Reminder of the deadline for the Basel conference:
I am pleased to announce the details for the forthcoming Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference taking place in Basel in September 2012. Our confirmed speakers should make it a strong event and I think it presents a real chance for all of us working in this area to come together. Basel is a beautiful place and the campus is the perfect venue for philosophy. Please circulate widely.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Aesthetics in the 21st Century
University of Basel
September 13-15, 2012
Confirmed Speakers: Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, N. Katherine Hayles
Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence as evidenced by recent works by major contemporary thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy (Muses II), Jacques Rancière (Dissensus; Aesthetics and its Discontents) and Alain Badiou (Handbook of Inaesthetics). In this vein, aesthetics does not merely designate a discipline concerned with theories of art, but more fundamentally the primacy of sensation and sensual encounter itself.
Even though these recent developments return to the work of the canonical authors, some contemporary scholars reject the traditional focus on epistemology (Baumgarten, Kant) and theorize sensation and the sensual encounter in terms of ontology instead (Harman, Shaviro). It is according to this shift that speculative realists have proclaimed aesthetics as ‘first philosophy’ and as speculative in nature. With speculative realism sensual encounter becomes an event that even no longer necessarily implies human agents. This is in alignment with the general speculative realist framework for thinking all kinds of entities and objects as free from our all-pervasive anthropocentrism which states, always, that everything is “for us.”
In this speculative realism has several important twentieth-century precursors, most notably Heidegger, Whitehead, Deleuze and Badiou with their respective concepts of event, (aesthetic) experience and encounter. This conference explores the resonances between these twentieth-century thinkers and their concepts and the recently reawakened interest in aesthetics, especially in its speculative realist guise. Hosted by the University of Basel’s Department of English the conference is particularly interested in the possible implications of what could be termed the new speculative aesthetics for literary and cultural studies. Thus, the conference aims at staging a three-fold encounter: between aesthetics and speculation, between speculative realism and its (possible) precursors, and between speculative realism and art and literature.
Please send your 300-word abstracts and 150-word bios to: aesthetics-englsem@unibas.ch.
The deadline for submissions is December 5, 2011. A selection of the papers given at the conference will be published as a special issue of Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism.
Conference Organizers:
Ridvan Askin, M.A.
Andreas Hägler, M.A.
Prof. Dr. Philipp Schweighauser
Department of English
University of Basel
Nadelberg 6
CH-4051 Basel
Switzerland
ridvan.askin[at]unibas.ch
andreas.haegler[at]unibas.ch
ph.schweighauser[at]unibas.ch
Paul Ennis
UCD School of Philosophy
Newman Building
Belfield
Dublin 4
Ireland
ennis.paul[at]gmail.com
Website
http://aesthetics.englsem.unibas.ch/conference/
Monday, November 14, 2011
Speculations has a new home at Punctum
We'll now be publishing Speculations with Punctum so the journal will be available there rather than on Lulu. Punctum is worth checking out in general and is also the home of O-Zone, the journal of object oriented ontology.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Cosmic Pessimism, Speculation, and the Unhuman part 1
I’ve noticed quite a few people are reading Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet at the moment. I gave it a quick download on the Kindle, and read it, more or less, straight through. It’s a wonderful piece of work and quite different from his previous book After Life which I found more difficult to get through if only because the book deals with a lot of material I am unfamiliar with.
His latest is a different beast; it talks about demons, black metal, speculation, a little philosophy, a little theology, and is outright fascinating in general. The book certainly has elements of the pessimistic style of recent continental realisms and the arguments are broadly in line with the less merry strands of 'speculative realism'. But mostly it’s a book about the un-human.
What I really like about the book is how it refuses to defang the weird in order to make appease these very same forms. Thacker’s book also has that cosmological edge that I personally find interesting (and that I see more and more through Land’s vision). This doesn’t mean that Thacker spends his time discussing cosmology, but rather that there is a cosmic pessimism that seems to run throughout his work.
Life, a key word for Thacker of course, comes across in this text as a shared zone of immanent pain, but it’s not a miserable text. What drives his interest in the un-human, as hinted it in his choice of quotations, is more a devotion to nothing, or nothingness in a similar fashion to the ‘un-thinged’ of Schelling (raised from the dead by Grant), the impersonal wills of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and Land’s obsession with entropic imagery (that crops up toward the end of Brassier’s Nihil Unbound too).
