Evolution, intentionality, information…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting event at Bristol later in the month, featuring amongst others the inimitable Dan Dennett: info here.

New title on Hegel and Deleuze

This edited collection on Hegel and Deleuze (edited by Karen Houle and Jim Vernon) looks pretty interesting – and some reliably quality commentators in there.

Here’s the blurb:

Hegel and Deleuze cannily examines the various resonances and dissonances between these two major philosophers. The collection represents the best in contemporary international scholarship on G. W. F. Hegel and Gilles Deleuze, and the contributing authors inhabit the as-yet uncharted space between the two thinkers, collectively addressing most of the major tensions and resonances between their ideas and laying a solid ground for future scholarship. The essays are organized thematically into two groups: those that maintain a firm but nuanced disjunction or opposition between Hegel and Deleuze, and those that chart possible connections, syntheses, or both. As is clear from this range of texts, the challenges involved in grasping, appraising, appropriating, and developing the systems of Deleuze and Hegel are varied and immense. While neither Hegel nor Deleuze gets the last word, the contributors ably demonstrate that partisans of either can no longer ignore the voice of the other.

And here’s the contents (courtesy of Jean-Clet Martin on Ian Buchanan’s “Deleuze” Facebook page):

Part 1. Disjunction/contradiction — 1. At the crossroads of philosophy and religion: Deleuze’s critique of Hegel / Brent Adkins — 2. Negation, disjunction, and a new theory of forces: Deleuze’s critique of Hegel / Nathan Widder — 3. Hegel and Deleuze: difference or contradiction? / Anne Sauvagnargues — 4. The logic of the rhizome in the work of Hegel and Deleuze / Henry Somers-Hall — 5. Actualization: enrichment and loss / Bruce Baugh — 6. Political bodies without organs: on Hegel’s ideal state and Deleuzian micropolitics / Pheng Cheah — 7. Deleuze and Hegel on the logic of relations / Jim Vernon — Part 2. Connection/synthesis — 8. Deleuze and Hegel on the limits of self-determined subjectivity / Simon Lumsden — 9. Desiring-production and spirit: on anti-Oedipus and German idealism / John Russon — 10. Hegel and Deleuze: the storm / Juliette Simont — 11. Limit, ground, judgment– syllogism: Hegel, Deleuze, Hegel, and Deleuze / Jay Lampert –12. Hegel and Deleuze on life, sense, and limit / Emilia Angelova — Part 3. Conjunctive synthesis — 13. A criminal intrigue: an interview with Jean-Clet Martin / Constantin V. Boundas.

Here’s a new word…

“Speleogenesis“, which I came across when looking up “speleology” – which I did because Deleuze said this:

The Presocratics installed thought in the caves, life in the depths.  They probed the water and the fire.  They made philosophy a strike of the hammer, like Empedocles smashing the statues, the hammer of the geologist, of the speleologist.

(LS, 153)

Maybe we could call a certain kind of philosophy “speleogenetic” – philosophising by digging new caves.

[The hermit] will doubt [...] whether for a philosopher every cave does not have, must not have, an ever deeper cave behind it – a more extensive, stranger, richer world below the surface, an abyss behind every ground, under every ‘groundwork’.

(Nietzsche, BGE, §289)

‘Transdisciplinarity’ workshop @ CRMEP

Info on (I think) the concluding workshop on ‘transdisciplinarity’ in the humanities to be held by the CRMEP at Kingston University:

Now Open for Registration

‘Romantic Transdisciplinarity: Art and the New’

An International Conference organised by the CRMEP as part of its AHRC project on Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities
In collaboration with the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

8–9 May 2013

Venue: Senate House, University of London, Malet Street (http://goo.gl/maps/Sjkmr)

A conference about the transdisciplinary legacies of early German Romanticism in contemporary theory and practice in the arts and humanities

Speakers include:

Howard Caygill (CRMEP, Kingston University)
David Cunningham (English, University of Westminister)
Boris Groys (Slavic Studies, NYU)
Claude Imbert (Philosophy, ENS, Paris)
Gertrud Koch (Film Studies, Free University Berlin)
Olivier Schefer (Aesthetics, Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris 1)
Alison Stone (Philosophy, Lancaster University)
Hito Steyerl (artist, Berlin)
Peter Weibel (ZKM, Karlsruhe)

Registration is *REQUIRED* via: http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/activities/item.php?updatenum=2379.
Please note that the fees for the conference – waged £60.00; students & unwaged £20.00; CRMEP students £15.00 – covers tea/coffee, the reception and lunch for both days.

