2015 Sep Abstracts Final

2015
SEP-‐FEP Joint Annual Conference

University of Dundee
Dalhousie Building

Contents
1. Individual Presenters and Titles
2. Panels
3. Paper Abstracts
4. Panel Abstracts

1. Individual Presenters and Titles

Alberts-‐Dezeeuw, Paul Possibilities of Posthuman Community
Berger-‐Soraruff, Amelie Psychopower in Social Networks
Browne, Victoria Unreproductive Maternal Bodies: Miscarriage, Organic Purposefulness, and
Aleatory Matter
Burns, Michael Frantz Fanon and a New (Materialist) Humanism
Buttingsrud, Camille Pushing the Limits: Proposing a Reflective Order of Embodied Self-‐Consciousness
Carney, Eoin Freudian Psychoanalysis as a Resource for Understanding the Dialogue between
Religious Language and Public Reason
Cazeaux, Clive Does ‘art doctored’ Equal ‘art neutered’?
Chanter, Tina The Affective Logic at Work in Politics: Exploring Images and Art with a Little Help
from Rancière
Čiučelis, Tomas The Notion of Survival in Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism: Derrida and The Time
of Life
Clark, Jonathan Owen Art, (Anti)aesthetics and Historical Ontology
Connolly, West Hamlet's Memory Palace: To Be or Not to Be . . . A Digital 'Act of Resistance'
Cortese, Domenico Self-‐Consciousness and Financial System: The Concept of Credit in the
Perspective of Hegelian Dialectic
Dada, Maria The Writing That Writes Itself
Daughton, Amy Relating Ricoeur's Social and Political Philosophy to “Religion” in the Light of
Recent Reception
de Lire, Luce "Perhaps this time we have gone too far" -‐-‐ Towards a Deconstructive Materialism
de Miranda, Luis Towards a New Frontier of the Self? A Genealogy of Esprit de Corps
Dimitrova, Zornitsa Interaction and Personhood in Sentient Automata
Dolphijn, Rick It Can Only Exist in Thought, It Can Only Result in the Work of Art: Deleuze's Ideal
Game
Foran, Lisa A Phenomenology of Reading: Deciding the Frontier between Philosophy and
Literature
Friedman, Lyat Criticisms of Technology and Technologies of Criticism
Gansen, Moritz Heroes of Pragmatism: French Frontiers
Genç, Alişan Heidegger’s History of Being, the Self-‐Destruction of History and the Importance of
Remembrance
Giannopoulos, Ilias Naïveté, Truth Content of Art and Verification of Solipsism: Adorno on Artistic
Expression and Aesthetic Experience
Giunta, Carrie Philosophy Can’t Breathe
Halsall, Francis The “Absolute Metaphor” of System: Hans Blumenberg, Systems and Modernity
Hewitt, Tom Degrees of Freedom: Agency in Improvised Music—Searching For Boundaries in
Entangled Network Space
Hickey-‐Moody, Anna Slow Life and an Ecology of Sensation
Hill, Auguste Consanguinity Disruptus: The Phenomenology of Incest as Limit-‐Experience
Hodge, Joanna The Withdrawal of What Shows Itself: Jean-‐Luc Nancy on Portraiture
Horta, Mario Limit and Borderland: Critical Openness in Foucault and Tarkovsky
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Ingala, Emma Aesthetics of the Real in Jacques Lacan: Beneath or Beyond the Limit?
Ioannidis, Iraklis The Problematic Other and the Essence of the Self’s Existential Basis
Irwin, Stacey Postphenomenology: Exploring the Technological Texture through Digital Media
James, Ian Philosophy at the Speculative Frontier: Must Every Thing Go?
Junker-‐Kenny, Maureen Religious Convictions in Civic Debate: A Comparison of the Perspectives of P.
Ricoeur and J. Habermas
Khandker, Wahida Process Philosophy and Cybernetics
Kurt, Fikret The Echoic Irony of Truth: Celan and Heidegger
Lemmens, Pieter Cognitive Enhancement in the Light of the Emerging Anthropocenic Condition
Levy, Patrick Sleeping Well – Sleep's Ambiguous Normativity
Lewendon-‐Evans, Harry Incommensurability and Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science
Liberati, Nicola New Technologies, Transparencies and the Idea of Information
Lord, Beth Spinoza and an Indeterminate Power of Thought
Martin, N. Gabriel The Crisis of Eurocentric Sciences
McGinness, Neil Distinguishing Limits and Borders: Connections between the Hawking-‐Hartle 'no
boundary' Proposal and Deleuze's Immanent Metaphysics
Meechan, John Thresholds of Influence: Towards an ‘Alinear’ Agency
Monaco, Davide Modal and Attribute Parallelism in Spinoza’s Ethics
Moore, Josie No Frontiers: Countering the ‘Imperialism of Theory’ with the Help of Whitehead
and Weil
Mullarkey, John Non-‐Philosophical Constraints: How to Remake a Thought Cinematically
Murphy, Sinéad Abandoned Without Reserve To Our Finitude: Virno and ‘Impact’
Musolino, Chiara Is Hope Teachable? An Answer from the Ontology of Not-‐Yet-‐Being of Ernst Bloch
Nagataki, Shoji Intelligence and Embodiment: from Classical AI to Developmental Robotics
Neill, Calum Dangling Above the Swamps of Nothingness
Neylan, Fintan On Meillassoux’s Several Vectorizations of the Subject
Norris, Benjamin Navigating the (Philosophical) Abyss: Realism, Rationalism and Empiricism
O'Connor, Tony Historicity, Idle Talk, and Grounded Discourse
Palmer, Helen Profundity and Strangeness, Touching and Skin: Queer Formalism at the Borders
Pedriali, Walter Between Nonsense and Metaphor: Chomsky and Ricoeur on Semantic Deviance
and Linguistic Creativity
Rae, Gavin Faith or Religion: Conceptualizing the Theological Aspect of Carl Schmitt’s Political
Theology
Rehberg, Andrea On Affective Universality: Kant, Arendt and Lyotard on Sensus Communis
Remley, William Reexamining the Political: the Anarchistic Political Philosophy of Jean-‐Paul Sartre
Roden, David Improvisation, Time and the Posthuman
Rosenhagen, Raja Murdoch on Love and Privacy
Ross, Bill Time as Retardation in Paradigms of Physical Action: Bergson, Serres, Deleuze and
Smolin
Salyers, Candice Publicly Private: Efforts to Develop an Ethics of Intimacy
Sands, Danielle Arendt and Thinking: The ‘Vital Tension between Philosophy and Politics’
Schaefer, Max On Pain of De-‐cision: Heidegger's Path Toward an Ethics in Holy Mourning
Secomb, Linnell Brutal-‐Romance in the Age of Metropolis and Empire
Senatore, Mauro Kant, Nietzsche and Derrida on Cruelty
Smith, Brian Seeing the World Other Than It Is
Smith, Dominic Paying Attention: Philosophy as Strong Therapy for the Information Age
Somers-‐Hall, Henry Sartre and Bergson: Sartre’s Logic of Multiplicities
Sonderegger, Ruth Critical Exercises
Spaid, Susan Birthing Movements: Historical Twists and Turns
Stocker, Barry European Frontiers and Philosophies of Violence
Thomas, Christopher The Creative Act: Towards a Spinozian Aesthetics
Thornton, Edward The Division of Time in Simondon, Deleuze and Prigogine
Uljée, Rozemund On the Frontiers of Thinking – Heidegger and Levinas
Viegas, Susana A Deleuzian Noology: Philosophizing and Thinking Film Otherwise
Wallenfels, Hannah Bartleby’s Death
Wellner, Galit Do Animals Have Technologies?
Whitehead, Stephen A Problem Shared: Philosophy, Theatre, Theatrum Mundi
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Wilcox, Marc Do We Owe Dead Animals Respect?
Woodward, Ashley Being and Information: On the Meaning of Vattimo
Woodford, Clare Living beyond the Frontier: Butler, Derrida and the Precarity of the Decision

2. Panels
Please see panel abstracts for a brief description of a panel’s theme and its respective panel
members. Please see paper abstracts for titles and content of individual papers in a panel. Panel
organiser(s) is(are) listed in brackets.

a) Affect and Its Vicissitudes in the Twenty-‐first Century (Joanna Hodge)
b) Frontiers of Modernity (Sinéad Murphy)
c) Jazz Improvisation, Agency and Freedom: Between the Human and Inhuman Lies the
Assemblage (Martin E. Rosenberg)
d) Limits, Borders and Cleaving (Helen Palmer)
e) New Horizons in Philosophy of Technology (2 Panels; Galit Wellner)
f) Ricoeur, Religion and Public Discourse (Todd Mei)
g) Postgraduate Panels (4 Panels; Eoin Carney and Scott Gallacher)

3. Paper Abstracts

Paul Alberts-‐Dezeeuw (University of Western Sydney, Australia)
Possibilities of Posthuman Community

Posthuman theory explores the possibility that while anthropocentrism is a system of values that
positions the human above other species, justifying systematic violence, human life is already
dispersing itself through technological innovation and hybridization, so that the force of
anthropocentrism is actually waning, or being transformed or displaced through new conditions
into something that undermines existing human exception. Such future-‐oriented speculation,
while correctly pointing to new human potentialities runs the risk of losing sight of critical
questions of the extent to which non-‐human beings are integral to the conditions of forming
anthropocentric human culture. In addressing these we address the degree to which the human
bond in a plurality cannot limit itself within a barrier of the ‘only-‐human’.

