Real Objects or Material Subjects: Additions…

So many have seen the announcement for the ‘Real Objects or Material Subjects‘ conference being held in March, 2010 in Dundee. Wanted to let everyone know about some additions we’ve made.

First, Peter Hallward will be joining us as well, giving a presentation on the socio-political stakes of the debate. This will be an amazing addition, as Peter’s work stakes an interesting position in context of the contemporary debates, and it will be interesting to hear more about his recent work on will and self-determination. (presuming he talks about this some)

Also, James Williams (Dundee) will also be giving a presentation. No more details on this yet, but James is a leading scholar on Deleuze and contemporary French philosophy, and will be another amazing addition to the line-up.

This conference is sure to be a great event, so plan your trip up to Dundee this march and join us!

Real Objects or Material Subjects? CFP

Real Objects or Material Subjects? A Conference on Continental Metaphysics

Keynote Speakers: Graham Harman (American University, Cairo) and Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico)

Dates: March 27 and 28

University of Dundee, Scotland

The aim of this conference is to stage a debate between two dominant strands of contemporary continental thought, as represented by the object-oriented realism of Graham Harman, and by the transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity recently proposed by Adrian Johnston.

Along with the debate between Harman and Johnston, we hope to attract papers from both advanced graduate students and early career researchers on related topics. Suggested topics include:

realism v. materialism, the contemporary relevance of ‘critical realism’, materialist theories of subjectivity, object oriented ontologies, the place of the political in the realism/materialism debate, the persistence of dialectical materialism, recent continental appropriations of eliminative materialism, realism and materialism in contemporary Anglophone philosophy, continental naturalism, the role of the physical sciences in contemporary philosophical materialism, the persistence of religious themes in recent materialist philosophy, the continued importance (or lack thereof) of thinking the ontological in conjunction with the political.

Abstracts of no more than 400 words should be submitted to m.burns@dundee.ac.uk by January 15th, 2010.

Do not hesitate to contact the organizers with any questions.

immanence-materialism papers

I know a few of these were up a while ago, but almost all of the papers (including mine) from June’s Immanence and Materialism conference at Queen Mary are now up on the conference website.

If anyone has thoughts on my paper, feel free to comment. It contains a lot of ideas I’m exploring and playing around with, and I’m already convinced some of the arguments in this don’t pan out, but either way, would love to chat about it more, especially as some of what I try to outline here relates (i think) to the recent Hallward discussion.

whats going on

So, after a pretty good stretch of consistent blogging I’ve taken a two week+ break. But I have good excuses! I spent a little over a week travelling around going to conferences with little to no internet access.

The first conference was the Immanence and Materialism event at Queen Mary, University of London. By clicking the above link you can access some of the papers, and hopefully I’ll have mine up soon. While I’m not the type to recount conferences play by play, I will say that I found this to be an excellent event, and almost every paper was highly interesting and there was some great debate during the discussion times. One interesting aspect was the contrast between the panels. For example, myself and a colleague were the only two papers on the first panel, and we both gave presentations that dealt with issues of freedom, subjectivity, choice, will, and the like. The next panel then featured papers of a highly determinist/monist bent, and one presenter even said, during her paper, “I’m glad that there have already been some papers dealing with will and freedom, because I am TOTALLY against that.” It was bold, but I appreciated the honesty, and it led to a fun debate over dinner where the two of us from Dundee attempted to convince this individual of the necessity of an ontological account of freedom. I don’t think we were convincing enough…

Wonderful conference though, and I look forward to future events at Queen Mary.

The next conference I attended was the ‘Towards a Philosophy of Life’ event at Liverpool Hope University. This event was the launching point for the new Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion. Although my panel was absolute shit, due to the fact that no chair showed up to moderate, and the first person decided to take 35 minutes to give their 20 minute presentation, the conference itself was a very good event. I got to meet lots of interesting people, and catch up with some old friends, and overall I was left feeling quite positive about the future of Continental Philosophy of Religion in the UK. The only horrible parts were the keynotes by John Caputo and Don Cuppit, who are collectively the most boring philosophers of religion still living, maybe when they die this obsession with ‘postmodernism’ will die too. Cuppit was one of the most bold apologist for globalization and the religion of capital I’ve ever seen, but maybe he can blame it on age or something.

Overall, I had a great time at both, and it was a wonderful excuse to get out of scum-dee Scotland for a week.

That’s all for now, but will attempt to get back to ‘real’ posting soon enough.

Conference Announcement

Well, seeing as his new book is being published as we speak, I figured it was as good a time as any to make a ‘Harman related’ announcement I’ve been holding back for a while.

