forms of subjectivity and agency
(Guattari, 1995). This means that rather than in terms of fixed properties, subjectivity is
understood as composed of relations and processes, dynamic and folding. It thus starts from the
lack of presupposition of a hierarchical distinction between bodies. Without suggesting that
there is no differentiation between bodies, the claim is that the notion of agency can belong to
any kind of body, sentient/insentient, organic/inorganic, human/nonhuman.
In my paper I will analyze this philosophical engagement with human-non-human relationality
that is influenced particularly by contemporary material realities. I will discuss how art that
deals with living matter has already been working with the non-human agency, revealing the
notion of nature not on the ground of the relation of exclusion (Agamben) but rather affirmation
of pre-individual, communal forms of subjectivity (Esposito 2012). I will look closely at this
philosophical debate in the context of art performance “May the Horse Live in Me” by Art Orienté
Objet (2011). After a long time of legal and ethical negotiations, the artist staged an experiment
in which she injected horse blood plasma into her veins. In this way, she exercised the idea of
human between the notion of unified person and partial agency driven by intensities (Protevi,
2009). I will investigate how such transistasis of one’s body can lead to unfixed and collective
forms of subjectivity.
Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko, currently a PhD candidate in cultural disciplines at Leiden University
engaged in a research about the notion of materiality in the posthuman visual culture.
22
Panel 2.1. “American Philosophers and the Continental Tradition”
Sofia Simitzi – On The Edge of Experience-Pragmatism Reconsidered
In the context of nineteenth-century Darwinism, W. James appears to be strongly influenced by
the biological approach. James' teleological conception of the mind, and the primacy he assigns
to action, create the appearance of curtailing the importance of intellectual pursuits. He seems to
present humanity as narrowly motivated by the fulfillment of its biological needs and practical
ends. He is Radical Empiricism constitutes an attempt to analyze the nature of reality at a critical
philosophical level which reveals the importance of pure experience. His intention is not to
ignore the pragmatic realities of common sense, described in ordinary language, but to elucidate
their dark side and to place them in the context of an ontological theory. Densely put, everything
real must be somehow experience able, and everything experienced must somehow be real.
According to James Field Theory, experiences are the result of natural as well as supernatural
relations. Not only do they present us with evocative information on the structure of everyday
reality, but provide us with intriguing evidence for the putative existence of an unseen order of
the self as well as of reality in the fundamental essence of the Flux of Experience and the Stream
of Thought. Consequently, that reality is pluralistic rather than monistic or dualistic. There is the
given—the data of the senses—which is brought in as a kind of stimuli from the region beyond
the subject. Added to this is the interpretative element, which the conscious being supplies. The
creative whole of experience, which includes both the given and the interpretative element, is
the one reality we know. Knowledge is thus based directly on sense perception, or experience,
which constitutes the continuous, flowing stream of consciousness.
This present world in a global era of multiple crises is the world of experience. We should try to
understand it and then attempt to construct mutatis mutandis forms of life in which all can grow
in toleration and intelligence. Pragmatism takes evolution, relativity, and the time process
seriously. The world is in the making;
William James inaugurated a tradition of investigating the phenomenology and evidential value
of experience and intersubjectivity and those experiences can and should undermine our takenfor-granted naturalistic conception of all things;
Dr.Sofia Simitzi, University of Ioannina – Greece.
David Martínez – Public and Private Autonomy in Habermas and Rawls
Habermas and Rawls stand in the Kantian tradition of political thought. However, in continuity
and rupture with Kant they seek a conception of law that implies an intersubjective and
procedural interpretation of autonomy. In modern conditions, the positivistic character of law is
bound up with the demand for legitimation and this implies that enacted law should guarantee
the autonomy of all legal persons equally; and the democratic procedure of legislation should
satisfy this demand. This is the reason why when autonomy is embodied in the medium of
coercive and positive law, it splits into public and private autonomy. Habermas and Rawls share
the intention of deriving both principles from the same root and this is the so-called thesis of coSEP/FEP 2014 – Philosophy After Nature – Abstracts
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originality between private and public autonomy. This thesis means that neither principle is
more important; neither is previous or more basic. In spite of this common ground, both authors
rise critiques to each other regarding their own understanding of the relationship between
private and public autonomy. Habermas argues that Rawls’s two-stage theory generates a
priority of private autonomy, and demotes the democratic process to an inferior status. Rawls
replies that he gives a proper place to public autonomy and he will criticize Habermas arguing
that in his theory it is a privilege of public autonomy or the democratic process over private
autonomy: the latter appears to be a functional feature to protect the former, and this means
that Habermas fails in his attempt to build a thesis of co-originality. Rawls also argues that
Habermas cannot get around a two-stage construction because when he combined the D
principle and the form of law, the system of rights that emerge appears to have normative
priority than the democratic process. In this same line Charles Larmore argues that Habermas
gives priority to public autonomy over private autonomy, because the former functions as the
ultimate basis on which our political life should be organized. In Larmore’s terms, popular
sovereignty rest in a more fundamental liberal principle called respect for persons. In the same
way of Rawls, Larmore argues that Habermas is not able to grasp the precise operations that are
working on his own theory, because the recognition of the D principle implies a previous
Kantian principle. However, is it really the case that the thesis of co-originality relies at the final
stage in a previous ´pre-political´ liberal core grounded in the Kantian idea of respect for
persons? In this paper I want to argue that an intersubjective understanding of autonomy, which
is reflected in the D principle, can do justice to both forms of autonomy. In this context, I want to
develop the common grounds between Rawls and Habermas regarding the foundation of law in
continuity and rupture with Kant (I), then, I will develop Habermas’s critique to Rawls and
Rawls replies, and then his critique of Habermas (II); finally, I will discuss whether an
intersubjective understanding of the Kantian concept of autonomy can work out as the
normative core of law (III).
David Martínez. DPhil (c) Social and Political Thought. University of Sussex.
Alessandro Zir – Interactive Kinds, Indifferent Kinds and the Surface of
Meaning: le sans fond de la psychopathologie
The notion of interactive kinds has been developed by Ian Hacking in papers such as “Making Up
People”, published in his book Historical Ontology (2002). The notion is connected with
problems related to the historical development of taxonomies and systems of classifications in
the Humanities and Social Sciences, which Hacking has investigated at least since The Taming of
Chance (1990). These problems are not unrelated to the issue of scientific realism, which
Hacking has addressed in Representing and Intervening (1983). Classifications in soft and hard
sciences meet somewhere, as it is suggested in Hacking’s The Social Construction of What (1998
— see in particular the book’s 4th chapter). Relying on literary and cinematographic images
typical of the turn of the 19th century (circa 1900) — the period when, according to Hacking
himself, the statistic methods most relevant to systems of classification both in social and
natural sciences get mature — this paper aims to unfold the surface of meaning towards which
Ian Hacking’s interactive and indifferent kinds converge.
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Dr. Alessandro Zir, Professor at the Graduate Program in Letters, Catholic Univ. of Pelotas (Brazil)
Researcher of the Latin-American Institute for Advanced Studies, Federal Univ. of Rio Grande do Sul
(Brazil).
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Panel 2.2. “Performance and the Body”
Daniela de Paulis – Cogito Ergo Sum
'Cogito Ergo Sum' (I think therefore I am) is a project speculating on the creative and
philosophical possibilities of exploring the cosmos by means of radio waves. The project is the
development of 'OPTICKS', a live performance lecture, during which images are sent to the Moon
and back in real time as radio waves. Since starting 'OPTICKS' in 2009, I have been
experimenting with the concept of 'cosmic flaneur' and of virtual travel, creating a series of art
works using the Moonbounce technology. 'OPTICKS' has been developed in collaboration with
the CAMRAS team at the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands, where I am currently
artist in residence. 'Cogito Ergo Sum' takes the concept of virtual space travel a bit further.
'Cogito Ergo Sum' is a live performance during which I send my thoughts into outer space as
radio waves. The brain waves, detected by a brain lab, are converted into sounds and
transmitted by the Dwingeloo radio telescope antenna. The title of the piece is inspired by
Cartesian philosophy, according to which the human consciousness resides in the mind. In the
Western cultural tradition, the mind is considered as the site of one's conscious existence.
Sending thoughts into outer space is thus a symbolic action for questioning this tradition whilst
communicating with possible extraterrestrial life, through a language that challenges logical
reasoning and poses questions about the conventional notion of intelligence. It is hoped that the
brain lab will be permanently installed inside the cabin of the Dwingeloo radio telescope, in
order to be used by visitors who will be able to send their thoughts into outer space, while
experiencing the immersive view of the Earth seen from Space though a set of simulators. 'Cogito
Ergo Sum' will thus allow people to experience virtual space travel, by shifting their
consciousness into outer space. The project will also foster a global view of our planet, raising
awareness on political and geographical issues.
Daniela de Paulis , artist and PhD student at the University of Amsterdam.
Martin E. Rosenberg – From “Projective Apprehension” to “ProprioSentience”: Embodied AND Distributed Cognition During Jazz Improvisation
The performance of jazz music requires precipitous decisions, often beneath the threshold of
awareness, by which one of any number of internal spatial schema for musical expression, and
their corresponding proprioceptive actions, might be enacted from one instant to the next, for
the purpose of performing harmony and melody in synchronized rhythmic relationship with the
musical flow of the jazz ensemble. Furthermore, those schema and actions manifest quite
differently on different instruments, so that one can argue that the instruments have agency in
shaping them.
I call these two stages of musical cognition top-down “Projective Apprehension” and bottom-up
“Proprio-Sentience.” By projective apprehension, I refer to the mapping and then internal
spatial visualization of routes across the instrument—in effect the fixing and “capturing” of
those routes as schema. In order to play a song, and then to improvise in response to the
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musical resources of that song as well as in response to the improvisation of the other musicians
performing, a musician must anticipate conceptually and master proprioceptively any number of
routes that may be taken at any moment during the course of a performance. Embedded in
proprioceptive memory through long practice, that musician must have access to those routes
“beneath his fingers” as it were, and to enact them immediately “in the moment” of performance.
Of course, we will see how the antithetical modes of time-processing, as modeled by Francisco
Varela, complicates an understanding of what being “in the moment” entails. Yet, during
improvisation, the contingencies of performance can never predetermine what route may be
taken at any specific moment in the course of that song’s performance. Every moment of
improvised music contains a “field” of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic resources implying
distinct performative possibilities, much like how phase space models a “field” of possible
alternative futures for a given system in time. This complicates our understanding of
intentionality in the performance of improvised music.
Proprio-sentience refers to the extent by which the enaction of proprioceptive memories remain
contingent and flexible enough so that, in the process of performing, the hands and fingers are
make micro-decisions by grasping one or another of a myriad of pathways unfolding during
improvisation from one instant to the next. As we will see, these micro-decisions are,
necessarily, both precipitous and beneath the threshold of conscious awareness, with each
contingent micro-decision closing off some possibilities and yet simultaneously opening other
possibilities.
But the immediate circumstances involving the performance of the initial musical route, as that
path becomes itself a springboard to many other possible routes on the instrument, involves as
well the ears of the performing musician registering the immediate stimuli of the other
contributing musicians’ performance while continuing to play at the same time. These
contingent circumstances will all contribute to closing off a range of possible musical routes on
the instrument, just as new ones open up, from one moment to the next.
When we think of how quickly these “decisions” are being made, we can embrace Stanley
Crouch’s observation that: “[T]o play such music (simultaneous improvisations of drums,
piano/guitar and bass while in support of an equally improvising soloist) demands superfast
hearing—a component of genius.” Yet, we will come to recognize that this kind of hearing—
beneath the threshold of awareness—is hardwired in the nature of every human being. To
paraphrase cognitive scientist and guitar enthusiast Gary Marcus, anyone is capable of learning
how to play, and to hear. How one learns how to engage in “superfast hearing,” and to process
time in both fast and slow ways, is the problem facing jazz musicians-in-training.
While we will examine astonishing recent research by Charles Limb and others on emergent
neuronal feedback loops within the individual during the performance of jazz (with comparison
to classical music), as well as the synchronization of neuronal firings between musicians
performing together, we must also confront how the feedback loops between the individual and
amongst the members of the ensemble during jazz performance can alter the individual jazz
performer’s performance choices, as well as alter the ensemble’s musical trajectory when that
individual musician introduces unexpected sounds. The reciprocity between the individual
player and the global behavior of the ensemble, as played out amongst musicians in an
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ensemble, bears resemblance to the emergent neuronal behavior observable in the individual’s
performer’s brain, so that the individual perfomer becomes a sub-system much as Varela has
described emergent distributed processes that involve global to local, and local to global
feedback loops. We will see that a jazz musician’s training in cultivating a capacity to cognize
and enact contingently, beneath the threshold of awareness, may constitute the initial conditions
for this global—local--global process to emerge spontaneously amongst the collective. This
feedback loop has been observed, and remarked upon by many, many musicians, and constitutes
a “peak experience” of the highest order.
Thus, the pathways on each instrument, and a player’s embodied cognition and enaction of
musical performance on it, becomes the circumstance--both a place and an event in the flow of
time--by which we may further inquire into an embodied form of collective intelligence at work.
In fact, I do not exaggerate how many musicians cite this experience as a motive for
improvisation and a raison d’etre, a vital impetus for devoting one’s life to playing jazz, and how
similar is their “ear-witness” accounts of it.
Examining the relationship between embodied and distributed cognition in the flow of time,
within and amongst musicians during improvisation, will lead us to some interesting queries
related to what Francisco Varela calls “ethical expertise,” and, to the point, to an ethos of
cognitive freedom contributing not just to aesthetics, but reverberating beyond to culture and
politics, and worthy of emulation in other realms besides music.
What goes on in jazz
improvisation that enables a musical instrument to become something other than an object that
produces sound--to become an “instrument” of emergent awareness?
Dr. Martin E. Rosenberg, Visiting Fellow in Art and Cognition, The Center For Transformative
Media, Parsons:The New School For Design.
Fröydi Laszlo – Artistic Intuition in Visualization of Natural Processes, and as
a Tool of Radical Empirism
Background
The visual artist and independent art book publisher Fröydi Laszlo presents the work of her
artist colleague Jeanette Schaering in a philosophic context. The presentation is based on visual
presentation of the artists work, interviews with her, and the authors personal interpretation of
the significance to philosophy and natural science.
Visual artist Jeanette Schaering has for years developed a holistic artistic practice based on an
inter- species relationship to plants as well as to the micro- organisms that take part in and
benefits the plant during its life cycle. She investigates how plants produce colour that may
visualize complex dynamic systems, as well as become fixed to a fibre. After fixation to a natural
fibre and without any use of external mordants, the organic colour is still part of a biological
process where air, mechanic forces, sunlight, humidity and chemical environment may inflict.
The research method is based on a broad field of studies, and travels. Anthropology, history of
dyeing, botany and understanding of local climate conditions are necessary to create a method
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and context for the artwork, but so are understanding of the contemporary art practice,
pedagogy, gardening, and physiochemical processes in plants, soil and putrefaction.
In this way the method transcends the classical borders between the natural and the human
sciences. In interviews the artist mentions intuition as a bodily, transcendent experience, which
leads the author to think of time, being and scientific method as posed by Henri Bergson in his
1903 book “Revue de métaphysique et de morale”
Could a focus on the intuitive experience of being “one” with the matter you research be a clue
on how to overcome the gap between “Mind and Matter” that is in the way of a more holistic,
though empirically based, understanding of a “Nature after the end of Nature?”
The element of colour and how the nuances in the artwork change through the timespans of
different biological processes, may be called the artistic communication or the aesthetic aspect
of the work, but what is visualized may as well be the moral dilemma:
”Water is a life essential element that is complex and dynamic in structure (…) Something provided
by nature that is pure and clean, but neglected by us becoming unclean and polluted. Our
negligence can continue unnoticed, as the pollution remains invisible.” J.Schaering
By visualizing biological colour processes in water samples, polluted or more or less “natural”,
the question of human, personal, responsibility is brought forth as well as our definitions of
“nature” and “natural”. In this way artistic research implies not only artistic or aesthetic criteria,
but functions as environmental activism in advocating a larger social interest in the detail and
complexity of the way natural processes work, adds development of more layered concepts of
time, and suggests ways to deal with multiple temporalities when engaging in a processual
dialogue with other species and co-existences on planet earth.
Fröydi Laszlo, Gothenburg based visual artist and publisher in the artist-run publishing company
284 Publishers.
Kuhlken, Julie – Adorno and Ethical Self-Performance
I want to consider here the sense of performance appealed to when one asks someone--or
oneself--to perform. It must first be noted that to ask someone to perform can be meant in a
variety of ways: It can mean to ask someone to undertake a task or social role. In a related vein,
it can mean asking that the individual undertake said task or role efficiently or successfully. It
can also, of course, mean performing a piece in a strictly artistic sense of the word. Or, and this
is the distinctively Adornian take on the notion that I want to consider here, it can be a request
that one perform tout court, that one perform one's self. In the last sense, to ask someone to
perform is not to ask her to occupy a social role or occupation. In fact, performing one's self
means to ask her to reject the social pressure to conform to such roles and occupations.
Performing oneself is an ethical task that resists the temptation to adopt a readymade, social
identity. Social identities promise that one can simply "be oneself." However, and as we will
develop, one cannot simply be oneself. Whereas the classic understanding of moral agency
describes moral action as a reflection of one's conscious will, Adorno criticizes this classic view.
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In his lectures on ethics, published as The Problems of Moral Philosophy, he takes up what he sees
as the central problem for the modern individual: namely, "the fact that I have right
consciousness does not at all imply that I shall act in accordance with that right consciousness"
(112). It is a problem that eludes the scientific and technological tendencies of contemporary
society, because one cannot address the problem of knowing how to act by devoting more
cognitive resources to it. Moreover, it belies the development of professional "ethicists," who
perform, in a non-Adornian sense, the social function of supplying the maxims of right
consciousness. One may very well have the best consciousness in the world, according to
Adorno, and yet the very nature of consciousness' rightness precludes a direct connection to
action, because a connection between action and consciousness paradoxically requires a "right
world"--a world in which moral action is the only possible successful action. In a wrong world,
the connection between right consciousness and right action is broken. In a wrong world, one's
actions do not reflect one's "true will" or "true self," but are rather a performance of selfhood. As
for right consciousness, and with it ethics, if it is to continue to be relevant, it must contain an
awareness of this modern condition of the self. In what follows, I will first sketch what the
performance of self consists in. I will then say something more about why such selfperformance is inescapable in modern society according to Adorno. I will conclude by looking at
the consequences, both ethical and artistic, of modern self-performance.
Julie Kuhlken, PhD.
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Panel 2.3. Immanuel Kant
Steve Howard – Kantian ‘Nature’ and the Elision and Reappearance of ‘World’
This paper will read ‘nature’ and ‘world’ against one another, through Kant, to consider the
priority of nature over world in Kant’s Critical period, and the dramatic return of world as the
subject of investigation in his last, unpublished texts. What is the significance of this elision and
re-emergence of world, in contrast to nature, in Kant?
In the opening lines of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), Kant defines the
‘nature’ that will be the subject of his investigation. He makes an Aristotelian distinction
between the formal and material meanings of nature. This, as attention to a similar paragraph in
the first Critique (1781/87) shows, is the distinction between nature in the adjectival sense – a
thing’s nature – and nature as a sum-total of appearances. The latter is the topic of Kant’s short
1786 text. This distinction is preceded, however, by Kant’s separation of ‘world’ and ‘nature’ in
the Antinomies of the Critique. World is the mathematical whole of appearances, an infinite
totalisation; nature a dynamical whole, and a merely indefinite totalisation.
‘World’ is central to the Antinomies, featuring in the thesis and antithesis of each. As Sean
Gaston’s The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida (2013) shows, the constitutive concept of
world is dismissed by Kant in the Dialectic, only to remain as a regulative concept. It therefore
has no place in Kant’s attempt to secure metaphysical grounds for the construction of the
concept of matter, and for the application of mathematics to physical nature, as pursued in the
Metaphysical Foundations.
The return of an apparently constitutive concept of world, then, is one of a number of
remarkable reversals that Kant undertakes in the Opus Postumum. In these papers, we find
meditations on the world-system, world-soul, the cosmos in its entirety and a universal world
material, variously caloric or the ether. These innovations in part react to Schelling and to other
developments in German idealism of the time; but they also represent Kant’s rethinking of his
own Critical system, to rectify its flaws and to enact Kant’s proposed ‘transition to physics’
through the thinking of fundamental forces. I will consider the consequences for our
understanding of the Critical system of the fact that Kant’s regulative conception of world –
which Gaston calls ‘the most radical concept of world in the history of philosophy’ – is
overturned in Kant’s final, unfinished work. Kant’s own, overlooked reversal will point to
possibilities for rereading the post-Kantian philosophical history of the concepts of world and
nature.
Steve Howard, PhD candidate in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP),
Kingston University.
Claudia Mongini – On the Concept of Force in Kant's Opus Postumum
My inquiry into philosophy after nature departs from the concept of force which Kant has
developed in his last and unfinished work, the Opus Postumum. Force is understood
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cosmologically as a proto-dynamic entity acting in concomitance with an all-pervading material
(the Ether), which preceedes the emergence of physical bodies (that is, it entails an ontological
priority to the relation between subjects and objects).
In the last decades, various translations have both contributed to a wider diffusion of the Opus
Postumum as well as to the problematization of its unfinished condition. The divergence in both
content and style between the Italian, the English and the French Edition of the work, shows the
presence of unresolved questions in the text itself.
In the presupposition of a line of continuity between the three critiques and the Opus Postumum
(with particular emphasis on the third critique) the French translation by François Marty
constructs its argumentative line upon the notion of passage. Force gets elaborated in terms of a
logics of (discordant) relation between apriori abstraction (mathematics) and physical
sensation.
By conceiving the transcendental conditions of the Opus Postumum in terms of a „new
schematism, the italian translation by Vittorio Mathieu focusses upon the question of the
autoposition of the ether. The ether becomes the pivotal notion accounting for a break between
the Opus Postumum and the previous critical period. In respect to the French one, this
translation inverts the roles of the two concepts (ether and transition): the break with the
critiques arises because transition is conceived as a consequence of the autoposition of the ether
(and not as its presupposition, as it was the case for Marty's playdoyer of continuity).
The english translation by Eckart Förster follows Mathieu along the hypothesis of the primacy of
the ether. Its focus however, is not set upon a logical derivation of the ether from the
schematism of the first critique, but by following an asthetic principle: the autoposition of
„nature as art“.