If we move to understand anthropocentrism as grounded in a certain ecological phase of
organizing species, and an interspecies arrangement of domestication in the distant past. This
can only be called a communitarian logic, one in which human sovereignty partitions itself along
with non-‐human species. Frontiers and boundaries are established which set the distances and
forms of exposure between species – or the types of singularities, as Nancy writes, which appear
together even before the law of community is established. These possibilities, which must have
first arisen somewhere in deep history, have to be considered as intrinsic to the directions of
human politics per se. Without proposing an originary scene, we can hypothesize them as
intersecting in important ways with the formation of primary bonds, as Derrida explains of
Aristotle, enabling politics of inclusion and exclusion, boundaries, frontiers, and enemies.

These structures remain with us, even as technological domination appears to fix nonhuman
creatures even more firmly in the grasp of human projects. Posthuman thought should include
the question of such opening of community as part of the reconstruction of such projects.

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Amélie Berger Soraruff (University of Dundee, UK)
Psychopower in Social Networks
Panel: Postgraduate Panel 2

This paper aims to look at social networks and how they affect the process of thinking. Are
digital technologies a threat to the individual’s freedom of thought? The paper will take its
bearings from Bernard Stiegler’s work on technology and will develop the issue of psychopower
in relation to social networks. Social networks are the new techno-‐geographic milieu where
people are targeted and transformed into consumers. Such networks, I will argue, are anchored
in our everyday habits and create addiction. They promote the desire for instantaneous
satisfaction and short-‐circuit longer term investments. Permanently connected to each other,
individuals are constantly faced with commercials and information according to their taste and
interests. According to Stiegler, technologies are a pharmakon. Their use can be a good for
people if it contributes to the transmission and the democratization of knowledge. However,
technologies can become toxic if they are used as instruments of domination. Stiegler develops
the concept of psychopower in order to analyse how technologies turn populations into markets
for consumption. Social networks give birth to a new digital environment in which everything,
the subject included, can become an object for consumption. The phenomenon of socialization
is itself perverted as it becomes as well a marketing tool that isolates the individual by creating
the illusion of a permanent connection to the world. These technologies, Stiegler argues, mark a
process of “individualization” through which individuals are reduced to consuming machines.
Individualization leads to automatization, which alters the individual’s freedom as well as their
thinking. Social networks may be considered as such psychotechnologies, the use of which
affects our faculties of understanding and reasoning by “forcing” us to go back to our libidinal
impulses. While tracking the subject’s interests, digital technologies aim to anticipate the
individual’s needs in order to fulfill his satisfaction without questioning this need. Led by drive-‐
based libidinal impulses, the use of social networks does not promote desire proper, nor critical
thinking. The short and discontinuous modes of writing they promote conditions a process of
thinking becomes more and more fragmented. By encouraging the subject to react on the move,
digital technologies alter people’s ability to focus and to be critical toward their environment
and toward themselves. With the worldwide development of the Internet and the quantity of
information made available to anyone, one might think that contemporary information
technologies are an open window to the world and create an incredible chance for the subject to
elevate himself. Nonetheless, the process of tracking perverts and narrows our use of
technologies. Instead of opening up the individual to other forms of knowledge, digital
technologies in fact narrow thought and desire, increasing intellectual poverty.

Victoria Browne (Oxford Brookes University, UK)
Unreproductive Maternal Bodies: Miscarriage, Organic Purposefulness, and Aleatory Matter

Pregnancy loss or “miscarriage” can be a disturbing phenomenon for various reasons, not least
because it contravenes normative teleological models of “organic purposefulness”. Just as
“sympathetic feet, in sympathy with the whole body, must be willing to carry” (Ahmed 2014),
sympathetic wombs, in sympathy with the whole maternal body, must also be willing to carry.
As Sara Ahmed writes, the barren or uncooperative womb “not only does not deliver its own
will to reproduce” but also seems to compromise “the health or well-‐being of the whole body”
(ibid.). Accordingly, a level of social stigma often surrounds miscarriage (despite its frequent
occurrence), with those maternal bodies that do not become maternal in the expected way
acquiring something of a pariah status.

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In this paper, therefore, I want to try and impress a greater sense of contingency and
waywardness on to our understanding of biological reproduction, such that unreproductive
maternal bodies are not rendered unthinkable, unmentionable or somehow “against nature”.
To do so, I will draw primarily on Emmanuela Bianchi’s notion of “aleatory matter”, which she
develops through a close reading of Aristotle’s biological writings, particularly his account of
sexual reproduction and embryonic development in The Generation of Animals. Undoubtedly
for Aristotle, biological processes (perhaps especially sexual reproduction) are governed
according to an overarching teleological order, at the level of organs and behaviours, as well as
organisms as a whole, which are “readily understood functionally as aiming towards certain
ends” (Bianchi 2014). Yet, at the same time, Bianchi uncovers an alternate, subterranean
understanding of feminine matter in The Generation of Animals and elsewhere, not as pure
passivity or solely participating in teleology, but as “harbouring opaque and unpredictable
motions that have the capacity to disrupt and derail the unfoldings of the teleological process”.
Whilst Aristotle insists upon organic purposefulness and the fulfilment of ends as “Nature’s
aim”, he nevertheless admits that “she cannot bring this about exactly on account of the
indeterminateness of matter”: matter is a site of potential to become A, but also potential not
to become A (ibid.). Surprisingly, then, the writings of Aristotle might be just the place to begin
disrupting rigidly teleological models of biological reproduction, and finding a place for unruly,
non-‐normative maternal bodies that do not produce what they are expected to.

Michael Burns (University of West England, UK)
Frantz Fanon and a New (Materialist) Humanism

While much of recent European philosophy has moved towards the embrace of the theoretical
frameworks of post-‐humanism, vitalism, new materialism, and even non-‐human philosophy; this
turn has been met by an equally polemic return to a dialectical materialism informed by the
work of Hegel, Marx and Lacan. This perspective, which can loosely be referred to as
‘transcendental materialism’ can be seen to various extents in the work of Slavoj Žižek, Adrian
Johnston, Catherine Malabou, and Lorenzo Chisea. While the so-‐called ‘new materialisms’ have
championed a vitalist and non-‐human approach to contemporary philosophical and political
debates, the new dialecticians have gone the opposite route and opened up new ways to
rigorously theorize the radical potential of human beings via the tools of materialist philosophy,
Freudian-‐Lacanian psychoanalysis, and recent neuroscience. While these developments have
opened up a new path to consider the human in a nonhierarchical and non-‐anthropocentric
manner, there is still a latent Euro-‐centrism haunting these recent attempts at a materialist
humanism. One figure who has remained absent from many of these recent discussions is Frantz
Fanon, whose own work took the resources of Hegel, Marx, and Freud to articulate a ‘new
universal humanism’ which would be capable of providing a political program to combat the
social, political and psychological effects of European colonialism. Through a consideration of
Fanon’s work in the context of recent forms of dialectical and transcendental materialism, this
paper will argue that Fanon’s voice is a necessary challenge and theoretical resource to the
project of theorizing the human in a contemporary context. In particular, Fanon offers a way to
problematize the inherent whiteness of a majority of recent contemporary materialist thought,
while also offering a theoretical basis for a materialist humanism capable of unifying diverse
human beings around universal and emancipatory political projects. Along with the discussion of
Fanon, the paper will also use the materialist work of Jean-‐Paul Sartre and the recent neuro-‐
scientific materialism of Catherine Malabou to argue for a materialist humanism which can take
seriously issues of race and gender while still aiming at a unified political project.

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Camille Buttingsrud (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Pushing the Limits: Proposing a Reflective Order of Embodied Self-‐consciousness

Philosophers investigating the experiences of the dancing subject (Sheets-‐Johnstone 1980, 2009,
2011, 2012; Parviainen 1998; Legrand 2007, 2013; Legrand & Ravn 2009; Montero 2013; Foultier
& Roos 2013) unearth vast variations of embodied consciousness and cognition in performing
body experts. The phenomenological literature provides us with descriptions and definitions of
reflective self-‐consciousness as well as of pre-‐reflective bodily absorption, but when it comes to
the states of self-‐consciousness dance philosophers refer to as thinking in movement and a form
of reflective consciousness at a bodily level – as well as to dancers’ reported experiences of
being in a trance and yet hyper-‐aware – we are challenged in terms of terminology and precise
descriptions.

