Symposium on the Non-Philosophy of Laruelle

A whole mess of events and CFPs to announce:

Warwick Symposium on the Non-Philosophy of Francois Laruelle

The Warwick University Philosophy Society, in association with Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, is pleased to announce a short symposium on the non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle on Wednesday the 3rd of March. This will take place in H0.52, in the humanities building, on Warwick main campus, from 3.30pm to 7.00pm.

Programme

3.30 – “Non-Philosophy in English” – Nick Srnicek (LSE), Anthony Paul Smith (Nottingham), Reid Kotlas (Dundee) – Three presentations introducing the central features of non-philosophy followed by a joint question and answer session.

5.00 – Break

5.30 – “From the First to the Second Non-Philosophy” – Francois Laruelle – Paper in French, with English translation provided by Anthony Paul Smith, followed by a question and answer session interpreted by Marjorie Gracieuse (Warwick).

Free to all, no registration required. For further enquiries contact t.k.osborne@gmail.com

See below the fold for more…

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Speculative Realism Round-Up

Plenty of action occurring in the SR world of late:

Speculative Realism Reading Group

Speculative Realism Reading Group

Nottingham Trent University will present its third reading group on Speculative Realism on Jan 27th, in Room 215 of the George Eliot at 1pm.  The reading for this session will be Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound.

Contact: patrick.oconnor[at]ntu.ac.uk

Deleuze and Speculative Realism

A new call for papers from the Deleuze International journal. Articles due April 30, 2010. The CFP below:

“Deleuze without a doubt became a major figure in various regions of contemporary philosophy. Not only continental philosophy, mostly influenced by phenomenological tradition is adopting Deleuze’s work but also disciplines which seem to be out of reach from mainstream academic reception these days.

Speculative Realism, Speculative Materialism or Object-Oriented Philosophy, even though these young ‘disciplines’ are actually loosely connected only by the rejection of what Meillassoux called correlationism are dealing with Deleuze’s ideas – be it in an affirmative or in a negating way. These ways of working with Deleuze seem to offer controverse forms in continuing Deleuze’s ways of thinking or demonstrating sources of friction which enriches the reception one way or the other. Deleuze’s work seems to become a landmark between and in philosohical disciplines once again.

Not only a dedicated and unique reception but to which extent the concepts of Speculative Realism, Speculative Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy (re-)thinking deleuzian ideas is very intriguing.

Some questions emerge from the speculative approaches which deal with Deleuze: Is another way of perceiving Deleuze’s work and combining it with more or less unexpected thinkers such as e.g. Alfred North Whitehead and Bruno Latour amongst others appropriate if one keeps the so called ‘traditional’ reception from a phenomenological or poststructuralist point of view in mind? Moreover – do concepts such as the molecular, the fold, multiplicities and difference as such offer junctions for deliberations that were once excluded by default? E.g. can Deleuze really be called a ‘hyper-realist’?

What kind of light is shet on keyfigures such as Tarde, Simondon or Bergson, just to name a few, who are evoked by Deleuze to enhance and develop his own concepts? Do those lines dissipate or do they have to be reconsidered?

Is ‘traditional’ reception when it wants ‘to put Deleuze to work’ responsible for a more popular perception of certain concepts such as the Rhizome which tend to fail? In which respect will deleuzian concepts enrich academia when thought of in a new way, e.g. social-ontological ideas based on assemblage theory, the social machine or the junction to philosophical pragmatism which already reflect how these notions are able to establish themselves in related disciplines?

And finally: Continental philosophy is challenged by speculative realism especially in terms of being reproached for not having scrutinised the very core of most of its approaches i.e. Meillassoux’s claim of correlationism. Is contemporary continental philosophy or post-continental-philosophy when freed from traditional boundaries, especially in the case of Deleuze, on the verge of creating deviating access to inherited questions such as subjectivation, the underestimated status of objects since Kant or of course the real itself, without falling back into naive realism?

We would like to encourage all authors who have or want to deal with Deleuze’s philosophy througout those various and diverse regions and perspectives of philosophy as outlined above to submit their concepts in order to create a picture of what recent Deleuze reception does or is able to look like. Especially if it is not entirely focused on the alleged roots from which Deleuze seemed to have ‘grown up’ resp. if we try to sidestep for a moment the perhaps not that solid categories under which his work was subsumed for some time now.

Please submit your papers until April 30th, 2010 to diel@tausendplateaus.de

Call for Papers DI3 PDF – Feel free to distribute!”

Theology, Gnosticism, and Theory

Geo/philosophy

The sixth volume of Collapse – one of the consistently most interesting journals around – is set to be released next month according to the Urbanomic website. You can order an advance copy here. See below the fold for more information on the volume, including the list of contributions.

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Oken, District 9, and Lovecraft

The following is my contribution to the cross blog event as well an excerpt from the final chapter of the forthcoming Slime Dynamics.

The question becomes what of ethics – a concern which too often than not is the center of contemporary philosophy at the cost of analytical or speculative breadth and depth. An ethics which must take the productivity and product being of nature seriously.

In “Being and Slime” Grant points out that, following Oken, an ethics without a philosophy of nature is a contradiction, a non-thing (Collapse 4, 287-289). The fundamental challenge of Kantian ethics and of subsequent post-modern ethics (following from thinkers such as Emanuel Levinas) is that they set themselves as groundless, as not following from any sort of nature or material substance. This groundlessness is only half -hearted however, as the dominant form of ethics bases itself on an unacknowledged (or celebrated) positing of the importance of human beings.

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The Copernican Revolution

A reader from UC Santa Cruz has been kind enough to send along a review of the latest Collapse volume, which was focused on what the Copernican revolution should mean for thought. It’s an interesting review, and it forms a nice prelude for a few upcoming events that will soon be announced in this space.

There are also a few remaining contributions for the Speculative Heresy/Inhumanities event, though this week has seen all of us far too busy to keep it running right now. We’ll be back next week with some more however.

I am the Subject

Today’s post in the Speculative Heresy/Inhumanities event comes from Mike Watson, author of the Logical Regression blog who has been critical of speculative realism, and has been doing some really interesting work on aesthetics. His piece today is a short and programmatic statement which argues for an irreducible aspect of the subject, over and above any scientific reductionist project.

I am the subject.
Mike Watson

  1. I am the subject and I exist.
  2. I am resistant to scientific inquiry as it is I who scientifically inquires.
  3. I am comprised, as thought, of chemical processes, but I am not reducible to chemical processes.
  4. I am material in base, but my objective complexion does not indicate the preponderance of the material over me.
  5. I am the object that is the subject. Definable by but not reducible to norms.
  6. I cannot be thought away for to think me away is to think of me, and this is not the same thing as to say that to think of me is to be thought by me.
  7. I inhere even in a non-dialectical objective thought system, as a shadow cast tellingly over the fallacy of such thought, for the thought which thinks such thought is the subject, insofar as subject = thought, even where that subject is composed of chemical processes.
  8. In a realm where all objects are accorded equivalence (even the human subject) I still exist.
  9. I am the sole common actor in all philosophical thought, which cannot proceed nor inquire into my honesty or accuracy without me.
  10. I am an object, and can admit of this without reneging on any of the above points.

Zombies and Ethics

The latest contribution to the Inhumanities/Speculative Heresy event can be found over at The Inhumanities – make sure to go check it out! Also don’t forget to check out An und fur sich’s newest event, focused on Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money.