By proposing a disjunctive reading between the Opus Postumum and its translations, i intend
examine the concept of force along two directional lines. The notion of physiology expresses its
transcendental charachter, inasmuch as it depicts the connection with objects of possible
experience in a way that surpasses experience itself. Force gets inquired along its problematic
status of a concept implicated in the creation of “a whole of nature of still greater extent”, which
transcends the laws of physics and establishing a wider dimension of “hyperphysics”. The idea of
transition grasps instead force from its operative condition, i.e. in its potential for constructing
of transversal relations.
In conclusion i intend to develop the current inquiry about force towards aesthetics, by means of
a disjuctive articulation with the concept of Sensus Communis aestheticus, developed by Kant in
the Third Critique. What is its genetic potential towards the unfolding of material modalities of
expression?
Claudia Mongini, PHD department of „Practiques et Théories du Sens“ at the University of Paris 8.
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Michael Lewis – Anthropology from Kant and Hegel to the Present Day
Michel Foucault identifies in the work of Kant an important tension between the Critical works
which rigorously oppose the transcendental and the empirical, and the Anthropology From a
Pragmatic Point of View which seems to put the rigour of the transcendental-empirical divide in
question.
Anthropology for Hegel marks the point of transition between nature and culture, and
represents an apparent refusal of the transcendental starting point in the name of a
presuppositionless account of the genesis of culture from nature, and man from the animal.
In the work of both Kant and Hegel, anthropology marks a troubling moment for post-Kantian
philosophy, since it suggests that the transcendental and the empirical cannot be absolutely
opposed.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen many attempts to demonstrate the porosity
of the boundary between the transcendental and the empirical, sometimes – and with ever
increasing frequency – taking the form of an exchange between philosophy and the empirical
sciences. And yet, these more recent attempts have tended to refuse the human being any
privileged role, or at least to move on from the question of man towards a different, supposedly
less problematic designation, such as ‘Dasein’ or ‘subject’, which frequently are deployed
precisely in order to bypass anthropology.
And yet perhaps we should return to Derrida’s insistence on how difficult it is for philosophy to
be finished with the human being and the question of man. And indeed, in certain recent
discourses, we are witnessing a return of the question of the relation between the structural
subject and its natural-biological support (‘man’). These discourses include, in particular, certain
strands of Lacanian psychoanalysis, but also a number of others, which this paper will consider.
More generally, this paper will explore the role of anthropology in philosophy, and it will
consider the extent to which anthropology can help us to understand what to do with the
transcendental-empirical divide today, either in the way of retaining it in a new form,
deconstructing it in a certain manner, or avoiding its very institution in the first place. Perhaps
the original paradigms for all three approaches may be found in the texts of Kant and Hegel.
Both Kant and Hegel’s Anthropologies have been examined separately, and put to productive use
in contemporary philosophical problematics, but rarely have they been put to conjoint use. This
paper proposes to do so. At the same time, Kant’s Anthropology, after awakening some interest
in the wake of the publication of Foucault’s introduction to his own translation of the text, has
since receded in the glare of German idealism with its ever more penetrating exposure. This
paper attempt to restore the balance and discover what is at stake in the confrontation between
Kant and Hegel on the particular question of the human being.
It is the hypothesis of this paper that an essential choice is presented to philosophy in the form
of the anthropologies of these two thinkers. We shall investigate what is at stake in the decision,
and explore the ways in which this decision has been taken in contemporary philosophy and for
what reasons. Michael Lewis, Philosophy, University of the West of England.
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Panel 2.4. Aesthetics after Nature
Clive Cazeaux – The Aesthetics of Research After the End of Art
In the last fifteen years, there has been a rapid expansion of interest in the arts as forms of
research. Two factors are largely responsible for this new field: (1) universities’ research
funding has become dependent upon the volume and quality of their research output (in Europe,
Australasia, and recently the USA), and this has obliged art in art departments to become
research in order to attract funding; (2) the dialogic, administrative turn in the arts means artists
are now adopting research methods from other disciplines, thereby creating an aesthetic from
conventionally non-aesthetic means. This paper addresses the place of the aesthetic in visual
arts research.
Since the transition in the twentieth century from the ready-made, through happenings and
conceptual art, to socially-engaged art practice, there is no longer a set of clearly defined actions
or properties which belong exclusively to art practice. The concept of ‘art’ has had any hope of
definition, essence, or necessary and sufficient conditions replaced by contest, antagonism and
politics. A recent exchange between Claire Bishop and Grant Kester is an example, with
frustration (from Bishop) and acceptance (from Kester) in response to the fact that there is
nothing left to call ‘aesthetic’ in socially-engaged art practice. Art now appropriates, subverts,
challenges and rearticulates any context with which it comes into contact, and is fought over by
competing discourses and institutions, e.g. critical, curatorial, celebrity, economic, and latterly
research. How should an artist-researcher deal with this thoroughgoing contestability? Where
does one start an artistic research project if everything is subject to competing discourses? This
paper considers what is left, and considers possible agreements and disagreements between the
demand for contribution within research on the one hand, and the idea that mechanisms of
contest and antagonism might themselves be sources of novelty on the other. Novelty of what
kind, and whether it might be poetic or aesthetic, is explored.
Prof Clive Cazeaux, Professor of Aesthetics, Head of Research Degrees, Cardiff School of Art and
Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University.
Bram Ieven – Economies of the Wild: Speculations on Constant’s New Babylon
and the Architecture of Capitalism
What if we approached Constant’s New Babylon not as an architectural project firmly rooted in
the politics of the early 1960s, but as an aesthetic intervention that develops new ways of
looking, and new ways of articulating affect and atmosphere that gives us insight in
contemporary capitalism? That is to say, what is we used New Babylon as a starting point for an
analysis of the contemporary, and thus as at one and the same time a theoretical and aesthetic
framework through which we can reorganize and rearticulate the present?
Combining a reading of Constant’s New Babylon and the architecture of contemporary
capitalism, this paper diverges from more traditional approaches to aesthetics by arguing that
contemporary aesthetics should not be concerned with the visible or the beautiful. To be sure,
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the visible is what interests aesthetics from an analytical point of view (Kant’s first critique),
whereas the beautiful is what interests aesthetics from a critical point of view (Kant’s third
critique). But as relevant and revolutionary as this approach may have been in the past, if
aesthetics today wants to regain its relevance for the analysis of our world it needs to
supplement the analytical and the critical with a more speculative approach.
Instead of searching for analytical insight or passing critical judgment, speculative aesthetics
turns things upside down; it searches for an ‘economy of the wild’ in its object of analysis, that is
to say it looks for new, instable trajectories for thought and for insight. The task of speculative
aesthetics is to uses those to confront contemporary reality. Although this implies both an
object-driven and context-driven approach to artworks, it most of all implies that we assume
that artworks are oriented toward the future, aimed at transforming or view of the future that
supersedes them. This is what speculative aesthetics can contribute to the study of the history
(and future) of art.
Bram Ieven is a philosopher and cultural theorist. He is an assistant professor of Dutch Studies at
Leiden University, where he teaches and does research on Dutch art and politics from modernism to
the present day.
Tanja Plešivčnik – Perceiving Nature and Environment Through Eyes of
Environmentalists and Aesthetics
The paper explores various aspects of understanding and perceiving nature and environment in
modern era, from environmentalism and environmental ethics to the aspects of environmental
aesthetics. It presents that the prevailing environmental topics and numerous political reforms
often reflect pragmatic focus and theoretical weakness for establishing appropriate appreciation
toward nature and environment. It argues for the need to research foundations of our
perception of nature and environment in order to help us to understand our relationship with
and to build more respectful attitude towards nature and environment.
Since the second half of the 20th century we have witnessed the growing concern for the
environment and nature. Solving environmental problems and ecological crisis is no longer
confined within the field of natural sciences, but has expanded to social sciences and society at
large.
Development of science and technology and increase of environmental topics in the media
enabled environmental topics to become global. Politics, which is often recognized as the
insufficient actor in solving environmental issues, has had a major impact on shaping public
opinion.
Klaus Eder argues that the modern environmental discourse has developed a new ideology. The
main framework for building a new ideology is ecology and ecological discourse is becoming a
common basis for collective actors who direct contemporary public discourse and public space.
In this ideological model series of practical frames, such as an ethical sub-frame and identity
sub-frame, offer new opportunities for legitimating institutions and for creating of consensus.
Moralizing of environmental problems, through the ethical and identity frameworks, is
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becoming a strategic element of ecological discourse, while knowledge of the environment has
greatly expanded.
Various attempts to strengthen adequate environmental ethics, as well anthropocentric as ecocentric point of view, have arisen within environmentalism. However, their arguments and
views are often controversial and insufficiently or pragmatically formulated. Therefore, it still
remains a challenge to formulate adequate modern ethics, that could guide our appreciation of
environment.
Environmentalism has also contributed to a new public awareness of aesthetic appreciation of
nature and environments and to emergence of need for series of theoretical discourses on
environmental aesthetics and to establishment of foundations of aesthetic appreciation of nature
and environments. Numerous questions emerged within the issue: how to define aesthetic
experience of nature, how to appreciate nature and environment, what are the aesthetic
qualities of environment, how to appreciate nature, etc.
Philosophy of environmental aesthetics might be helpful in providing the answers to questions
above. Within environmental aesthetics two main theoretical approaches have developed: a
noncognitive approach toward aesthetic experience (Berleant, Brady, etc.), that focuses on
importance of sensory and emotional responses, perception and imagination and a cognitive
direction (Carlson, Saito, etc.), which emphasizes the importance of knowledge in aesthetic
perception and evaluation of environment and nature.
Within the analysis of the aspects of environmental aesthetics, the prominent question will be
stressed: whether environmental aesthetics might offer a more solid basis for development of
our appreciation of nature and environment or not.
Tanja Plešivčnik, Phd student.
Sue Spaid – Rethinking Positive Aesthetics: How Nature's Fans Avoid
Becoming its Foes
Until recently, most philosophers have regarded nature as a cultural construct, circumscribed
and dependent on human attitudes (Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh Univerrity Press, 1992), p.53.). These days, speculative realists encourage the
adoption of Kant’s orginally mind-independent view of nature as applicable to all nature, not just
wilderness. Positive Aesthetics claims that pristine nature offers positive aesthetic qualities,
while virgin nature is necessarily beautiful. In light of obvious counter-examples such as ugly
wild animals, scary swamps and/or sublime vistas, I consider this view indefensible, though it
may explain why some consider wilderness less a “cultural artifact” and more mindindependent. Framing nature as mind-independent has led some to distinguish Environmental
Philosophy from the mind-dependent field of Aesthetics, even though the latter grants access to
the former. This paper demonstrates that actions bounded by judgments grounded in nature’s
mind-independence tend to enhance human beings’ engagement, whether aesthetic or ethical,
with nature. By nature’s engagement with human beings, I have in mind the way nature provides
for and sustains human beings, and vice versa, which I term “kinship.”
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To show the significance of mind-independence, I review the pro/con arguments underlying: 1)
the mind-independent view of nature, 2) the significance of aspection, however minddependent, 3) the need for assessment tools that guide human action, and 4) the potential for
grounding ethical actions in kinship. This paper supports nature’s mind-independence, which
problematically justifies inaction (and even offers good reasons for inaction). Rather than
employing Aesthetics or Ethics to guide human decisions, inaction grants nature its
independence and prevents human beings from exerting control or assuming jurisdiction.
Human inaction rather risks immoral consequences even when its reach is minimized. For
example, babies born to domesticated or zoo animals typically require human intervention. To
ignore an animal mother’s inadequacies is no less irresponsible than to refuse a human being’s
plea for help. Just as one acts to help an animal mother in time of crisis, it seems wrong not to act
to protect nature from human harm.
When human beings employ aspection to assess and then act to diminish nature’s potential
harms, we seem right where we began, acting as though nature is mind-dependent. Of course,
nature is no more mind-dependent than members of our kin, whose actions we can neither
control nor expect to understand as necessarily reasonable. To what do we appeal to justify the
demanding claim that human beings must act to relieve nature’s injuries? This paper justifies
such claims by appealing to relationships based on kinship which ensure mind-independence,
while keeping human beings tied to their natural environment, and vice versa. Some might make
the extreme claim that we owe more to nature, upon whose sustenance we depend, than to
human beings with whom our daily lives don’t intersect. Since human beings are part of nature,
both are kindred participants in shared eco-systems. In conclusion, the view that sees
wilderness as uniquely mind-independent and exemplary of ideal beauty conceals mankind’s
connection to nature, thus minimizing human beings’ responsibility to nature.
Sue Spaid, American philosopher living in Belgium.
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Panel 2.5. “Michel Serres (1)”
Eugenie Brinkema – Horror After Nature After Love: from Serres to Pontypool
This paper is as much formal performance as analytic of Michel Serres’ figure of the parasite
(para, next; sitos, food; what feeds next to) in mixing the discourse of philosophy with the
contemporary horror film in order to make the claim that, in the critical act of feeding nearby,
awkwardly and in an undetermined relation, horror materializes and attests to the violence that
subtends philosophical claims about relations between noise, parasite, and love.
The victims of the virus in Bruce McDonald’s 2008 horror film Pontypool babble, murmur,
stutter and hitch. This is because the virus in the world coming undone is transmitted through
figures of speech: euphemisms, “terms of endearment,” or “phrases that conflict.” The sign of
infection is a speaker who now fails to speak correctly—or, rather, the mark of violence is a
commuted conversationalist whose speaking has been conscripted to the motile logic of the
virus. If this film gives body and mouth to Burroughs’ claim that language is a virus, it also enacts
a performance of Heidegger’s insistence that we do not speak language, language speaks us.
Instead of allegorizing the noisy plasticity of language, the film formally attests to the mode by
which the discursive out-vitalizes the animal as a practice of wrecking force. The being-alive of
beings is constantly under threat by a too-much aliveness transmitted through viral logic that
feeds off of and destroys bodily materialism; however, what appears in its place is the vitalism of
a non-human but affirmative, generative mode of expanding aesthetic linkages rendered in the
film as infinite word play and cinematic potential.
What interrupts this network of devastation is a figure that bonds the logic of the virus to a
particular conception of Serres’ parasite, a surprising term that ruptures the binaries on which
the discourse of horror as much philosophy relies: living or dead; material against discursive; —
and that figure is love. Serres’ shifting figure of the parasite precisely collapses the dimensions of
the biological and the social on which the film relies, displaying the static and noise that, if it
devastates, also enables certain messages to pass, those that “cannot cross an unexcited
channel.” But the parasite is also coextensive with the dimension that does violence to violence
in Pontypool, pivoting on the signifier “kiss.” If love for Serres is “the third indefinitely excluded,
indefinitely included”, the horror film displays the subtending dimension of this indeterminate,
indefinite relation. (In-betweenness comes at a cost.) Serres’ formulation of resistance—the
claim that there is no (conceptual, discursive) foundation without parasites that come back or
rats that return—manifests in the film as: no love without horror. It is the undecided but
intimate relation between horror and love that undoes the metaphoric potential of Serres’
language, returning to his discourse a brute materiality. The horror film exposes the nonexaggeration of this relation, attests to it as the necessary, offering to the philosophical signifier
a visceral demonstration of what it looks like when a concept lives at the other’s expense.
Eugenie Brinkema, Associate Professor Contemporary Literature and Media, MIT.
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Vera Bühlmann – Cosmoliteracy – the Alphabetization of the Nature of
Thought
With his 1996 book The Natural Contract, Michel Serres has formulated a forceful critique on the
notion of “ecology” – by leaving that word absent from his book altogether. In a 2006 interview,
he explains why: as we are beginning to experience today the actuality of nature in its fragility,
we ought to address nature in juridical terms, not in logical terms, he maintains. The proposal, as
I understand it, is rather straightforward: all things, if they are to be considered according to
their nature, must be endowed with universal rights. Serres imagines the natural contract as the
working out of the terms of these rights, and these terms must be entitled as terms according to
a universal characteristics. The powerful philosophical idea behind Serres proposal is that the
very idea of a determination of a nature of things can be formulated in no other way than in the
terms of this determinations own reciprocal complement, namely an assumed nature of thinking.
With his core notions as presented in The Natural Contract, those of „world-objects“ and
„collectivitysubjects“, Serres wants to address „the progressing and profound transformation of
the status of objects in the process which drives action and knowledge to prosper towards
universality“ (Michel Serres, Revisiting the Natural Contract, CD-Rom). I will engage with the
idea of a Natural Contract by suggesting that we can think about Serres proposal supported by
the auxiliary construction of the following analogy: the universal characteristic’s symbolical laws
(the laws of universal algebra) can be conceived as conserving and articulating the abundant
plenty of sense that can virtually be made to matter, just like Emmy Noether’s Laws of
Conservation conserve and articulate the energy total in the universe that can be articulated,
captured, and organized by mechanical and dynamical transformations. My paper will sketch, in
tentative manner, how we might revisit George Booles idea of Laws of Thought through Serres
notion of a Natural Contract, and how in this interplay we can find hints at how to begin
conceiving an alphabetization of the nature of thinking.
Vera Bühlmann, ETH Zurich.
Lucie K. Mercier – Between Abstraction and Analogy: Translation as Method
The philosophies of translation display a great variability in their object, not only according to
the general theoretical perspective undertaken (experiential, practical, ethical, historical), but
also to the philosophy of language that underpins them. Translation’s current definitions are
extremely polarized: on the one hand the sheer “transcoding” of meaning, from a source-text to a
target-text, on the other hand, a fully fledged experience of the “other” or difference, in a realm
of radical equivocity, which largely exceeds a neat transfer of meaning. In other words,
translation appears to be permanently oscillating between under-determination and overdetermination, in what seem to be profoundly incompatible dimensions. This paper seeks to
reformulate the terms of this debate through the prism Michel Serres’ early works. From the late
1960s onwards, the concept of translation has prominently figured in his works, to designate a
method, in the double sense of a means of knowledge and a way, route, channel of information.
Rather than grounding himself in a pre-established conception of language, his concept of
translation enabled him to expand language or logics into a general theory of “-duction”, first
between forms of systematicity, and later, between more or less chaotic varieties of spaces. The
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passage through the sciences, rather than linguistic theory, enabled him to perceive a continuity
between different translational modes, to formulate translation as a field of variations rather
than ascribing a single definition to it.
I propose to engage with a specific illustration of the notion of “translation as method” by
analysing Serres’ 1962 article on Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, in which Serres performs
a geometrical reading of Foucault’s account of madness. For Serres, translating madness into the
language of geometry constitutes a way of “autochthonous method”, which circumvents the selfevident language of positivism or naturalism. What is verbally non-communicable is translated
into a topology of incommunicability. Foucault’s depiction of the production of otherness and
exclusion is presented as a complex structure that abstracts historical or empirical givens, but
also refracts, dis-locates them into analogical images. With the notion of “border” (bord), Serres
moves through different fields (social, physical, symbolic). In doing so, he does not only unravel
a general structure of othering, he also reconstitutes parts of its experience. Rather than relying
on notions of betrayal, fidelity or hospitality, his conception of translation depends on notions of
continuity, discontinuity, inside and outside; it is thus enigmatically located, I will attempt to
show, halfway between ontology and method.
Lucie K. Mercier, CRMEP / London, UK.
Oxana Timofeeva – Living in a Parasite: Marx, Serres, Platonov and the
Animal Kingdom
This paper mainly addresses to the metaphor of the animal kingdom, as applied to a
philosophical analysis of a human society, particularly in K. Marx (who, in his early
article Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood, speaks about a beast of prey) and M. Serres (who
reconsiders both natural and social relations in terms of parasitism). It performs a peculiar
virtual dialog between Marx, Serres and Hegel about a parasitic structure of nature and society,
and analyses the dialectics of the animal multiplicity, capital, spirit, mediation and universality.
Animality here is a framework for reconsidering such notions as power, exchange, violence,
repression, language, sovereignty, subjectivity, and body. This analysis focuses, first of all, on the
bestial aspects of social ontology. It historically problematizes the question of the end of nature
and the place of philosophy in this process. The question of the end of nature is taken in its
ambivalence: both as the question of finalization/completion (can nature exhaust itself and thus
come to its end at all?), and the question of a certain teleology, where nature encounters history.
Thus, for Hegel, the aim of nature is, after all, to extinguish itself for the sake of spirit, to sacrifice
itself, but do we really deal with its dialectical Aufhebung, overcoming, or, rather, with
repression (of the natural/animal), where that which was repressed always comes back? The
revolutionary thought is particularly interesting in this respect and needs to be addressed.
Referring to the work of Russian modernist writer and intellectual Andrey Platonov (namely, to
his ideas of a tragic dialectics of nature, as compared to a Hegelian dialectics), the paper further
investigates Marxian origins of Russian avant-garde culture with its revolutionary attitude
against nature and discusses the question of technology and artificiality in a framework of past
historical and future potential politics of nature. This investigation involves such categories as
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subjectivity and desire in and after nature, in both philosophical and psychoanalytical aspects,
and briefly outlines a project of animal philosophy as a progressive response to contemporary
theoretical and practical challenges, where, first of all, the problem of materialism, or, rather,
materialisms (be it historical, dialectical, transcendental, agential, or other materialism), is at
stake. What could be the philosophical attitude towards nature of nature today, what is its
subject-matter? And, after all, what can philosophers learn from the animal kingdom?
Oxana Timofeeva, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of
Science (Moscow), an Alexander for Humboldt Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin, a member
of an artistic collective “Chto Delat?” (“What Is To Be Done?”, Russia).
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Panel 2.6. “Politics, Modernity, Art, Institutions”
This panel beings together four papers exploring the political foundations of modern philosophy,
the modern state and ways of resisting the limits that institutions and structures of modernity
impose. The first two papers begin discussion through locating modern European philosophy in
Kant, Hegel, their contemporaries and predecessors. The second two papers activate philosophy
through reading contemporary European philosophy in relation to practices of political
resistance articulated through education and art. A metanarrative speaking to modern
philosophy as a mode of resisting limits of modern, and indeed contemporary life, articulates in
different ways in each of the papers.
Julia Ng – Body, Force, Right: figures of life after nature
This paper proposes that the philosophy of the bodily conditions of possible experience—which
Kant called “pure physics”—finds its most lucid expression in contemporaneous literary
conceptions of the barest minimum of “life.” “Life” first arises as a genuine problem in the late
eighteenth century from Kant’s so-called Opus postumum, whose philologically ambiguous,
fragmentary state and delayed publication demand that Kant’s post-critical “transition” to a
theory of matter be treated as an abortive attempt to grasp the physically real, in a manner
ultimately out of the control of its author. Following the objection raised in Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie that the construction of matter is circular because it presupposes the
impermeability of bodies in order to generate impermeability, Kant seeks a new proof for the
immediately, physically real. His attempt to connect a priori principles of natural science to a
space and time that are not merely empty forms of intuition, however, soon leads him beyond
simply accounting for the possibility of matter’s cohesion, and towards the very possibility of a
transition to physics. The three solutions that Kant proposes—body as simple machine; force as
function of a universally distributed ether filling space and time; the right of physics as a theory
of the subject’s original self-positing—evince his struggle to work out a new theory of matter
based on an awareness that the metaphysical foundations from which he commences no longer
suffice. In his account, minimal “life” presents itself as anything but simple, and rather as the
problem of conceiving life as resistant to its own theorization as a relational category.