Although we’re still a ways off, I’d like to give everyone a heads up on a conference we’ll be holding at the University of Dundee next March called:

‘Real Objects, or, Material Subjects? A Conference on Continental Metaphysics’

Which will feature keynote presentations from Graham Harman and Adrian Johnston. I am still working on arranging one more (very good) keynote speaker, but it’s still too uncertain to announce anything. The conference will take place over two days and we’ll soon be putting out a call for papers. It’d be great to have some of those involved in recent ‘interweb’ debates on these matters show up in person and contribute to what will hopefully be a lively and important weekend of philosophical debate. Also, there are early talks on having selected papers from the conference published in a wonderful journal (which will for the time being go un-named).

So, mark your calenders for 27-28 March 2010. It will be great to see Harman and Johnston go ‘head to head’ on these issues, especially as Graham has already come up with the title “I Am Also of the Opinion That Materialism Must Be Destroyed” for his presentation. Should be fun.

Conference in London later this month

(lots of dundee people. hopefully we make our department look good!)

IMMANENCE AND MATERIALISM CONFERENCE

QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

23 June 2009

Registration for this event is now open: please contact Simon Choat
(s.j.choat@qmul.ac.uk) to register. Registration and attendance are
free.

Programme details below. All papers will take place in Room 3.28,
Francis Bancroft Building, Mile End Campus, Mile End Road, London.

PROGRAMME

9:00am  Registration

9:30am  Panel 1: Immanence, Transcendence, Ontology (Chair: Simon Choat)

Michael O’Neill Burns (University of Dundee): ‘The Life of
Materialism: Politics between Concept and Affect’

Brian Smith (University of Dundee): ‘Extending Badiou’s
Mathematical Materialism to Account for Real Change: Beyond the
Transcendence/Immanence Dichotomy’

Paul Rekret (Queen Mary, London): ‘Derrida, Foucault, Immanence,
Transcendence’

11:10am Tea Break

11:30am Panel 2: Marx, Materialism, Immanence (Chair: Alberto Toscano)

Nicole Pepperell (RMIT University, Melbourne): ‘What’s the Matter
with Marx? Notes on Marx’s Immanent Critique of Materialism’

Vidar Thorsteinsson (Reykjavik Academy): ‘Materialism’s Cognitive Edge’

Francesca Manning (CUNY): ‘Capital as Axiomatic within Spinoza’s
Communist Ontology’

1:10pm  Lunch Break

2:15pm  Panel 3: Philosophy, Politics, Praxis (Chair: James Williams)

Matteo Mandarini (Queen Mary, London): ‘The Fate of Politics’

Duncan Law: ‘Two Ontologies of Materialism: from Non-Philosophy to
Non Philosophy’

Michael Goddard (University of Salford): ‘Misrecognising
Immanence: Towards a Critique of the Anti-Deleuzian Strategies of
Badiou, Zizek and Hallward’

3.55pm  Tea Break

4:15pm  Keynote Address (Chair: Caroline Williams)

James Williams (University of Dundee)

Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, London): ‘Immanence Unframed:
Secularization, Enlightenment, Fanaticism’

an introduction, and more…

I would like to introduce the new blog of a good friend, named Dan. His blog is called Vacuous Savor, and he already has some interesting post up that seem to be coming out of a recent period of Zizek reading. Surely worth checking out for those interested in the relationship between philosophy-theology-politics.

Right now I’m working on a paper, to be presented later this week, on the place of the subject in philosophies of life and concept in the recent french tradition. I’m framing the debate between the work of Badiou and Henry, and trying to ‘get at’ a concept of the subject that is founded through a relationship to the absolute life of Henry, while retaining the political axiomatics of Badiou. To bring things to the ground, I’m attempting to evaluate these accounts of the subject in relation to their efficacy in providing sites of novelty under capitalism. At this point I’m still wrestling with how to read the role of both life and capitalin Badiou’s work, and specifically in Logics of Worlds.  I’m also finding his quick dismissal of Negri/Deleuze to be problematic in regards to questions of Life; I say this as being someone who agrees with Badiou over these figures 9 out of 10 times, but still can’t help but finding Badiou’s attempt to bring the world life back to the centre of philosophical thinking a bit silly/pretentious.

But I’ll digress…at this point my mind is still a bit cluttered. I’m going through some (hopefully) final edits of the paper before leaving for the states on wednesday, so will potentially post it here before then, but if not, I will surely post the paper after the conference. Which, just now, I noticed is going to be attended by an entire class from Canada as a sort of philosophical field trip. This should be, if nothing else, interesting.

two things.

First of all, I recommend everyone start off their blog-reading-day by reading dominic’s badiou(ian) take on sexuality.