After empirical research on dancers’ experiences and studies of the above-‐mentioned
philosophies of dance, aligning this material with Husserl, Zahavi and other phenomenologists’
descriptions of reflection and embodied self-‐consciousness, I find it plausible to acknowledge
the existence of a third state of self-‐consciousness; a reflective process experienced through and
with the embodied and/or emotional self. This self-‐consciousness seems to have its own distinct
structure irreducible to reflectivity and pre-‐reflectivity. My paper aspires to capture the nature
of this transcendence of the bodily aspect of the self.

The interviewed dancers describe their bodily self-‐consciousness on stage with terminology
phenomenology traditionally uses on the order of reflection: they are (bodily) attentive,
intensely self-‐aware, explicitly aware of the other and the world, they are disclosing experiences
through transformation (by means of the body), they are (emotionally and/or bodily) articulating
what they experience pre-‐reflectively, and thematically transforming or reproducing something
received or grasped from their second-‐nature as dancers, or from other pre-‐reflective
experiences. This could indicate a reflective state of self-‐consciousness, yet, there is a
simultaneous lack of thinking and rational control, reports of having artistic black-‐outs, feeling
something taking over, someone else leading their arms and legs, of being in a trance. There
seems to be an experientially lived as well as theoretically seen experience of the self in which
the subject’s bodily aspect of self “thinks”/reflects/accesses herself as object through/in/by
means of her embodied activity, in which she is completely immersed.

I define this state of self-‐consciousness as embodied reflection. In this state the subject’s
attention is springing from and is of the bodily self, more specifically the subject’s movements
and/or her emotions -‐ the lived body (Leib). Temporarily embodied reflection shares the
characteristic immediacy with pre-‐reflectivity, the straight-‐forward mode with which the subject
undergoes its experience. In this paper I shall elaborate on its further characteristics.
Embodied reflection is neither mystical nor exclusively experienced by artists or experts. I
believe we all have the capacity to reflect emotionally and bodily – playing as children, during
erotic convergence, and in meditation, just to mention some situations. It is the universal human
experience of being profoundly focused through the non-‐conceptual aspect of the self.

Eoin Carney (University of Dundee, UK)
Freudian Psychoanalysis as a Resource for Understanding the Dialogue between Religious Language
and Public Reason

This paper will examine the ways in which psychoanalysis can serve as a useful paradigm for
understanding Ricoeur’s approach to justice, particularly in relation to science and technology. I
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will argue that psychoanalytic practice, understood as a face to face dialogical situation which is
supplemented by various explanatory ‘models’ or theories, is interesting for Ricoeur because of
the ways in which it resists a ‘scientific’ disenchantment of the self, whilst still developing a
reflective equilibrium between ‘technical’ methods of treatment and the resources found within
language and the patient themselves. Furthermore, one of Ricoeur’s reasons for engaging with
the work of Freud is in order to take seriously his critique of religion. He situates this critique
within a tradition of ‘disillusion’ rather than of ‘disenchantment’, that is, like the other ‘masters
of suspicion’ Marx and Nietzsche, the Freudian deconstruction of religion should be interpreted
as a necessary demythologization of religious discourse, but one which leaves open the space for
a ‘second naivety’. In contrast, Ricoeur himself is suspicious of other sciences of the psyche and
belief, such as behavioural psychology, since they result in the disenchantment of the self and
the technological denial of the sacred. This contextualisation of Freudian technique within the
broader hermeneutic task of understanding becomes a useful lens through which we can assess
Ricoeur’s reading of the Rawls. On the one hand, for Ricoeur, Rawl’s ‘technical argument’
contains its own ethical aim of disillusion, in the way in which it serves as a critique of the
‘sacrificial principle’ found in utilitarianism. On the other hand, if it is taken as a pure description
of the human person (for example as a rationally behaving agent), or as a method for
‘constructing’ principles of justice as opposed to the work of discovering them, it risks becoming
a political mode of disenchantment. The solution, as is the case in psychoanalysis, is to
emphasise the importance of the reflective equilibrium between the explanatory theory and
concrete dialogical situations.

Clive Cazeaux (Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK)
Does ‘art doctored’ Equal ‘art neutered’?

In the last twenty years, there has been a rapid expansion of interest in the arts as forms of
research. Two factors are largely responsible for this: (1) universities’ research funding has
become dependent upon the volume and quality of their research output (in Europe,
Australasia, and recently the USA), and this has obliged art in art departments to become
research in order to attract funding; (2) the dialogic, administrative turn in the arts means
artists are now adopting research methods from other disciplines, thereby creating an aesthetic
from conventionally non-‐aesthetic means. As a result, many art schools in Europe, Australasia
and America now offer PhDs in art practice. However, there is concern from some circles that
the requirements of research dilute or ultimately cancel the power of art.

In this paper, I argue that the worry over dilution or cancellation is based on a
misunderstanding of the nature of art’s autonomy. Art and the aesthetic are often defined as
sources of autonomy, freedom or excess, in contrast to the determination and constraint
exercised by rational, cognitive or scientific judgment, for example, the sublime, Nietzsche’s
aesthetic as a force of transformation, Adorno’s autonomous art acting upon concepts, and the
doctrine of art for art’s sake. I pursue a connection between the aesthetic theories of Kant and
Adorno to develop an aesthetically-‐inclined epistemology. This theory situates the power of art
as the element which either demonstrates the inadequacy of existing concepts or which brings
about novelty through the realignment of existing concepts. On this model, visual arts research
is shown to be a process that obliges artists to pay attention to the effect that their work has on
concepts, in a manner that reaffirms the autonomy of art. Whether this obligation to attend to
concepts is welcomed by artists remains to be seen, and I consider some of the factors ‘for’ and
‘against’ the attractiveness of my epistemology to artists, with reference to artworks produced
as research.

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Tina Chanter (Kingston University, UK)
The Affective Logic at Work in Politics: Exploring Images and Art with a Little Help from Rancière
Panel: Affect and Its Vicissitudes

An historically seradimented environment, riven with affects, is just there. Until, all of a sudden,
it isn’t. It undergoes a shift, and precisely as it does so, we can sometimes catch sight of it, just a
glimpse at first, but slowly we can begin to record, classify, unpick, analyze, adumbrate its
features. We can begin to put them together in a different way, discard some of them, refigure
others, let them fall into new patterns, reimagine them. This might be done more or less
consciously, more or less deliberately. With each slight shift, new possibilities can occur, new
perspectives can open up as old ones close down.

In this paper I employ Rancierian terminology to analyse an image and a work of art in order to
explore diverse ways in which affects can operate in the visual and political arenas, with
particular reference to veiling.

Tomas Čiučelis (University of Dundee, UK)
The Notion of Survival in Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life

In this analysis I will draw on the ontological implications of Hägglund’s reading of Derrida
through thinking how the structure of trace can be operative beyond the human being as an
inscriber. In the brief overview of some of the fundamental notions that Hägglund uses in his
book Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, I will focus on the problem of proceeding
from logical possibility of a metaphysical notion (things in themselves, God, etc.) to the inference
of its real existence. The question that I will address, therefore, can be formulated as follows:
how do we bring about—or legitimise the promise of—the ‘good,’ democracy, ‘truth,’ the thing
in itself, or God? The paper will be concluded with the introduction of the original notions of
'hypocrisy' and 'catastrophe' as the affirmative modes of critical thinking and event.

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Jonathan Owen Clark (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, UK)
Art, (Anti)aesthetics and Historical Ontology

This is a proposal for an individual talk. The aim is to propose a new grounding for one of the
central original aims of the discipline of ‘antiaesthetics’. This movement questioned the implicit
ahistoricism within the aesthetic concept, or the idea that ‘aesthetic experience exists apart,
without ‘purpose,’ all but beyond history’ [Hal Foster, The Anti-‐Aesthetic]. The grounding
proposed involves a modification of what the philosopher of science Ian Hacking has called the
study of ‘historical ontology’, defined in terms of objects and phenomena that come into
existence due to specific forms of human action and intentionality. The relevance of this idea to
both art-‐making and its history is introduced, and a definition of art and artworks given that
stresses their situation and agency within a field defined by three axes of: perception;
communication; imagination, trans-‐perception and/or perceptual absence. This notion of art
has the advantage of affording much closer links between aesthetics and actual art historical
evidence, in particular recent research that suggests how artworks have been seen to ‘stand-‐in’
for various types of historical or religious figures, embody moods or affects, or constitute the
latest in a series that determine a retroactive type of historical chain. Art can represent or even
physically manifest actual agency (as in theatre, and certain types of painting and sculpture) or
virtual agency (as in music, where the ambiguity of the source of this agency was a major
problem in early modernity). The link proposed from art to historical oscillations between
systems of perception and human communication will recall the work of Niklas Luhmann. But it
also connects to recent research aiming to bridge analytic-‐continental divisions via a
reinvigoration of aesthetics as aesthesis, or as a science of perception. The extended
anthropological and historical definition of art given sees artworks objects in performative
terms as systems of actions that are intended to enact changes to the world, rather than just
encoding symbolic propositions about it; and as solutions to transhistorical problems of
perception, time, space, and memory. Art is involved with special kinds of perceptual
technologies, that are, at least in part, devices for enmeshing individuals into networks of
human intentionalities. The last part of the talk will consider artistic development as occurring
by means of multiple simultaneous historical trajectories, each marked by their own
temporalities, and in doing so, will question the limits of a recent proposal by Paul Crowther to
create a ‘post-‐analytic’ and phenomenological account of art and its history.