As I hope to show, the eighteenth-century concept of “mere life” arises unencumbered by
presuppositions about what life is for, while also departing from the Enlightenment concept of
life as mere machine. In this Kant is joined by the German Romantic poet Novalis, whose
elaboration of the fragment, much studied in literary disciplines, can be seen as a complement to
the Opus postumum. As a genre that by definition is not under the control of its author, the Opus
postumum finds a counterpart in Nietzsche’s Will to Power. Both are concerned with a cosmic
perspective on the meaning of the word “life”—or, as Heidegger put it, “life” as it “bodies forth
[das leibende Leben].” Paired with the poet Stefan George, whose larger-than-life image as the
great hero aligns him with Nietzschean self-mythopoeticization, Will to Power (as edited by
Nietzsche’s sister) represents that which Kant and Novalis resist in their endless fragmentary
hesitation: to bring a utopian possibility of “life” to fruition, and provide this fruit to the German
people in neatly bound editions.
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Dr Julia Ng (Goldsmiths)
Nathan Widder – State Philosophy and the War Machine
This paper will put Hegel’s political philosophy into conversation with Deleuze and Guattari’s
war machine thesis along four axes: a shared understanding of political structure as an
assemblage of desire; competing understandings of dialectical and non-dialectical becoming;
how moments of semblance in the unfolding of Hegelian right offer points where the war
machine can emerge from within State structures; and finally, Hegel’s civil servant as the
mediating figure within the State in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s metallurgist as the figure
who disjunctively relates the State to the war machine. In establishing this exchange, I hope to
demonstrate how Hegel’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s accounts present comparable structures
and ambiguities, but with very different priorities surrounding them. While Hegel aims to
contain the excessive contingencies and multivalent desires that mark the ideals and institutions
of his State’s Ethical Life, Deleuze and Guattari seek to use them to problematize the State’s
purported rationality, and whereas Hegel’s political philosophy culminates with Ethical Life as
the highpoint and precondition of politics, Deleuze and Guattari show that these same
arrangements find their precondition in a fundamental exteriority. Recent scholarship on
Deleuze and Hegel has moved beyond the simplistic viewpoint that Deleuze’s philosophy of
difference has no real relation to Hegel’s dialectical thought, and has demonstrated clearly how
Deleuze has significant affinities with Hegel even while breaking sharply with him, and, indeed,
how Deleuze’s and Hegel’s projects share many philosophical aspirations. With respect to their
political thought, I hope to show that the relation between Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari is
that of a disjunctive synthesis, wherein they are intimately intertwined but incapable of full and
final resolution. The stark antithesis to Hegel often appearing in Deleuze’s and Deleuze and
Guattari’s rhetoric must be understood in light of this much more complex and subtle
connection.
Professor Nathan Widder (RHUL)
Anna Hickey-Moody – The Art of Refusing the Capitalist Bleed
In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari characterize capitalism as the social, material, psychic
machine that ‘eats’ and recodes its own outsides. There is very little that cannot be ascribed
capitalist value and, for the most part, art is a vector of a capitalist economy and system of
production. Later, in What is Philosophy? art is characterized as that which makes an outside. Art
makes us think otherwise, and (like thought) is only able to be accessed by those who have the
strength for it. Art here has a political function. It constitutes an outside to what, in the title of
this paper, I call the ‘capitalist bleed’. Namely, the infiltration of the commodity form into our
desires, our dreams, our libido, our materiality. If art does constitute an outside to market value,
such other worlds are manifested by bodies whose materiality (or ‘natural’ state) refuses
capitalist overcoding. Through examining the work of Candoco Dance and Restless Dance
Theatre, this paper explores probeheads for proto-subjectivities; untimely fictionings of a world
yet to come.
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Candoco Dance and Restless Dance Theatre capture and press into being expressions of worlds in
which bodies, embodiment and the complexities of intellectual actualities can incite curiosity.
Through making percepts, or perceptions of other worlds, that speak through affections of the
spectator for an other, Candoco and Restless challenge and redefine how bodies (including the
thinking body) foster convivial communities of diversity and complexity. Restless and Candoco
expressly create performance art through collaborative processes between disabled and nondisabled dancers. Restless frames itself as “a centre of excellence for disability ethos and
practice” (2010, online). Candoco views its work as “pushing the boundaries of contemporary
dance” in ways which “broaden people’s perception of what dance is and who can dance.”
Material protosubjectivities, new assemblages of bodies generate perceptions of other worlds.
As Candoco’s website states, “We want to excite by being daring, inspire by being excellent and
question by being diverse”. Here we see, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms, that there is no existence
without co-existence and the necessity of being becomes a necessity of “being-with” (Nancy
2000), a being-with that is a mutual exposure to one another.
Art after nature then, is part of the philosophy-art-science-machine through which dividuals are
made subject to a world escaping the capitalist bleed, a world mediated by untimely art as a
politics of resistance. Untimely art makes new publics (Habermas 1962). Art escaping the
capitalist bleed is future oriented and it makes its people, its subjects, through scrambling
capitalist codes in a manifestation of untimeliness that is temporally and spatially modulated.
The materiality of the body becomes part of an aesthetic compound that articulates new
differences and speaks to emerging images of thought. Creating a being of sensation in dance
theatre is a material way of invoking the untimely, of conceptualizing bodies differently.
Dr Anna Hickey-Moody (Goldsmiths)
Aislinn O’Donnell – What is Made Possible by the Space of an Institution?
In this paper, I look at the work of Félix Guattari and Jean Oury on institutional analysis and
institutional psychotherapy in order to re-imagine educational institutions as open,
experimental spaces which aim to cultivate the composition of singular and collective
subjectivities.
As is the case with philosophy, literature on Deleuze and education has tended to underplay the
importance of his collaborations with Félix Guattari, and often pays relatively little attention to
the ways in which genesis of their ideas was influenced by the context of institutional
psychotherapy and institutional pedagogy in France, in particular the work of Jean Oury,
Fernand Oury, François Tosquelles, Fernand Deligny, Célestin Freinet, as well as the existentialanalytic movement in Europe, in particular Erwin Straus, Henri Maldiney, and Jacques Schotte.
(Two notable exceptions are Gary Genosko and Janell Watson.) Guattari developed his ideas
through his sustained engagement as a practitioner and psychoanalyst in La Borde, a psychiatric
clinic established by Jean Oury, in the Département de Loir-et-Cher in 1953, as well as through
his commitments as an activist. Unlike the anti-psychiatry movement headed by Cooper and
Laing, and Illich’s call to deschool society, these theorists and practitioners were not interested
in disestablishing institutions. They wanted to challenge logics of those institutions that were
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characterised by a homogeneous atmosphere, hierarchical structures and technocratic modus
operandi. In their view, such models of institutions foreclosed the possibility of creating
conditions that can lead to real transformations of subjectivity. Institutions, be they educational
institutions or psychiatric institutions should, in their view, be attuned to the real and whole
human being who is there, existing in a singular context, and should seek to care for his or her
singularity and respond to the reality of his or her experience, rather than attempting to fit him
or her into a pre-existing theoretical model or set of techniques.
Deleuze and Guattari sometimes described institutions as stratifying, machines that close off
‘becoming’, rather than as spaces that potentially permit of permanent creation and reinvention. However, as Gary Genosko notes, ‘Guattari focused on how an institution contributed
to the creation of certain kinds of subjectivity [..]’ 10. He explored practices of experimenting with
the institution’s ‘therapeutic co-efficient’ in order to disrupt the ways in which people related to
the institution, in particular the structures of authority therein. A ‘therapeutic co-efficient’ is not
so much concerned with fixing problems or curing a patient, but was directed toward the
broader question of how to live and how to find purpose in life, a concern for pedagogues and
psychotherapists. He called this practice institutional analysis.
Of course, all institutions produce subjectivities, but what kinds of subjectivities do they
produce? Institutions play a significant role in our lives, shaping the subjectivities of the young,
experience and self-understanding in illness and vulnerability, relations to authority, to work, to
sexuality, and the quality of lived experience. If educational institutions are run on principles
that involve homogenization, standardisation and segregation, or if they institute broadly
authoritarian relationships premised upon rigid hierarchies, they tend to contribute to mental
and social alienation. Oury and Guattari are interested in the creation of institutional spaces that
enable the participation of each person as a singular being, the cultivation of new forms of
subjectivity, and the elaboration of diverse ways of being in the world. This means that each
institution has to develop in a singular fashion rather than in accordance with generic models.
This is what is involved in a caring institution. Of interest here is the way in which the
therapeutic endeavour extends beyond the face-to-face relationship to transversal relationships
instituted between different elements such as the corridors of the institution, the kitchen,
gardens, other people – staff, other patients, the local community – as well as encounters with
poetry, gardening, cooking and so forth. The institution is re-conceived as an open space of
experimentation to ‘programme’ chance and allow for encounters that might permit the creation
and emergence of new kinds of subjectivity.
Dr Aislinn O’Donnell (Limerick)
Genosko, Gary (2008) ‘Félix Guattari and popular pedagogy’ in I. Semetsky (ed) Nomadic Education. Rotterdam:
Sense Publishers, p. 62.
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Panel 2.7. “Biopoliticis”
Rose-Anne Sophia Gush – Feminist Actionism: Anti-Art and the Philosophy of
Contemporary Art
This paper will begin with a question of legacy and tradition: that of art’s recent history (since
1958) and the criteria for re-forming or breaking open aesthetic paradigms. Asking how have
artworks destroyed those that have gone before them and attempting to understand these
questions historically and philosophically through the work of Theodor Adorno this paper
should shed light on the mediations of capitalist society.
After Adorno, if what is at stake in the production of art is the dialectic of form and expression,
then, in this paper I will explore this dialectic through a deep engagement with the early works
of Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT. Considering works such as Aktionhose: Genitalpanik (1968)
and Remote… Remote… (1973), this paper will investigate a moment when artists attempted to
redefine the concept of art with actions as “Anti-Art” (during the 60s and 70s) posed as a
negative proposition that can be understood as signifying arts expansion beyond its previous
formal limitations; breaking boundaries in media, in space and in temporality. These artworks,
using the artist’s body as material, as canvas, are textured with pain and violence, a texture that
collides with an advanced technique with new technologies (materials) such as the body and
photography. Through their form (objectivity), they expose the dominance of exchange, and the
oppressive structure of patriarchal capitalism.
In considering VALIE EXPORT’s work, my aim is to highlight the philosophical importance of
art’s mimesis to, and resistance to, “the new”: to technologies that literally glimmer and shine
(film), the particular use of the gendered body and the old philosophical question of art’s
aesthetic semblance [Schein and Erscheinung]. Asking these questions I hope to elaborate an idea
of the capitalist technics of our current moment, by employing an Adornian lens and working up
from the particular artworks, through the various mediations in order to consider the concept of
art, the philosophical implications of art that breaks with Modernism, in order to think
Contemporary art 44 years after Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory of 1970. Furthermore I
hope that this will work towards an immanent critique of the technics of capitalist society (as
totality). I hope also to shed light anew on the continuing criticality of contemporary art, its
history and its legacy.
Rose-Anne Sophia Gush, PhD in History of Art at the University of Leeds.
Olga Cielemęcka and Monika Rogowska-Stangret – Time and Space of
Stigmergic Politics
In this paper we elaborate on the idea of stigmergic politics – which takes inspiration and its
name from a biological phenomenon. Stigmergy is a mechanism that enables communication
and self-organization of living organisms by the means of changes that occur in the surrounding
environment. We use this concept as a model for a new kind of political strategy.
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This project is grounded on two basic assumptions. First, we understand human subjectivity as
an effect of multiple and differentiated, human and non-human factors. We are further inspired
by philosophers who capture subjectivity as formed by power, knowledge, biology, and
technology. We make reference to the work of Michel Foucault and his idea of subjects as
products of power relations, Jakob von Uexküll who pinpointed the dependency of an individual
on its surrounding through the concept of the Umwelt, and Karen Barad and her notion of intraactions as a concept that helps to think objects not as prior to relations, but as intrinsically
entangled in various alliances.
Second, we see the problem of life itself and its recent re-conceptualizations in contemporary
philosophy and feminist scholarship as pivotal questions in today’s politics. The concept of life
that we put forward is based on elaborations of the issue of life itself in terms of biopolitics
(Foucault, Hardt, Negri), “mistake” and contingency (Canguilhem), discourse (Foucault, Butler),
and evolution (Darwin, Grosz).
Making reference to two suppositions mentioned above we describe stigmergic politics through
spacial and temporal aspects entering into a dialogue with “politics of location” and reflecting on
the importance and influence of the concept of time for political strategies (rethinking and
overcoming the past, directing towards the future).
In its political dimension stigmergy serves us as a key concept to think through the idea of
cooperation and grassroots organization which is not limited to human beings, but rather allows
wider alliances that would include humans and non-humans alike. This strategy relies on
reacting to changes and alterations in the milieu, as well as the actions and needs of others, and
on participating in the common work of reshaping the world together with them.
We wish to pose the following questions: what kind of political strategies will become available
if we see the human being as an animal formed by its natural environment, one that is shaped by
a plethora of phenomena, of which it is a part and with which it coexists? What forms of
cooperation, co-creation, and comm(on)passion will become available if we see the sphere of
politics in such a way that it does not refuse to acknowledge the humans’ proximity to the nonhuman, and that it discerns the models of animal forms of organization and collectivity in its
institutions and strategies?
Olga Cielemęcka, Warsaw University, Poland/University of Alberta, Canada.
Dr Monika Rogowska-Stangret, Warsaw University, Poland.
Severin Staalesen – Naturalising Phenomenology: Phenomenology Meets
Philosophy of Biology
The project of naturalising phenomenology faces a seemingly insurmountable hurdle. If, as is
commonly held, phenomenology consists in the search for the transcendental structures of
consciousness, and naturalism consists in the reductionistic explanation of consciousness in
terms of psychology, biology and ultimately physics, then one simply can't have a naturalised
phenomenology because it is a contradiction in terms. The simple answer to this is yes, when
47
speaking in these terms a naturalised phenomenology is a contradiction in terms; but that
doesn't mean we should continue speaking in such terms. There is more to phenomenology than
that which Husserl had to say, and moreover, naturalism is not invariably reductionism. One
could say that these two positions represent two poles of a continuum, with transcendental
phenomenology at one end and reductive physicalism at the other. There are, evidently, a
swathe of positions in between these two extremes.
This has not gone unnoticed. In his 2012 review of this research program Shaun Gallagher noted
that there is more than one fruitful, not to mention justified, interpretation of phenomenology,
and that naturalism need not be thoroughly reductionistic. Indeed in finishing he (tentatively)
suggested that the unification of phenomenology and naturalism might come after we have
redefined both. In pursuit of this point I want to outline a non-reductive naturalism that
promises to be broadly consistent with (a) phenomenological psychology. In particular, I want to
argue that a position broadly construed as pluralist realism can be the naturalistic framework
within which phenomenological psychology is a perfectly legitimate scientific activity. In
summary, this view of nature, which is championed by the prominent philosophers of science
John Dupré and Philip Kitcher, and which recalls Quine's radical empiricism and Goodman's
irrealism, begins by denying that there is a privileged way of investigating the world. Taking the
failure of reductionism in biology as their point of departure, Dupré and Kitcher variously argue
that there are a number of legitimate ways in which the world can be structured and that
physics is only one of them. From this it follows that the ontological structures posited by the
higher order sciences, such as biology and psychology, do not need to be corroborated by
physics; all that matters is that they are empirically verifiable. I want to propose that in this
context the structures posited by phenomenological psychology could count as legitimate
scientific artefacts.
To this end my paper will proceed as follows. After proposing an account of phenomenological
psychology that draws on the works of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, I will then outline and briefly
motivate an account of ontological pluralism drawn from the works of Kitcher and Dupré, and
then finish by clarifying how phenomenological psychology could count as a legitimate scientific
activity within such a framework. Whilst what I aim to achieve falls well short of naturalising
phenomenology, I would like to think that, if successful, it might gesture toward future avenues
to this goal.
Severin Staalesen, postgraduate student at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Nathanja Van den Heuvel – Towards a Corporeal Sport Feminism,
Embodiment, Situatedness and the Problematics of Change
Girls and women have long been excluded from sports due to normative ideas about female
bodies and ‘ideal’ femininity. Their inherent weakness and fragility would contradict the
(masculine) characteristics required for sport, such as aggression and strength. Moreover, in the
past both a woman’s sexuality and her caretaking responsibilities were considered to decline
with sport participation. It is only in the last century- with the Sport For All movement- that
female participation in sport has begun to gain acceptance and encouragement.
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Given the struggle for female sport equality, it is hardly surprising that feminist scholars
working in the field of sport have had an ambivalent relationship with the body. Criticizing crude
biological determinism - which troubles the possibility of change - they advocated that gender
and sexuality are socially constructed, leaving body movement, comportment and the gendered
sporting body under theorized. However, idealisation and normalisation not only affects
interpretations and perceptions of the human body, but there are practical physical effects as
well. Claims about how bodies should execute sporting activities are deeply gendered,
normalizing male able embodiment.
This calls for an articulation of the connection between physical experience in sport and socio
political empowerment.
How do patterns of body movement and comportment in sport produce particular kinds of
bodies. How do these bodies resist and reinforce the power relations that produce them?
Whatexperiences of movement, comportment and embodiment accompany these bodies and
how are they informed by the gender ideology? To respond to these questions in this paper I
examine the limitations of an over emphasis on the discursive and aim to accommodate the
intersections between material corporeality and the social and cultural systems through which
embodied sporting selves are made and experienced. I will bring together different lines of
feminist thought engaged with Merleau-Ponty’s situated lived body as ‘a point from which to
rethink the opposition between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the self
and other’ (Grosz, 1994, pp. 20, 21).
Emphasis will be put on Iris Marion Young’s phenomenological account of gendered body
movement and comportment (Young, 2005), Linda Alcoff’s ‘visible identities’ (Alcoff, 2005) and
Elisabeth Grosz’ and Moira Gatens’ redeployment of the notions of ‘body image’ and ‘bodily
imaginaries’ (Grosz, 1994, Gatens, 1996). Using their insights into the various relations between
the inside and the outside of the (sporting) body I aim to provide the groundwork for ‘a
corporeal sport feminism’.
Nathanja van den Heuvel, PhD candidate Social Political Philosophy at Leiden University and
committee member of the Dutch Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP.NL).
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Panel 2.8. “Phenomenology”
Rachel Paine – The Affective-Narrative View of the Self
I focus on two significant but distinct lines of thought in current philosophical approaches to the
question of personal identity as the basis for developing an affective-narrative account. One is
the view that identity is constituted by a narrative. Marya Schechtman’s account of a value-laden
narrative as constituting the self offers an important refinement of the psychological continuity
accounts originating with Locke. Schechtman argues that memories properly understood are not
memories of discrete events reflecting singular past experiences. Rather, our memories are, for
the most part, summarizing and condensing experiences, such that what we remember is shaped
by what we take to be meaningful, rather than by objective accounts of past experience. This
'taking to be meaningful' gives memory accounts the character that makes them relevant to
constituting personal identity. That we say things about ourselves be reference to memories,
reflect on past experiences, and discuss our memories with others, all reflect the centrality of
memory in the constitution of the self.
I develop this line of thought, answerable to our experience as subjectively-grasped beings, and
well supported by empirical data, to show how these acts of reflection are central to our making
sense of, and so constituting, a self with an identity that involves its past, present, and future.
The other view arises out of considerations explored by Matthew Ratcliffe in his work on the
"existential feelings" that ground our experience of being in the world. Ratcliffe also works with
empirical and phenomenological data that supports his account of our felt presence as the
preintentional ground of our being in a world with others. This account, drawing on Husserl and
Heidegger, develops the idea that we experience ourselves as affectively constituted in ways that
bear on our temporally-extended sense of being oneself. With this affectivity grounding our
emotional and cognitive ways of grasping ourselves, it shows itself to be a central constituent of
personal identity.
While Schechtman’s narrative account does not explore existential feelings, it is an account of
memory that depends upon memory having temporal depth and personal value. Ratcliffe's
existential feelings possess the qualities Husserl recognized in our affective present moment as
containing both the past and the future such that they contribute significantly to this experience
of our past and anticipated future as figuring in our narrative sense of self. Utilizing
Heideggerian insights, the structure of these feelings is bound up with our concernful dealings in
a world of others, through which we experience and express our care for our being.
My aim in this paper is to explore the idea that both existential feelings and narrative are
necessary for the constitution of the self. I argue that not only are they both constitutive of the
self, but they are interdependent: narrative depends upon feelings and feelings upon narrative.
The temporal depth of our existential feelings is the ground and frame for the temporal depth of
our dynamically reconstituted grasp of our own past experience and anticipated future in
narrative subjectivity.
Rachel Paine, Affiliation: Tutor, Department for Continuing Education, Oxford University.
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Christian Skirke – Reflection and its Place in Nature
My paper criticizes recent naturalist accounts of reflection, and outlines a phenomenological
alternative to them. My alternative is inspired by Husserl’s discussion of transcendental
reflection in Ideas (1913) and Cartesian Meditations (1931) as well as by Sartre’s discussion of
self-consciousness in Being and Nothingness (1943).
To situate my discussion, let me begin with the platitude that reflection is essential to
philosophical activity. It plays an especially prominent role in First Philosophy from Descartes
and Spinoza to BonJour and Frankfurt. First Philosophy, in its modern guise, claims that
philosophy has its own autonomous method, and often maintains that all other intellectual and
scientific endeavours depend on this method. Second Philosophy (Maddy 2007), in particular
contemporary philosophical naturalism, rejects this claim to methodological independence and
priority. Whereas First Philosophers take reflection to offer higher-order legitimations for basic
beliefs and desires, Second Philosophers reject the higher-order view as viciously regressive.
They implant reflection in the externalist perspective on knowledge and volition that is typical
for philosophical naturalism (Kornblith 2012). The place of reflection in nature is to make beliefs
and desires more reliable (Evans & Frankish 2009).