In all these thinkers, Thacker included, there is an attempt to break the endless variations on philosophy as concerned with the peculiar ‘destiny’ of symbolic thinking. We know that the post-Kantian philosopher-subject has traditionally taken this to necessitate a way of thinking about thinking.
Leaving Thacker aside his book got me thinking a little about the meaning of the various continental realisms, and their almost oedipal relation to Kant. Except to do that one has to ignore all the counter-revolutions to Kant that have already taken place.
On the edges of the tradition one can already find interesting thinkers pondering the nature of thinking-subjects as they exist in their not-quite-at-home situation amidst an indifferent and alien cosmos (the ‘cold world’ as Dominic Fox puts it).
The thinkers attuned to cosmologically-inspired pessimism tend to think about human consciousness as an ‘error,’ or ‘aberration,’ and, to borrow from Žižek, one begins from this perspective with the assumption that when it comes to the human ‘something went terribly wrong.’
In thinkers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Land, what went wrong was the emergence of an entity that quite simply knows too much.
These despondent cosmological visions have a strange lineage, and it’s not just the non-anthropocentric metaphysics revived by thinkers such as Deleuze, but there’s even a bit of the whole grand-error narrative holding over from Heidegger. This is why I tend to characterize continental realists as inverted Hegelians.
They try to think ‘Hegel without hope’ which means to bleed his vision of any theological or onto-theological comfort (the latter being nothing more than comfort within reason). So you still have the problem of the wound of subjectivity, but it’s a cosmic, perhaps even comic, burden in that it ultimately leads nowhere; there’s no answers – just the horrible realization, so wonderfully brought to bear by Land, that philosophy is just plumbing the depths of unknowing.
Whereas thinkers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer found a little solace in art, great figures, or poetry the contemporary cosmological pessimist is hermeneutically doomed to know that everything tends toward dissipation; everything desires to become a zero-sum. It’s a pitiless Universe all the way down, and there’s not even the memory of a receding gift to cling to (not even the Greeks can save us now…)
His latest is a different beast; it talks about demons, black metal, speculation, a little philosophy, a little theology, and is outright fascinating in general. The book certainly has elements of the pessimistic style of recent continental realisms and the arguments are broadly in line with the less merry strands of 'speculative realism'. But mostly it’s a book about the un-human.
What I really like about the book is how it refuses to defang the weird in order to make appease these very same forms. Thacker’s book also has that cosmological edge that I personally find interesting (and that I see more and more through Land’s vision). This doesn’t mean that Thacker spends his time discussing cosmology, but rather that there is a cosmic pessimism that seems to run throughout his work.
Life, a key word for Thacker of course, comes across in this text as a shared zone of immanent pain, but it’s not a miserable text. What drives his interest in the un-human, as hinted it in his choice of quotations, is more a devotion to nothing, or nothingness in a similar fashion to the ‘un-thinged’ of Schelling (raised from the dead by Grant), the impersonal wills of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and Land’s obsession with entropic imagery (that crops up toward the end of Brassier’s Nihil Unbound too).
In all these thinkers, Thacker included, there is an attempt to break the endless variations on philosophy as concerned with the peculiar ‘destiny’ of symbolic thinking. We know that the post-Kantian philosopher-subject has traditionally taken this to necessitate a way of thinking about thinking.
Leaving Thacker aside his book got me thinking a little about the meaning of the various continental realisms, and their almost oedipal relation to Kant. Except to do that one has to ignore all the counter-revolutions to Kant that have already taken place.
On the edges of the tradition one can already find interesting thinkers pondering the nature of thinking-subjects as they exist in their not-quite-at-home situation amidst an indifferent and alien cosmos (the ‘cold world’ as Dominic Fox puts it).
The thinkers attuned to cosmologically-inspired pessimism tend to think about human consciousness as an ‘error,’ or ‘aberration,’ and, to borrow from Žižek, one begins from this perspective with the assumption that when it comes to the human ‘something went terribly wrong.’
In thinkers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Land, what went wrong was the emergence of an entity that quite simply knows too much.
