So I'm just finishing up a brief return trip to Dublin and remain shocked at the rapid pace with which Dublin seems to be disintegrating on some fronts (albeit improving slightly in some others).
It got me thinking a lot about Heidegger (from Freiburg to Dublin is from dwelling to Gestell...) and I managed to write up some notes for a possible Heidegger paper. I'm going to try incorporate it into an upcoming talk for a black metal conference happening in Dublin soon...details as I get 'em.
On that front it is worth noting I finally got to meet Michael O' Rourke and we managed to visit the Tool-Use exhibition exhibition here in Dublin. It was weird to see this happening at all since for a while I felt like the only person in Ireland with any interest in OOO.
Now things are happening quite a bit on that score and certainly on the aesthetics front. However the visit made me quite aware that I need to talk to artists a lot more. That being said it was nice to be able to talk to Michael about all this over a pint of Guinness. Hopefully Dublin can become a hideout for para-academic exiles.
Equally cool is that I will be able to attend the SEP-FEP conference in York (with none other than Graham Harman as a keynote) alongside two Irish academics - Francis Halsall and Tim Scott (even better is that there will also be two excellent continentalists from UCD there too). The panel is called Aesthetic Objects: Art and Object Orientated Philosophy (details here including abstracts) and my own paper is called More than Theory: On Speculative Realism and Aesthetics. It will be a hybrid of my Basel and Ecotone papers so I'm not sure how it will look by September, but I'm getting more relaxed about giving papers these days so I'm going to see how things pan out.
Tomorrow I head off to Nottingham for the Eco-tone event (schedule, abstracts) organized by the ever-helpful and forward-looking David Reid. My paper is called Melancholic Coexistence amongst Objects and I am hoping that I can at least fulfil the minor role of discussing some OOO metaphysics before letting the properly interesting people show me what thinking the outside is really like. Since I'm on early in the morning I am going to be in a nice position to sit back and take it all in. I'm also getting to meet Robert Jackson for the first time and I'm certain I'll learn a thing or two from him. I'm also hoping I'll get to meet some of Nottingham theology crew again.
For now I need to relax a litte...my body took a lot of beating this week from all that booze!
I really wish that I could be at the "Aesthetic Objects" conference. Maybe they will put it online?
ReplyDeleteI've been wanting to write up my thoughts on SR/OOO and aesthetics for a while now in some formal way but it's hard to keep up with all the activity.
Plus I need to plead artist here, as an amateur with the philosophy side of things I feel like I'm walking in the dark.
I'm not sure, but I'll see what I can do. But I wouldn't be put off at all. As Robert pointed out in a recent blog post both sides need to buck up on what they lack. This is a good thing in the end since there is much to learn from each other. So I say go for it!
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