Superpositions. Non-Standard Perspectives on Critical Theory, Philosophy and Media Studies ─ A Symposium on Laruelle and the Humanities
October 10/11 2014
Friday, October 10, 2014: 7:30-8:30 pm
Dorothy Hirshorn Suite, Room I205
Arnhold Hall
55 West 13th Street
Reception and Introduction: Special Guest, Alex Galloway
Saturday, October 11, 2014: 9:30 am – 6:00 pm
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Room 202
Arnhold Hall
55 West 13th Street
Symposium
Organizers:
Rocco Gangle (Endicott College)
Julius Greve (University of Cologne)
Ed Keller (The New School/CTM)
List of Speakers:
Alex Dubilet (Berkeley, University of California)
Alexander R. Galloway (New York University)
Rocco Gangle (Endicott College)
Julius Greve (University of Cologne)
Katerina Kolozova (University American College-Skopje)
Dave Mesing (Villanova University)
Benjamin Norris (The New School)
Anthony Paul Smith (LaSalle University)
Paper titles and Speakers’ bios:
Dubilet: “(Non-)Human Identity and Radical Immanence: On Man-in-Person in Laruelle’s Thought” —
Alex Dubilet is a Lecturer in the Program for Religious Studies and the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His primary research and teaching interests encompass the fields of philosophy and religion, history of Christianity, theories of secularism and religion, and political theology. He is a co-translator into English (with Jessie Hock) of François Laruelle’s Théorie générale des victimes (forthcoming from Polity Press).
Galloway: “Against the Digital: Laruelle and the One” — Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is author or co-author of several books, most recently The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012) and Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minnesota, 2014).
Gangle: “Non-Individuation and the Humanities Research Program” – – Rocco Gangle is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Endicott College. He is the author of François Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introductionand Guide and the forthcoming Diagrammatic Immanence: Category Theory and Philosophy (both with Edinburgh University Press). He is one of the earliest Anglophone translators of Laruelle’s work and has written a variety of articles linking non-philosophy to Levinasian phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy and mathematics.
Greve: “The Decisional Apparatus: Jameson, Flusser, Laruelle” – – Julius Greve is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Cologne. He currently works on the concept of nature in the novels of Cormac McCarthy and on 19th/20th-century philosophies of nature, in particular those of Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Lorenz Oken, and Gilles Deleuze (including the ideas these thinkers have spawned in contemporary philosophical speculation). Greve’s further research interests encompass the tradition of intermediality in American cultural practices and the history of critical theory.
Kolozova: “Into the Chôra of Marx’s Text: Metaphysics of Wage Labor as Political Theory and Praxis” – – Katerina Kolozova, PhD, is the director of the Institute in Social Sciences and Humanities-Skopje and a professor of philosophy and gender studies at the University American College-Skopje. She is also visiting professor at several universities in Former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria (the State University of Skopje, University of Sarajevo, University of Belgrade and University of Sofia as well as at the Faculty of Media and Communications of Belgrade). in 2009, Kolozova was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric (Program of Critical Theory) at the University of California-Berkeley. Kolozova is the author of The Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststucturalist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014).
Mesing: “The Use of Non-Philosophy in the Task of Philosophy: Laruelle, Critical Theory, and Materialism” – – Dave Mesing is a PhD student in philosophy at Villanova University in Philadelphia. He works at the intersection of contemporary critical theory and the history of philosophy, and has interests encompassing Spinoza, Marx, Italian operaismo, the history of materialism, and contemporary continental philosophy.
Norris: “Experiencing the (Philosophical) Abyss: Empiricism and Non-Philosophy” – – Benjamin Norris is a Phd. student in philosophy at The New School for Social Research. His work centers around the critical perspectives on Spinoza found in the works of Kant, Schelling and Nietzsche. He is the author of “Re-asking the Question of the Gendered Subject after Non-Philosophy” in Speculations volume 3.
Smith: “Is the (Black) Muslim an Ordinary Human: The Universal and the Particular in Non-Philosophy’s Human Question” – – Anthony Paul Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at La Salle University. In addition to his own use of non-philosophy in A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought (PalgraveMacmillian), he is the translator or co-translator of five of François Laruelle’s texts and the author of the forthcoming François Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh University Press) and Laruelle: A Stranger Thought (Polity).