On the view I defend here, naturalism is right to complain that the traditional view of reflection
as a higher-order process leads to vicious regress. But this doesn’t entail, I argue, that reflection
takes the role to enhance belief and desire by making them more reliable. This puts into
question whether reflection has the place in nature naturalism assigns to it.
Transcendental phenomenology offers a very different model of reflection (cf. Siewert 1999,
2012). Husserl argues that transcendental reflection doesn’t objectify intentional experiences
from a higher-order standpoint, but makes explicit what enables these experiences. This kind of
reflection can be interpreted as an instance of wide intentionality that is subject-directed, occurs
“in the act” of experience, and gives subjects “experiencing experiences”. Sartre drives this point
further by saying that reflection brings out instability in reflective states such as belief. Overall,
Husserl and Sartre retain one idea from First Philosophy. They treat reflection as the
cornerstone of self-knowledge. Due to their specifically phenomenological perspective on
reflection, however, self-knowledge doesn’t come to stand for introspective higher-order belief.
Rather, it comes to stand for a self-critical attitude.
Naturalists like Kornblith disparage self-knowledge as a superfluous self-congratulatory
appendix to reflection. In conclusion, I want to turn this challenge against the naturalist. It seems
absurd to me to put reflection in charge of reliability. Reflection is designed to highlight that
subjects have stances towards the world, present in how they experience their experiencing,
how their feelings feel to them or how what they see looks to them. These stances allow subjects
to go along with nature as well as to go against nature. Sartre, obviously no naturalist, argued
that reflection brings out ambiguity in belief. Husserl, more ambiguous in his affiliations, insisted
that transcendental reflection went to the core of the phenomenological enterprise because it
fostered self-critical attitudes. Contrary to the place naturalism assigns to reflection,
transcendental phenomenology takes reflection to unsettle apparent certainties. SubjectSEP/FEP 2014 – Philosophy After Nature – Abstracts
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directed reflection shows that the convictions of subjects lack the natural safety that reliable
beliefs or desires exude. Whoever associates reflection with critique, and doesn’t wish to be
caught up in regress, should have a look at Husserl and Sartre, and take the phenomenological
alternative seriously.
Dr. Christian Skirke, Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen, Capaciteitsgroep Philosophical Tradition
in Context, University of Amsterdam.
Naomi Van Steenbergen – The Limits of Direct Attention: a Phenomenological
Account
What if, as philosophers, we are after our own nature? What, in other words, if we desire to
employ philosophy in order to come to know ourselves – our ontological make-up, our
selfrelation, the ways in which we are shaped by our surroundings? Does the specific domain of
self-knowledge place special boundaries on certain familiar methodological tools?
In this paper, I answer this question in the affirmative with reference to a specific philosophical
instrument: direct attention. Direct attention, in my view, is a well motivated topic of
philosophical scrutiny, because it plays a major role in philosophical methods of all kinds, as well
as in what we might call “folk epistemology”. We naturally assume that in order to come to know
something, we need to focus our attention directly on that thing itself. Training our attention on
some object or phenomenon is generally assumed to be helpful – even necessary – in developing
a grasp of it. However, as I shall argue, there are certain limits to what direct attention can
reveal. In this paper, I shall consider a case study in an attempt to draw out the nature and
conditions of these limits. The everyday phenomenon I shall use for this purpose is distraction.
Imagine I have noticed that I have a tendency to get distracted from my work if there is music
playing, and I want to get a better grasp of the process of this distraction.
Imagine further that I plan to do this by means of focusing directly on my distraction, catching it
in the act, so to speak. It is not hard to see what would happen: as my mind starts to wander, I
quickly focus on this wandering, but as I do so, making the wandering the direct object of my
attention, I inevitably alter the action my mind is engaged in, disrupting the very process I aimed
to capture. Direct attention, then, seems incapable of revealing the process of distraction. Or to
be precise: it seems impossible for me to study my own distraction, from a first-person
standpoint, by means of direct attention. This example, I shall argue, reveals a limit to what
direct attention can capture. And this limit seems to be absolute: it is fundamentally impossible
for direct attention to reveal my own distraction to me.
I shall conclude by suggesting that this case study makes visible a sliver of a much broader
methodological issue: that many objects of philosophical interest do not manifest themselves
most clearly or fully when we directly and intentionally observe them. Why this is so and what
methodological alternatives might be available to us are questions that could not possibly be
done justice in the scope of a short paper. Nevertheless, I hope to show clearly that the issue of
the limits of direct attention as a disclosive instrument is a philosophical question well worth
pursuing.
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Naomi van Steenbergen, International Fellow at the New Europe College, Institute
for Advanced Study, Bucharest.
Martin Möhlmann – Do you have the time? Not now!
To the most important parts of Husserl’s oeuvre can be counted his many analysis of timeconsciousness. Derrida (2011/1967) read Husserl’s account of temporality on the basis of three
reference points: first, the temporal structure is described on the basis of the self-identity of the
now as “source-point’; second, there is no simple self-identity of the present, because the
impression is continuous with retention and thirdly, we have to understand perception in a
broad sense. Living from these reference points Derrida wants to show us that non-identity is
introduced into the heart of consciousness, thus pointing to différance as the “ultratranscendental”.
In my paper, I first want to show that Derrida’s deconstructivist reading is based on his reading
of Husserl as an intuitionist. Showing exactly on what early thought on temporality Derrida’s
reading hinges, I show that Husserl himself avoided this thought as soon 1906/07 where he took
distance from what he called the representation theory of time-consciousness.
Subsequently I want to describe an account based upon what Kortooms (1999), called the third
model of the L-manuscripts (published as the Bernauer Manuskripten in Husserliana XXXIII),
that escapes Derrida’s deconstructivist reading. After giving a description of this model I will
first show its particularity as a model of time-consciousness that does not involve a now-point
and as such does not genuinely require the notion of primal impression.
Subsequently, I will defend this model against the criticisms offered by Zahavi (2004) who
claims first, that since fulfilment is characterized by a dyadic structure, the proposed account
will not be able to clarify self-constitution. I shall show that this criticism is unjustified since it is
based upon the premise that pre-reflective self-awareness is founded upon the consciousness of
a primal impression as such. Zahavi’s second concern is that this model objectifies the primal
stream of experience, but it can be easily shown, I believe, that this is based on an unsympathetic
reading.
Moreover, I shall show through phenomenological analysis that the choice of this model to
describe temporality without the use of a primal impression and a corresponding now-point, is
not only desirable but necessary, since experience gives us examples of phenomena in which it is
at the very least ambiguous whether or not the “point of maximum givenness” of a certain object
lies within a “now” of perception.
53
Panel 2.9. “Gilles Deleuze”
Iain Campbell – Experimental Methodology and the Problematic in Gilles
Deleuze and John Cage
In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze & Guattari discuss a contemporary model of art in which aims and
objects, recodings and axiomatics are eschewed, in favour of pure process - “art as
'experimentation'” (Anti-Oedipus p. 371). This notion of experimentation in the field of art
derives from the thought and work of John Cage, who through the 1950s developed a method of
composition in which the composer's intentionality is destabilised by processes of chance and an
emphasis on sounds in themselves, aiming to free sound from the restrictions of a harmonic
formalism which had dominated musical discourse for more than two centuries. In this paper I
will read Deleuze and Cage together to develop a better understanding of what is entailed in the
practice and process of an experimental methodology, as a model of both musical and
philosophical creation.
Citing Ananda Coomaraswamy, Cage puts forward that the function of art is to “imitate Nature in
her manner of operation” (A Year From Monday p. 31), a claim which is central to accusations of
quietism and illegitimate universalism made in critical readings of Cage. To develop Cage's claim
as a response to these criticisms, I will ask - what is the model of 'nature' to which Cage is
referring, and how does it relate to his experimental methodology? My point of approach will be
through the question of the problem – Cage suggests that what in his work is most open to
analysis is the questions he asks, or the problem on which he is working, and for the Deleuze of
Difference and Repetition it is the encounter with problems, or problematic Ideas, “the ultimate
elements of nature”, that forms the basis of thought as a “bond of a profound complicity between
nature and mind” (Difference and Repetition p. 165), against an epistemological model in which
pre-given rules are utilised to provide 'correct' solutions.
The constitution of the problematic Idea is one of the most obscure elements in the philosophical
apparatus of Difference and Repetition, founded upon Deleuze's reformulation of Nietzschean
eternal return and the “divine game” in which all of chance is affirmed (Difference and Repetition
p. 283) - what is clear, however, is that the problem is defined in terms of structure, suggesting a
model of thought that seems to align Deleuze with a kind of modernist formalism, and which
appears to be left behind after Guattari's reformulation of Deleuze's early works through the
concept of the machine. By looking at Cage's work as a practical development of an experimental
compositional methodology, and the role of methods of chance in this development, I hope to
clarify how chance operates in Difference and Repetition, and as such to gain a better
understanding of what is entailed in the 'structure' of the problematic Idea – and in so doing
begin to outline the generative continuity that can be found in the 'break' between Deleuze and
Deleuze-Guattari, as well as the shape that the experimental methodology of Deleuze's
philosophy takes across his writings.
Iain Campbell, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London.
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Mark Jackson – Image of Life
The English translation to Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will has an epigraph prefixed by its
translator, F.L. Pogson—with the author’s permission—that comes from the philosopher,
Plotinus, and aims at encapsulating Bergson’s ‘system’. It reads: “If a man were to inquire of
Nature the reason of her creative activity, and if she were willing to give ear and answer, she
would say—‘Ask me not, but understand in silence, even as I am silent and am not wont to
speak’.” In the second chapter of Time and Free Will, Bergson goes to the heart of the matter
concerning the heterogeneity of sensible qualities of immediate consciousness and
quantification within the mediums of homogeneous space and homogeneous time: “What we
must say is that we have to do with two different kinds of reality, the one heterogeneous, that of
sensible qualities, the other homogeneous, namely space. This latter, clearly conceived by the
human intellect, enables us to use clean-cut distinctions, to count, to abstract, and perhaps also
to speak” (97). In an appeal to the maintaining of a vivification of life, Bergson develops an
understanding of duration, a process-philosophy, in order to unconceal precisely what our
“human intellect” as a “special faculty” makes almost impossible to recognise—the
heterogeneity of sensations: “sensations and tastes seem to me to be objects as soon as I isolate
and name them, and in the human soul there are only processes” (131).
This paper aims at recognizing the legacies of Bergson’s radical temporalising of life in two
milieus. An initial legacy is found in the early lecture courses delivered by Martin Heidegger,
especially WS 1919-1920 and WS 1921-22, notwithstanding Heidegger’s many critical
comments on Bergson’s understanding of consciousness and sense data and the non-radicality
of his conception of time in duration. The paper sketches out Heidegger’s approaches to a
fundamental ontology of life, modified in Being and Time (1927), and again in his 1928 lecture
course on Leibniz, and especially in his 1936 lecture course on Shelling. It is this lecture course
that opens Heidegger’s radical approach to Nietzsche in the four years that follow, especially
with respect to a Nietzschean will-to-power in all things. The second legacy is found in the
philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze that culminate in his final short work, Pure Immanence:
A Life. The paper aims to draw out with Deleuze a way of thinking-along-with both Bergson and
Heidegger inasmuch as they each construe a radical difference with respect to temporalising an
ontology of life. Essential in this discussion is the fact that where Deleuze most engages Bergson
is precisely in his two books on cinema, The Movement Image and The Time Image. The guiding
question becomes: How is cinema not a de-vivification of life, a reification or object-presentation
of life? This implicates the distinctions made by Heidegger between physus and techne, between
cultivation and building, and the distinctions for Bergson between intensity and extensity.
Dr Mark Jackson, Associate Professor of Design, School of Art & Design, Faculty of Design & Creative
Technologies, Auckland University of Technology.
André Reichert – Diagrammatic Crystallizations in Deleuze's Later Works
In my paper I would like to argue, that a diagrammatic practice can be found in the drawings of
Deleuze's works. Some of these drawings can be understood as diagrams (in the sense Deleuze
gives to this concept) that are linked to the creation of the diagrammatic plane of immanence of
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a certain philosophy. So I will argue that these diagrams play a major role not only for
understanding the operations of thought but also for creating them. In my paper I want to show,
that this an interesting access to the understanding of the practice of sketching diagrams in
Deleuze’s works and I want to try to discover its role in the philosophical practice described in
What is philosophy?. In doing so I want to compare it to the use of diagrams in the sciences.
The diagram of “The Baroque House” for example doesn't illustrate the Deleuzian text of The
Fold, nor does it represent the argumentation in Leibniz's Neue Abhandlungen, but it draws
together two metaphors occurring in Leibniz's text. And in drawing them together, the place of
the fold is being discovered, that links the two metaphors together and opens up a new
movement of thought.
In my talk I want to show that Deleuze, in his concept of the diagram, among other places,
develops the relationship between the actual and the virtual on the one hand as actualization of
the virtual in the actual and on the other hand as crystallization. Crystallization is a process
whereby the actual and the virtual fall together and from here the virtual can be changed out of
the actual. Whereas the conceptual practice always affects movements that get actualized
differently, the diagrammatic practice sets the concepts themselves into motion in their
crystallization. It is here that the sketching of diagrams in Deleuze’s works is to be localized.
Dr. André Reichert. Grako 1288 Freunde, Gönner, Getreue. Husserl-Archiv Freiburg, AlbertLudwigs-Universität Freiburg.
James Williams – Nature and the Process Philosophy of Signs
This paper considers the sign in natural relations as defined according to process philosophy. It
is part of a wider project for a process philosophy of signs. The paper responds to ideas from
Uexküll, Deleuze, Ruyer, Simondon, Braidotti and recent work on process philosophy of biology
by John Dupré. It attempts to suggest a model for the philosophical definition of the sign which is
neither tied to human interpretation, nor to ideas of meaning or definitions of language
essentially tied to human use. The paper seeks to argue that the sign adds a dimension of
significance and value to natural processes. It then responds to counter-arguments that the
natural realm is value-independent, such that value must be thought of as strictly human, either
through sensations, affects, capacities or reason. The paper then considers the radical claim that
the idea of value extends to inorganic processes. It argues that this extension is formally possible
and philosophically helpful, but that it does not depend on kinds of panpsychism. In conclusion,
the paper considers different models for the process philosophy of signs in terms of moral
decisions and hierarchies of values. It suggests that such values must be immanent and local
rather than organised in terms of a Platonic model of levels of value organised directionally
towards more general and abstract higher forms. The paper closes by responding to the
criticism that values must be thought on a cosmopolitan rather than local level if we are to
respond to the global dimension of natural crises.
Professor James Williams, School of Humanities, University of Dundee.
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Panel 2.10. “Michel Serres (2)”
Georgios Tsagdis – Revolutionary Parasitology: The (st)age of the Plague
“My beast, my age, who may
look you in the eye,
join the vertebrae
of one century to another,
with his blood?
Blood of creation gushes
from the throat of the earthly:
only the parasite shudders,
at the gates of the new days.”
-Osip Mandelstam
The Age, 1923
When a song heralds a new world at the threshold of its transformation a sole, last remain
occupies the poet: the parasitic shudder; the tremor of what does not seem to share in this new
life, perhaps what never shared in life at all. Yet; what life, which age?
The parasite attaches itself to the host, to the past, discovers its own demise in their death. The
parasite shudders at the inauguration of the future for it is nourished by the age of its host. The
parasite is age, age is parasitic. Perhaps this is the only difference: the parasite, unlike man,
doesn’t kill. If it was to decide death, it would choose (aging) life. The parasite laments. Man
glorifies.
Yersinia pestis. The parasite of the plague, the parasite of parasites carried by fleas, carried by
rats, carried by ships. Carried across Europe. This parasite Artaud refuses to acknowledge. His
plague, one of the theatre’s doubles next to metaphysics and cruelty, is a disease without a
catalyst, the catalyst but the disease itself.
Artaud delivers a transformative phenomenology of this disease, an account destined to
inaugurate a new age on stage, yet also for those attentive enough, for those standing at the
threshold, a new stage of thought of all that is living, all that is of the earth, made of humus, the
humble human and the animal, life and life—one becoming the other.
This phenomenology Artaud is quick to designate as “spiritual physiognomy” in order to
subsume under it the spiritual etiology he has decided for plague and theatre. Spiritual does not
refer here to the hand of god, but to a natural law of action and reaction, a law however of
distance, a law without the in-between. Here Artaud errs. For the plague to enter stage and be
succeeded as in the Augustinian narration by the theatre, for this double to drive gestures to
their limit, reforge the nexus of the visible and the invisible, to restore the conflict, the
Heraclitean polemos of life and of enjoining symbols, the parasite, the verminous catalyst is
required.
57
It would take more than four centuries for the French Revolution to repeat the leveling cleansing
and re-announce the end of servitude by renouncing feudal serfdom, as the Black Death of the
14th century in many lands had dictated.
In the present paper, deeply indebted to Michel Serres, I propose to follow the thread of this
revolutionary logic, catalyzed by verminous intervention and question the dichotomy of
life/death-man/parasite, by retracing the contours of these figures in view of the possibility of
the future, of a new age where man is transformed through the un-will of the parasite.
Georgios Tsagdis, Currently PhD in Philosophy under the supervision of Prof. Howard Caygill Centre
for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University.
Chris Watkin – Michel Serres’ 'Great Story': From Biosemiotics to
Econarratology
From the five volumes of his Hermès series (1968-1980) and through to The Natural Contract in
(French original published in 1990), Michel Serres has argued that the origins of human
language are rooted firmly in the rhythms and calls of the natural world, that information theory
is derivative of fluid mechanics, and that all life is alike in receiving, processing, storing and
emitting information. For Serres, ‘nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant,
an animal, or the order of the world’. This radical lifting of the qualitative barrier between
human language and channels of information processing in what was previously called the
‘natural’ world underpins a new account of the human, an account which reveals the dichotomy
of nature and culture to be a secondary distinction between many interweaving and ultimately
inextricable modes of information processing that differ only in their relative scale.
This detailed and longstanding work in biosemiotics helps provide a powerful theoretical
platform for Serres’ more recent project, pursued over the course of four seminal but as yet
untranslated texts from 2001-2009 (L'Hominescence, 2001; L'Incandescent, 2005; Rameaux;
2007; Récits d'humanisme, 2009), in which he elaborates a new narrative account of the universe
and the place of humanity within it, a narrative which he calls the ‘Great Story’ (‘Grand Récit’).
Serres’ econarrative throws down a challenge to develop new ways of thinking beyond the
dichotomy ‘nature and culture’ with its attendant notion of a qualitative divide between the
human and non-human worlds, exposing the dichotomy as increasingly threadbare and arguing
for a new humanism that knows nothing of a qualitative opposition between the natural and the
cultural. Serres notes that, at the time when it was still admissible to discuss nature and culture
separately, a person might be thought cultured if they had some working knowledge of four
thousand years of history, beginning either in Greece or Mesopotamia. With the Great Story we
now have fifteen billion years behind us and that, Serres maintains, must change a person’s
thinking completely or, to translate him literally, a person who understands her place in the
Great Story ‘no longer has the same head’.
In this paper I argue for the importance of Serres’ Great Story in staking out the incipient field of
econarratology, a field in which ‘nature’ is not ventriloquized in human language but can, in a
non-metaphorical way, tell its own story. I also use Paul Ricœur’s account of narrative identity to
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expose, and offer a remedy for, a potentially problematic internal inconsistency in Serres’
econarrative, an engagement which opens the way, in return to extend the powerful tool of
narrative identity beyond its anthropocentric straitjacket. Serres’ econarrative of the Great Story
is not only a timely challenge our assumptions about the uniqueness of human language within
the natural world, but also a call to rethink the very categories within which those widely-held
assumptions make sense.
Dr Chris Watkin, Convenor: French Studies, School Honours Coordinator, School of Languages,
Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Monash University, Melbourne.
David Webb – On the Milieu and Nature: from Canguilhem to Serres
Georges Canguilhem’s studies of medicine, health, the normal, and the pathological propose a
conception of health quite distinct from that of a fixed ideal. Like Nietzsche, Canguilhem regards
health as a capacity to rise above the challenges and threats that life presents, and to do so by
setting new norms, rather than by returning to old ones.
Having introduced Canguilhem’s conception of health in terms of normativity, I examine it via a
reading of two of his essays: ‘Health: a Popular Concept and a Philosophical Question’ and the
chapter ‘The Living Being and its Milieu’ from The Knowledge of Life. Canguilhem understands
the relation between the living being and its milieu as creative, and as mediated by the needs of
the living being. There are two aspects to this creativity. First, that the living being creates its
milieu by selecting from a multitude of stimuli just those which are significant for it in meeting
its needs. In this way, a single physical space can simultaneously support many different milieus.
Second, that it is creative in finding new ways to satisfy its needs, or to modify them. There are
some interesting conclusions to draw from this, not least with regard to politics. However, I
want to draw on the work of Michel Serres to examine a possible limitation of Canguilhem’s
account.
For Canguilhem, health – the capacity to be normative – depends on the condition of the
individual living being , and on the scope that exists for it to innovate in the creation of its milieu.
A living being whose options for how to satisfy its needs are greatly reduced is unlikely to feel
healthy. Constraint, and the capacity to overcome it, is therefore an important consideration.
In The Natural Contract, Serres also considers the importance of constraint. He describes how
our occupation of the earth has brought us to the point where we continually confront its limits,
and where this confrontation poses a deadly threat to us all. Contemporary needs, he writes, are
contributing to the re-birth of nature by promoting global connectivity, and thereby
undermining the localism that previously regarded the relations of dependency between the
living being and its milieu as relatively simple and contained. If nature is a network of bonds ,
the satisfaction of a need (and the correlative creation of a milieu) may produce multiple effects
beyond our immediate control. In this situation, new forms of constraint arise, and the threat to
life is all the more acute. To survive in this environment, writes Serres, requires “virtuosity.” To
close, I will set out what this involves, and assess the extent to which the localised dependency
that Serres regards as superseded in fact characerises the sense of milieu as Canguilhem
understood it, thereby underpinning Canguilhem’s conception of health and normativity. Insofar
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as this is the case, Serres’s notion of virtuosity is a valuable addition to that of normativity as a
condition for health.
Prof David Webb, Awards Leader in Philosophy, Chair of the Faculty Research Degrees Committee,
Faculty of Arts and Creative Technologies Staffordshire University.
