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
March
Sociological reflexivity/Philosophical reflexivity
Thursday 04 March 2010
14h Auditorium
Negation/Consistency 3
Thursday 09 April 2009
1030h-1230h auditorium
The April session of Versus Laboratory, after the last minute rescheduling of our speaker Oliver Feltham, will focus on a reorientation of the question of materialism inspired by the previous sessions and the initial results of the research projects of the researchers involved. The initial proposal of the Versus Laboratory this year was to investigate the ways in which the problem of materialism has been displaced onto other fields of discourse in contemporary thought and to thus encounter the emerging face of materialism today. A first hypothesis was that materialism is today encountered as a dogma: as the reigning doctrine today across the fields of science and politics, there are only heretics of the materialist doctrine rather than any genuine counter-proposals. In this, thinkers are criticized as “not materialist enough” or “crypto-idealists”. Materialist critique is only ever immanent, correcting a deviation rather than encountering a genuine enemy. Our proposal for this seminar is to produce a layout of the three contemporary and basic materialist positions in order to put this hypothesis into question. By doing this, we hope to provide some form of synthesis for the project going forward as well as develop critical questions for destabilizing the status of this materialist dogma.
In the first session, we encountered the work of Badiou and the attempt to render an ontological discourse in the form of mathematics, that is, in the complete subtraction of the question of being from any form of “given” in thought. In this mode, the question of materialism resides in the formal and non-representational capture of the un-presented and the in-existent. Materialism is then the consistency that extends beyond the limits of the eidos or presentation of reality, that which is activated in the “theory of the void” to which mathematics corresponds.
In our second session, Barot provided a sketch for a thoroughgoing critique of abstract thought, using Sartre’s late work where the problem of praxis provided the very lens to detect the material moment of thought. In this second mode, materialism emerges as the very friction that is encountered in what is given in our historically determined scientific and discursive inheritance. Materiality arises as the difficult relation between the “objective” givens of our situation and the active subjective powers which maintain their consistency while threatening their overcoming, exposing the consistency of the discursive as material conditions.
The position of Deleuze, which is never explicitly proposed as “materialistic” but that furnished a basis for a new materialism especially in political theory, is founded in the medieval doctrine of univocity of being. Being materialist for Deleuze seems to assume the fact that being is said in one and only sense for all individual beings. This entails on one hand the impossibility to build up a stable hierarchy of beings (bearers of a different degree of “being”), nor of different discourses (mathematical, philosophical, political, etc.). If being is univocal, it means that discourse (also philosophical one) cannot have a different ontological status from the presented reality that it is supposed to render, and that they are equally immanent to being. This entails what we could define as a precise ethical stance in philosophical practice: being materialist is just a question of posture in the act of philosophizing, the posture that depends on the particular conjuncture in which it engages itself. This framing of the Deleuzian conception of materialism would constitute also an introduction for the fourth session of the seminar.
In this quasi-synthetic seminar, we will look for a forward moving synthesis through the modalities of materialism through these three modalities of the absolute, the mediated and the immanent. In this we will formulate some precise questions to continue in our seminar and thus to introduce a new cut into the knot of the reigning dogma of materialism today.
Bibliography:
(N.B. Disucussions will review issues discussed in the texts of the two previous seminars)
G. Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, 1-35. link
G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 35-42. link