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‘Superpositions’ refers to the non-philosophical practice of conjugating distinct strata of academic discourse on the model of quantum interference rather than classical logic, which entails a distinctive ‘equalization’ of the standard hierarchies of disciplines and knowledges. The outcome of such a practice remains largely unknown. Perhaps similarly unknown is the work of François Laruelle, inventor of what has been most recently called ‘non-standard philosophy’. Laruelle, once named “the most important unknown philosopher working in Europe today” (Ray Brassier, 2003) has developed an innovative and powerful repertoire of concepts across an oeuvre spanning four decades and dozens of books. His work will undoubtedly come to have a significant impact on the critical practices of the humanities; this symposium explores Laruelle’s work across its possible relations to contemporary issues in philosophy, critical theory and media studies.
24-26 October (Friday-Sunday)
32nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy (SAGP) with the Society for the Study of Islamic Philosophy and Science (SSIPS)
Lowenstein Building
Lincoln Center Campus
Contact: Daryl Tress
Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in—the Anthropocene—demands an intensive rethinking of the project of our species-being.
Might the various traditions of critical theory be a resource for thinking the Anthropocene? This is the topic that Roy Scranton, Stephanie Wakefield and McKenzie Wark will attempt to broach in this event.
Author, journalist, Iraq war veteran, and Princeton Ph.D candidate, Roy Scranton‘s journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. His book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene has just been published by City Lights.
Stephanie Wakefield is co-founder of Woodbine, in Ridgewood, Queens, and a geographer at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently finishing a book on oysters and the ‘becoming infrastructure of nature/becoming nature of infrastructure,’ and teaching Urban Environmental Studies at Queens College.
McKenzie Wark is the author, most recently, of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso Books), and teaches in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research
This event is sponsored by The New School for Social Research.
A panel discussion of Critical Theories and the Budapest School, edited by Jonathan Pickle and John Rundell.
Moderator:Dimitri Nikulin
Panelists: Andrew Arato, Richard J. Bernstein, Jonathan Pickle, and Agnes Heller
Presented by The New School for Social Research.
Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute will jointly present the conference “Political Theology Today as Critical Theory of the Contemporary: Reason, Religion, Humanism,” to be held at Deutsches Haus at NYU, from February 15-17. Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III will deliver one of the keynote speeches. For a detailed conference schedule, please click here.
Across the globe the liberal logic of capitalism and technocracy has seemingly triumphed, and with it a culture of secularism, now the dominant ideology of the liberal establishment that prefers progress to tradition, an individualized identity to a sense of shared belonging, and free choice to common purpose. As much as this regime has produced wealth, it has also generated inequality and dissatisfaction. The populist insurgency that is sweeping the West is in large part a repudiation of this secular politics, opening the space for a post-liberal political theology. A resurgence of religion is underway that marks the failure of the secularization thesis and the need for alternative cultural resources, beyond positivism, to understand the place of humanity within the cosmos. Is this our new “Great Awakening”?
Amid the crisis of rationalism, critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas have sought to rescue the project of a reasonable humanism from the twin threats of religious fundamentalism and secular naturalism. Yet Habermas’s conception of postsecularity remains residually secularist because he does not permit faith to make any substantive or critical contribution to public discussion that could undermine the primacy of formal, procedural reason. In response Pope Emeritus Benedict invoked Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment because the slogan “reason alone” leads to the dissolution of reason—to the conclusion that only will and power have any reality. The only way to avoid this outcome is to recall—so Benedict’s argument in his much-commented but poorly understood 2006 Regensburg address—that the West’s commitment to humanist reason is grounded in the classical and Christian idea that human rationality participates in the infinite reason of transcendence. Otherwise the rational is but the illusion of our own and of nature’s will to power.
The 2019 Telos Conference will discuss the role of political theology as critical theory of the contemporary: the reappearance of faith in civic life. The focus will not be on intellectual history but rather on how faith is reshaping politics and culture today.
Please note: Sessions taking place at Deutsches Haus at NYU will be open to the general public. Attendance for break-out sessions will be limited to conference participants who have registered with the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute only. Events at Deutsches Haus are free and open to the public. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. As space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event to ensure you get a good seat. Thank you!