Events
May
More than a lot — Displacements in ontology
Saturday 10 May 2008 - Sunday 11 May 2008
Auditorium, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
September
Politics and Thought
Saturday 27 September 2008 - Sunday 28 September 2008
Jan van Eyck Academie, Auditorium
March
Materialism of Excess: Versus Laboratory ICI-Berlin/JVE-Maastricht common session in Berlin
Friday 27 March 2009
10am - 1pm ICI-Berlin Christinenstrasse 18-19, 10119 Berlin
November
Form and Formalism
Saturday 07 November 2009 - Sunday 08 November 2009
Auditorium
December
Screening: Facs of Life
Tuesday 01 December 2009
21h projection room
February
Screening: Koji Wakamatsu's "United Red Army"
Tuesday 02 February 2010
21h Rm. 201
June
On Jia Zhang-Ke's "24 City"
Tuesday 08 June 2010
11h-12 JVE Academie
Form and Formalism
Saturday 07 November 2009 - Sunday 08 November 2009
Auditorium
*NEWS:
Form & Formalism: Schedule
Nov. 7
9:30h- 10h Versus Laboratory Collective, Introduction
10h- 11:20h Patrice Maniglier, “The structuralist legacy”
response by Juan-Luis Gastaldi
11:30h-13h Matteo Bonazzi, “Knowledge, transmission and the formation of the unconscious”
response by Samo Tomsic
13h-1430h Lunch
14:30h-15:50h Gabriel Catren, “Homological extimities (swiss-cheese western)”
response by Tzuchien Tho
16h-17:30h Emmanuel Barot, “On a formal destiny of the negative”
response by Giuseppe Bianco
17:30h Coffee
18h-19:30h Paul-Antoine Miquel, “Life: an extended physical approach”
response by Charles T. Wolfe
19:30h Dinner
Nov. 8
10h-11:20h Antonello Schaccitano, “No math, no science, no psychoanalysis”
response by Pietro Bianchi
11:30h-13h Zachary Luke Fraser, “The concept of ‘blind-spot’ (towards an optometry of logic)”
response by Knox Peden
13h -14h Lunch
14h-15: 30h Roundtable discussion
Please RSVP with the organizers by email [tzuchien.tho at gmail] so we can prepare the conference space and packets.
Some changes in the conference line up. Participants will include: Emmanuel Barot, Matteo Bonazzi, Gabriel Catren, Zachary Luke Fraser, Juan-Luis Gastaldi, Patrice Maniglier, Paul-Antoine Miquel, Knox Peden, Antonello Sciacchitano, Charles T. Wolfe.
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While the decay of old distinctions pushes us toward new horizons, new challenges and opportunities forge a new cartography of regions in which philosophical speculation touches ground and takes flight. Whereas ruptures with common traditions must be marked and the entropy of once heated debates recombine in new configurations, the invention of new forms is the synthesis from the bones of previous battlefields and the construction of new formalisms give us the lexicon to organize the dialectics of a struggle to come. Between the past and the future what is impossible to give a precise order is the present and it is precisely at this limit of actuality that we are called to thought.
From philosophy’s original attachment to the concept of form, this term, circulating between the organization and limit of knowledge, the access to being and the index of truth, has served to give relevance to philosophy’s sometimes organizational, sometimes interventionary and even sometimes silent legitimation of historical transformations of thought.
In the last century, the dissolution of the unity and mastery of philosophy, at once through a purification of the objects of philosophical investigation and its self-limitation in the shadows of scientific discourse, has placed the concept of form outside the field of contestation. If the advent of modern science was the disenchantment of nature then modern philosophy’s attempt to rid itself of the wonder of the concept has expressed itself finally and precisely on the excision of the problem of form.
In its wake, the formal relation between concepts, the irreducible imperative of a still-operative rationalism in knowledge express themselves in local terms. The refusal of globality in turn provokes the proliferation of terms that take the place of the formal, the concatenation of contexts, concrete relations that situate the limits of formal notions. Thus instead of a mathesis universalis, we turn to a language of complexity, instead of systematic closure, we turn to indefinite multiplicity, from architechtonics to deconstruction.