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Panel 3.1. “Technology and Humanity”
Tista Bagchi – Philosophy after Human Reproductive Technologies
Natural scientists and philosophers alike have sought to interpret nature, and now
biotechnologists working in different domains are seeking to change specific aspects of it. These
two spheres of activity have now given rise to a fresh set of problems with reference to
philosophy of science. The central claim of this paper is that questions about human
reproductive technologies demand to be situated squarely within this set of problems. First,
there are certain presumptions about the evolutionary differences between humans versus
(non-human) animals that inform policy decisions relating to genetic engineering and more
specifically to reproductive technologies. Thus, there are ethical bans on human cloning in an
overwhelmingly large number of nations of the world, but a significantly smaller number of
nations – and cultures – have comparable bans on the cloning of animals, based to a significant
extent on the “lower” ranking of animals in evolutionary terms. Based on this observation, it is
tempting to conclude that it is only within the framework of evolutionary biology that there is
such a differential hierarchy set up between humans and “lower” animals. However, significant
communitarian traditions that do not recognize the theory of evolution as a valid account for the
creation of life (e.g., the Biblical Judæo-Christian tradition, the Islamic tradition with
qualifications, and certain localized Hindu communitarian practices as well) also recognize
ontological differences between human beings and all other forms of life (occasionally lumping
one or more kinds of animals with plant life as well). Thus a hierarchy-based view of the human
versus animal distinction is widely prevalent in regions of the world that are now practicing and
further experimenting on assisted reproductive technologies for human beings, though it is by
no means universal (as Bagchi 2012 [forthcoming, JIPR] has argued in the context of certain
Indian – not only Hindu – cosmogonies). Sober (1994, 2001) has explored the issue of causation
in the domains of biological ontogeny and genes (as contrasted with environmental causes) with
special reference to human biological parameters. His view of causation is, overall, in harmony
with the arboreal evolutionary model at whose apex human beings are placed as of now. This
paper claims, however, that this view of causation needs to be augmented in terms of a very
different view of the interrelations among living species, viz., the “rhizome” model of
interactions and coexistences among species as transferred from Deleuze and Guattari’s (197280) “rhizomatic” view of interrelated developments. In the context of the philosophical issues
arising from the practice and development of human reproductive technologies, the paper finally
points towards a need for the recognition of both Sober-style derivational/arboreal directions in
which to proceed – as, in the study of biolinguistics, language is studied in terms of treestructure derivations (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002, Hinzen 2006) – and a more symbiotic
(“rhizomatic”), ecologically sensitive account of the contextualization of such reproductive
technologies (as also claimed for language ecology by Mufwene 2001, 2008). “Post-nature”
philosophy, it is proposed, thus needs enrichment from both perspectives vis-à-vis human
reproductive technologies.
Professor Tista Bagchi, Department of Linguistics, University of Delhi.
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Ashley Woodward – Economy, Ecology, Organology
This paper brings together the themes economy, ecology, and organology in the thought of JeanFrançois Lyotard and of Bernard Stiegler. While in many respects Lyotard and Stiegler present
comparable analyses of libidinal economy and technics, they are at odds concerning the values
underlying desire. This allows a clarification of what is at stake in thinking about a broad range
of issues concerning economics, nature, and social organization.
The first part of this paper will trace the links between ecology, economy, and technics - which
Stiegler theorises with the concept of general organology - as they were developed throughout
the twentieth century in what might be called a ‘general cybernetics.’ These links were made
possible by relying on a model of forces derived from Freudian metapsychology (the drives),
themselves modeled on thermodynamics, and crucially on information theory, insofar as it
employs the thermodynamic concepts of entropy and negentropy. This model, in various forms,
underwent various ‘analogical transcriptions’ between different fields and disciplines in the
twentieth century, from the botanist Arthur Tansley’s “Great Universal Law of Equillibrium,” to
Forrester’s notion of “feedback,” to Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, to Howard and Eugene
Odum’s application of cybernetic principles to ecology, to the application of cybernetics to
human social systems by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, and so on. In general, what has
been privileged in economy, ecology, and organology is the idea of a self-regulating system in a
constant state of equilibrium. The idea of nature itself has largely developed on this model,
despite empirical evidence against it.
The second part will demonstrate how Lyotard’s thought reacts to this ‘general cybernetics’ by
critically reconsidering the values which underlie the drives operative in libidinal economy, and
by analogical extension, in general cybernetics. Lyotard, it will be shown, effectively ‘revalues’
the drives by reading Freud through Nietzsche, giving value to the death drive (read as the
Dionysian and a repetition of affects akin to the eternal return) as the motive force for artistic
creativity, political transformation, and everything which he terms ‘event.’ For Lyotard, nature
must also be rethought from this perspective of revaluation.
The third part of the paper will outline Stiegler’s work on the libidinal economy operative in his
theory of organology. For Stiegler, technics are a pharmakon, both poison and cure, and these
are themselves the two tendencies of libidinal economy, Eros and the death drive. In contrast to
Lyotard, it will be argued, Stiegler’s work on libidinal economy remains closer to Freud’s higher
valuation of Eros as the constructive force of individuation (the Apollonian), a position
associated with the values of ancient philosophical traditions such as Platonism, Epicureanism,
and Stoicism. In short, while Stiegler privileges Eros, the binding of the drives, and, it would
seem, ‘negentropy,’ Lyotard privileges Thanatos, the unbinding of the drives, and entropy.
This comparison thus allows a stark critical contrast. It will be argued that - while their explicitly
endorse such positions - Lyotard errs on the side of instability (risking total revolution and
anarchy), Stiegler errs on the side of stability (risking a reactive and conservative position).
Nevertheless, both offer extremely valuable perspectives, and each may be read as a corrective
to the other in our thinking through what is at stake in our thinking of economy, ecology, and
organology.
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Dr. Ashley Woodwar, Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of Dundee.
Renato Silva Guimarães – Surmounting the Crisis of Man-to-Nature Relations
with Oswald de Andrade and Vicente Ferreira da Silva
Still relatively unknown, Oswald de Andrade and Vicente Ferreira da Silva create a philosophy
(in the first half of the 20th century) that, between European intellectual production and the
magical reality of Brazil, outlines profound insights. With Brazil as mirror and backdrop, their
reflection on humankind and nature touches on epistemological problems that aim not only for a
critical reconstruction of, but also a reconciliation of fractures: it seeks to decolonize thought
(questions taken up by B. Latour, Viveiros de Castro, I. Stenghers). In Brazil, the Christian and
existential currents of thought «... agree on certain points: the denunciation of technical
civilization, an increasing desacralization, the crisis of the ethic principle, and the recuperation
of a sense of the sacred as an instrument for surmounting the crisis of man-to-nature relations. »
On the one hand, we have Oswald de Andrade, according to whose ideas «the Tupi and African
paganisms reside as natural religions in the soul of the converted, whose unconscious substrate
makes up part of the ancient right to vengeance in tribal Tupi society 11». The Oswaldian project
didn't seek a heroic rupture with the rational values of modernity, but tried to find, in a past
destroyed by Brazilian civilization, the possibility of restoring a non-hostile relationship
between culture and nature, through the pleasures of nudity, the defense of oral culture, and the
demystification of death and of power. On the other hand, we have the valorization of the supranatural and the critique of occidental history as a progressive substitution of «natural
things» from Vicente Ferreira da Silva 12. For this philosopher, the artistic creation of new myths
is capable of transforming man beyond anthropocentrism.
We are particularly interested in two key points tied to After Nature :
A. Oswald de Andrade’s poetic program, the technologized barbarian liberates himself from the
power of coercion.
B. Vicente Ferreira da Silva’s idea that the foundation of civilization as an orgy where the man is
confused with the nature.
Together they challenge us to rethink the techno-industrial paradigms and the return of the
poetic vision, the Earth become Gaia.
Renato Silva Guimarães, Docteur Associé,Université Paris 1 (Panthéon Sorbonne) UFR d’Arts
Plastiques et Sciences de l’Art Centre Saint Charles.
« O paganismo tupi e africano subsiste como religião natural na alma dos convertidos, de cujo substrato
inconsciente faz parte o antigo direito de vingança na sociedade tribal tupi.» NUNES, Benedito " A antropofagia ao
Alcance de Todos ". In ANDRADE, Oswald – Do Pau-Brasil à Antropofagia e às Utopias. 2éd. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização
Brasileira, 1970. p. xxvii.
12 « Our author signals the points of departure from an anthropocentric interpretation of the cycle in which we live:
a)the idea of illumination of the Being in Heidegger; b)the thesis of the transcendence of art in Epicharmus; c) the
affirmation of ex-centricity in artistic creation in Rimbaud. », MARCONDES CESAR, ibid., p. 81.
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Chantal Bax – Levinas and Nancy on Social Identity After Technology
This paper contrasts the views of Levinas and Nancy on the potential of technology to destabilize
or even eliminate the division of the human world into different - and divergent – social units; to
undo “the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers” (HGU 232), in the words of
Levinas. I will do so by focusing on two of Levinas’ and Nancy’s shorter texts.
Writing on the occasion of the first manned journey into space, Levinas’ 1961 essay “Heidegger,
Gagarin and Us” takes issue with Heidegger’s negative assessment of technology. According to
Levinas, technological developments will precisely be able to counter Heidegger’s infamous
emphasis on place and rootedness, with all its troubling implications. Gagarin has after all
showed us that it is possible for a person to exist beyond any local or socio-historical horizon in
an entirely undivided space. Technology, Levinas maintains, is able to “wrench us out of the
Heideggerian world” (HGU 232-3), both literally and figuratively.
After pointing out that Levinas’ entire project can be explained as an attempt to free the subject
from its socio-cultural confines, I will qualify Levinas’ faith in the uprooting potential of
technology. That is to say, regardless of his claim that the time has come leave any kind of Blut
und Boden thinking behind, Levinas seems to have been unable to break with his own
enrootedness. This can be seen in his account of femininity in Totality and Infinity and in his
denigrating interview remarks on Palestinians and Asians. That Levinas was apparently unable
to see every particular other as a horizonless individual sharply contrast with his arguments in
“Heidegger, Gagarin and Us”.
Proposing that this is precisely due to Levinas’ wanting to deny, rather than redefine, the role of
roots and communal identity in human life, I will then turn to Nancy. While he agrees with
Levinas that the climate of Heidegger’s thinking should be left behind, he opts for a
deconstruction rather than a renunciation of human situatedness. This is reflected, not only in
Nancy’s sustained effort to rethink the concept of community, but also in his account of
modernday technology, which he describes as ‘ecotechnics’ in his 1991 essay “War, Right,
Sovereignty – Technè”.
In the course of this reflection on the Gulf War, Nancy initially introduces the term ecotechnics to
invoke the economic and technological processes that have produced a world order in which
multinational companies rather than sovereign states are the main loci of power. He however
goes on to argue that ecotechnics thus understood hides the true – and more positive – meaning
of this development. By spreading globally, any notion of sovereignty actually empties itself out,
and rather than looking for a figure to replace the role of the nation and the people, this space
should simply be kept empty. Taking ecotechnics seriously as the very spacing of the world, we
can see that today’s world is one “of the intersection of singularities, not of the identification of
figures” (WRST 140), Nancy maintains.
I will end my paper by examining whether Nancy’s horizontal rethinking of technology and
identity avoids the risks of Levinas’ attempt to leave all horizons behind.
Chantal Bax, received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam, currently working on a new
research project at the Radboud University in Nijmegen.
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Panel 3.2. “Rationalism”
Max Schaefer – Phenomenology as Radical Critique of Reason – From Kant to
Henry
This paper seeks to clarify that phenomenology, far from being a canon or fixed set of positions
laid out in this or that thinker, stands as a developing methodology bent on a critique of reason
or 'rational consciousness.' I will thus demonstrate that, though not a static or settled
movement, phenomenology is characterized by a relative continuity, which stretches from
thinkers before and after Husserl.
I work toward this position by showing how certain principles fundamental to phenomenology
develop from the self-critique of reason provided by Kant. I argue that Kant's attempt to
establish the "self-knowledge" of human reason" is troubled from within by his determination of
inner and outer sense (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Reason, A XII). I seek to further explicate how,
in Kant, the mind's immediate inner sense of itself (via the linear succession of time) presents a
negativity or indeterminacy, which Kant struggles to unite with the determinacy of outer sense
(i.e. the permanence and position of external spatial relations) (Garth Green, The Aporia of Inner
Sense, 88). In so doing, I argue that Kant's self-examinaton of the limits of synthetic knowledge
hinges on the division of inner and outer sense, yet the possibility of synthetic knowledge
requires their unification.
I argue that the phenomenology of life proposed by French thinker Michel Henry itself needs to
be seen as, in part, a response to the difficulties inherent to Kant's determination of inner and
outer sense, and thus as a further development of phenomenology as a critique of rational
consciousness. I maintain that since Kant's negative conception of the infinity (or invisibility) of
time -- i.e. as an irreducible ecstasy or gap in human knowledge, which directs us to secure everfurther evidence of our position in the interminable beyond of the world -- cannot account for
how it is that the same objective unity characterizes both the understanding and sensibility,
Henry performs a radical reduction, which lays out a genetic account of how transcendence (and
thus all concepts, judgments, etc) first come to be as such.
By positively grounding the negative succession (i.e. intentional reference) that haunted Kant's
project in a non-intentional and non-cumulative experience of the living present (as
potentiality), I argue that Henry reveals how critique necessarily begins in a detachment and
self-forgetting, which ex-poses us to the nature and limits of the things themselves.
Will Stronge – Nature Qua Exception: Caught in the Nets of Reason
This paper does not in fact seek a new philosophy of nature, but instead aims at highlighting a
particular conceptual structure often produced through such philosophical endeavour. By
identifying the logic of capture implicit in philosophies of nature, and the parallels this has with
political strategies, I will indicate other potential paths that do not implicate nature within a
regime of knowledge (meant in a literal sense), i.e. they do not deploy nature.
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Critiques of nature qua exception have been influential in European philosophy; Adorno and
Horkheimer trace the concept in relation to the Enlightenment attitude – here nature serves as
the foil of reason and its presupposition, acting both as an adversary and the objective condition
of rationalization itself; for Foucault, sexuality takes on the role of natural exception – sexuality
is the dark, unknown, instinctual aspect of the human that we are compelled to seek out and
express. In both cases, natural being is the opaque code to be cracked – requiring, concomitantly,
new networks of power to be introduced.
I wish to introduce another figure into this lineage – Giorgio Agamben. In The State of Exception
Agamben speculates that the political “strategy of the exception, which must ensure the anomic
relation between violence and law, is the counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at
capturing pure being in the meshes of logos”. I wish to expand upon this intriguing association,
hopefully proving its validity in the process, through a reading of a philosophy of nature, namely:
Schelling's Naturphilosophie. What we find is that the 'net' of the understanding both includes
nature as its necessary object (Being), but must also exclude nature due to its primordiality – its
'unprethinkability'. The inclusive exclusion at work here is an important concept for Agamben's
political philosophy. It demonstrates the dangerous possibilities that follow from the peculiar
binding of nature to the human so as to paradoxically distinguish the two inseparably. From here
we get the binaries between the city (political order) and nature – constitutive of the ban (and
therefore also of the wolf), between human and animal – constitutive of the 'anthropological
machine', and between bios and zoe – crucial to the political logic of the West. These are some of
the stakes of the theoretical pursuit of nature that I would like to bring out in the paper. With
respect to this, Agamben's political philosophy, I claim, should be read as a critique of the
deployment of natural categories.
Thus, the Kantian question as to the possibility of a philosophy in pursuit of nature qua nature
(i.e. the totality of being), is again posed – this time in a political sense. As a regulative ideal,
nature does not just regulate our experience, as it does for Kant, but conditions our political
practice. Therefore, I will attempt to argue both that nature has been, and will most likely
continue to be, a political concept in disguise, and, following from this, 'bare' nature can perhaps
only be depoliticised if we abandon the term entirely.
Will Stronge, Associate Lecturer at UWE Bristol, UK.
Michael C. Cifone – Call of Nature; Science in Despair to Become a Self. A
Propaedeutic on the Possibility of a New Science of Nature
The year 1900, we are coming to realize, was a crucial year in the history of science, if not in the
history of civilization itself. It was the year of the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,
the year of Max Planck’s paper on the quantum hypothesis and also the year in which Gregor
Mendel’s work was rediscovered. It was also the year in which Nietzsche died, and the year of
the publication of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, which helped launch what would
later be called “phenomenology”. And starting roughly in the year 1900 (something we only
know now, in retrospect) world population began an unprecedented growth curve and, along
with it, came a sharp increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
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Freud challenged the purely neuro-mechanistic understanding of the human psyche by
introducing meaning as an essential psychical determinant; Planck challenged the possibility of
achieving a completely deterministic, causal-mechanical understanding of the elementary
processes of nature; and Mendel showed that there must be biological structures in an organism
that are the physical determinants of inheritable biological traits (“genes”). In each case, as the
science unfolded from these epochal discoveries, human subjectivity—the human as such—
became the crucial issue, as if, though science had since at least Descartes disavowed it, it was
destined to return, a kind of “return of the repressed” (to borrow a psychoanalytic turn of
phrase). In quantum theory, by the 1930s, in was clear that the unquestionable dichotomy
between measured and measurement, subject and object, must be encountered as a problem
intrinsic to physics. In the ensuing field of biogenetic science, the manipulation of the genome
would make humanity itself—with its science—a component of biological determination, an
organism capable of redefining and reorganizing itself at the biogenetic level. And now it would
seem as though humanity not only had the power to manipulate both its own genetic structures,
and the elementary processes and structures of nature itself, but it also has succeeded in setting
off a chain of events that would threaten its own survival as a species (not to mention the
survival of many others). The “subjective” component of science simply refuses to go away.
The only “functional” science, I claim, was the “science” of psychoanalysis, the one scientific
pursuit that managed to allow subjectivity itself to stand forth as both observer and observed, as
subject investigating and object investigated. In this way the “science” of psychoanalysis
managed to avert precisely the crisis that, in 1938, Husserl was to define as a crisis of
“rationality”: since science historically has sought to eliminate human subjectivity from its own
foundations in favor of purely mechanical forces and laws, this makes it “irrational” in the sense
that it ends up effectively denying its own condition of possibility. Yet, psychoanalysis is not
generally regarded as a “science” (precisely because of its “subjective” character), and the
Husserl-inspired battle to rectify science’s “irrationality” (the search for the proper place of
human subjectivity or “consciousness”) is largely fought by philosophers or philosophicallyinformed scientists who basically accept the framework established by Husserl and subsequent
generations of phenomenologists.
Following Lacan’s neglected attempt to establish psychoanalysis as a science, I argue that the
crisis of science should not be understood phenomenologically, as a crisis of “rationality”, but
should be understood psychoanalytically. I claim that science is forced to determine itself as a
self, yet it despairs of doing so precisely because it would seem to contradict its status as a
universal, “objective” practice. Thus, science suffers a crisis of faith in its transcendental Ideals,
which are now being challenged from within science itself (and because of this, we should also
consider the crisis from a Nietzschean point of view: as a crisis of nihilism).
Understanding that the crisis in science is really best understood psychoanalytically (the
collapse of its transcendental sense of security and the ensuing need to determine itself as a self
without a transcendental ground), we see that the root-cause of the crisis is, following Heidegger,
the very “representational” standpoint it has long adopted, which standpoint entails the
elimination of the subjective in favor of the so-called Archimedean “view from nowhere”.
Overcoming its representational form, I argue, allows science to fully determine itself as a self,
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which leads to the suggestion that, rather than persisting in its current late
Cartesian/Newtonian form, we are able for the first time to consider a truly new possibility for a
new science of nature, an anti-representational science prefigured in Lacan, whose philosophical
foundation can be found within the work of Heidegger and Deleuze. I therefore end with a
discussion of the necessary transition from the Lacanian to the Heideggerian and Deleuzian
standpoints, and a discussion of what determinate form this anti-representational science of
nature should take. My claim is that its form should be musical, and therefore we conclude with
some thoughts in this direction.
Dr. Michael C. Cifone (Independent Scholar and Adjunct Professor, University of San Francisco).
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Panel 3.3. “New Materialism”
Pamela Mackenzie – The Fourth Kingdom: Ascension of the Plastisphere
“Animal, vegetable, or mineral? I hadn't thought of that before. Maybe this little thimble belongs
to a kingdom all its own. The fourth kingdom. The kingdom of plastic.” -The Kingdom of Plastics,
General Electric, 1945, short educational film.
It is all around us: in the oceans, in the land, in our homes and in our hearts - and now it can even
support life 13. So why is it that this crucial component of modern society is also one of its main
antagonists? And, more importantly, what are we going to do with all that plastic?
Derivative and disposable, plastic is seen merely as the by-product of human activity, neither a
part of the sacred “natural” realm nor afforded the dignity of artisinal production. As plastic
compounds proliferate and appear in increasingly discomforting quantities and locations, its
disruptive presence is causing a strong animosity among all environmentally conscious
crusaders. With the new ideology of ecology positioned in defence of the natural, our shared
cultural enemy is this new artificial adversary. But how fair are we being to what is merely the
byproduct of consumer society – is plastic just misunderstood?
Plastic suffers from a diminished sense of importance and value due to its secondary status as an
alien, artificial material. I will argue that this is a position that deserves a critical reassessment.
My paper explores how this perceived difference shapes cultural discourse and attitudes around
plastic objects while aiming to demonstrate the integration and agency of this organic polymer.
Taking seriously the insights of various contemporary philosophers theorizing about the
integrity and autonomy of nonhuman objects, I will negotiate plastic as an actant, intruding in
various cultural spaces of meaning.
The central problematic motivating my project is a critique of the commonly-made distinction
between the natural and the artificial. By insisting on holding certain materials apart from
others on the grounds of their production by humans, an unnecessary ontological gap opens
between that which is considered natural and that which is instead merely other or derivative.
This radical distinction obscures the impact of industrial production and ignores the new
ecosystems that continuously emerge within and through the 'non-natural'. Object oriented
ontology (ooo) plays a crucial role in reframing the plastic debate. The emphasis in ooo on
critically reassessing the ontological framework through which objects are understood can allow
a revaluation of plastic as more than merely an inexpensive second-class substance.
This paper will take a brief tour through the historical production and reception of plastic and
then address the use and re-use of plastic in contemporary artistic production. Plastic art, or
PLART, can powerfully reconstruct this adaptable material as a viable and valuable cultural
material, while deconstructing the obfuscating natural/artificial distinction. The liminal organic
plastic recreations of artists like Portia Munson, Tony Fehler and Aurora Robson (see attached
“Plastic heart gives dad Matthew Green a new lease of life” BBC Health (August 2nd 2013), Accessed April 7th 2014
and Eric Zettler, “The 'Plastisphere:' A New Marine Ecosystem,” The Ocean Blog (July 30th, 2013), Accessed April 7th,
2014.
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images) synthesize an uncanny artistic backdrop for a critical analysis of the separation of
human production from the natural realm. Pamela Mackenzie,Concordia University, Montreal.