These despondent cosmological visions have a strange lineage, and it’s not just the non-anthropocentric metaphysics revived by thinkers such as Deleuze, but there’s even a bit of the whole grand-error narrative holding over from Heidegger. This is why I tend to characterize continental realists as inverted Hegelians.
They try to think ‘Hegel without hope’ which means to bleed his vision of any theological or onto-theological comfort (the latter being nothing more than comfort within reason). So you still have the problem of the wound of subjectivity, but it’s a cosmic, perhaps even comic, burden in that it ultimately leads nowhere; there’s no answers – just the horrible realization, so wonderfully brought to bear by Land, that philosophy is just plumbing the depths of unknowing.
Whereas thinkers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer found a little solace in art, great figures, or poetry the contemporary cosmological pessimist is hermeneutically doomed to know that everything tends toward dissipation; everything desires to become a zero-sum. It’s a pitiless Universe all the way down, and there’s not even the memory of a receding gift to cling to (not even the Greeks can save us now…)
Sunday, October 30, 2011
From the Ripper to M. R. James (and beyond)
[Sorry for the lack of links, but Blogger is acting funny]
I just managed to finish my Jack the Ripper paper for the P.E.S.T. event in Dublin (November, 20th), and it has inspired me to get around to a few projects I had put on the back-burner due to my thesis. Writing a thesis is great in many ways; you get into a subject in a way that doesn’t seem possible again until you reach the exalted status of Professor on a sabbatical (or, if you are fortunate, land a research-oriented post-doc).
First among these projects is a piece on M.R. James. The Ripper paper is a work-in-progress. I’m under no illusions that it is a coherent piece as it stands, but I need to test it out to see where the gaps are, and so it’ll require a few conference outings. That said the core of a paper is hidden in there somewhere. I think Helvete are planning on making an issue from the P.E.S.T. event so I’ll have time to do that I am sure.
But for now I am focusing on writing a little something on M.R. James. Dylan Trigg tweeted a nice review of the collected ghost stories of James the other day from the Telegraph, and it reminded me of a long-repressed desire to engage with James in some way. I still can’t figure out what I need to do here. The tales seem to call out for a phenomenological reading, but I suspect this has been attempted before.
What I really want to tackle in James is the how ‘tight’ the atmospheres he creates are. Not just in terms of the locales our protagonists end up in, but how psychologically resistant they tend to be to the other characters. Coupled with the shortness of the tales I’ve always been impressed by how James plays on the solitude of the reader (not that they can’t be read in groups, but they are best approached alone).
The other theme floating around my head with regard to James is his trick of making the invisible, or unimaginable, visible, or imagined. His stories often involve academics, or the academically-minded, with an interest in what we can characterize as ‘invisible’ interests; in the sense of being fascinated by not-quite material phenomena like language, the archaic, or dead cultures (although, in certain cases, our protagonist will find themselves engaging with the remains/ruins of some way of life that no longer exists).
That the moment of fear often corresponds to the making-present of a more tangible alien force is what is so jarring. Our heroes are forced to bear witness to what should not be. They certainly do want to find something, but they find something entirely different.
I often feel that our heroes have arrived at whatever small village they happen to be in precisely because they managed to push past boredom toward some niche interest, and in this way the stories feel like warnings not to be too curious.
In deciding to fulfil some long-held need to seek out a forgotten slice of arcane knowledge they often wind up out of their depth. What they discover is that their psychological defences are usurped by a random find; a seemingly innocent object that nonetheless draws them toward it. By unwisely deciding to be drawn-in they inadvertently evoke forces from the ‘outside.’
It is then only a matter of time, according to the logic of the tales, that the hero will ultimately be intruded upon; at first slowly, but eventually they are enveloped.
There is much for me to do here if I am to make a coherent piece out of all this, but that’s the aim for the moment. After that I intend to write something on the movie Aliens, but in between there is some work on Meillassoux to be done, the Heidegger volume, and Speculations too. So a busy time ahead.
I just managed to finish my Jack the Ripper paper for the P.E.S.T. event in Dublin (November, 20th), and it has inspired me to get around to a few projects I had put on the back-burner due to my thesis. Writing a thesis is great in many ways; you get into a subject in a way that doesn’t seem possible again until you reach the exalted status of Professor on a sabbatical (or, if you are fortunate, land a research-oriented post-doc).
