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 continued our reasearch with the theme of reflexivity: 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. During this time, Versus Laboratory continued in parallel at the ICI Kulturlabor - Berlin, with a project on the conceptual pair, object/subject. 

From the Fall of 2011 through to the Spring of 2012, Versus Laboratory, now under the direction of Dhruv Jain, Alexi Kukuljevic and Luke Fraser, will return to its founding idea—that it is through a productive dissonance with philosophy’s external conditions that conceptual innovation is best achieved—to explore how the antagonisms and exigencies of technique serve to modulate the conditioning of philosophical concepts. We will undertake a re-examination of the technical dimension of philosophy's conditions, the operations of formalization and materialization that expose thought to otherwise indiscernible tensions and deadlocks that are immanent to its translation into action, and which technical thinking and practice must perpetually overcome, whether by abstract compromise or concretizing synthesis. It is in the adaptations of philosophy's conditioning techniques (art, science, politics, love) to the antagonisms they encounter as they struggle with thought's outside that we will seek philosophy's contemporary conceptual impetuses. The conceptual lens through which we will focus these encounters – and which we expect these encounters to transform – will be the concept of antagonism itself.