Katharina D. Martin – The Digital Milieus and Their Material Entanglement
In addition to dichotomies such as nature/culture one finds itself between the digital and
material as an opposition which just has been located as such. Nevertheless, I agree with Hansen
that “we are now in a perfect position to analyze the deep correlation between embodiment and
virtuality and also to take stock of how much the virtual has been absorbed into everyday life.” 14
In this paper I will investigate the milieus of the digital and material, and their specific
entanglement, and undergo the attempt to revalue embodied and digital associations. I argue
that digital invisibility, lacking a direct political cause and central organization, involves flows of
molecular forces.
For Deleuze and Guattari is „The notion of the milieu [is] not unitary: not only does the living
thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another, they are
essentially communicating.” 15 When the software of learning algorithms, are made part of
systems for automatic decision making, an autarkic interaction between computer programs is
established. They develop their own stratified digital milieu. In the case of the computer vision
algorithm of the face detection software, one has a method to act within the digital milieu. The
technique of “dazzle painting” on ships during World War One can be applied to the face, causing
the face detection algorithm to end his search.
These digital and mathematical imperceptibility can be understood as a transcoding. The images
of a dazzle painted face present a different code, disturbing prevailing power relations. Although
the black and white makes the face digitally undetectable, it stays recognizable within the
human perception. By engaging with the digital language actual material change has been
established. The face painted black and white, witnesses the communication through strange
milieus. This way of dealing with the semiotics of algorithms shows an apprehension of the
digital mode of existence.
Katharina D. Martin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Aesthetics and Art Science at the
Academy of Fine Arts, Münster.
Paul Rekret – Material Entanglements and the Question of Separation
This paper seeks to examine the political connotations of the increasingly prevalent invocations
for a ‘new materialism’ in contemporary social theorising, and for concepts of agency in
particular. New materialist theories are premised upon transcending or overcoming the limits
which social constructivism is said to place upon thought; the reifications involved in the
division of subject and object, mind and body, human and animal or even organic and inorganic.
These divisions are said to amount to a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human being at
the centre of social existence. The dominance of social constructivism and of philosophies of
14
15
Marc Hansen: Bodies in Code, Interfaces with Digital Media, 2006, p.x
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, 1987, p.313
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finitude more broadly, are said to engender a relativisation of the discoveries of modern science
and to neglect the materiality of the human, as well as other bodies. Moreover, this neglect of
materiality is claimed to produce an incapacity to engage the imbrications of twenty first
century economic, technological and environmental crises and crucially, limits our conceptions
of political agency insofar as the latter is reduced to a property of human actors. For new
materialist theorists, once material factors are given due agency can no longer be located merely
with a human subject and consequently, the category of agency is extended beyond intentional
human action to encompass bodily affects, non-human objects and even inorganic matter.
Accordingly, the scope and scale of the political are fundamentally altered.
While new materialist theories insinuate an ontology of contingent and dynamic material
entanglements that acts as a prototype for a progressive posthumanist politics, they tend to
locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the
terrain of epistemic error or ethical hubris. This paper contends that new materialist theories
thus risk falling short of their own pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material
conditions of the separation of the mental and material and that the failure to do so has
profound repercussions for accounts of political agency. Drawing on recent developments in
postgenomics, reproductive technologies and biometrics, this paper seeks to re-frame the
question of the separation of the mental and material beyond the terms of ontological
affirmation characteristic of new materialism to a terrain of collective political contestation.
Dr. Paul Rekret, Assistant Professor of Politics, Richmond American International University.
Petra Klusmeyer – Sound and Time
Sound is ‘not excactly a phenomenon’, according to Jean-Luc Nancy (2007, p. 20); instead, it
forgoes manifestation. This notion, which he refers to as evocation, stems from a different
reasoning: sonorous appearance is not about manifesting presence (‘naming’) but rather acoming-to-present (‘impulsion’ (Ibid.)) as ‘sonorous presence arrives’ (p. 14) – sounds and resounds. ‘Evocation’, he writes, ‘[is] a call and, in the call, breath, exhalation, inspiration and
expiration'; it ‘summons (convokes, invokes) presence to itself’ and in this sense ‘supposes it
already established' (p. 20). For Nancy, ‘listening is passing over to the register of presence to
self, it being understood that the “self” is precisely nothing available (substantial or subsistent)
to which one can be “present,” but precisely the resonance of a return’ 16 (p. 12). Hearing, indeed,
listening does not immediately implicate a subject; subjectivity convokes in the encounter with a
sonourous event in space and time. ‘Sound-space’ and the listener, I will emphasize, coalesce in a
shape-taking activity immanent to the experience of taking-shape. 17 (Here shape is to be
understood to allude to an evanescence, or evanescent intensity, perhaps a semblance of form.)
The word ‘return’ in French means ‘renvoi’ and enfolds, according to Charlotte Mandell, several meanings, such as,
‘return (as in return to sender, return a gift), send back (a parcel), repeat (a phrase or passage in music), refrain, refer,
allude back’ (Translator’s Note in Nancy 2007, p. xi).
17 Jane Bennett and William Connolly (2012) confirm ‘the ontology of Becoming’ as the fundamental experience of
change and flux in the world; they do, however, acknowledge the ‘uncanny fact that individuated entities emerge,
collaborate and manage to withstand the hustle and flow for a while’ (The Crumpled Handkerchief, para. 4). Here
reference is made to Walt Whitman who declared: ‘The shapes arise! Shapes of doors giving many exists and
entrances’ (Whitman 2002 citied in Ibid.) In a sense, the above-mentioned ‘shape-taking activity’ gives articulation to
a force arriving into presence, perduring over time as something but not quite as concrete as the door Whitman
suggests but a material formation nonetheless that arises in the event.
16
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In other words, sound taking place in a space when apprehended in-and-by itself (when sound
resounds, in reverberation) or when apprehended in-and-by other (in the act of hearing, which
supposes a listening subject) bears the perceptible (aisthetic) 18 condition for an ‘edgy meaning’
(Nancy, p. 7); sound as fringe, perhiphery of sound-space where sense is found in resonance
only: a refrain, self-relation between sense-feeling and sense-meaning. Resonance (from the
Latin verb resonare, ‘to sound again’) affords the condition for a re-sounding past, present and
immanent future in recipricol motion; presence thus established through clamorous dynamics:
amplified force, either noisy or silenced. 19 Always already between, sound suspended in time as
vibrational relation effectuating as ever-resonant presencing to ‘self’. Thus, evocation anticipates
the ever-resonant presencing, summons presence to itself, however, ‘straining between the two:
time and sonority, sonority as time and as meaning’ (Nancy, p. 20).
Let us briefly consider the two: sonority and time, or preferably sound and time. 20 In fact, sound
as time, as above-proposed, understands a sonic event not in terms of being which implies a
stable identity, reified objectness; instead, this way of thinking sound (also shared by Christoph
Cox (2006)) advocates its occurrence as procedural becoming. Thus, sounds are not placed
‘time-objects’ constructing the event of its happening. 21 The appearance, or coming-to-present of
sound resounding (to echo the above) rather follows the notion of evocation, that is, it summons
and invokes, arrives and remains: ‘[…] the sonorous appears and fades away into its
permanence’ (Nancy, p. 2). Following this logic, permanence is resonance in the making (‘being
18 The word ‘aisthetic’ stems from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning ‘esthetic, sensitive, sentient’, which in turn was
derived from aisthanomai, that is, ‘to perceive, feel, sense’. (cf. Hayles 2014). In 1735 Alexander Baumgarten coined
the term ‘aesthetics’ with new meaning in the German form Æsthetik (modern spelling Ästhetik) and circumscribed
aesthetics as the ‘science of sense knowledge’.With his conception of aesthetics, Baumgarten sought to reassess the
entire area of sense experience, which had been deemed inferior to rational knowledge by the metaphysical and
logical traditions within Western philosophy since ancient times. […] But aesthetics comprised much more than what
we usually understand by sense perception. It included, according to Baumgarten, the whole range of sensibility that
was bypassed by modern science, such as taste, judgment, imagination, experience of the fine arts and beauty, and so
on. Especially the judgment of taste in its wider meaning as the “sense of beauty” or the ability to judge according to
the senses (and thus not according to the intellect), was to be the central object of aesthetics (Braembussche 2007, p.
2).I use the term here to emphasize the sensory dimension of aesthetic experience as intense – to the extent that is
‘devoid of interest’ (cf. Shaviro 2009). This thinking aligns with Alfred N. Whitehead's conception of an aesthetic
ontology: ‘Beauty is an event, a process, rather than a condition or a state. The flower [or the sound] is not beautiful in
itself, but beauty happens when I encounter the flower [sound]’ (Shaviro 2009, p. 4).
19 ‘The resonance effect [acoustics] refers to the vibration, in air or through solids, of a solid element. The production
of resonance requires a relatively high acoustic level and a concordance between the exciting frequency and the object
put into vibration. Modal resonance refers to the phenomenon of standing waves in a three-dimensional space’
(Augoyard et al. 2006, p. 99). For instance, between two parallel walls with even surfaces a system of standing waves
is established, in which sound waves that are in exact phase will add together to produce stronger amplitude levels,
often observed in urban environments. In contrast, standing waves that are inverted, i.e. exactly 180 degrees out of
phase, will inevitably lead to sound cancelation; meaning, two waves produce a null wave (no net change in pressure),
which results in no sound (cf. above ‘silenced’). Qualifiers such as ‘noisy’ or ‘quiet’ are unique to the particularities of
the human hearing system and result from the brain’s interpretation of incoming sense data. Whether an acoustic
signal is considered pleasant or unpleasant is dependent on the individual’s experience of a sonic phenomenon,
whereas the signification of terms such as ‘noise’ or ‘silence’ is largely based on cultural context and in part personal
taste. In everyday use, the word resonance is often falsely interchanged with sonic effects such as reverberation or
echo. Resonance, interesting to note, is not only found in acoustics but can be considered ‘a general physical
phenomenon’ (Ibid.) which occurs in all periodic sinusoidal movements, typically in mechanics, electricity, optics, and
acoustics.
20 Sonority refers to a particular quality of a sound, whereas sound when understood in a general sense can take on
any quality or meaning that results from the situation in which it comes to pass, e.g. the rustling of leaves in contrast
to the background hum of a city.
21 Cox writes that ‘music constitutes a domain of beings, time-objects that spatialize sound and that mark a pulsed
time, the tempo of narrative and the subject, forms with beginnings, middles, and ends’ (2006, p. 9).
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as resonance’ (p. 12)). The word permanence will conjure ideas such as stability, continuity,
perpetuity … infiniteness. The nature of sound (hence resonance) invites this temporal rationale;
common sense tells us to think sound as event, something that occurs over time in order to be
heard, felt, apprehended – especially when contemplating sound in terms of audible, tangible
occurrences (anthropocentrically speaking). However, resonance and likewise permanence –
although immedialty linked to temporal notions – cannot exist (materialize) apart from space.
(Not just ‘us’ but wasps, hammers, stars, snowflakes and electrons are bound to space, albeit
not a space but all possible spaces or in Deleuzian parlance: multiplicites, virtual and actual.)
This concern provokes a ripple, an impulse to think sound anew: On the one hand, there is the
proposition that supposes sound’s ontology to be that of time (sonority as time); on the other
hand, resonance requires space, sound enlivens space and place. Although we cannot strictly
speak of a discrepancy between these positions, that is, sound and time on the one side and
sound and space on the other. My intention is to draw out a complementary position, an inbetween, a middling situatedness, which lends an ear to sound in correlation to the notion of
intense spaces and the ‘marking’ of temporalities. Here Nancy’s concept of evocation returns: a
call and, in the call, breath … movement, the resonance of a return … inhalation … exhalation …
one … the other: Sound as noumenon, one. And not exactly phenomenon, the Other. Can we
conceive of an in-between? Perhaps something akin to the enigmatic breath, real (this we shall
know for sure) yet wonderous; ‘it’ breaths ‘me’.
Petra Klusmeyer is a PhD Candidate at Media and Performance Studies, Utrecht University and
teaches at the University of the Arts, Brehmen.
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Panel 3.4. “Derrida and Nancy on Politics”
Simon Glendinning – Derrida and the Question of Religion Today
While Derrida urged us to think a certain “beyond” of European modernity, his work is
profoundly attentive to the formation of the modern European understanding of the world and
the significance of our lives. In a text called “Faith and Knowledge”, written in 1994, he turned to
modern secularity, and suggested that we should approach it through the lens of a thesis in Kant
on the connection between morality and religion; a connection that will disclose the modern
European public space as both secular and Christian. It is a thesis in Kant that Derrida will use as
an astonishing interpretive key to the question of religion and the religious revival today, a key
also to the character of radicalised fundamentalisms which he already saw developing. The
Kantian thesis could not be more simple, but Derrida asks us to “measure without flinching” the
implications of it. If we follow Kant we will have to accept that “Christian revelation teaches us
something essential about the very idea of morality”: namely, that “in order to conduct oneself in
a moral manner, one must act as though God did not exist or no longer concerned himself with
our salvation.” In this paper I discuss Derrida’s sense of the implications and challenges of the
global spreading out of this modern European understanding of the proper form of action and
deliberation in the public realm.
Simon Glendinning, Professor of European Philosophy, European Institute LSE.
Richard Iveson – Being without Life: Fully-Populated, Worlds Beyond the
Organic
Whether explicit or implicit, the living/nonliving binary structures practically every aspect of
our existence. However, through a rigorous reading of Jacques Derrida against himself, this
paper argues that the trace, by definition, is the constitutive condition of everything temporal,
that is, for anything and everything that endures upon the scene of presence and thus necessarily
deconstructs the living/nonliving dichotomy. Consequently, I argue, there emerges a differential
relation of the living-nonliving within every existent, a relation which disallows unthinking
instrumentalization while at the same time opening up potential spaces for the emergence of
truly radical posthuman bodyings.
Further, it will be argued that reading Derrida alongside Manuel DeLanda’s ‘structure of the
space of possibilities’ enables us to understand how Darwin’s mechanistic materialism instead
ensures the emergence of a nonlinear history, that is, as proceeding by way of mutual
interactions between components that produce accelerating feedback loops and thus nonlinear
and nonhierarchical bifurcations.
Moreover, insofar as it is entirely irrelevant whether the process in question is composed of
molecules or of living creatures, if it refers to cerebral auto-affection or the replication of ancient
crystalline structures, a history of ‘fully-populated’ worlds thus becomes possible. In other
words, by reading DeLanda’s gradient together with Derrida’s iterability it becomes possible to
account for both change of whatever kind, and the possibility of nonlinear innovations emerging
from apparently closed systems of repetition. Such ‘fully-populated’ worlds are, that is, worlds in
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which every existent is subject to the trace and thus to abrupt phase transitions at critical points,
and hence to what Derrida describes as the spectral modality of ‘I don’t know.’
As such, I propose a thoroughly materialist deconstructive praxis as involving a necessarily local
ethics and politics, i.e., an emergent, nonlinear engagement with the space of possibilities that
must always concern itself anew with specific historical, contextual, and institutional material.
Taking as an example the question of whether a laboratory researcher requires ethical clearance
to work with bacteria, I will attempt to show how an implicit living-nonliving binary, in
continuing to function, inevitably shuts down a more complex, layered approach as well as
prohibiting the potential emergence of radical ‘new’ beings. Further, through the same example,
I show how the refusal to acknowledge a living/nonliving distinction itself presupposes a
living/nonliving opposition that is perhaps even more problematic, opening as it does the way to
an unfettered instrumentalization in which the mode of a being’s existence is irrelevant – an
irrelevancy based upon a reduction of life to nonlife.
Finally, by way of a conclusion, I briefly reconsider Freud’s life and death drives – with the
former as the libidinal drive towards death (quietude), and the latter as the instinct to return to
the inorganic (fragmentation) – as a tension understood as a differential cathexis which accords
both with Derrida’s spectrality and DeLanda’s gradient.
Dr Richard Iveson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
University of Queensland.
Leda Channer – The Resistant Monarch; Jean-Luc Nancy on Hegel’s Sovereign
In his 1982 essay, ‘The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch’, Jean-Luc Nancy writes that the
Monarch is a “singular complication in Hegelian theory” 22 and that “the position of The
Monarch, as a position, escapes the deduction that necessitates it.” 23
For Nancy then, there is something about Hegel’s monarch or sovereign, something about its
position, that means that it escapes, eludes and resists the very thinking that would seem to
require it. For Nancy, attention to the function of the Monarch would therefore reveal something
about Hegel’s thinking in general, indeed it seems that Nancy could be implying here that it is the
Hegelian problem par excellence for those seeking to identify a kind of fundamental internal
resistance in Hegelian thought.
A number of questions arise from this initial reading of these citations. What is meant by
deduction here; is the implication that the speculative method as a whole is resisted in the some
way by the Monarch, or just its application to the specific consideration of constitution of The
State? Is it only when assessing the position of the Monarch that this resistance or escape would
be discernable? Is it possible to assess the Monarch without a sense of position or is the Monarch
unthinkable without a position? If the Monarch does indeed resist or escape the speculative
method as a whole, then how does it do this whilst appearing at the same time to affirm it? Is
Nancy, JL “The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch” in The Birth To Presence, (trans. Mary Ann and Peter Caws,
Stanford University Press, 1993 (First published in Social Research, 49, No.2, Summer 1982)), p. 113
23 Ibid, p.137
22
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Nancy saying that there is something about dialectics and the speculative method that presents a
dual appearance of confirmation and resistance? Would the insight of a double appearance
imply a strategy for (re)reading Hegel?
In this paper, I will consider these questions in the following way. The main focus of the paper
will take the form of an explication Nancy’s essay ‘The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch’ and
my own reading of the function of Hegel’s Monarch in the concept of The State. In order to enrich
this explication I will also propose a reading of Nancy’s subsequent and perhaps more famous
essay ‘The Inoperative Community,’ in which he offers the engagement with union that he
considers Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Rights to have attempted but not completed, as
later commentary and reflection on the earlier essay. In this way, I hope to offer both a
description of a moment of recognition of resistance in Hegel and a reflection upon it.
Leda Channer, PhD Researcher, Associate Lecturer: Ethics & Social Philosophy, History of
Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Jacob Bittner – Nancy's L'Intrus: Testimony to the Disappearance of Biopower
in the Excess of Life
My paper explores Jean-Luc Nancy's L'Intrus (trans. The Intruder) as a testimony to how the
modern regime of biopower (Foucault) produces a life in which this very regime is however
itself in question. I read Nancy's L'Intrus as a subject-oriented philosophical testimony to a life
which has been radically reconfigured after a traumatic event (a heart-transplant). I claim that
this life follows a logic of the supplement (Derrida) in the sense that Nancy's text establishes an
aporia with respect to the occurrence of this event. It is the mechanisms of biopower which
produce this event in which, following Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer (which Nancy refers to), a
'qualified life' becomes nothing but its 'bare life'. However, I argue that the mechanisms of
biopower, in producing this life, have effected a life that itself transcends its causes and, turning
against the biopolitical paradigm, produces a new simultaneous governing regime in which it is
not only life that is at stake, but the very mechanisms of biopower as such. From the perspective
of the conceptual framework of Claude Romano's L'événement et le monde (trans. Event and
World), this life has, on the one hand, neither undergone an event so that this event would have
been left behind in a new established world and, on the other hand, this life is not a life of a pure
event without a world since, in this life, precisely the possibility of events as happening to 'me' is
in question. Nancy's text thus stages 'life proper' as a world-establishing 'event', but in such a
way that this world-establishing event is itself at stake in a world that is established as unestablished since its contingency is absolutely exposed. This paralogic is made possible by
Nancy's text that through a dispersion of mutually interpretative propositions produces itself as
a 'living' philosophical argument. Nancy's 'life proper' exceeds its conditions in the biopolitical
questioning of - 'is this life worth living?' - since it adds itself as an implicit question which is
prior to any decision of the 'worth of life'. This question is: 'Is this life still life in the sense that it
is possible to measure its worth? What is left – what has survived – what is yet to come?' In this
way, L'Intrus becomes visible as a testimony to a life 'after nature', a life, which is at stake as a
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life that might not be biopolitical life; that is to say, as a life in which not only this very life is in
question, but its living possibility of this very questioning is in question.
Jacob Bittner, PhD-Candidate, King's College London.
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Panel 3.5. “Spinoza (1): Self-determination in Spinoza:
Interdisciplinary Approaches”
This panel presents works in progress from the AHRC Equalities of Wellbeing project
(www.equalitiesofwellbeing.co.uk). In this project we aim to find out how Spinoza’s philosophy
and architecture give us a distinctive way of understanding equality through proportion, and
how this can have impacts on the wellbeing of individuals and communities. In this panel, we
will present some of our current research focusing on individual wellbeing.
Does Spinoza – who appears to deny the existence of the self, and who argues that all
determination is necessitated – suggest that individual wellbeing is achieved through selfdetermination, and if so, how? Are we autonomous, self-determining individuals, or is our being
better understood as being constituted by relations? How are those relations rooted in our
bodies – defined by “proportions of motion and rest” – and the “equality” between our bodies
and our minds? How should our understanding of the indeterminate character of “God or
Nature” affect our sense of our own determinacy? These are some of the questions we will
address in this panel.
Peg Rawes – Spinoza's Geometric Thinking and Housing Rights
Spinoza's Ethics presents a philosophy of human and non-human geometric relations which I
will suggest constitute a valuable way of addressing issues of social justice and selfdetermination in the UK's modern housing market crisis. In the text Spinoza elaborates how
the individual's rights to self-determination are constituted as a relational set of material and
psychological powers or expressions. We might therefore call it a radical geometric thinking in
which the rights of the individual, and the implied ethical responsibility of the community to
individuated wellbeing, are understood in terms of asymmetric proportions – i.e.
as differentiated
and dissimilar
–
because an individual's
capacity
to
selfdetermination is inherently related to proportion. The individual is constituted as a differential
'ratio', a proportionate set of relations between our mental and physical attributes which are
enhanced and activated, or 'depressed' and pacified in proportion to human and non-human
attributes (and which I consider to anticipate Foucault's social, technological, juridical and
subjective biopolitical regimes).
I will then examine these ideas in relation to the crisis in contemporary UK housing, suggesting
that there is a correspondence between the powers/capacities identified by Spinoza and aims to
generate greater equalities of wellbeing through post-war social housing design and the Parker
Morris Space Standards of the 1960s/70s. Concerns about the non-human, non-natural built
environment (especially provision of affordable social housing and ecological urban design) are
now firmly back on the agenda with calls for improved minimum space standards and
ecological housing design in the current UK Government's review of housing design standards. I
will consider this with respect to wellbeing rights for the most dissimilar communities, the
vulnerable, disadvantaged and socially excluded, including the elderly and low-income.
