15 October, 2010 – Albuquerque, New Mexico, RMMLA Conference
Speakers
Ian Bogost
Levi Bryant
Timothy Morton
14 September, 2010 – Goldsmith’s, London, UK
In the early 1970s, post-68 French thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard made the heretical suggestion that capital should not be resisted but accelerated. Deplored, repudiated then forgotten, this remarkable moment was returned to only in the UK during the 1990s, in the theory-fiction of Nick Land, Iain Hamilton Grant, Sadie Plant and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Drawing upon Fernand Braudel, Manuel DeLanda, and cyber-theory, 90s accelerationism drew a distinction between markets (as bottom-up self-organising networks) and capital (an oligarchic and predatory system of control). Was accelerationism merely a new cybernetic mask for neoliberalism? Or does the call to “accelerate the process” mark out a political position that has never been properly developed, and which still has a potential to reinvigorate the left?
Speakers
Alex Andrews
Ray Brassier
Mark Fisher
Benjamin Noys (Paper)
Nick Srnicek (Paper)
Alex Williams
Transcendental Realism Workshop
11 May, 2010, 12pm-7pm – LIB 2 and S0.11, Warwick University, Coventry,
The purpose of the workshop is to examine the arguments underlying the increasing push towards realism in parts of modern continental philosophy, along with approaches that bridge the analytic/continental divide, and to assess the possibility of transcendental approaches to realism within this context.
Speakers
Ray Brassier (American University of Beirut)
James Trafford
Reid Kotlas (Dundee)
Nick Srnicek (LSE)
Tom O’Shea (Sheffield)
Pete Wolfendale (Warwick)
Object Oriented Philosophy Conference
23 April, 2010 – Atlanta, Georgia
Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.
Bringing some of its foundational figures together for the first time, this inaugural Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium marks an effort to brew a new flavor of post-continental philosophy for the twenty-first century.
Speakers
Ian Bogost
Levi Bryant
Graham Harman
Steven Shaviro
Theology, Gnosticism, and Theory
5 March, 2010, 11am-5pm – The University of Nottingham, Great Hall, Trent Building
An introduction to non-philosophy for philosphers, theologians, and theorists.
Speakers
Francois Laruelle
Philip Goodchild
John Milbank
John Mullarkey
Graham Ward
Warwick Symposium on the Non-Philosophy of Francois Laruelle
3 March, 2010 – Warwick University, UK
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.
Free to all, no registration required. For further enquiries contact t.k.osborne@gmail.com
Speakers
Francois Laruelle
Reid Kotlas (Paper)
Anthony Paul Smith (Paper)
Nick Srnicek (Paper)
Militant Dysphoria: What are the Politics of Disaffection?
30 September, 2009 – Goldsmiths, University of London
An event to discuss some of the issues raised by Domininc Fox’s Cold World: The aesthetics of dejection and the politics of militant dysphoria, due to be published by zer0 at the end of September. What is meant by ‘militant dysphoria’, and in what ways can the concept help us move beyond the impasses of contemporary politics? How might disaffection be converted into militancy? What political potentials are there in dysphoric music such as Black Metal? The event will also explore the relationship between politics and Speculative Realism.
Speakers
Dominic Fox
Nathan Brown (Paper)
Mark Fisher
Nina Power (Paper)
Nick Srnicek (Paper)
James Trafford
Alex Williams (Paper)
20-21 June, 2009 – Zagreb, Croatia
A century has passed since the 1909 publication of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a text in which Lenin responded to the supposed ‘disappearance of matter’ in physical theory by attempting to clarify the stakes of philosophical materialism. He did so by interrogating the consequences of contemporary positions on elementary philosophical questions: Is being prior to thought? Can we establish the adequacy of thought and sensation to material objects independent of thought and sensation? Is it possible to reduce the operations of thinking to material processes? Is ‘matter’ a philosophical or scientific concept? What is the relation between philosophical materialism and political praxis?
These questions continue to agitate contemporary thought, but they are no longer the ‘same’ questions: their significance has been transformed by a centry of political, scientific, and philosophical interventions. This symposium is dedicated to reassessing their stakes for 21st century philosophy and politics. Dialectical. Historical. Transcendental. Non-Philosophical. Eliminative. Speculative. ………………. Something called ‘materialism’ continues to demand that we take a position. What is it?
Speakers
Miran Božovič (Paper)
Nathan Brown (Paper)
Martin Hägglund (Paper)
Peter Hallward (Paper)
Graham Harman (Paper)
Speculative Realism / Speculative Materialism
24 April, 2009, 12–7pm – Lecture Theatre H124, St Matthias Campus, University of the West of England, Bristol BS16 2JP
Speakers
Ray Brassier (American University of Beirut)
Iain Hamilton Grant (University of the West of England)
Graham Harman (American University in Cairo)
Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London) (Paper)
Speculative Heresy 