West Connolly (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Hamlet's Memory Palace: To Be or Not to Be . . . A Digital 'Act of Resistance'

How do we interpret aesthetic value in digitally created (or enhanced) works of art, and what
differentiates digital forms of expression from 'non-‐art' objects, encounters and the notion of
everyday aesthetics? Practice based research takes form in a composite digital and 'non-‐digital'
hybrid art installation that evolves from the concept of a memory palace – a mnemonic device
attached to a visual cue, opening links into a situated narrative that explores a space, in order
to retrieve stored memories. The conceptual framework for the actions draw inspiration from
methods established by Heiner Müller's Memory Theatre project, together with elements of
Gilles Deleuze's 1987 discourse on What is the Creative Act? and the underpinning Bergsonian-‐
Deleuzian notions of perception, affection, actiondistinction and the deconstruction of these
variants of the movement-‐image, in a complex layering of pictorial elements that brings
difference to the fore and offers the potential to forge a time-‐image – a visual composition that
captures an image of change (or difference) interlaced with duration (or continuity) in its
unique framing of a passage of time, and in becoming so, offers evidence for an understanding
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of our relationship with the virtual, as an interaction between the past (and memory) and the
future (and fantasy) by means of the present.

Overlapping spectral projections of film, theatre and visuals onto panels of a suspended
structure – a floating labyrinth defined by fabric, latticework and optical illusions of
positive/negative spaces – aim to evoke an understanding of synthetic fragments of memory
co-‐existing in the present. The presentation recycles visual, sculptural and performance
materials from preceding works of film, theatre and visual arts practice. The new work employs
digital media components (image/sound capture and manipulation) to delineate thematic
concerns, conflicts and connections, in a reanimated drive to unpack hidden meaning and
evolve new lines of inquiry.

Domenico Cortese (University of Dundee, UK)
Self-‐Consciousness and Financial System: The Concept of Credit in the Perspective of Hegelian
Dialectic

According to Hegelian dialectic the Ethical end coincides with the Ontological one of reciprocal
recognition of two or more self-‐consciousnesses. A consciousness becomes authentically human
only in the moment in which its desires are recognized by its social environment and reflected
from this latter, as in a mirror. In this way, consciousness becomes aware of the necessity of an
agreement with the other self-‐consciousnesses in order to reach what is reciprocally satisfying
and “natural” within the constraint of intersubjective life. Such a purpose, nevertheless, meets
an aporia in the moment in which self-‐recognition of one’s own desires is revealed as materially
limited by the contingent and unjust socio-‐economic institutions present within a context. This
aporia can nevertheless be eluded trying to isolate the concept of reciprocal bargain, which is
ideally at the basis of exchange economy. If economic expansion and the concept of credit are
based, as necessary and sufficient condition for their implementation, on a direct recognition of
potential desires of a community, at least financial system can change from being an “unjust and
contingent institution” to being a direct reciprocal recognition of self-‐consciousnesses. The
analysis is carried out through the comparison between the Italian alternative economic
circuit Senza Soldiand the typical mechanisms of modern finance. In this latter, credit has been
transformed from being an “anticipation of relations” to being a mere object and commodity
among the others, whose values and operations are determined by market laws completely
independent of credit original function.

Maria Dada (Durham University, UK)
The Writing That Writes Itself

My paper will investigate ‘the emergence of the writing that writes itself’.

In Technics and Time Bernard Stiegler introduces us to ‘the question of technics’, which is ‘what
is the relationship between technics and time?’ Stiegler points out that the ‘question of technics’
can be examined with the help of Derrida’s différance, the trace or writing. Technologies of
inscription, printing and reproduction owe their existence to the structure of the grammē, which
for Derrida is the movement of the history of life.

Writing is life continually supplementing itself through prosthesis and the inscription into the
nonliving. However, at some point in the movement of the grammē there is a change in form
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that occurs which is reflected in the change of anticipation into the anticipation of death. So
there is a new form of différance that emerges, which Stiegler identifies as ‘a new prosthetic
configuration’ or a new mirror stage for humanity in which it reflects on itself through technics.

My paper will look at the possibility of another later shift that occurs in the 17th century with
the advent of the first digital calculator invented by Blaise Pascal. The beginning of what
Foucault calls the classical episteme gave rise to another form of writing, a form of writing that
writes itself. This writing adheres to the structure of the grammē but perhaps does not
anticipate its own death like the anthropocentric writing before it. How are we to understand
this new form of inscription and the technics that it brings forth?

Amy Daughton (Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, UK)
Relating Ricoeur's Social and Political Philosophy to “Religion” in the Light of Recent Reception

This paper will give a brief critical survey of recent reception of Ricoeur's ouevre with respect to
the role religion and theology played in his work, interacting throughout with examples of how
Ricoeur approached this methodological engagement. This survey will ultimately emphasise the
real need for current scholarship to maintain the clarity between these disciplines that Ricoeur
established, with a view to the needs of discourse in the public sphere today.

Considering Ricoeur's work as a whole, one can argue that Ricoeur's engagement with
speculative theology, as he termed it, increased. There are certainly places in his later work
where Ricoeur did employ theologians and their speculative discourse on God where he likely
would not have done thirty years previously: Thinking Biblically offers a series of reflections
engaged with philosophical theology of Aquinas, Pseudo-‐Dionysius and others; Memory, History,
Forgetting closes with an epilogue of forgiveness entangled with the Gospel narratives of
superabundance.

However, what is consistent is that these detours continue to lie within Ricoeur's work on
scripture, his remarks on his personal convictions, or as festive clearings outside his
philosophical systems. For some theological commentators such as Dietmar Mieth and Boyd
Blundell this has been a very welcome distinction, much needed by theology and philosophy
alike. James Carter’s new work proposes a very different perspective, reframing Ricoeur’s
philosophical oeuvre as a ‘moral religion’ grounded in a Spinozist metaphysics, Aristotle’s
anthropology and Kant’s moral philosophy. Carter explicitly describes this project as collapsing
the distinction at play in order "to celebrate both corporate living and Life as the whole of which
we are a part".

This prompts a serious critical reflection on whether this is a legitimate reconstruction of
Ricoeur’s work. Moreover, there is the strategic question of what this renaming seeks to
achieve. Does it help us draw on his phenomenology of action for our shared public life in a
concrete way? While this paper will ultimately conclude that this may not be the most
productive way forward, the underlying concern over what might be missing in public life that
needs answering by philosophers and theologians is a valuable goad to further thinking.

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Luce de Lire (Johns Hopkins University, USA/European Graduate School, Switzerland)
"Perhaps this time we have gone too far" -‐-‐ Towards a Deconstructive Materialism

This paper will outline and try to respond to three problems of deconstructive thinking from an
analytically informed perspective. It will argue against “Quasi Transcendentalism” (Gasche,
Hagglund etc.) and respond with a “deconstructive materialism”:

1) Limitation of Scope and reified conceptualism: Figures like differance, hymen, parergon etc.
are said to have (quasi) transcendental status insofar as they are “possibility and impossibility”
of the structures they de/constitute. This is problematic as it assumes two stabilized sets of
conditions: the (literary, philosophical etc.) canon and the conceptual (vs. “concrete”) realm as a
stabilized entity. The first one can be diagnosed as one of Derrida's pitfalls: re-‐reading is
incessantly re-‐inscribing. In this way deconstruction assists the persistence of given power
structures in its very practice. The second undermines deconstruction's destabilization of
borders between “theoretical” and “practical” endeavors (compare the Postcards and Glas),
granting a closed off “theoretical” realm a paradigmatic role over against some “arbitrary” non-‐
conceptual reality.

2) The unbearability of differance: Another apparent “goes without saying” is the catastrophic
effect of differance-‐like-‐structures: Ronell speaks of a “trauma of metaphysics” while Derrida
diagnoses how classical metaphysics is taking pains to eschew and exclude these structures.
However, apparently the times of the unbearability of differance are over: For example, in
finance capitalism financial markets do conceptually rely on a system without semantic value,
equivalent to what Derrida with regard to “language” termed “errant semantics.” Therefore, we
know of quite concrete cases of pursuing rather than eschewing “differance” with devastating
effects. Derrida's historical analysis must therefore be updated.
3) Modalities: The meaning of “condition of possibility and impossibility” seems to play a crucial
role in understanding what “deconstruction” does. However, there is a crucial conceptual
problem lurking: What exactly is a “possibility”? Quasi transcendentalism offers two solutions:
Either the “impossible event” or a “deferred actuality.” I will show that both options yield a
recasting of metaphysics of presence on a meta level. Quasi-‐Transcendetalism does not have the
appropriate answers. Some modal logics (Kripke, Lewis) will help to illuminate the problem in
pointing out the “statistical” model of modality most “deconstructive” thought rests upon.
However, relying heavily on a notion of “actuality” (at a possible world), it does not solve the
problem (even in Lewis' indexical interpretation of “actuality”). What then are we to make of
this “possibility”?

