This post is largely jumping off from a string of comments between Reza Negarestani, Benedict Singleton, and Alex Williams amongst others from several weeks ago. Also Liam Sprod discusses some similar issues here. It is also jumping from from Reza’s two recent lectures in NYC.
It started with this quote from Giuseppe Longo:
“In this sense, there are no laws that entail, as in physics, the becoming of the biosphere, and a fortiori, the econosphere, or culture or history, or life in general. In the same sense, geodetic principle mathematically forces physical objects never to go wrong. A falling stone follows exactly the gravitational arrow. A river goes along the shortest path to the sea, it may adjust it by nonlinear well definable interactions as mentioned above, but it will never go wrong. These are all geodetics. Living entities, instead, go wrong most of the time: most organisms are extinct, the majority of fecundations, in mammals, do not lead to a birth, an amoeba does not follows, exactly, a curving gradient — by retention it would first go along the tangent, then correct the trajectory, in a protensive action. In short, life goes wrong most of the time, but it “adjusts” to the environment and changes the environment, if possible. It maintains itself, always within an extend critical interval, whose limits are the edge of death, by changing the observables, the phenotypes, that is the very nature of the living object.”
In the most general sense there is a discussion of spatiality here which is generally lacking in Naturphilosophie (something I have mentioned in a few talks on Schelling) and other Naturphilosophie practitioners generally do not have a good concept of space. This is particularly problematic given the fairly convincing account of German Idealism as functioning as various means of heterogeneous monisms. This difference between Hegel and Schelling in this regard would be that the connectivity of substance is more ideal (what exactly the objects of objective idealism points to numerous conflicting readings) whereas for Schelling objects are the instances of colliding powers.
Continue reading ‘Asymptotic Thinking and Naturphilosophie: Some Thoughts (pt 1)’
Filed under: Brassier, Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, nature, ontology, Schelling, Speculative Realism | 1 Comment
Tags: Bertholz, Brassier, Chatelet, German Idealism, Longo, Negarestani, Oresme, reza negarestani, Speculative Realism, Zalamea
Even more conferences!
Updated yet again!
Failure
Feb 14-15, 2013
Keynote: Jack Halberstam
The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at U of W Milwaukee
300w abstracts by Dec 1, 2012
Labyrinths: Navigating Complexity Across the Humanities
Feb 15-17
Keynote: Cary Wolfe
McGill English Graduate Student Association
150w abstracts by Dec 1, 2012
Duquesne Graduate Conference in Philosophy (Philosophy and Nature)
Feb 23, 2013
Keynote: Adrian Johnston
Duquesne Univerity
3000 word papers due Dec 1, 2012
Fallout: Visions of Apocalypse
March 9, 2013
York University
250 w abstract due Dec 3, 2012
(Re)Actviating Objects
March 15-17, 2013
Western University
300 w abstract due December 5, 2013
Weaponising Speculation
May 2-3, 2013
Independent Colleges Dublin
Abstracts due: January 12, 2013
Translating Realism
May 10-11, 2013
Keynotes: Adrian Johnston, Dorothea Olkowski, Michael Naas
Notre Dame
Papers Due: January 15, 2013
The Return of Speculative Philosophy
April 5-6, 2013
Keynotes: Rebecca Comay
University of Ottawa
Abstracts Due: January 30, 2013
Villanova Philosophy Conference (Apocalyptic Politics)
April 12-13, 2013
Keynotes; Dolar, Zizek, Zupancic
Villanova University
Abstracts or papers of 3500 words due Feb 1, 2013
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Futures of Schelling Conference
I am coordinating the next annual North American Schelling Society Conference which will take place at my home base of Western University. The theme of the conference is Futures of Schelling. The CFP is below. Also, if you are a graduate student interested in attending and want to do things on the cheap please let me know and I can try and arrange free places for you to stay with other Western Students.
Futures of Schelling: The Second Conference of the North American Schelling Society
Western University London, ON Canada – August 29- September 1, 2013
With the recent resurgence of interest in Schelling he is no longer just a “vanishing mediator”
(in Žižek’s phrase) between Idealism and Heideggerian or postHeideggerian thought. Schelling is being read in interesting ways both within this tradition and outside it. The North American Schelling Society’s second annual conference seeks to address the broad theme of the futures that Schelling opens up, in his own work, in the work of contemporaries or predecessors that he helps us to reconceptualize, and in the way his work informs or can inform subsequent and future philosophical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary work. Possible topics might include:
- How Schelling helps us rethink the work of contemporaries (such as Hegel) or predecessors (such as Boehme)
- Schelling and subsequent theorists and philosophers who have taken up his work (such as Habermas, Žižek, Heidegger, Nancy)
- Schelling’s impact on and significance for the style of philosophical thinking and writing
- Schelling as a returning and retreating origin for disciplines other than philosophy (e.g. psychoanalysis, aesthetics, anthropology)
- Trends in Schelling scholarship
- The significance of the analytic utilization of Hegel (by Brandom, McDowell etc.) for Schelling scholarship
- Schelling’s relation to emerging technologies
- How Schelling can help us think about the environmental crisis
- Schelling and the sciences
Good papers that are simply on Schelling are, of course, also welcome. Please send either 1000 word abstracts or completed papers of 3000-5000 words to Tilottama Rajan (trajan@uwo.ca) AND Sean McGrath (sjoseph.mcgrath@gmail.com) by February 1st 2013.