Enquiries to crmep@kingston.ac.uk

Astra Taylor on education

Here’s an interesting talk by filmmaker Astra Taylor on education, home schooling and the heritage of the ‘radical pedagogy’ experiments of the 1960s:

Locke and European philosophy

Conference coming up at LSE. I saw Stella Sandford present a paper at the SEP-FEP conference last year which I seem to recall was material from the preface of Balibar’s book mentioned below, and it was pretty interesting stuff:

‘John Locke and European Philosophy’

Monday 11 March, 6.30 – 8pm
Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE

Locke’s foundational place in the history of British empiricism and liberal political thought is well known, but in what sense is John Locke a modern European philosopher?

ETIENNE BALIBAR, Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University; Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, University of Paris 10 Nanterre and Visiting Professor, Columbia University, in conversation with QUASSIM CASSAM, Professor of Philosophy, Warwick University.

Chair: Stella Sandford, Reader in Modern European Philosophy, CRMEP, Kingston University

This event is organised in anticipation of the publication of Etienne Balibar’s “Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness,” edited and with an Introduction by Stella Sandford (Verso, 2013).

‘Why de Beauvoir Matters’ @ the Ashmolean

Why de Beauvoir Matters with Dr Jonathan Webber (Cardiff University)

Wednesday March 20, 6pm,

Ashmolean Education Centre (St Giles Entrance)

Drinks and nibbles from 17.45

https://www.facebook.com/events/346553628787743/

No booking required but please arrive early to ensure you get a seat.

Simone de Beauvoir is a major figure in twentieth century feminist thought. She is often portrayed as merely a follower and minor critic of Sartre, applying his existentialism to the question of gender. This talk will present a different picture. Her work on age and ageing, it will be argued, is significant both as a deep contribution to existentialist thought and as a stimulus to much needed theoretical reflection on this neglected topic.

Dr Jonathan Webber is Reader in Philosophy at Cardiff University. He is the author of The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the translator of Routledge’s edition of Sartre’s The Imaginary.

Deleuze’s Abécédaire with English subtitles

A reblog from Schizosophy: YouTube playlist of Deleuze’s Abécédaire with English subtitles. Lovely.

Post-Romanticism

Below is a CFA for an issue of the journal CounterText which looks pretty interesting:

CounterText Special Issue

General Editors: Ivan Callus, James Corby

Special Issue Editor: James Corby

Post-Romanticism: Are We There Yet?

 

Romanticism has not yet come to its end.

–Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy

 

What interests us in romanticism is that we still belong to the era it opened up.
– Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute

What is ultimately at stake here can be formulated in terms of the following question which weighs upon us and threatens to exhaust us: can we be delivered, finally delivered, from our subjection to Romanticism?
– Badiou, Theoretical Writings

‘Post-Romantic’ is, in its way, as uncertain and fluid a term as ‘Romantic’; it is a necessary term, however…’
– O’Neill, The All-Sustaining Air

What will become of the poem after Heidegger, after the age of poets, in other words, in what will a post-romantic poem consist?
– Badiou, Conditions

 

An invitation to focus on yet another ‘post-’, particularly in light of exhortations such as Mikhail Epstein’s recent call for a discursive shift in the humanities away from the ubiquitous ‘post-’ prefix (understood in all of its Lyotard-inflected complexity) to the ‘proto-’, may seem neither auspicious nor inspiring. What is more, of the plethora of ‘post-’s that have dominated the theoretical humanities in recent decades—postmodernism, poststructuralism, post-marxism, post-feminism, postcolonialism, post-theory, posthumanism etc—post-romanticism has undoubtedly attracted the least interest and provoked the least commentary. This is perhaps due partly to the lack of certainty about its referent. But might that, in itself, be a reason for treating it as significant and for considering it more closely? It is, after all, a term that, though uncommon, persists—is even deemed ‘necessary’ according to one of our epigraphs—and yet it names something that is still not completely apparent, something that either has not yet materialised fully or something that exists but which we do not yet properly understand, obscured, perhaps, by our investments in alternative cultural histories. The term post-romanticism, then, holds open a space of artistic and cultural production that refuses easy assimilation into the comparatively conventional paradigm of modernism and its postmodern futures.