As an alternative conception I want to offer “deconstructive materialism.” In drawing on Spivak,
Preciado, and sometimes Ronell, I want to depict another “deconstructive” trajectory, which
short circuits the problems mentioned above via immersion in the social and material tissue
without fetishizing “reality.” Grounded in an interpretation of “im/possibility” as “infinite
regress,” “deconstructive materialism” locates the structures in question not – as does quasi-‐
transcendentalism – in the realm of concepts, but in real-‐life-‐conditions like the ghostliness of
the police, the impossible communication with the politically othered, the inexplicable
experience of stupidity etc. “Deconstructive materialism” calls for a ”Disastrology” of social
conditions rather than inference from texts and discourses.

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Luis de Miranda (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Towards a New Frontier of the Self? A Genealogy of Esprit de Corps

In a planet that might count ten billion humans in 2100, modern individualism and its form of
consciousness might not be viable anymore. Evolution or history might demand that society be
organised in cohesive groups of intermediate size. Identities would be managed by communities
of interest or of passion, with a strong esprit de corps.

But what exactly is esprit de corps? It is a notion transplanted in the eighteenth century from the
military language of the Mousquetaires (‘All for one, one for all’), and critically implanted into
politics by Diderot and d’Alembert in the Encyclopédie (1752); for the latter, esprit de corps
designates the dogmatic cohesion of a closed society, its privileged togetherness, and the
deletion of the individual in favour of the group tactics.

At the end of the Ancien Régime, France was seen a divided living character in search of an
identity. As the doctor removes a disease from a body, revolutionary minds felt that it was
necessary to diminish the influence of intermediary groups (religious orders, labour
corporations, social casts), and encourage a form of rational individualism paradoxically coupled
with nationalism. The explicit goal was to create a form of supra-‐esprit de corps: a strong
belonging to the greater body of the nation, and even to humanity (cosmopolitism). Today,
nationalism, universalism and individualism do not seem to be democratically satisfying
anymore, and are often criticised. Communitarianism on one hand, critical theories on another,
challenge us to think new frontiers of identity and belonging.

For more than two centuries, esprit de corps designated an obstacle to social creation, liberation
or personal creativity. For Bourdieu, in Noblesse d’État, the compound designates the
segregated incorporation of social capital. Yet, today, the notion of esprit de corps is often
considered (in the global management discourse but also by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille
Plateaux) as a lost virtue that needs to be recreated. Before the expression emerged in French,
the cohesion of a group was suggested in less dualist terms, as a given inspired by Catholicism
(love, friendship, philia…). A genealogy of the rhetorical device of ‘esprit de corps’ shows that
the political metaphor of the body, since Plato and Aristotle, via Hobbes and Rousseau, has a
persistent effect on our worldview. Today, in the epoch of minorities, communities, and
corporations, it is important to examine if esprit de corps can be reactivated as a device for
political self-‐empowerment of the unrecognized bodies. Can we invent a wider frontier for the
self, beyond individualism?

Zornitsa Dimitrova (Independent Scholar)
Interaction and Personhood in Sentient Automata

Artificial sentient agents augment human environments. Even more so, nonhuman autonomous
agents – robots, cyber agents and intelligent systems – have become part of our environment to
such an extent that humans require ongoing interaction with them in order to perceive
themselves as functional. Still, even such ‘intelligent’ objects are seen as nothing more than the
extensions of human agency into a world. Heidegger’s account of technology in Being and Time
(1927) reveals the problematic nature of this attitude. Views on equipment as an inconspicuous
‘readiness-‐to-‐hand’ (98-‐100) implicitly argue for objects’ availability as tools. They foreground
the auxiliary character of sentient automata. At the same time, accepting the possibility of
viewing these agents as counterparts or even autonomous species remains problematic.

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Another transformation – perhaps one emerging out of a society in crisis – presents itself in the
unspoken stance that ‘a human being is not enough’. As if in response to this anxiety, the
cultural imagination has systematically depicted embodied sentient automata as
anthropomorphic, yet only sketchily so. Automation sentience is limited, robots are physically
unappealing, and very few instrumentalised creatures can speak. That is to say, they are devoid
of ‘logos’ and therefore of personhood. Interaction is one-‐way and takes place at human will. In
contrast, it is only very recent scholarly research (Matthias 2008) that shows that the
relationship between ‘personality’ and ‘humanness’ is not as close as traditionally perceived. A
new situation arises, thus, once we decide to take into account the ‘personhood’ potential of
sentient automata. A new vantage point opens up as one chooses to dwell upon the
autonomous quality of responsive software, genetic algorithms, machine learning or cases of
robotic agent architecture.

Artistic practice inverts exactly this need to perform and reinstate the accessory character of
automata. Every too often it is in art that one witnesses a performance of machines acting like
humans. Performances such as David Karave’s Home Automation (2005) or Frank Garvey’s
troupe of robots put on display our capacity to create artifacts and recognize ourselves in these
creations, yet also stage an encounter with a sentience that is intensely Other. With their focus
on empathetic participation, robotic performances thus invite us to construct an extended
concept of personality and interaction. Inasmuch as personhood can be seen as a narrative and a
discursive construct (Matthias 226-‐9), its genesis being grounded in culture-‐specific ritualistic
behavior (229), herein one ceases to view humans solely in their role as interveners. Within the
spatiality of robotic performance, humans overcome their position as a controlling entity to let
other forms of being take the scene and be. It is these tensions that become the subject of the
present paper.

Rick Dolphijn (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
It Can Only Exist in Thought, It Can Only Result in the Work of Art: Deleuze's Ideal Game

Though it does not appear to be a major theme throughout his oeuvre, ‘the game’ is
conceptualised several times in the work of Gilles Deleuze. Most famously, in A Thousand
Plateaus, written with Félix Guattari, there are two instances where the game is an important
part of his conceptual apparatus. First there is the opposition between chess and go, by means
of which two very different types of warfare/ two different types of space (polis (chess) against
nomos (go)) are being reveilled. Second there is ‘the refrain’, the core of Deleuze and Guattari’s
theory of music which is loosely based on Freud’s Fort-‐Da: the idea that especially children learn
to accept the presence and absence of the mother by simple games of repetition. There are
however many more instances in which the game, and authors that have written about the
game (think of Lewis Carroll and Mallarmé, Nietzsche, Pascal and Leibniz), play a crucial role in
Deleuze’s thinking.

Central to his thoughts on the game, is ‘the ideal game’ as it is introduced to us in the tenth
series of Logic of Sense. Here it becomes clear how Deleuze’s conceptualization of the term
differs from how the dominant ideas of gaming (gamification, the ludic turn). The ideal game
refuses to accept the dualism that marks the reception of Huizinga (in which the game is
considered to be “opposed to reality”). It also moves away from ‘game theory’ as it is applied in
strategic decision making, “because any such theory misunderstands the nature of openness of
events”, as James Williams puts it. In contrast to both ideas, Deleuze’s ideal game makes no
sense and has no reality, since it is precisely in being nonsensical that the Ideal game is real.
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Deleuze then defines the ideal game as such: it is what happens in thought and what produces
the work of art.

Following Deleuze, the ideal game is thus different from the ‘normal game’ that works with a
prior set of categorical rules, that determines hypotheses which divide and apportion chance,
that organizes the game into really and numerically distinct successions, and that ends with
victory or defeat. Normal games thus put a limit to both chance and human activity. Ideal games
on the contrary, are by no means limited and therefore not only (on the one hand) have a lot to
say about “what chance can do”. Yet at the same time (on the other hand) the ideal game seems
to be a crucial ‘moment’ where two planes of creativity, being thought and art (or philosophy
and aesthetics), meet. For it is through the ideal game that both thought and art are real, id est,
that they are able to disturb “reality, morality and the economy of the world”, as Deleuze puts it.
Rereading Deleuze’s take on the ideal game, as well as the other moments where ‘the game’
pops up in his thinking, this paper intends to expand on what the game can do as an idea and as
a practice. It shows how mind and body (the task of philosophy and the work of art) are in the
end the same thing (to put it in Spinozist terms).

