Seminars
February
The Singular, part I
Tuesday 05 February 2008
15:00 Auditorium, Jan van Eyck Academie
March
The Singular, part II
Tuesday 04 March 2008
15.00 h Auditorium, Jan van Eyck Academie
April
The Singular, part III
Tuesday 01 April 2008
14:00 h Auditorium, Jan van Eyck Academie
May
The Dual, part I
Tuesday 06 May 2008
14:00 h Auditorium, Jan van Eyck Academie
June
The Dual, Part II
Tuesday 03 June 2008
14:00h Auditorium, Jan van Eyck Academie
July
The Dual, Part III
Wednesday 02 July 2008
14:00 auditorium
September
The Multiple, Part I
Tuesday 09 September 2008
17h30 room 204
November
The Universal, Part I
Tuesday 04 November 2008
15:00 h Auditorium, Jan van Eyck Academie
December
Versus Laboratory 2008 final triple session: Alliez, Riha, multiple, universal
Monday 01 December 2008 - Sunday 02 November 2008
Auditorium
January
Versus Laboratory 2009 Presentation - Matter Matters
Thursday 15 January 2009
13h45 Jan van Eyck Academie
February
Negation/Consistency 1
Thursday 05 February 2009
1030h-1230h auditorium
March
Negation/Consistency 2
Wednesday 11 March 2009
1030h-1230h auditorium
April
Negation/Consistency 3
Thursday 09 April 2009
1030h-1230h auditorium
May
Matter/Knowledge 1
Thursday 21 May 2009
14h-16h RM 204
June
Imagination/Dialectic 1
Sunday 14 June 2009
14h-18h RM 204
September
Imagination/Dialectic 2
Thursday 03 September 2009
14h-15h Auditorium
October
Stasis/Rupture 1
Thursday 08 October 2009
14h Auditorium
November
Stasis/Rupure 2
Thursday 05 November 2009
14h
December
Stasis/Rupture 3
Tuesday 01 December 2009
14h
February
Historical contingency/Subjective necessity
Wednesday 03 February 2010
10h30-12h30 Auditorium
April
Index, Suject, Form of Life
Thursday 08 April 2010
14h Auditorium
May
Sociological reflexivity/Philosophical reflexivity
Thursday 27 May 2010
14h Auditorium
Versus Laboratory 2009 Presentation - Matter Matters
Thursday 15 January 2009
13h45 Jan van Eyck Academie
Presentations during the opening week
Giuseppe Bianco: “In what sense does the living matter?” , Thursday 15 January 2009, 14h30
Giuseppe Bianco will present his actual research concerning subjectivation in the age of biopolitics and inscribe his project within this year’s versus laboratory program and within his past research. The lecture – in which the question “In what sense does the living matter?” will be posed – will try to draw a general report of the biological paradigm that appears to dominate contemporary philosophy . The actual problem of “the living”, whose contours are certainly ambiguous and elusive, seems nevertheless to pose in a new way, the double ontological and deontological question of matter and materialism.
Tzuchien Tho: "The subtraction of materialism", Thursday 15 January 2009, 13h45
In the mode of self-presentation and as a means to set down some specific points of investigation for the year to come, Tzuchien Tho will give a presentation entitled "the subtraction of materialism" during "opening week" at the Jan van Eyck Academie. The question of materialism ties together some of Alain Badiou's earliest philosophical projects to his most recent, drawing out the continuities and the discontinuities in his philosophical reflections over the last forty years. On the other hand, this thematic will provide a specific site to illustrate the precarity of the concept of matter.
Versus Laboratory 2009 Program
Matter matters – Dissenting Materialisms
In 2007, under the supervision of Bruno Besana and Ozren Pupovac, Versus Laboratory was started to investigate contemporary philosophy under the thesis that the production of concepts takes place in the context of dissensual relations between a philosophical interiority and its “outside.” This exteriority shapes the interior of a putative philosophical field where the collision between philosophical and non-philosophical thought, practice and activity calls into question the intimacy presupposed between philosophical practice and the production of concepts. If it is in fact this alienation of the philosophical field to itself by its dissensual exterior that marks the productive tensions and ambiguities which drives philosophical thought, then it appears as though philosophy risks its own disintegration by being precisely what it should be. Our proposed continuation of the Versus Laboratory at the Jan Van Eyck Academie aims to extend this investigation by placing emphasis on this risk, on the separation that occurs in the interiority of philosophy which in turn generates extra-philosophical effects.