Second of all, IT makes us aware that the communism conference at birkbeck this weekend will be offering free viewing of the event on screens in a separate room. A nice pacifying gesture on the part of Birkbeck if nothing else. Hopefully will see some of ‘you’ there this weekend. I’ll be there, and rolling with a gangsta ass crew.

bad news.

from graham:

“Dear Conferees,

It is with some regret that I have to announce that Quentin Meillassoux will not be able to attend the April event. He will however be sending us his paper which will be circulated to conferees in advance to enable a fuller discussion of its topic than might otherwise have been possible.

We understand and share the disappointment of many at this news.

Despite this, however, the conference will go ahead as planned.

Iain Grant”

Bad news indeed. Not that this event won’t still be wonderful, but as according to the recent classification of SR sub-categories I think I fall into the Meillassoux (badiouian) group, this is a big loss. Hopefully he ends up somewhere in the UK later this year, as I was very impressed last time I got to see him speak and share a meal with him, and would very much like to do it again, this time with some much better questions in mind.

the incident at antioch/the incident at glasgow

As always, sorry for never posting. I can promise that while not posting here, I’ve been getting good philosophical work done in the real world though! More on that at another time…

So, a couple of weeks ago a colleague and myself spent the day at an event in Glasgow which featured the first english performance of Alain Badiou’s play ‘Incident at Antioch’. The event featured about an hour of selected scenes from the play, followed by a ‘discussion’ time in which the translator of the play and Ward Blanton (University of Glasgow) asked questions to Badiou, and it ended with about 20 minutes of open q&a time.

So first, the bad. The play was embarassingly terrible. My colleague and myself, who seemed to be two of the only philosophy-types there (the event was advertised and organized by theology/literature people) were having to hold back from laughing out loud during some of the scenes. It was almost as if someone fed a copy of ‘Being and Event’ to some automatic play generator website. The character development was pretty hilarious as well, you had this angry revolutionary son who represented Theorie Du Sujet with a more axiomatic mother who’s personality resembled Being and Event. I’m sure if the play was updated he’d add a wise old grandmother to represent Logiques de Mondes. Badiou seemed to at least be somewhat aware of his (lack of) playwright abilities, as he at one point quipped that this was the second public performance of this piece in over twenty years.

During the initial part of the discussion time the translator and Ward Blanton (who is a professor of biblical literature I think?) asked fairly tame questions. The translator of the play (I forget her name, American woman from LA) asked fairly boring questions and treated Badiou as an interesting playwright rather than an important philosopher, and clearly her background made it unlikely that she really had a basic grasp of his philosophical work anyways. Blanton’s questions were a bit better, although he kept trying to ‘push’ Badiou into talking about religion/theology, which he slyly avoided by basically quoting himself from the St. Paul book. The level of discussion made it seem as if most of the crowd had read the St. Paul book, and likely nothing else, so for someone who is a serious student of Badiou, it was a bit frustrating.

After the moderated discussion they opened the floor for questions. The first question amounted to “hi, I’ve clearly never read your work but am now going to ask a question in which I seem like I’m being creative and challenging but in fact just exhibiting the fact that I haven’t even read the introduction to one of your major works”, and sadly, Badiou then spent 10 minutes responding with some really basic remarks about his system as a whole. The next question was asked by my colleague, and was quite an in depth question regarding forcing, cohen, set theory, etc; and sadly, I don’t think Badiou understood much of it, and the translator didn’t get it either, so it wasn’t translated well, and then he just gave a basic response regarding the place of set theory in his work. I had my hand up to ask a question about Kierkegaard (which in all fairness amounted to me searching for some justification regarding my doctoral research project) but sadly they cut off questions after about 20 minutes.

Although Badiou wasn’t really given time to speak at length, I took some notes and will share them here:

At one point while discussing violence he stated that “Violence is the result of order, not dis-order.” Which was interesting.

Later he mapped out what he sees as the four primary political ‘groups’. They were:

1) Students

2) Residents of the Paris Suburbs

3) Workers

4) Undocumented Works

He went on to say that a riot amongst one group qualifies as a revolt or movement, but the inauguration of a new politic (or a real politic) requires that 2 or more groups be engaged. At one point he said “politics is to create the passage between one movement and others.” He said that when groups go to action one by one, it qualifies as revolt, but one more than one group go into action together it becomes a political possibility. He went out to define politics as “the creation of the passage between two different groups“, and said that “the union of four groups would be the revolution“, and only in extraordinary circumstances is that possible.

He then went onto to provide a counting exercise that was right out of a revolutionary version of sesame street in which he stated that:

“4 is the number of the event, or change; 3 of new forms of organization; 2 is the number of politics; and 1 is nothing.”

So, nothing new exciting, but as a some sort of ’student’ of Badiou’s work, I still found it to be exciting experience, although I’m hoping that the communism conference in London next week will serve as a much more intense experience of Badiou’s ‘live’ work.