Lisa Foran (Newcastle University, UK)
A Phenomenology of Reading: Deciding the Frontier between Philosophy and Literature

The relation between philosophy and literature is often framed in moralistic terms – from Plato
to Martha Nussbaum. Against such an approach, this paper asks: what is the experience of
philosophy? What is the experience of literature? Insofar as both practises are produced as
texts these questions become, what is the experience of reading? Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s
description of a text, I claim that what distinguishes the experience of reading philosophy and
reading literature is the nature of appropriation. That with philosophy the reader engages in an
appropriation of the text in order to better understand her own world, but that with literature
the reader is appropriated by the text, leaving her own world behind. Both experiences can be
transformative for the reader insofar as philosophy and literature can reveal a certain truth.

However, as I further claim, they reveal different kinds of truth. The ‘truth’ revealed (sometimes)
in the experience of reading philosophy – a kind of propositional truth, a truth we can take home
with us and use again – simultaneously conceals the kind of truth we can experience in the
reading of literature. The ‘truth’ revealed through the experience of reading literature is, I
believe, closer to the kind of knowledge Emmanuel Levinas describes as a knowledge of the
flesh, a wisdom of the skin. It is a truth that marks us, that opens up a world for us, that leaves
us altered in an inexplicable way; but it is a truth that seems to vanish at the approach of
language itself. This kind of knowledge, this kind of truth, reveals itself only by concealing the
truth we can possess and re-‐express – the truth we find in philosophy (or at least a certain kind
of philosophy).

What I would like to suggest, therefore, is that philosophy and literature are texts which, in the
experience of being read, reveal and conceal each other; or more precisely reveal and conceal
each others ‘truth’. How this truth is revealed is often down to the decision taken by the reader.
In reading a text as philosophy the reader already decides to appropriate it into her own world.
In reading a text as literature the reader decides to leave her own world behind. It is this
decision that constitutes or predetermines the truth revealed in the act of reading. Texts by,
amongst many others, Hélène Cixous, Georges Bataille or Jacques Derrida, which exceed the
‘definition’ of ‘philosophy’ or ‘literature’; force the reader into a state of suspension between
15

these choices, bringing the decision of the reader itself into relief. In such a limit situation, the
frontier between philosophy and literature opens and remains to be decided.

Lyat Friedman (Bezalel Academy of the Arts and Design, Israel)
Criticisms of Technology and Technologies of Criticism
Panel: New Horizons in Philosophy of Technology 2

. . . indifference, doubt, and finally, severe
criticism are rather signs of a profound habit of
thought. Our age is the age of criticism, to which
everything must be subjected
(Kant, Preface to Critique of Pure Reason)

This paper seeks to examine two types of praxes: technological and critical. It will examine a
genealogy (Marxist in nature) of technology along with a genealogy of critical thinking
(Heideggerian in nature). Risking generalization, three types of technologies (instrumental,
machinery and digital) will be compared to three types of critiques (linear, genealogical and
rhizomatic). The relation of each type of technology with each type of thinking will provide the
ground for a discussion of whether thinking in general and critical thinking in particular are
independent of technology. That is, can thinking take place without technology? Can technology
be separated from thinking? What is the image of thinking?

Aristotle’s logic and arguments validating causal reasoning is shaped by the use of tools for
work. This type of technology is linear and relies on causal relations so as to make things work.
Manual operation is required and bodily power is its source of energy. Tools, such as a hammer,
a plow or a writing instrument can be used as an image for thought. Kant’s transcendental
reason and Heidegger’s phenomenology reply on a very different image: the image of the clock,
the machine, and even the type-‐writer. This type of image forms a structure that operates
several tools in sync. The factory is a multi-‐layered structure that coordinates numerous workers
with operating tools working together, like clock-‐work. The image of operating machinery can
easily be detected in the image of thought for Kant and Heidegger (as well as Marx, Nietzsche,
Freud, de Saussure, Levi-‐Strauss, Barthes or Foucault). It is the image of a structure operating its
strata in harmony: Reason compels its categories to cohere with the manifold of sensations;
Being withdraws to the background of an image of being; a system of signifieds is veiled behind
a chain of signifiers; and a subject who can manage, from above, the regulatory organization.

In a similar fashion, digital technology produces virtual images of thought as thinking. It is a new
“selfie” by which thinking imagines its operations. Screen-‐touch information provides
interdisciplinary connections, pop-‐up schisms prescribed by algorithms. Thinking becomes as
easy as touching the screen on a cellular phone. It exhibits multi-‐stabilities and prides itself of
the innovative forms by which wiz-‐kids play the game. Critical thinking, provocative
transgressions and unprecedented rhizomatic connections render thinking as a multi-‐layered
web busy with reconstructing a network of fractal information. Thinking becomes the
consolidator of logical processes. It is the image of a powerful computer rewriting its own
operating system.

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Moritz Gansen (Free University of Berlin, Germany)
Heroes of Pragmatism: French Frontiers

When pragmatism, perhaps the first original American philosophical programme, crossed the
Atlantic in the early twentieth century, it was often perceived as indeed a threat to European
philosophy, which at the time meant: to thinking itself. Especially in France, where academic
philosophy was dominated by Neo-‐Cartesian and Neo-‐Kantian forms of rationalism, the
pragmatist critique of Cartesian and Kantian images of thought appeared as a kind of lese-‐
majesty. But there was more at stake in the debates around pragmatism than the fate of one
philosophical tradition or another: ultimately, it posed the question of the philosophical
sovereignty of the European nations. Anti-‐pragmatism accordingly appeared as a correlate of
anti-‐Americanism; as George Herbert Mead aptly and polemically summarised, pragmatism was
often “regarded as a pseudo-‐philosophic formulation of that most obnoxious American trait, the
worship of success”. In Europe, American philosophy hence seemed to be little more than an
obscene oxymoron (to which William James’s rhetoric of “our general obligation to do what
pays” certainly contributed).

However, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) this academic hostility towards pragmatism
and American philosophy more generally, it is possible to trace several strands of a French
reception and transformation, of an appropriation and repurposing; more radically, one could
even argue that a certain form of pragmatism and radical empiricism has found its heirs not in
American neo-‐pragmatism, but in French attempts at “transcendental empiricism”, as Jean Wahl
and Gilles Deleuze dubbed their philosophical projects. For them (as for Henri Bergson, Gérard
Deledalle and recently Bruno Latour), pragmatism presented an alternative to mainstream
French philosophy, a kind of philosophical “expatriation” (Félix Guattari) that allowed for a
process of radical innovation.

This process, finally, had to be premised on a different, a proper understanding of the nature of
the pragmatist subject, revising the often superficial readings of an early antipragmatism. As
Deleuze thus clarified in his essay on Herman Melville’s Bartleby, “[t]he hero of pragmatism is
not the successful businessman”; the subject of pragmatism is not the one governed by the
habitual reterritorialisations of a Protestant ethic. In fact, the subject of pragmatism is never
given in advance – much rather, pragmatism is, once again in Deleuze’s words, “an attempt to
transform the world, to think a new world or new man insofar as they create themselves”,
insofar as they deterritorialise; it is “first of all the affirmation of a world in process”, a process of
incessant becoming. Accordingly, David Lapoujade has interpreted hoboes, migrant workers, as
the true minoritarian subjects of classical pragmatism: “It is they who cross the country in an
ambulatory manner and who travel the network of connections in all possible directions. They
travel a fragment of the road and go from transitions to temporary stays […]. It is thus in a
curious manner that James’s philosophy can be said to be the philosophy of American
capitalism.”

The proposed paper will trace these lines and figures of a French re-‐evaluation of pragmatism in
more detail; through an analysis of their specific “nostalgia for a different America” (Stéphane
Madelrieux), it will sketch out some of the key figures of a genealogy of contemporary forms of
French pragmatism.

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Alişan Genç (Middle East Technical University, Turkey)
Heidegger’s History of Being, the Self-‐Destruction of History and the Importance of Remembrance

It is generally acknowledged that in the essay “Time and Being”, Heidegger attempts to
encounter being in its historicity, yet this historicity must be thought in accordance with the
very manner of being’s happening and not in terms of any other kind of history. In this
context, this paper focuses on the role of the non-‐historical (ungeschichtlich) element as
constitutive of history in Heidegger’s thought on the basis of what Heidegger calls the
fundamental trait or movement (Grundzug) of being, namely its self-‐withdrawal. To understand
this peculiar relation the Heideggerian notion of strife will be taken as the guiding thread for
the whole discussion. Firstly, it will be shown that historicity is constituted by a conflictual
relation between the non-‐historical and historical elements. Secondly, it will be argued that
this non-‐historicality is what renders Heidegger’s project of the Destruktion of Western
metaphysics possible precisely by resisting being assimilated in the epochal naming of being
that enables the so-‐called other beginning. In light of this, by interpreting the non-‐ historical
element as resisting metaphysical closure, the overarching aim of this paper is to show that
Heidegger’s thinking of the history of being implies a polemical (as derived from polemos)
understanding of the phenomenon history as bearing its own possibility of self-‐
Destruktion. In turn, the issue of remembrance will be situated in relation to the non-‐historical
element. I will draw on What is Called Thinking regarding the possibility of authentic thinking in
the age of modern technology. I will attempt to show the intricate relation between the non-‐
historical yet constitutive element of historicity of being and remembrance. My aim is to show
that Heidegger interprets the peculiar kind of remembrance as the authentic mode of thinking
insofar as it is receptive to the uncertainty and futurality of the history of being.