When the term ‘post-romantic’ is used, it is often in a rather unimaginatively chronological way to indicate literature, music and other art forms produced in the latter half of the nineteenth century, after the high-water mark of romanticism but still bearing many of its traits. Of far greater interest than this, however, is the possibility that post-romanticism might refer to something—an aesthetics or poetics—that marks simultaneously a rupture and, in some sense, a continuation of romanticism. Thus understood, though in a manner yet to be determined, post-romanticism would exist in what might be called, following the title of the journal in which this special issue will appear, countertextual—existing, that is, both with and against romanticism. But here O’Neill’s epigraph highlights a problem that further compounds the difficulties of definition and understanding, namely that romanticism itself can often prove to be a frustratingly, wanderingly nebulous concept. So, we might ask: in considering post-romanticism, which understandings of romanticism compete for relevance? Which, if any, ultimately succeeds? One of the strongest contenders, perhaps because it emerged as the most sophisticatedly theorised, is the romanticism of the early German romantics, which was as much a philosophical intervention as it was a literary one. It is to this conception of romanticism, which can trace an august twentieth-century lineage through the work of Benjamin, Heidegger and Blanchot, that the other three epigraphs—by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy and Badiou—refer. Broadly, this romanticism seems to offer a sort of aesthetics of failure, a confrontation with the limits of human reason accompanied by rather unhopeful gestures to a beyond of some kind. Using a term recently associated with Quentin Meillassoux, a thinker whom can be considered among the vanguard of a recent, Badiou-inspired rejection of romanticism, this sort of romanticism might be understood as a deeply dissatisfied aesthetic acknowledgment of correlationism, the idea that what we know is always conditioned by our way of knowing it. What remains just beyond reach, but which art can strive to approximate, is the unconditioned or absolute. It is from this romanticism that a despairing Badiou, judging it to be saturated and exhausted, wishes to be delivered.

However, given the stubborn persistence of this and other conceptions of romanticism (to echo the title of Richard Eldridge’s book), in spite of Badiou and, indeed, in spite of Hegel’s famously damning assessment of romanticism, might talk of post-romanticism actually be premature? Admittedly, there seems to be a canon of literary works produced over the past century that could conceivably, if presented in a particular way, be seen as something like a distinct, though perhaps relatively meagre, post-romantic canon (one might think of T.E. Hulme, Pessoa, Beckett, Larkin, de Man, Badiou, and so on—a grouping that seems to exist perilously somewhere between the disparate and the desperate); but would such a canon indicate the fragments of an existing post-romanticism that has not been thoroughly identified and properly mapped, or are these perhaps post-romantic texts avant la lettre, or can they, in fact, be accommodated quite comfortably in modernism’s capacious folds without the need for the countertextualising category of post-romanticism? And, in any case, might this focus on a decidedly philosophical romantic tradition foreclose other post-romantic possibilities? Furthermore, what kinds of philosophical and political commitments might be implicit—or might we expect—in a post-romanticism worthy of the name? Finally, then, to reiterate Badiou’s question that so succinctly seems to encapsulate all of these issues, ‘in what will a post-romantic poem consist?’

Abstracts should be approximately 500 words in length and should be submitted with a brief bionote to James Corby (james.corby@um.edu.mt) by 30 April 2013. Please write “POST-ROMANTICISM” in the subject field of your email. Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by 31 May 2013 and invited to submit full-length articles by 31 January 2014. Final acceptance of articles will be subject to editorial screening and peer review. CounterText is a peer-reviewed journal that will be launching in 2013 (see here for more details http://www.um.edu.mt/arts/english/countertext).

More Warwick events (French philosophy, Hegel)

A couple more events coming up at Warwick:

Interrogating French philosophy, 1957-1967

5:30pm – 8pm, Tue 5th Mar 2013; Location: Room S0.11, Social Sciences Building

Speakers:

• Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths College, London)
• Nick Hewlett (Warwick)
• Tzuchien Tho (CIEPFC, Paris)
• Giuseppe Bianco (Warwick)

Hegel’s Science of Logic

Conference on Hegel’s Science of Logic. The conference will take place on 2nd-3rd May 2013 and is funded by The Leverhulme Trust.

Speakers:

• Charlotte Baumann (UCL)
• Michela Bordignon (Padua)
• Alfredo Ferrarin (Pisa)
• Dietmar Heidemann (Luxembourg)
• Anton Friedrich Koch (Heidelberg)
• Richard Lambert (Warwick)
• Christian Martin (Munich)
• Johannes-Georg Schülein (Bochum)
• Graham Wetherall (Warwick)
• Claudia Wirsing (Jena)

Anyone who is interested in attending should register with Graham Wetherall (G.J.Wetherall@warwick.ac.uk). There is no charge for registration, but it would be helpful to the organisers if you could notify us if you plan to attend.