Dr Peg Rawes, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
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Christopher Thomas – Spinoza’s Problem of Indeterminacy and Melville’s
Bartleby
The protagonist of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the scrivener” famously refuses selfdetermination through his repetition of the phrase I would prefer not to. When Bartleby retorts
in neither the affirmative nor negative to the proposition of him reengaging in the business of a
bartender, he responds through his infamous refrain but then adds that he is not particular. It is
on this very point of the un-particularity of Bartleby that this paper will create an encounter
between the protagonist of Melville’s story and the substance-mode relation as theorised by
Spinoza in Part I of the Ethics. The Bartleby-Spinoza encounter will allow us to think the relation
of substance and mode as a relationship of inextricability, asymmetry and, more crucially,
necessary confusion. Through an initial Deleuzian reading of Melville’s character, Bartleby’s
radically indeterminate phrase I would prefer not to will be understood as a formula that does
not carry the predicable references that everyday language is based upon. This lack of reference
to determinable things, absence of action with a view to an end, and indifference to both
affirmation and negation provokes a problem of comprehension for all who encounter Bartleby;
a problem that echoes the relation of the infinite-finite in Spinoza.
Bartleby, I will suggest, is presented to the reader as a substantive entity without determinable
qualities or teleological agenda. With this, Bartleby occasions the problem of the determination
of the indeterminate from a finite position–a position that is always involved in fictive ends and
determinate things. Bartleby’s formula, then, in expressing no particular thing but rather the
totality of things, suggests a method of determining a self that is based on an understanding of
indeterminacy; which is to say, only through indeterminacy may we engage in a true
relationship with the totality of things of Spinoza’s universe.
Christopher Thomas, PhD student in Philosophy, University of Aberdeen.
Caroline Williams – Thinking Nature after Spinoza: Towards a Morphology of
Subjectivity
In recent years, philosophers and critical theorists have continued to deconstruct or displace the
question of the subject. This endeavour is most clearly present in the contemporary turn to
materialism where a new regard for mutations of nature, together with the agency of things,
demand novel ontologies to describe them. How might we understand this sustained interest in
agency alongside what appears to be the elision of the subject? How, moreover, can this field of
material processes be separated from the production of subjectivity entailed by it? My paper
responds to these questions and explores how one might continue to think about the genesis of
the subjective, and processes of political subjectivation, within perspectives that appear to
neutralise it. I enlist Spinoza in this task since it is to his philosophy that one must turn to locate
an important philosophical source for such positions.
My paper begins to sketch out a possible frame for thinking about the morphological structure of
subjectivity. I wish to utilise an idea of morphology in order to draw attention to the complex
formation of a malleable, mutative, polysemic subjectivity. As a study of the forming and
deforming of things, the concept of morphology allows one to map the various layers and
connections between concepts and processes that press upon and create subjectivity.
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After Spinoza, any ontology of substance must be understood not as the figure of a sub-stantia as
ground, or foundation of all forms but instead as a field of variations or differences. Indeed all
individual things in Nature, regardless of their species or form, must be understood as
modifications of this infinite variability of substance. Not only does this ontology unbalance, and
then destroy, all accounts of the subject as imperium in imperio, it also entirely transforms the
way in which one might come to theorise and understand the register of subjectivity. Indeed, I
suggest here that it is precisely the absence of the concept of the subject in his philosophy that
incites Spinoza to think its morphological basis and political reality. In order to make sense of
this paradoxical claim, I will trace in Spinoza’s philosophy the operations of an active, nonsubjective conatus. It is perhaps this concept that is most helpful to understanding a
contemporary morphology of subjectivity.
Dr Caroline Williams, School of Politics & International Relations Queen Mary, University of
London.
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Panel 3.6. “Posthumanisms”
David Roden – On Reason and Spectral Machines: an Anti-Normativist
Response to Bounded Posthumanism
In Posthuman Life I distinguish two speculative claims regarding technological successors to
current humans: an anthropologically bounded posthumanism (ABP) and an anthropologically
unbounded posthumanism. ABP holds:
1) There are transcendental constrains on cognition and agency that any entity qualifying as a
posthuman successor under the Disconnection Thesis (Roden 2012, 2014) would have to obey.
2) These constraints are realized in the structure of human subjectivity and rationality.
One version of ABP is implied by normativist theories of intentionality for which original or
“first class” intentionality is only possible for beings that can hold one another publicly to
account by ascribing and adopting normative statuses (Brandom 1994). If Normativist ABP is
correct, then posthumans – were they to exist – would not be so different from us for they would
have to belong to discursive communities and subscribe to inter-subjective norms (See
Wennemann 2013).
Normativist ABP thus imposes severe constraints on posthuman “weirdness” and limits the
political implications of speculative claims about posthuman possibility such as those in my
book. In this paper, I will argue that we should reject Normativist ABP because we should reject
normativist theories of intentionality. For normativism to work, it must be shown that the
objectivity and “bindingness” of social norms is independent of individual beliefs or
endorsements. I will argue that the only way in which this can be achieved is by denying the
dependence of normative statuses upon the particular dispositions, states and attitudes of
individuals; thus violating plausible naturalistic constraints on normativism.
In response, I will argue for an anthropologically unbounded posthumanism for which all
constraints on posthuman possibility must be discovered empirically by making posthumans or
becoming posthuman. This implies a similarly unbounded posthuman politics for which there is
no universal or reason or transhistorical subjectivity.
David Roden, Research Affiliate and Associate Lecturer in Philosophy, Open University.
Danielle Sands – Returning to Text: Deconstructive Paradigms and
Posthumanism
Deconstruction was a textualism and it is only textualism with its accompanying scandalous horror
of idealism that might allow us to retrieve thought from the myopias of post-humanism.
Claire Colebrook
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That Claire Colebrook’s deliciously unfashionable endorsement of a textual deconstruction
sounds vaguely shocking testifies to quite how démodé this particular philosophical paradigm
has become. From pre-millennial cross-pollination between theory, literary studies and
European philosophy, we have witnessed as philosophy has dissolved these links, favouring
instead: a politicised philosophy (Badiou, Žižek); a turn to ‘reality’ (Speculative Realism); or a
focus on life, affect and the body (Agamben, Braidotti, Haraway). Whilst Žižek was perhaps
overhasty to conclude that “the Derridean fashion is fading away” (Žižek, 11), a blunted version
of Derrida’s work has often proved a convenient counter against which new schools of thought
cut their teeth. In turn, keen to render Derrida’s work relevant and radical – and battling on
another front against Derrida’s religious defenders – Derrida scholars have repackaged Derrida
as a ‘radical atheist’ (Martin Hägglund) or a posthumanist (Cary Wolfe), consigning textual
Derrida to the forgotten past. No doubt there is a sigh of relief from the philosophers’ quarter as
they are given leave to push the unyielding questions of text, writing and genre to one side,
however I contend that the question of text in deconstruction remains unresolved, and that as
Colebrook asserts, it is of continued significance.
In this paper I shall do two things: first, retrace the idea of text in Derrida’s work, retrieving it
from its unhelpful designation as part of the ‘linguistic turn’, and assessing, for example, whether
text is a synonym for différance, a name for “radical heterogeneity” (Ryan, 103), or an “anarchic
dispersal” (Colebrook, 196). I shall also ask how it might complement or illuminate more recent
paradigms, such as life or plasticity, which are thought to have supplanted it. Secondly, I shall
employ the notion of text to consider the relationship between deconstruction and
posthumanism. In their different ways, both Colebrook and Braidotti look to sever the ties
between deconstruction and posthumanism, the former perceiving the posthumanist project
misguided, blind to its own intrinsic humanism, and the latter disavowing deconstruction’s
“linguistic frame of reference” (Braidotti, 30).Nonetheless, posthumanist thinkers such as Cary
Wolfe endeavour to combine the two, imbuing posthumanism’s response to contemporary
philosophical, ethical and ecological problems with deconstructive reflexivity. Employing a
specifically textual deconstruction, I shall evaluate whether this union is convincing.
Dr. Danielle Sands
Nathalie Trussart – Foucault’s Notion of Knowledge-Power: Towards
Speculative Critique
Since Michel Foucault coined it, his notion of “knowledge-power” has been reduced to two
identities under which he was classified: on the one hand, the identity of thinker of human
sciences and, on the other hand, the one of thinker of power. It is a necessary condition to take
Foucault away from these two identities, in order to follow, in his own texts, his thought of
knowledge-power. The latter is expected to fulfil a Foucaldian request expressed in 1974: to put
an end to the antinomy of knowledge and power. Put in very simple words, this antinomy bears
on the mythical negativity of power as what is to be denounced and the mythical positivity of
knowledge as pure and relieved of any power.
This new reading offers a new critical perspective on Foucault’s proposals: a speculative critical
perspective rather than a denunciative critical perspective. This is what this paper will develop,
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showing the contrast between those two critical perspectives, both being possible readings of
Foucault’s notion of knowledge-power in his own terms.
Firstly, the notion of knowledge-power will be read through the denunciative critical
perspective which is the most common use made of Foucault’s notion, although along diverse
variations. Power-knowledge – often used in this order - is in this case the motto of the
denunciation of “doubtful knowledge” launched on behalf of the ideal and pure science betrayed
by powers which are conceived as external to the scientific production. A caricature of this
stance would be when any scientific output is reduced to human and social conventions imposed
on a subject of research – may be human or non-human -which is unable, in this perspective, to
differentiate between the several scientific proposals made about it.
Secondly, this denunciative critical perspective is shown to be inconsistent with some of
Foucault’s statements and texts, among which, “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” and “Surveiller et
punir” will receive special attention. As this denunciative critical perspective is weak with
regards to the notion of knowledge-power and other related notions, the critical perspective
adopted by Foucault may have another nature.
And finally, this other nature of Foucaldian’s critique is clarified, which I call the speculative
critical perspective on the notion of knowledge-power. What “speculative” and “critique” mean
will be characterized in Foucault’s own terms.
Nathalie Trussart, Independent scholar, Bruxelles.
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Panel 3.7. “Realism”
Alexandros Alexandropoulos – Being at Home: Nature in the Work of
Nietzsche and Freud
This paper proposal is going to focus on the issue of the role of nature in the psychical and social
sphere in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud.
Both thinkers' works have often received criticism for their references and allusions to the
biological, the natural sciences and their parallels between the bodily, the psychical and the
intellectual. Scholars of Nietzsche and Freud tend to suppress these elements of their theories.
This paper will, on the contrary, aim to confront them and assess the role they played within the
Nietzschean and Freudian oeuvre. This paper will proceed in discussing three main themes
around which the Nietzschean and Freudian conversations unravel: 1) character formation 2)
health and malaise 3) fantasies of beingat- home.
character formation: The incorporation of the natural in the Freudian and Nietzschean work has
particular significance on the topic of character formation. Both thinkers often draw parallels
with biological and the organic in order to explain the development of the psychical world of
individuals. I will seek to demonstrate that these references rather than being a form of
embarrassing rhetorics actually play a key role in developing Freud's and Nietzsche's specific
theories of character formation and theories of action. On this part I will focus on Nietzsche's
famous assertion that the deed is everything and that the doer comes second. I will seek to
investigate on the sequences that this can have for psychoanalysis and critical theory.
health and malaise: The issue of malaise in culture, of a certain form of unnaturalness and
painful character of social living comes again and again in both thinkers work. In this part of the
essay I will seek to explain the role these themes of malaise in the Freudian and Nietzschean
oeuvre. What purposes do they serve in their work and what desires of the writers do they
reveal? I will claim that in their analyses of natural and unnatural, concepts of health and
pathology are being built. I will, also, claim that in their notions of what naturalness consists
offer us perhaps the best insights in their philosophical intentions.
fantasies of being-at-home: The paper will conclude with one of the key functions of themes of
nature in the Freudian and Nietzschean thinking: I will claim that both thinkers develop
different variations of a will of being at home based on a melancholic assertion of unnaturalness
and alienation in modern living. I will examine this idea and pursue its philosophical and critical
consequences. I will use this fantasies of being at home to reflect on the sources of this
uneasiness and alienation in the works of the two thinkers and discuss what critical potential
such an analysis could have.
Alexandros Alexandropoulos is a PhD candidate in CRMEP, Kingston University.
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Tom Giesbers – Today’s Realists Viewed from the Perspective Historical
Realism around 1800: Three Forms of Belief
In recent years continental philosophy has seen an explosion of interest in realism. What is
readily observed is that the notions of reality, real objects and matter differ greatly amongst
these realists. To some degree these positions are strictly incommensurable and yet there is a
sense in which, in self-identifying with realism as a position, these theorists find themselves
united. The question now arises as to whether we can derive a common intuition, one which is
fundamentally shared by speculative realists and new realists alike, prior to their differing
notions of reality.
In this paper I will examine several of today’s realist positions from the perspective of the
notions of belief which were developed around 1800 by philosophers associated with German
realism and idealism (Hamann, Kant, Jacobi). These notions of belief entail a fundamental
(pre)disposition towards certain kinds of epistemic claims and can therefore be considered to be
prior to specific concepts of reality. For instance, the belief which informs the Kantian notion of
hope expresses a preference for one class of epistemic claims over and against the other.
Following the formulation of this belief, a definite scientific normativity becomes possible (cf.
the distinction which many of today’s realists make between true and false objects). Similarly, a
Hamannian univocal belief, often paired with a skepticism concerning the certitude of
knowledge, leads to the idea that every claim is normatively equivalent. The resultant mode of
critique which opens up is radically anti-reductionist (cf. Gabriel’s critique of ‘neurofundamentalism’).
I will argue that these notions still offer a productive way to characterize contemporary realist
positions with regards to the possibility of science and critique (be it socially normative or an
attempt to map cognitive functions), which allows us to interrogate these positions in terms of
what they have to offer.
A peculiar feature of the recurrence of these notions of belief in relation to realism is that not all
of today’s realists seem to be aware of the historical roots of their position, as is exhibited in
Harman’s recurring claim (in lectures) that there could have been ‘a realist turn around 1800,
but there wasn’t,’ seemingly to the end of highlighting the novelty of his own position.
In the sense that Meillassoux’ After Finitude was something of an conceptual impetus for many of
the speculative and new realists, I will trace this renewed interest in reality back to Meillassoux
and his teacher Badiou. Both to some degree exhibit a commitment to a Lacanian dual notion of
the Real (which in turn draws heavily on Kant). The conceptual decision to maintain a dual
notion of the Real informs many of today’s realists positions and explains why there is a dearth
of the third classical notion of belief: Jacobi’s para-epistemic faith, which commits to the prior
harmony of possible particular knowledge claims with reality conceived in its totality.
Throughout all of this it will become clear that the notions of belief developed around 1800 are
still, albeit mostly unacknowledged, apt descriptions of the structure and the conceptual
decisions in current theories of realism.
Tom Giesbers, PhD candidate Departement of philosophy and religious studies Utrecht University.
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Sidra Shahid – Transcendental Conditions: Norm, Nature, and Objectivity
In this talk, I would like to argue for a Wittgensteinian construal of transcendental conditions.
Considered along Kantian lines, transcendental conditions give us constraints on experience that
are necessary, universal, and a priori. Synthetic a priori claims, according to Kant, are possible
because their necessity neither derives from unconditioned reality nor from empirical
experience, but from the metaphysics of mind. While metaphysical realism, broadly understood,
takes objectivity to mean unqualified mind-independence, Kantian conceptions of objectivity
argue for a qualified conception of mind-independence. Though we do not have access to
unconditioned reality, reality is nonetheless mind-independent, constituted as it is by fixed
necessary, universal, and a priori forms of intuition and the categories. Such claims, however,
have met with serious criticisms. One criticism contends that these conditions are nothing more
than shadows of the same metaphysics which they attempt to thwart; claims to non-contingent
features, whether of mind or reality, are in other words, metaphysical claims unpalatable to a
post-metaphysical program (Sacks 2000). Stronger transcendental claims, it has been argued,
should be abandoned in favor of weaker transcendental claims. Such claims would index the
necessity and universality of transcendental conditions to mutable norms and practices instead
of supplying a metaphysics, which trades in immutable and non-contingent features of the very
nature of mind.
The two horns of the dilemma that emerge from this picture are rather familiar. If we adopt a
conventionalist line, we are committed to the stance that nothing more than our practices sets
constraints on thought and experience. Such a stance is open to the charge of relativism, failing
as it does to provide a robust notion of objectivity. If we adopt a metaphysical line by appealing
to our mental nature, for instance, though we manage to safeguard objectivity, we end up
making metaphysically excessive claims, which often turn out to be unwarranted.
In this talk, I will take insights from Wittgenstein to argue that once it is recognized that the
pathways of conceptual-formation are heterogeneous and include social and natural
circumstances, the putative opposition between norm and nature and a parallel distinction
between mind and reality is dissolved (PI, II, xi). However, Wittgenstein’s account is not without
tensions: despite his call to abandon such distinctions, Wittgenstein often appeals to human
behavior “as a shared system of reference” (PI 206), what may seem to be a claim to a
metaphysics of human behavior. As I will argue, however, such a conception of human nature is
non-metaphysical and can be made unproblematic, once it is made clear that notions of nature
and objectivity are only intelligible within a normative framework. In order to clarify this
position, I will take on board a transcendental reading of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, according
to which questions concerning objectivity are only intelligible in light of a shared system of
practices, which emerges partly in tandem with our natural circumstances. Intelligibility
conceived in this way transforms the notion of objectivity and relativism, raising doubts about
whether a choice between objectivity and metaphysics on the one hand and norm and relativism
on the other is in fact requisite.
Sidra Shahid (University of East Anglia, UK).
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Angela Kun – Mythology and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy
According to a scientist standpoint, mythology holds no value whatsoever. This is nothing but a
mass of superstitions: a polymorphic arbitrariness of imagination. On the other hand, in a neostructuralist reading, the symbolic thesaurus of mythology is pure esthetical discourse. Both
views are denied in Schelling’s philosophy of mythology. His philosophy of nature is a highly
speculative attempt to provide a unity that specialized scientific endeavours have long lost.
However discarded may this be in the eyes of the scientific establishment it is still very
acclaimed by contemporary environmental philosophy. But it is in Schelling’s philosophy of
mythology that we find a different use and understanding of nature which we believe is a very
profound although eclipsed approach. Schelling argues that mythology is not just an allegorical
knowledge of nature. This is something as profoundly embedded in the original unconscious
origins of mankind’s self-consciousness as the genesis of language or the genesis of peoples.
These are all original and immemorial constitutive acts in the unfolding of the universal
consciousness of mankind. The countless variety of divine images is not to be seen as an
infantile/anthropomorphic description of nature. Quite the contrary: mythology is a cosmomorphic description of the transcendental consciousness. Naive understandings of nature were
originally used as elementary building-blocks in the never ending effort of
human
consciousness to thematise and understand itself. Even before philosophy and science,
mythology is the first act of self-consciousness, Uranfang, that practically constituted mankind.
Our purpose is to expose and develop the consequences of this utterly revolutionary reading of
nature as a fundamental part of the mythological process.
Dr. Angela Kun
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Panel 3.8. “The Other Side of Matter”
This panel presents four provocations on the other side of the matter of philosophy. Drawing
upon the work of Georges Bataille, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Michel
Serres, the papers collectively address a range of materialist thinking through feminist critiques
of nature, focussing on issues concerning the sensorial body, temporality, consumption, gender,
sex, and desire.
key terms: event; topography; topology; sexual difference; Geschlecht; Geschichtlichkeit; genres, as
fixed form, and as multiple and transformative
Felicity Colman – Natural's Not in It: Materialist Informatics
After the death of man, we no longer need to speculate about notions such as the meaning, the
beauty, the reality, or the concept of life. Yet, the economic systems of speculation (whether
dressed as financial, creative, or mechanised) that control the flow of life forms still remained
focused upon the informational potential of a biopoliticised body. These include its essential and
fetishising components, produced as functions of a living capital body (lcb). As Haraway (1991)
cautions in relation to biotic elements, the materiality of essential properties of the lcb distracts
from consideration of the design, flow, boundaries, systems, and constraints of what she terms
the ‘informatics of domination’.
Speaking broadly of the political agency of the gendered body, feminist philosophy has brought
about a turn to the address of the lcb of feminicity. This turn (Braidotti 1994; 2002; 2006; Van
Der Tuin 2009) highlights the need for a more robust feminist epistemology, one that can
address the materialist and pathological technological factors (analog, digital, biological) that
feed the systems of speculative economies. These factors include conditions that emphasise a
politics of identity and / as gender, facilitated by the predications of their biotically prescribed
systems; reproductive technologies, the political divisions of labour, prescripted desires. This
paper will explore the conceptualisations of the technological emergence of the predicated lcb of
feminicity. Instead of looking at the distinctions of bios/zoe for the answers to the whys of
biopolitical organization of gender, the paper will describe the epistemological forms the
practices of materialist informatics by feminist thinkers, and ask what, if any, critique they offer
to thinking the coercion of the senses into predication of the lcb.
Felicity Colman (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Erin K Stapleton – The Activity of Dark Matter
New materialist and associated feminist thought is engaged with the reconceptualisation of
matter away from the inert stability of Newtonian physics (as it implies, amongst other things,
the immutability of biological determinism) and toward an energetic and dynamic theory of
material itself (Bennett, Cheah, Coole & Frost, Coole, 2010). The theoretical understanding of
material as “an active principle” (Bataille, 1930/1985; Bennett, 2010) is largely attributed to the
dissemination of Quantum physics, which demonstrates that matter is energetic and infected
with both space and the unknowable “dark matter” that exceeds constitutional theory and form
(Coole & Frost, 2010). Coole and Frost write that “dark matter” (so designated by physics to
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reflect its resistance to classification) is the most common and pervasive substance that
constitutes matter in the universe. It is necessary for experience of mass and the phenomenon of
gravity, and yet its existence remains only negatively defined (in that it must exist in order for
these physical laws to operate) (Coole & Frost, 2010: 12).
Bataille argues for the inclusion of what he designates as “base material” in the development of
materialist thought. While Bataille conceived of base material as socially and politically
unacceptable or unpleasant matter encountered and produced by bodies, his conceptualisation
of base material has clear parallels with the appearance of “dark matter”. In theorising “dark
matter” (which, as Coole and Frost report) constitutes a large percentage of the material we
encounter as base material, this matter can be considered in relation to Bataille’s sovereign
heterogeneity, where the heterogeneous or outcast position cannot be reconstituted by
structures of language or known forms. It is also this dark matter that reserves and produces the
energy that allows matter, in general, to be active.