As for the issue of the transmission of knowledge, the field in which the metaphysical lineage of form has perhaps left its most enduring mark, the issue of formalism has come to play a different role. In the contemporary restaging of the classical metaphysical relation between form, innateness of ideas and transmissibility of knowledge, the status and agency of formalism has come to problematize the modes and structure of the transmissibility of knowledge. While formalism normatively operates to provide a non-subjective dimension for the transmission of knowledge, it is precisely this operation, existing somewhere between the objective and subjective, that opens up the new conditions of philosophical reflection. In the functions of representation, sign, index, symbol, and trace, questions surrounding the reflexive knots of the subject of knowledge and the conditions of the subject’s possibility find an “objective” dimension for their dialectical expression.
Aside from philosophy’s own recent history and its changing relation to other fields of thought, from a wider historical horizon, one might say that every major reinvention of what philosophy “is” and what its relationship is to knowledge has to do with an encounter with the emergence of a new hegemonic formalization (scientific and otherwise): Plato and Greek geometry, Galileo and modern physics, Descartes and geometric analysis, Spinoza and axiomatic proof, Kant and Newtonian physics, Hegel and infinitesimal analysis, etc. In the twentieth century, these sites of encounter have become the very sites where philosophical contestations are produced and whose results reflect directly on the practice of formalization itself: the crisis of mathematical foundations, the status of structure and discursivity in the human sciences, logic’s legitimacy in philosophy’s “linguistic turn”, and phenomenology’s status as rigorous science. In this context, a developmental review of these movements and contestations will have to wait for further research at another time. Instead, we would like to attend to some localized spaces where these debates are active in contemporary thought. To this end, our seven invited speakers have been asked to present their own current research which we believe does contribute to this ongoing understanding of the actuality of formalism in contemporary thought and can help us move toward new questions and sharpen the means by which we can evaluate this encounter today.
We have decided on a panel of seven speakers of a pretty eclectic selection. Some have done extensive work on the status of formalism in contemporary science (in the plural sense of the hard sciences, the social sciences and psychoanalysis) where others deal more specifically with the development of historical and conceptual limits of formalism for the actuality of thought, still others see the development of formalism as a crucial dimension for pushing forward the frontiers of thinking itself. Our idea is that we could learn from each other in precisely this eclectic regard and sketch the commonalities and disagreements in our shared theoretical horizon. In this, we want to avoid a conference of papers each of which are artificially constrained to speak generally about this issue. Against a general approach, we hope to draw from the work of different thinkers working on different fields as the only way to respond to the horizon of contemporary thought.
However, the stakes of the workshop which we see as one of the central questions of our larger project concerns whether the formalization across these different fields, absorbed in many ways under a philosophical discourse, is not simply an equivocation of the term. In what ways would the problems of formalization in psychoanalysis respond to the problems in physics or phenomenology? Here, we would like to test some limits of philosophy’s supposed general account of these different forms of formalization. As Alain Badiou stated recently, “I believe that if all creative thought is in reality the invention of a new mode of formalization, then that thought is the invention of a form.” As a statement which serves a kind of contemporary historical index, we hope to ask if Badiou’s notion here presents something actual in contemporary thought or if there is some equivocation or banality that renders his statement rather empty. As interested in synthesis and as we are in as rupture and distinction, we would like to lay out the resources for evaluating this sort of claim.
Some background questions:
How has the reconceptualization of the terms difference/identity, global/local, order/disorder, rupture/continuity, model/structure… transform the space of formalization’s supposed efficacy?
What is left in the idea of modeling philosophy after the rigor of scientific discourse? How does this leave the problem of the transmission of knowledge (mathesis) as a philosophical occupation?
In a time when some of the most “rigorous” of sciences venture further into the realm of speculation, undoing our commonsense notion of the “empirical” and the standard order of things, how does the oldest philosophical notions of form come back into play?
What is left in the broken relationship between philosophical form and scientific formalism?
What can we still expect of the relation between knowledge and truth?
In what way does the problem of formalism still intervene on the relation between the various dimensions of knowledge, does it simply constitute an equivocation that links up disparate and incongruous processes under a philosophical contrivance?
Some references:
Bachelard, Gaston, Le nouvel esprit scientifique
Badiou, Bouveresse, et al. “La Formalisation” Cahiers pour l’analyse, no. 10,1969.
Canguilhem, Georges, Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences
Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and repetition
Foucault, The archeology of knowledge
Husserl, Edmund, The origin of geometry
Jacob, Francois, La logique du vivant
Lacan, Jacques, “Science and truth” in Ecrits, pp. 726-745; Seminar XX
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The savage mind
Safouan, Mustafa. Jacques Lacan et la question de la formation des analystes