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…)
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