In this paper, I will argue that by conceiving of “dark matter” as theoretically analogous to
Bataille’s base material, the notion of active materialism in Bataille’s work can be redeployed in
communication with feminist new materialist thought in order reconsider the material of
resistance by bodies to experiences of social and physical restriction.
Erin K Stapleton (University of Kingston)
Joanna Hodge – Of the Event: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,
Historical Difference
It is Luce Irigaray, drawing on Heidegger and Freud, Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, who declares this
the epoch of sexual difference, in Ethique de la difference sexuelle (1984), shortly after Derrida
publishes his challenge to the Heideggerian formula concerning ontological difference, under the
title Geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference (1983). A sexual division of labour
sidelines this question, in the intervening thirty years, and prevents an adequate encounter
between these two responses to Heidegger, but this settlement has been disrupted by the
emergent dispute between molar and a molecular conceptions of the event, which aligns
Heideggerians against Deleuzians. All along it has been known that questions of gender and
those of genre, determinations of discursive formation and of style of enquiry are tightly coiled
around each other.
The proposal here is to show that the question of sexual difference is the question of the
transmission of the past into the future, and is to be transposed into a series of alternate
topologies of temporal transmission. The past is imprinted in light of an image of a looked for
future, as gender, generativity, and generational distinctiveness, and when these differences are
not opened out, history is rendered a reiteration of the same, rather than an opening on to the
transformative potentialities announced, but not performed under the Heideggerian rubric
‘historicality’ (Geschichtlichkeit). Conjoining the analyses of Geschlecht and Generation, of sexual
difference and ontological difference opens the history of the future up to these alternate
topologies.
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A molar account of sexual difference thus gives way to ‘a thousand tiny sexual differences’ and
the transmission of meaning from past to future, and the shape of time itself, turns out to be a
matter for contestation rather than one of grim necessity.
Joanna Hodge (Manchester Metropolitan University)
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Panel 3.9. “Continental naturalism”
David W. Johnson – Nature as Unity, Heterogeneity, Productivity: MerleauPonty on the Vertical Genesis of Sense
For Merleau-Ponty, ‘nature’ names an originating event of sense which is ontologically more
primordial than either a sense-giving subject or sense-bearing object, both of which are
abstractions from this original unitary dimension of what he calls the ‘flesh’. This is a unity
composed of difference; I am interwoven with the world while nonetheless being also a
divergence or gap [écart] in the being of nature that makes possible my experiential presence to
things. The things of the world, moreover, always already have a certain direction of meaning
[sens]; they address me and call for expression. I am able to respond and be an embodied giving
expression to the world, a saying of what ‘wants’ to be said, because I am the opening within
which the world appears. Hence things can find their echo in me, and I am the power to
understand and say them.
Yet if beneath our own productivity we discover the originating productivity of nature, we seem
to be lead to the conclusion that everything we say and express is what wants to be said, what
asked to be expressed, that each time I speak, I speak on behalf of nature. This is an untenable
view, however, since surely we fail over and again in our attempts to be faithful to what
demands to be said or expressed.
I contend that the sources of this problem lie in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the perception that
precedes expression. Merleau-Ponty understands perception as the folding of the flesh back onto
itself, but in this sweeping vision, the whole of perceptual experience seems to be assimilated
into the same massive event, so that we are unable to distinguish between the emergence of
perceptual meaning and achievement of perceptual truth.
These difficulties can be overcome by revising and supplementing the particulars of MerleauPonty’s account, which views the structure of our body and the capacities, skills, and knowledge
sedimented in it as helping to constitute the perceived world, one to which it simultaneously
belongs. Because he stresses the anonymous and general dimension of these contributions of the
subject to perception, Mereleau-Ponty overlooks the way in which the development of a
particular sensibility has significant implications for how and what we perceive. In narrowly
focusing on our bodily skills and capacities, moreover, he tends to reduce the developmental
potential of the self in relation to perception to its physical capacities. I suggest, on the other
hand, that who we are and become as individuals, with specific sensibilities that grow out of
particular life histories, also determines how things appear, and even what can appear in our
perceptual experience. Who we are and become, moreover, is something that is open to a certain
kind of self-shaping. The significance of this claim for our problem can be seen in our capacity to
cultivate our powers of perception; by deepening the bond between self and world and so
bringing the two into a fuller kind of harmony, our perceptions are able to be faithful to what is
there to be perceived.
David W. Johnson, Assistant Professor Department of Philosophy Boston College.
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Tsutomu Ben Yagi – From Nature to Fūdo; Revisiting Watsuji’s Thought at the
Spatial Turn
As a result of the contributions made by contemporary phenomenologists such as Edward S.
Casey and Jeff Malpas, we are witnessing a growing interest in the phenomena of space and
place in philosophy and beyond, which some have come to identify as a “special turn”. While
such a development certainly invites new insights that depart from the traditional focus on
concepts such as time and history, it is rather regrettable that the contribution to
phenomenology and hermeneutics made by Tetsurō Watsuji has largely been neglected in the
discussion. Insofar as Heidegger has taken, on the one hand, the temporocentric view to the limit
and, on the other hand, paved the way out of it by subsequently shifting attention to space, he
undoubtedly occupies an important place in the on-going phenomenological discourse on space.
It is precisely in this context that Watsuji’s thought gains relevance for the discussion. For
Watsuji was arguably the first thinker to have directed an elaborate criticism against Heidegger
that the latter’s thinking in Being and Time is too temporocentric.
Watsuji was staying in Berlin as a guest researcher in 1927 just as when Being and Time was
being published in Germany. He read the book during his stay and, while being very much
impressed by it, immediately developed a critical standpoint on the subject matter. Upon his
return to Japan the following year, Watsuji began composing Fūdo (Climate and Culture), which
would subsequently be published in Japan in 1931. In this book, Watsuji criticises Heidegger’s
view in Being and Time by suggesting that it is too temporocentric and that he underestimates
the significant role played by spatiality broadly understood. In response, Watsuji develops the
concept of Fūdo that brings together space, climate, nature, geography, ethnology, culture,
history, and environment, among others. Watsuji thus recognised the significance of spatiality
even before Heidegger himself made a decisive shift in his thinking towards it. To take one of his
original insights, Watsuji’s careful distinction between Fūdo and nature (Shizen) allows us to
overcome the opposition between the human world and the natural world, insofar as Fūdo
designates the cultural climate that brings together the living culture of human beings and the
natural environment that surrounds it.
By attending to an ordinary word in Japanese in a phenomenological manner, Watsuji draws out
from the concept of Fūdo the respect in which our lives and culture are shaped and guided by the
landscape and climate, and vice versa. Given this perspective, the very manner in which thinkers
like Casey and Malpas carry out an analysis of space and place appears problematic. The rich and
subtle descriptions of space that one finds in Watsuji’s analysis of Fūdo are fundamentally
lacking in their analysis. For it fails to take into account of these phenomena in their proper
intricacy and interrelatedness. One might even be inclined to suspect that their investigation
merely leads to an inversion of priority, namely, topocentrism in place of temporocentrism. In
revisiting Watsuji’s thought at the spatial turn, I wish to place the current approach to the
phenomenological analysis of space and place in question and to highlight the need to recast the
very manner in which the question is posed.
Tsutomu Ben Yagi, Ph.D Student at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.
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Yogev Zusman – The Aleatory Limits of Naturalism
As is frequently observed, with regard to the informational patterns they instantiate, material
configurations are accidental or contingent, at least in the sense that they always involve
redundancy to some degree. But if information is always materially instantiated, without being
determined by the media of its instantiation, then this also means that there is in fact no ‘material
substrate’ which is not already instantiating informational patterns and which is not instantiated
in and by other ‘formal substrates’, ad infinitum.
In fact, in this little paradox materiality is relegated to the abyssal nature of a universe of
information, and the contours of a dematerialized naturalism are beginning to appear. Indeed, it
is this anarchic potential of an infinite regress (or an infinite progress) of forms of forms which
already Aristotle sought to hold in check by introducing the identification of ‘primary matter’,
accidentality (to automaton) and potentiality (dunamis).
The first question I would like to address in the course of my presentation is how this general
schema of modern naturalism relates to the possibility of accidents and noise, without
subscribing to the Aristotelian ‘solution’. Here I will propose to briefly follow both Hegel’s
speculative development of retrograded teleology as an attempt to differentiate accidentality
from contingency, and Spinoza’s unique concept of necessity.
In general, there are three principal strategies in which the accidental is treated in Western
philosophy: accidentality is just another name for the ‘inherently irrational’ (mystical
materialism); the appearance of accidentality is due only to the epistemic limitedness and
deficiency of finite beings; and, finally, accidentality is an essential moment or turn in the
‘continuous act’ of nature’s auto-creation.
In light of these strategies the important question is still this: can we really say nothing more
with regard accidentality than simply state that it may be completely explicated in terms of the
‘interactions’ or ‘encounters’ of disparate elements, whose own inner-constitution is ultimately
contingent? As we shall see, the problem here would be that in this view we are all too quickly
led from an atomism of elements to an atomism of laws, ‘natural laws’ or global factors (whence
an implicit metaphysical commitment to a ‘cosmology’, namely to the logic of the cosmos).
But what if accidentality is conceptualized as ‘scale or level independent’ and accidents ‘scale or
level dependent’, in the sense that accidents may be weaving the very ‘lieu’ wherein elemental
disparateness, as well as divergent forms of connectivity, emerge? One important thing to be
noticed then is that one would no longer ascribe significant ‘indeterminacy’ to the microcosmic,
while deeming “insignificant” large-scale accidents. Another important consequence is that the
notion of Nature as a cosmic auto-creative ‘envelopment’ is called into question, but without this
entailing then that the notions of universality and invariance are thereby necessarily discarded.
The difficult task, of course, is to show how, and it is to this task that I wish to dedicate the
greater part of my presentation.
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Yogev Zusman has recently submitted a dissertation in philosophy to the senate of Tel-Aviv
University, Israel and teaches Hebrew in the Paul Valéry University, Montpellier.
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Panel 3.10. “Spinoza (2): Spinoza’s Relational Autonomy: Past and
Present”
Spinoza’s philosophy has been both celebrated and reviled for its strict commitment to a kind of
naturalism, according to which all aspects of human beings are to be understood in
fundamentally the same way that we understand any other natural phenomena. Spinoza takes
this to imply, most controversially, that our volitions are determined by prior causes, which
leads him to deny that humans possess free will in the sense of a spontaneous power for
determining one’s own actions in isolation from external things. Although one might take this to
imply that Spinoza rules out the possibility of freedom and autonomy, Spinoza insists on the
possibility and importance of freedom, a form of self-determination, which philosophers today
would describe as autonomy. This is possible because Spinoza offers a distinctive conception of
freedom and autonomy as constituted by a kind of power or activity, which is compatible with
causal determination. According to this view, our autonomy is “after nature”—in other words,
follows from nature—because our power is determined by the same processes and principles
that govern the rest of the natural world.
Spinoza’s account of autonomy is distinctive, for it contrasts with the later and more familiar
Kantian conception of autonomy as governing oneself in accordance with commands of reason
that originate spontaneously in the agent, that is, without being determined by objects in space
and time. Whereas this Kantian conception of autonomy involves self-sufficiency—determining
oneself independently of external influences—Spinozistic autonomy derives from external
sources: our material and political conditions, our interactions and relationships with others and
our roles in communities. For this reason, Spinoza has been regarded as a historical precursor to
recent theories of relational autonomy, which stress the importance of our relatedness to
autonomy. More specifically, relational theories of autonomy hold either that the self is
fundamentally relational, which makes self-governance relational, or that autonomy itself should
be understood as consisting in certain relations with others, rather than as a kind of selfgovernance. These theories are informed by feminist criticisms of traditional conceptions of
autonomy and rights, including the sort found in Kant, as excessively concerned with
individuality and self-sufficiency.
We are proposing a panel to investigate the nature of Spinoza’s relational conception of
autonomy and its relevance to present day theorizing about relational autonomy. This panel will
consist of three papers. The first paper examines the metaphysical basis for Spinoza’s
conception of freedom and autonomy as relational in his account of activity. The second paper
considers how Spinoza’s account of autonomy is able to make sense of cases where agents make
apparently free choices that engender their own oppression, or diminish their own power to
persevere autonomously. The third paper implements a Spinozistic account of autonomy to deal
with paternalistic interventions in the case of prostitution. It examines how these interventions
should be designed so as to provide agents with better resources to improve their own
autonomy.
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Matthew J. Kisner – Spinoza’s Activities
In my paper, I examine the metaphysical basis for Spinoza’s conception of freedom and
autonomy as relational. Spinoza understands freedom as consisting in self-determination, which
he describes as being an adequate or total cause of one’s own states and actions. While this basic
notion of freedom and autonomy is shared by most accounts of autonomy, Spinoza’s autonomy
is particularly friendly to relational conceptions of autonomy because he regards this selfdetermination as derived from external influences. In Spinoza, the self or individual human
being is constituted by an essential power, what he calls conatus, a striving to maintain one’s
existence and increase one’s power. The particular complexion of this conatus—that is, one’s
degree of power and how the power is expressed—is determined by its relations with external
things. In this respect, the self is constituted by its relationship to other things, which implies
that these relations also determine one’s self-determination or autonomy. This paper
investigates the metaphysical basis for this basic notion that one’s conatus is determined by and
derived from external sources.
The paper argues that this basic notion is made possible by a distinctive account of activity. In
Descartes, perhaps Spinoza’s primary intellectual influence, things are understood to be active
when they initiate change, while things are passive when they undergo change. For instance, if
the teacher initiates learning in the student, then the teacher is active and the student is passive.
On this view, it is not possible for something to be active when it undergoes a change initiated by
something external. At first glance, it may seem that Spinoza accepts this view, since he claims
that we act only when we are the adequate or total cause (3D2), which implies that we are not
active when our states and actions are determined by external forces. However, Spinoza also
countenances a second notion of activity, our power of activity (3post1), which is equivalent to
our conatus. Unlike the former sort of activity, the latter is consistent with external
determination, since the conatus ultimately derives from and can be strengthened by external
things. Thus, Spinoza claims, “the human body can be affected in many ways in which its power
of acting is increased” (3post1). Consequently, this second notion of activity explains how our
activity and, consequently, our conatus and individual identity can be constituted and
determined by our relations to external things.
Since the distinction between these two sorts of activity is not generally recognized, the paper
shows the importance of the distinction for understanding Spinoza’s broader philosophical
system. In general, Spinoza equates the first kind of activity—being an adequate cause—with
having adequate ideas, which he explains as our power of reason. He equates the second kind of
activity—our power of activity—with our virtue and perfection. Consequently, the relationship
between these two sorts of activity is central to understanding the relationship between reason
and virtue, the central concepts of Spinoza’s ethics.
Matthew J. Kisner, Associate Professor, Philosophy University of South Carolina.
Keith Green – Suicide and Self-hatred in light of Spinoza’s Account of Activity
In this paper, I will examine cases of actions that are phenomenologically autonomous but that
undermine one's own agency (or power of activity) and perseverance. Examples of such cases
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include, but are not limited to, uncompelled suicides (the third category Spinoza envisages in
Ethics 4p20s). Such ‘actions’ are often motivated by introspective emotions (affects), affects that
Spinoza claims conduce to ‘weakness of spirit’ [impotentia animi] such as shame, humility,
penitence, or self-disgust, conjoined to ideas that mirror hateful social attitudes. Subjects of such
emotions then often acquiesce to different treatment that would otherwise be regarded as
unambiguously unjust, or otherwise a violation of a person’s dignity.
These cases seem paradoxical because, according to Spinoza, we are autonomous when we act
from our conatus and our conatus necessarily promotes our good. Consequently, it seems that
for Spinoza, autonomous action should be beneficial, on metaphysical grounds.” I will argue,
however, that Spinoza’s account of activity implies that such actions can be attributed to the
‘subjects’ who ‘commit’ them, but that they are nonetheless harms, but that Spinoza’s account of
activity does not imply that such actions are not really actions of the subjects to whom they may
be attributed (as immanent causes).
I will first take as my point of departure Spinoza’s remarks about suicide in Ethics 4p18s and 20s
in terms of “unobservable external causes conditioning (disponunt) a person’s imagination and
affecting his body” such that “his body assumes a different and contrary nature,” but “a nature of
which there can be no idea in mind”. Second, I will show that Spinoza’s causal account of
uncompelled implicitly extends to the negative self-regarding affects that he defines in Ethics
3p30 (shame and penitence), and following Ethics 3def.§24 (where humility and abjection are
included). And I will argue that this account is also part of the explanation for why these forms of
self-regard cannot be virtues in 4p53 and 54, and, in 4p56 and why some of them (abjection,
which Spinoza claims is the ‘opposite’ of ‘self-love’) amounts to ‘weakness of spirit’ [impotentia
animi]. Finally, I will argue that Spinoza’s account of these forms of self-regard and the forms of
self-treatment that they motivate count as ‘action’ but at the same time amount to harms—
specifically harms of ‘servitude’, and thus of oppression.
In conclusion, I will argue that the implication that a subject’s affect, desire, and action can
express (and amount to) harm offers ethical insight unavailable from the perspective of other
accounts that ground autonomy in the phenomenology of choice rather than in a causal account
of a subject’s affects, desires, and self-consciously ‘chosen’ actions.
Keith Green, Associate Professor, Philosophy, East Tennessee State University.
Andrea Sangiacomo – Paternalism and Autonomy in Light of Spinoza’s
Account of Action
This paper aims to implement Spinoza’s account of autonomy to deal with the use and legitimacy
of paternalistic interferences. Paternalism is often invoked to prevent certain subjects from
acting in a self-harming way, although their choices appear to be both free and voluntary. To
justify paternalistic interventions, it is commonly argued that agents acting in a self-harming
way are not really autonomous but rather are forced to behave in such a way by visible forms of
exploitation or simply by some kind of “adaptive preference.”
97
In this paper, I would like to argue that by adopting a Spinozistic approach to relational
autonomy we can develop a rather different approach to paternalism. Specifically, I will discuss
the case study provided by prostitution and interventions intended to combat it. I would like to
show that these interventions should not be designed to remedy a “self-harm” but rather to
equip the agents with better resources to improve their own autonomy.
In the first part of the paper, I present in some detail the issues raised by prostitution. I argue
that interpreting it as the result of a lack of autonomy oversimplifies the discussion. I propose to
distinguish not only between degrees of autonomy but also between several kinds of autonomy,
depending on the quality of the relationships between the agents and others.
In the second part of the paper I provide a detailed reconstruction of proposition 59 of the
fourth part of Spinoza’s Ethics, according to which “to every action to which we are determined
from an affect which is a passion, we can be determined by reason, without that affect.”
Specifically, I stress how, in Spinoza’s view, “reason” should be understood as the possibility of
an “agreement in nature.” In Spinoza’s view, this agreement is not established a priori but is
concretely achieved only once different agents are able to cooperate together to improve
reciprocally their powers of acting.
In the third part, I apply Spinoza’s view to the case of prostitution. I argue that prostitution can
be read as an “action to which someone is determined from an affect which is a passion” in
Spinoza’s sense. From this point of view, prostitution can be viewed as a specific way in which an
agent can autonomously pursue some form of activity. The self-harm associated with
prostitution can be understood in terms of relationships of contrast or “disagreement in nature”,
i.e., non-cooperative interactions (such as those based on oppression and exploitation). In this
way, without denying that prostitution can entail a form of autonomy, I claim that Spinoza’s
approach allows us to conceive the possibility to improve the quality of this autonomy by
enhancing the quality of the relationships the agents entertain with others. I conclude by
suggesting that paternalistic interventions should thus aim at establishing how, by entertaining
various kinds of relationships, an agent can develop in a better (and hopefully less harmful) way
the same positive aspects that she autonomously considers relevant to her.
Andrea Sangiacomo, Post-doctoral Researcher, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
Keren Mock – Baruch Spinoza’s Hebrew « Naturae Nominis » : Modification,
Conservation and Degeneration
Baruch Spinoza could be considered as one of the most important modern philosophers dealing
with the concept of Nature. In the Ethics in particular, he regards Nature as an equivalent to
deity notably with his famous expression « deus sive natura »
Yet, the concept of Nature in Spinoza’s philosophy refers also to a less common aspect of Nature:
the noun in the Hebrew language. When he analyses Hebrew, Spinoza concludes that it is
composed solely by nouns. In this regard, Hebrew has no verbs, as the philosopher discribes it in
his Compendium grammatices linguae hebraeae: «For all Hebrew words, except for a few
interjections and conjunctions and one or two particules, have the force and the properties of
the noun. » Therefore, one may ask what are the characteristics of a language which is, by
98
nature, composed by a variation of nouns? And what is Spinoza’s conception on the nature of
these nouns?
Published among other posthumous works in 1677, the Compendium grammatices linguae
hebraeae criticizes in an innovative way Holy Scriptures traditional hermeneutics. It also deals
with regularizing the language through the rules of nature. Arguing that his predecessors wrote
grammars of the Holy Scriptures but no one had written the grammar of Hebrew before him,
Spinoza changes the conception of the holy language into a profane language whom accepts
changes and the effect of time. In
other words: language according to Spinoza has a natural
evolution. Let alone the feable attention that this text receive in comparison with the Tractatus
theologico-politicus (1670) where Hebrew is also of Baruch Spinoza’s analysis of the Holy
Scriptures, by introducing a new tool for analyzing the sacred language, through the composition
of a grammar he intends to regulate its rules. Moreover Spinoza nominalises Hebrew according
to the rules of nature: modification, conservation and degeneration.
Spinoza Emphasises the irrational dimension of religion that appears in over--‐ interpreting
biblical texts. By Doing so, Spinoza Broke with the tradition of theological hermeneutic
interpretation of biblical texts practiced by his predecessors and established a thorough analysis
of the syntax and morphology of biblical and post--‐ biblical Hebrew. Spinoza Developed a
method for scientific and historical consideration of holy texts suggesting that it may no longer
be attributed to divinity solely. Thus, Language may abide by the rules of nature.
While many philosophers dealt with the concept of nature, few did it while considering it as the
nature of a language and even fewer composed a grammar. If The concept of nature could be
thought within the concept of god, the concept of language applies not only to the entire Hebrew
Language but also to the correlation between language and its referent in nature.
Keren Mock, Ph.D. candidate, Paris Diderot University, Department of Language, Literature, Image,
Civilization and Human Sciences under the supervision of Prof. Julia Kristeva (literary critic,
psychoanalyst, Paris Diderot University) and Prof. Pierre-Marc de Biasi (École Normale Supérieure/
CNRS- director of ITEM : Institute of Texts and Modern Manuscripts).
99

SEPFEP_Panels-Abstracts_02-09-2014

Transcription

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