First among these projects is a piece on M.R. James. The Ripper paper is a work-in-progress. I’m under no illusions that it is a coherent piece as it stands, but I need to test it out to see where the gaps are, and so it’ll require a few conference outings. That said the core of a paper is hidden in there somewhere. I think Helvete are planning on making an issue from the P.E.S.T. event so I’ll have time to do that I am sure.
But for now I am focusing on writing a little something on M.R. James. Dylan Trigg tweeted a nice review of the collected ghost stories of James the other day from the Telegraph, and it reminded me of a long-repressed desire to engage with James in some way. I still can’t figure out what I need to do here. The tales seem to call out for a phenomenological reading, but I suspect this has been attempted before.
What I really want to tackle in James is the how ‘tight’ the atmospheres he creates are. Not just in terms of the locales our protagonists end up in, but how psychologically resistant they tend to be to the other characters. Coupled with the shortness of the tales I’ve always been impressed by how James plays on the solitude of the reader (not that they can’t be read in groups, but they are best approached alone).
The other theme floating around my head with regard to James is his trick of making the invisible, or unimaginable, visible, or imagined. His stories often involve academics, or the academically-minded, with an interest in what we can characterize as ‘invisible’ interests; in the sense of being fascinated by not-quite material phenomena like language, the archaic, or dead cultures (although, in certain cases, our protagonist will find themselves engaging with the remains/ruins of some way of life that no longer exists).
That the moment of fear often corresponds to the making-present of a more tangible alien force is what is so jarring. Our heroes are forced to bear witness to what should not be. They certainly do want to find something, but they find something entirely different.
I often feel that our heroes have arrived at whatever small village they happen to be in precisely because they managed to push past boredom toward some niche interest, and in this way the stories feel like warnings not to be too curious.
In deciding to fulfil some long-held need to seek out a forgotten slice of arcane knowledge they often wind up out of their depth. What they discover is that their psychological defences are usurped by a random find; a seemingly innocent object that nonetheless draws them toward it. By unwisely deciding to be drawn-in they inadvertently evoke forces from the ‘outside.’
It is then only a matter of time, according to the logic of the tales, that the hero will ultimately be intruded upon; at first slowly, but eventually they are enveloped.
There is much for me to do here if I am to make a coherent piece out of all this, but that’s the aim for the moment. After that I intend to write something on the movie Aliens, but in between there is some work on Meillassoux to be done, the Heidegger volume, and Speculations too. So a busy time ahead.
Monday, October 24, 2011
O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies
I'm sure you've all heard, but O-Zone just landed today. Looks great and a strong editorial board. Link here.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Systems Session: The Prince and the Wolf (Dublin)
The moment I left Dublin became cool:
Next Systems Session: The Prince and the Wolf
After a shorter first meeting the Systems seminar group will begin in earnest on Nov. 2nd (2011) at the Gradcam building, (just off Thomas St.) and the next sessions this calendar year are Nov. 23rd, Dec 14th.
The general starting point of the seminar was “systems” thought of in connection with phenomenology, technology and the body. This has now expanded to include debates related to Speculative Realism/ Object Orientated Philosophy.
Specifically: as agreed, the key text this year will be the Harman and Latour debate in The Prince and the Wolf.
We’ll begin discussing this text at the next session and take things from there.
Next Systems Session: The Prince and the Wolf
After a shorter first meeting the Systems seminar group will begin in earnest on Nov. 2nd (2011) at the Gradcam building, (just off Thomas St.) and the next sessions this calendar year are Nov. 23rd, Dec 14th.
The general starting point of the seminar was “systems” thought of in connection with phenomenology, technology and the body. This has now expanded to include debates related to Speculative Realism/ Object Orientated Philosophy.
Specifically: as agreed, the key text this year will be the Harman and Latour debate in The Prince and the Wolf.
We’ll begin discussing this text at the next session and take things from there.
Friday, October 14, 2011
My 'Cosmos and History' article...
...can now be found here alongside a whole bunch of interesting pieces (also worth checking out the back archives of C&H if you never have before). Am currently busy IRL on a trip back to Dublin, but can't wait to dive into the issue when I get back.
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