Ilias Giannopoulos (National University of Athens, Greece)
Naïveté, Truth Content of Art and Verification of Solipsism: Adorno on Artistic Expression and
Aesthetic Experience

According to Adorno, epistemology generally tries to abandon solipsism through “critical self-‐
reflection” and the latter tries to imitate the “subjective point of reference in art”. However,
solipsism confuses “aesthetic semblance” with truth beyond the realm of aesthetics. When
referring to the need for a reversion of the relation of epistemology and art, especially for
“normal bourgeois consciousness” in the Aesthetic Theory, Adorno does not really make any
suggestions. But how could a non-‐conceptual expression or even knowledge, as the artistic,
serve as paradigm for any epistemological attitude? Indeed, Adorno states that “art is the
historicophilosophical truth of a solipsism that is untrue in-‐itself”. Starting point for artistic
creation is, or should be, a true subjective need for expression. Appreciation of art also takes
place in a non-‐conceptual realm of subjectivity and tries often to unveil subjective intentions of
the creator in the work. Adorno also highlights art’s “double character” as both autonomous
phenomenon and fait social. This outlining of art penetrates the most of his statements on
artistic creation and expression, and on aesthetic experience and judgement. At the same time,
he locates the value of the artwork beyond the subjective realm of both creator and recipient,
among others, in its truth content which is determined in the above mentioned oscillation
between sociological determination and autonomy. That means, though art’s having a
“subjective point of reference”, solipsistic truth is not the only truth for art; the truth of art,
more than any other truth, has to be subjectively perceived and experienced but may have
intersubjective content. Also the aim for any epistemological attitude is truth. It seems that
epistemology and artistic-‐ creation and perception generally share a common field of reference
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in the pursuit of truth. In addition, by determining artworks and their meaning in a historical
“process of becoming” and beyond the “putative lived experience of the subject […] but only
within an already developed language of art”, he definitely transcends art’s solipsistic truth
concerning its creation and perception. Is this a transcending or indeed a
“historicophilosophical truth”, that is, a verification of an initially solipsistic attitude of the
“most progressive consciousness” and of its projection in society? In another context, when
analyzing the various, whereas not subsequent, layers of aesthetic experience as “objective
understanding”, Adorno explicitly emphasizes an oscillation, actually reciprocity, between
sensuality and thinking. In this process “naïveté” constitutes a “goal” and not an “origin” as if
the art-‐recipient should forget any acquired experience and knowledge and return to a
solipsistic, non-‐conceptual state of a tabula rasa. In this paper I will try to outline and
reconstruct the relationship between Adorno’s statements on solipsism, as artistic and
epistemological attitude, truth content of the artwork and naïveté. In order to understand the
role of solipsism in art and Adorno’s relevant statements, I will introduce J.S. Schmidt’s
distinction between epistemological and ontological solipsism. I will also explore the possibility
that naïveté, as “goal” of aesthetic experience, may serve as axiological foundation of solipsism
allowing it to appear as virtue.

Carrie Giunta (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK)
Philosophy Can’t Breathe

Air is ever-‐present and becomes an absence when there is no breath, according to Luce Irigaray.
Marx’s oft-‐quoted phrase, “All that is solid melts into air…” exemplifies a tendency to think
about air as absence and not taking place in presence.

For Irigaray, a Western philosophical tradition emphasises thinking over breathing. The
forgetting of breathing, she argues, is a disregard for air. For in air, the philosopher “does not
come up against a being or a thing.” There is nothing but absence. Contra to Heidegger, Irigaray
argues that to breathe means to be. In her ontology of breath, she draws on Hindu scriptures
and the practice of yogic breath control.

Peter Sloterdijk considers how a “breathing economy” is needed, as air is our most immediate
environmental resource. While Irigaray’s philosophy of breathing is based on air, Sloterdijk’s
atmoterrorism and airquakes call attention to the defenselessness of breathing. Atmoterrorism,
he argues, is rooted in the double negative that living organisms cannot not breathe.

This paper highlights a similar vulnerability about breathing. Following the demand to improve
respiratory efficiency in biomedical research, philosophy must also cultivate breathing. What
suppresses the breath is not an underlying lack of air, but a stifling, cloudy layer over philosophy.
A heavy fog sits between philosophy and the oxygen it needs.

This paper harnesses the cloud metaphor to express the epistemic violence of racism in the
philosophical canon and exclusion or forgetting of philosophy that is not Europecentric. In
remembrance of Eric Garner,1 and considering the way in which the violence denounced by the
#blacklivesmatter movement is also cognitive and epistemic, and in recognition of the current
student-‐led movement,2 which asks: “Why is my curriculum white?” this paper asks why
philosophy can’t breathe.

19

Francis Halsall (National College of Art and Design, Ireland)
The “Absolute Metaphor” of System: Hans Blumenberg, Systems and Modernity
Panel: Frontiers of Modernity

In this paper I use Hans Blumeberg’s idea of “Absolute Metaphor” to argue that the concept of
“system” is the dominant, regulatory idea of modernity.

The (tacit) manifesto for Blumenberg’s whole intellectual project appeared in succinct form in
his early book Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Metaphorology, Blumenberg claims, “seeks to
burrow down to the substructure of thought, the underground, the nutrient solution of systemic
crystallizations.” Absolute Metaphors make concept formation possible and they are prior to it.
So, ultimately, for Blumenberg, metaphysics is both a product of history and has it as its frontier.

Blumenberg’s project entailed a systematic history of ideas that would bring to the surface and
then interrogate the concepts that are used to understand the world. These would then be
shown to be underwritten – and hence made meaningful – by a realm of non-‐conceptuality
(Unbegrifflichkeit). We can gain access to the realm of non-‐conceptuality though myth and
metaphor. Myth and metaphor (pace Cassiere) are the symbolic forms that make thought
possible; they provide the frontiers for consciousness.

From this starting point Blumenberg produced several works of staggering erudition that sought
to unpack the foundations of knowledge in Western Modernity. These included: The Legitimacy
of the Modern Age, which can be read as a lengthy riposte to Schmitt’s celebrated claim that the
modern state emerged from “secularized theological concepts”; Work on Myth,about the
continuity of mythical tropes in modern thinking; and The Genesis of the Copernican
World which looked at the consequences of the Copernican revolution on thought and
experience.

Here I use Blumenberg’s theory of non-‐conceptuality to argue that throughout modernity
“system” as a principle has become sedimented into our lives and thought to such an extent that
we rarely even notice it. Systems are a non-‐conceptual basis to thought which pre-‐supposes that
things are connected with one another and that thought can reflect upon and participate in
those connections. Hence, my conclusion, that systems have become embedded into our
thought in ways that we often don’t recognise and hence provide its boundaries, edges and
limits.

Tom Hewitt (Open University, UK)
Degrees of Freedom: Agency in Improvised Music—Searching For Boundaries in Entangled Network
Space
Panel: Jazz Improvisation, Agency and Freedom: Between the Human and Inhuman Lies the
Assemblage

“Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise,
and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist -‐ leave that to the classical musicians” – Dave
Brubeck. The implication is that the jazz improviser is a free agent in the production of the sonic
object. But is she? Another musician, a clarinet improviser, says that he is very aware, during
performance, of being part of a performer-‐clarinet-‐software-‐hardware assemblage. This paper
will question the notion of agency in respect of the improvising musician by looking at the
synchronic and diachronic nature of the entanglements between the sub-‐assemblages which
cause and constitute the musical phenomenon, by drawing on the connectionist philosophies of
20

Deleuze and Guattari, Latour, De Landa and Hodder. In his essay Paergon, Derrida discusses the
problems associated with defining the boundaries or frames of artworks. Borrowing from the
spirit of Derrida’s coinage, I use the term paraprosopon to discuss where the boundaries of a
person might lie. I argue that, pace Kosko, such boundaries, between the ergon (work)
and prosopon (person) are fuzzy and indeterminate. If we cannot, with certainty, say where
these boundaries are, how can we, with certainty, describe where the agency lies in improvised
(or any) musical production? And if the agentive subject ‘itself’ is difficult to pin down, how can
we even begin to discuss the question of free-‐agency? Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by
this. Humans have been cyborgs since they started using stone tools, and musical cyborgs since
they first blew a bone flute. We are, in Clark’s terminology, human-‐technology symbionts. Our
symbiotic association with technology becomes ever more pervasive and entangled with the
passage of time. I posit a metaphysical space, Entangled Network Space, where the de-‐ and
reterritorialization of these entangled assemblages plays out.

