Dissensual relations are points of thought

Versus Laboratory is a theoretical laboratory which seeks to examine, and experiment upon, some of the most pertinent moments of the polemical genesis of thought in contemporary philosophical practice. In the different projects of the laboratory we aim to explore how philosophy shapes its interiority – the production of concepts – by capturing non-philosophical objects, how the intrusion of the material from political, aesthetical, scientific and more widely extraphilosophical acts and discourses shapes, transforms and divides philosophy.

Our inquiry is twofold. On the one hand, we want to understand how philosophy forms, disturbs, interrupts, modifies its actual conceptual configuration via the interference of political, aesthetical, and more widely extraphilosophical acts and discourses. On the other hand, we want to understand how this seizure of the extraphilosophical within philosophy is also a point of irreducible disagreement, in which philosophy is transformed and divided. In this, however, we want to show how dissent is not simply a reactive, but also a productive procedure that generates thought.

The project has started in 2008, under the direction of Ozren Pupovac and Bruno Besana, with a monthly seminar in which four abstract concepts – singularity, duality, multiplicity, universality – have been analyzed in the exact points in which contemporary philosophy has reshaped their definitions via a struggle with the senses that these ideas have in the fields of political, artistic, psychoanalytic and scientific practices. During its second year in 2009, with a new team consisting of Pietro Bianchi, Giuseppe Bianco and Tzuchien Tho, Versus Laboratory recommences its inquiry into dissenual points of confrontation between philosophy and its exteriorities by taking up the question of matter and materialisms. Concepts dear to philosophy since its beginnings, “matter” and “materialism” are at the very same time used as hammers – for instance by science and by politics – against philosophy, which is therefore obliged to rethink the conceptual signification of these two notions.

In 2010, we will continue our reasearch with the theme of relflexivity: the mutual identification of the subject in the object and the object in the subject. This takes multiple forms: in the void of the object in the subject’s asymptotic approach, in the non-identity of the object taken in itself and the non-identity of the subject taken in the problem of constitution and index. In other words, the problem of reflexivity is another version of the problem of materialism posed by Marx: in what sense is the “objective” condition of “subjectivity” already complicated by the attempt of ascertaining the meaning of either of them? Here, it seems, the subject is already to be found in the conditions of the object and the object in the conditions of subjectivity. However, in highlighting the issue of reflexivity, the explicit materialist problem of the subject-object ambiguity is brought into sharper focus.

In parallel, Versus Laboratory continues in the ICI Kulturlabor - Berlin, with a project on "object-subject"

Upcoming events

Seminar

Sociological reflexivity/Philosophical reflexivity

Thursday 27 May 2010
14h Auditorium

The idea of a “reflexive sociology” is one of the cornerstones, if not the main one, of Pierre Bourdieu’s entire intellectual enterprise, underpinning his claims to provide distinctive and “scientific” knowledge of the social world and, in particular, a scientific knowledge of knowledge products (including the philosophical).
During the last two decades this idea has, on one hand, been applied to the analysis of philosophy by some of Bourdieu scholars (Pinto, etc.) inaugurating a new clash between scientific fields, but also giving new instruments for analyzing philosophical discursivities; on the other hand, while in his earlier writings Bourdieu stood against the use of sociology as a means for political activism, in his later intellectual career, launching himself into the role of a public intellectual, he stressed the political importance of the reflexive analysis that any intellectual agent should have.
In this seminar, we will clarify the precise signification of the Bourdieusian notion of “reflexivity” underlining its originality, distinguishing it from a phenomenological conception among others.
Starting from the three key notions of habitus, capital, and field, that circumscribe Bourdieu’s analysis, we will address the consequence of the original idea of epistemic reflexivity on philosophy and politics starting from some precise cases of analysis taken from the history of twentieth century French philosophy.

Event

On Jia Zhang-Ke's "24 City"

Tuesday 08 June 2010
11h-12 JVE Academie

24 City is a 2008 film from Jia Zhang-Ke, a leading member of the new wave of Chinese directors known as the “sixth generation”. The film depicts the last days of a large state-owned factory (Plant #420) in the process of its demolition in order to make way for a luxury condominium complex named the “24 City”, after an enigmatic Tang Dynasty poem. Shot as a sort of pseudo-documentary, Jia maneuvers in and out of the deserted factory-space, speaking to workers their friends, children and mentors, weaving together a snapshot of contemporary China that is as ambiguous as it concrete. Treating elements as diverse as classical literature, the legacy of Maoism and the emerging cynicism of youth in the Deng Xiao-Ping era, Jia intricately problematizes the conditions and precipitations for acting and speaking in China today.