Mutations occur, as they are apt to do in philosophy, often in the archival dust of the past. Yet they occur in a local, punctuated point of interruption and intervention. In the second year of Versus Laboratory, we propose to recommence by taking up the question of matter and materialisms. A concept dear to the very birth of philosophical thought, the singular term of matter equally dominates the heart of contemporary thought across the fields of politics, art and science. Far from being a pure philosophical concept, it has been generated in disparate fields, domains linked only through the vernacular, staging some of the most important conceptual reinventions in contemporary thinking across multiple fields. It is this ambiguity of sense that now burdens us with a deep senselessness of what one means by espousing “materialism”, especially in philosophical contexts. This senselessness is in excess on two fronts. On the one hand it suffers from a profusion of meanings, demanding clarification. On the other, it serves as an empty term, knotting together disparate practices under a shared but ambiguous term. In our contemporary age of multiple materialisms ranging from the inheritors of the Marxist tradition of dialectical materialism, the so called “biopolitics,” to the various forms of (anglo-american) analytic philosophies of mind and epistemology, the contestation of what we mean by the term “matter” has become one of the central tensions of philosophical fracture. It is with this lens that we proceed in deepening of the sense of the “versus” in Versus Laboratory.
In narrowing the focus of the seminar on matter, we aim our investigation on the way contemporary practices are reshaping and reinventing the interiority of philosophical materialism. By this focalization, not only do we hope to investigate the validity of our fundamental thesis within this particular context, but, through it, we hope to delineate the form that it takes in the actual production of concepts. Indeed, we might risk its very dissolution, discovering the notion of matter as little more than non-sense. As if to turn the notion of locality on its head, the generality of materialism indexes not only the dissensus between fields of thought but also the contestation and separation within the fields themselves.
Moreover, the question of materialism and matter will be considered as another way to articulate the main issue of Versus laboratory. On the one hand, materialism seems to be used to designate a doctrine or a set of theories concerning being, or the essence of reality. But, on the other, it may also constitute a methodological or an ethico-political imperative for practice. This imperative implies the preliminary idea that all thinking depends on something exterior to it (a theoretical field linked to a social one, a field of powers and forces, one or more non-conceptualizable events, etc.) and that no act of thinking is or will ever be fully transparent and autonomous. In this perspective, as Canguilhem famously remarks, insofar as, “philosophy is a reflexion for which all foreign matter is good,” then indeed, “all good matter is foreign....” This might be considered the “materialist” postulate of this second year of Versus Laboratory, a particular staging of the founding idea that the production of philosophical concepts has its origin in the dissensual relation generated by the heterogeneous.
But, even this motto, is perhaps too “idealistic” and incomplete in two ways. First, it continues to stress the “formal” position of philosophy overarching other practices of thought, considered in the role of material. Secondly, it assumes the possibility of a reflexive – and virtually transparent – relation with the “outside”. To the contrary we will try to insist methodologically on the absence of the privilege of philosophy over the other practices, on the tight and knotted relationship that all thinking entertains with what is commonly called “ideology,” and on the fact that the “degree” of materialism engaged in a practice is likely to be judged only from the conjuncture in which it inscribes its intervention.
The second year of Versus Laboratory plans eight sessions around four themes:
1. Negation and Consistence
2. Conjuncture and Event
3. Forces and Body
4. Stasis and Difference
Each one of these pairs of concepts forms a dialectical relation to the other. Not only do they constitute a set of basic dissenting terms by which philosophy has approached the question of matter but they have also been the questions that brought philosophy to their limits –the limits where they are forced to encounter their “outside.”
In addition to the seminar series, two conferences are planned to investigate two focal points of the contemporary rethinking of the material. The first, planned for May 2009, will focus on the relation between knowledge and matter, aimed at investigating issues confronting materialism today, ranging from the bold hypotheses of the emerging school of Speculative Realism, which investigates the seizure of the real in the rejection of correlationism (and thus empiricism), to the reinvention of the sense of the mathematical in contemporary philosophy. This conference will be headlined by Alain Badiou who has already committed to participating in this second year of the laboratory. The second conference, planned for November 2009 will focus on materialism in politics, investigating the ambiguity in the uses of “matter” in political thought, addressing contemporary senses of the “concrete” as well as the privileging of the notion of “bios” in political thought. In these investigations, we hope to provide some local models for the investigation of the dissensus between philosophical interiority and its exterior but also deepen the method of disjunction which underlies the premise of the laboratory. In bringing historical examples to contemporary developments and vice-versa, we aim to clarify the senses of materialism as it is practiced today and, in so doing, highlight a singular and dissensual point in contemporary thought.
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