Submissions will be blind-vetted, so please remove all identifying information from the actual paper or abstract.
Filed under: cognitive science, Hegel, history, Iain Hamilton Grant, Kant, nature, ontology, politics, Schelling, Speculative Realism, transcendental materialism, Zizek | 3 Comments
Tags: Brandom, Fichte, Future, Futuristic German Idealism, fwj von schelling, German Idealism, German Philosophy, Hegel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Naturphilosophie, Objective Idealism
There are too many ways to address the difference, to try and even partially grapple what the difference really means. In Speculative Realism broadly construed and the related fields generally realism is taken as deflationary and materialism is inflationary. Realism is taken to be more concerned with epistemology whereas materialism is more concerned with doing justice to the things themselves. In my view, the former tends to isolate rationalism for the sake of coherence whereas the latter hyperbolizes certain facets of subjectivity for the sake of a flat ontology (for humans to dig into reality not as specially tasked for such digging but as one thing among others). In many ways its a matter of ‘what can we know about is and what is not’ as opposed to ‘what could be for the most democratic idea of what is.’
Problems for each side: for realism the material complexification of the base units of rationality (ie the material composition of the human body, the human mind) such as discussions of the human binome or local ecologies provide an inflationary challenge to the deflationary impulse of explanation as reduction. While materialism often claims realism often focuses on reduction or is eliminativist this often overrides the necessity of limiting one’s field of thought or experimentation in terms of constraint and ground, that focus methodologically can lead to a kind of reduction which is explanatory but not necessarily ontologically reductionist.
Filed under: cognitive science, Harman, Hegel, history, Kant, nature, ontology, psychoanalysis, Schelling, Speculative Realism, transcendental materialism | Leave a Comment
Tags: Adrian Johnston, cognitive science, eliminativism, epistemology, hyperobjects, material, realism
The post was partially inspired by Sarah Marshall‘s piece Beyond Clarice at the Hairpin.
I’ve mentioned several times that I have the fantasy of retreating to a cabin somewhere, watching an egregious amount of horror films (though I wonder how many one has to watch as I’ve already seen around 200), and writing a book called Thinking Horror (named after the fourth issue of Collapse which has had such a huge impact on my thinking on horror. While I want to study horror in a more abstract sense, in terms of philosophical frameworks (horror in terms of its ontology, epistemology etc) I do not want to disregard so much of the work that has been done on the social aspects of horror (quite a bit of which has had a feminist focus). But I do not think that these are diametrically opposed: in fact I think addressing what horror is (outside of the cultural constraints) can allow it to be employed in ways which move beyond them (as long as the cultural problems with the original films is not forgotten). It’s tempting to use Hegelian language here, to suspend the cultural baggage of horror in order to overcome it (not to forget it or pretend it was never there). In fact, the very form of horror (which so often relies upon an initial trauma) allows for this: the formative horror of the killer (here I am limiting myself to slasher films) provides the back story for the film.
Continue reading ‘From Last Girl to First Woman?: Blood, Psychadelics, and Pink Dresses’
Filed under: art, Copjec, fantasy, feminism, film, gender, politics, television, trauma | 1 Comment
Tags: Beyond the Black Rainbow, feminist horror, gore, halloween, horror films, horror movies, the descent, the love ones, valerie leon
Art, Aesthetics, and Thought
I am consistently guilty over my lack of knowledge of contemporary art and aesthetics. Particularly in relation to Speculative Realism it seems that artists, curators, and media practitioners of various stripes are far better than philosophers or theorists at addressing art. This seems particularly evident in events such as The Matter of Contradiction (the video of which has recently been posted here). Part of this stems it seems from an ostensible difference between practice and theory or at least a group who stays generally more immersed and theory and moves towards practice or pragmatism (though not necessarily) versus practitioners who work in theory but work centrally in practice. This is an obvious simplification but the demands of the respective fields at least institutionally fuels this skew (as their respective disciplinary histories).
Filed under: art, Badiou, Deleuze, Iain Hamilton Grant, politics, Ranciere, Schelling, Speculative Realism | 2 Comments
Tags: aesthetics, art, Badiou, contemporary art, Iain Hamilton Grant, reza negarestani, Schelling, unground
Upcoming Conferences of Interest
There a quite a few interesting philosophy and theory conferences coming up in the next few months so I thought I’d do a post here:
Feminism, Science and Materialism
Feb 14-15, 2013
Keynote: Karen Barad
CUNY, NYC
1000 w abstracts due November 1, 2012
Duquesne Graduate Conference in Philosophy (Philosophy and Nature)
Feb 23, 2013
Keynote: Adrian Johnston
Duquesne Univerity
3000 word papers due Dec 1, 2012
Fallout: Visions of Apocalypse
March 9, 2013
York University
250 w abstract due Dec 3, 2012
Villanova Philosophy Conference (Apocalyptic Politics)
April 12-13, 2013
Keynotes; Dolar, Zizek, Zupancic
Villanova University
Abstracts or papers of 3500 words due Feb 1, 2013
Filed under: art, Badiou, Deleuze, feminism, gender, Hegel, Kant, Lacan, nature, ontology, politics, psychoanalysis, queer theory, transcendental materialism, Zizek, Zupancic | Leave a Comment
Tags: Adrian Johnston, apocalypse, cuny, dolar, duqesne, karen barad, nature philosophy, Philosophy, politics, quantum physics, technology, villanova, Zizek, zupancic