Anna Hickey-‐Moody (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
Slow Life and an Ecology of Sensation

This paper is a new materialist a mobilisation of, and response to, Jasbir Puar’s timely work on
debility. I argue for anecology of sensations as a methodology for thinking and feeling through
what I call a political economy of ‘slow life’ as way of valuing how 'disabled' bodies and
subjectivities machine the world. Implicit in this suggestion is the belief that disabled bodies and
embodied subjectivities machine the world in ways that show up limits in popular sensory and
spatial geographies and economies. The idea of a political economy of slow life is my response to
Puar (2011) and Berlant’s (2007, 2011) respective suggestions that the biopolitical control of
disabled, debilitated, obese and queer populations is effected through a governmental
assumption (and production) of a slow death. Rather than thinking through the uniting qualities
of debilities, let us better understand the differences marked by disabilities. I want to develop a
robust ecology of sensation, bringing feminist new materialist theory together with Paul Carter’s
suggestion that “the language of creative research is related to the goal of material thinking, and
both look beyond the making process to the local reinvention of social relations” (2004: 10).
Here we see the philosophical and social significance of creative practice as political activism laid
plain. Echoing Estelle Barrett’s (2007:1) proposal that, “artistic practice [can] be viewed as the
production of knowledge or philosophy in action”, I advocate for affective activism developed
through making art with intellectually disabled people. We need to build ecologies of sensation
that acknowledge, appreciate and respect. The body, and embodied interactions, are pivotal to
new materialism, as it is a complex intra-‐action (Barad, 2007) of the social and affective,
embodiment is a process of encounters, intra-‐actions with other bodies.

This begins to show why thinking about matter and performative practices matters – if bodies
and things are produced together, through performance, then ‘things’ and how they might act
on bodies are co-‐constitutive of our embodied subjectivity. The concept of intra-‐action is central
to Karen Barad’s (2007) new materialism, and refers to the movement generated in an
encounter of two or more bodies in a process of becoming different from themselves and each
other. In other words, focus shifts from the subject and/or the object to their performative
entanglement, the event, the action between (not in-‐between), is what matters.

As a way of exploring this entanglement and co-‐constitution of matter and subjectivity, new
materialism has emerged as a methodology, a theoretical framework and a political positioning
that emphasizes the complex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power
(Dolphin and van der Tuin, 2012). Matter teaches us through resisting dominant discourses and
21

showing new ways of being. Bodies resist dominant modes of positioning, political acts defy
government rule, sexuality exceeds legal frameworks – resistant matter shows us the limits of
the world as we know it, and prompts us to shift these limits. This opinion piece is not intended
to build a particular argument pertaining to the pedagogical nature of matter, nor to simply
open debate on what the concept of debility might take away from understandings of disability.
Rather, I am looking to open up the concept of ecologies of sensation and affective activism as a
way of seeing and feeling the political economy of intellectually disabled lives. The matter,
performance and senses of intellectual disability are both pedagogical and resistant.

References
Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter
and meaning. Durham and London UK: Duke University Press.
Berlant, L., 2007. Slow Death. Critical Inquiry, 33 (Summer), pp. 754-‐780.
Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Carter, P., 2004. Material Thinking the theory and practice of creative research. Carlton, Vic:
Melbourne University Publishing.

Auguste Hill (European Graduate School, Switzerland)
Consanguinity Disruptus: The Phenomenology of Incest as Limit-‐Experience

Exploring incestuousness empirically is essential to the discovery and recovery process of incest
as a trauma inducing extreme. I look at the edges of its restricted nature in order to provoke
essential material from incest’s hidden existence. Because the disintegration of sexual limits
produced by the act of incest is a psychologically charged arena often resulting in amnesia, it is
usually addressed as a pathology. However, the process yields to memory recall as its subject
relives the traumatic events in the present. Episodic memory becomes a conceptual devise upon
which to build a phenomenological stage for the drama of incest. Limit-‐Experience
phenomenologically extends the taboo of incest dynamically into media discourse.

Using episodic recall I am constructing a memory enabled Limit Experience. Like Wittgenstein’s
metaphilosophical perspective on abstract thought, I embrace the embodiment of trauma to the
soul as metacreative material. By converting incest from history’s taboo holding place into an
essential tool for plumbing the depths of the creative impulse I maintain that it is the most
crucial progenitor of artistic power for the act’s object.

In addition, the delineation of sex as a simultaneously destructive and constructive act is
enhanced by harnessing the pathological tendency of incest in a phenomenological extension
toward theorization, intuition and pure reason. In particular, the biological connectivity of
incest’s subject and object is a centering focus of my inquiry.

A product of Derrida’s development of deconstruction is the prevention of violence. As an
exercise in critique of the transgressive act of incest I specifically denote a schism between body
and mind, what can be philosophized and what must be performed. In the context of
consanguineous violations, fodder for a reconstruction of the psyche’s narrative becomes an
Artaudian theatre of the absurd.

Wittgenstein redirected the edifice of philosophical thinking toward “the therapeutic” because
he didn’t believe in theory-‐construction. Transgressive behaviors like incest lay a delicate
foundation for empirical experimentation based on the availability of phenomenologically
22

centered Limit-‐Experience as it is defined by the work of Foucault and Bataille around sexuality
and personal change.

Embodied incestuousness, then, is the central focusing link between performance and
(anti)philosophy that I will be exploring. In this vein of inquiry, the strength of limit-‐experience to
encapsulate and perpetuate dissociative fodder for creativity is somewhat documented among
Foucault, Bataille and Artaud. In addition I’m interested in asking what performance philosophy
can do toward integrating the experience of incest into a healthy dialogue between
sensationalized, culturally constructed media depictions of taboo and the act of authentically
embodying trauma.

Having been an actor in Hollywood, an installation/performance artist in art school and a
filmmaker I’m particularly interested in determining the cathartic value of philosophy on trauma
and propose that an antiphilosophical approach may be more germane to the phenomenon of
embodied healing. Therefore, Puchner’s idea about “mind (ing) the gap” is particularly pertinent
here. and with awareness that performance yields its own philosophy I will also be taking into
consideration the meta-‐performative push back effect of exposing a taboo to an audience.

With the intention of illustrating the limits of performance and philosophy in a specific context
going beyond the limits of reason as Wittgenstein put it, my overreaching goal with
Consanguinity Disruptus is to negotiate space for the value of incest as an instigator of
movement, groundlessness and in its antiphilosophical performativeness recreate a media
driven cultural portal to sublimity.

Joanna Hodge (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
The Withdrawal of What Shows Itself: Jean-‐Luc Nancy on Portraiture

Jean-‐Luc Nancy has dedicated two texts to the art and destiny of the portrait: Le regard du
portrait (Editions Galilee 2000) and now L’autre portrait (Editions Galilee 2014), in which he
refers back to the discussion in the former of the question of the ‘look’ of the portrait as its
distinctive site or domain (foyer). The latter is preceded by an epigraph which intimates how the
portrait arrives by opening up a space, embedded in subjectivity, welded to a concept of the
subject, but from the beginning disruptive of any concept of the subject. From Lacan, on
Holbein’s Ambassador, and Foucault’s discussion of Velasquez’ Las Meninas, to the images
adduced by Nancy, the concept of the subject as a site for articulating a theory of affect has
been rendered volatile and put into a circulation of meaning from which it will return irreducibly
altered.

The affects of self-‐loss and self-‐recognition, of mis-‐recognition and dissimulation are conjured up
for inspection in Nancy’s delicate discussion of the ruses of portraiture, of its capacity to show
what it does not show, in the absence of the subject of the portrait, doubled by an absence and
subversion of subjectivity itself. The paper will explore Nancy’s positioning of his discussion in
relation to Lacoue-‐Labarthe, on the emergence of a concept of mimesis without a model, and in
relation to Levinas’ account of a ‘visage sans figure’, both cited in his text. It will also explore
how this staging of affect without subjectivity, sameness without identity, art criticism without
aesthetic theory illuminates an emancipation of artwork from theory and a multiplication of
artwork, beyond the restrictive delimitations of genre: portraiture, still life, landscape; painting,
montage, installation; art, philosophy, critique.

23

Mario Horta (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
Limit and Borderland: Critical Openness in Foucault and Tarkovsky

One of the fundamental objectives of the Kantian Critique of Pure Reason was to draw the limit
of finite human knowledge through an inquiry into its conditions of possibility. Post-‐Kantian
philosophy could, however, never gain the security that this limitation had promised. What
should have been excluded by the Critique seemed to constantly resurface within finite human
knowledge and critical philosophy had to take upon itself the task to think what had been
expelled.

This perpetual demand to reconsider its own fundamental limitation, that might be considered
as one of the major faults of the Kantian Critique, can, however, also be considered as one of its
most valuable legacies. It is the foundational openness that results from this disruptive structure
of the Critique that we, it seems to me, should take into consideration if we intend to investigate
the new frontiers of philosophy.

Foucault and Tarkovsky – Limit and Border-‐region
In order to provide a clearer outline of the relevance of the inherent openness of Critique for the
question of the frontier I intend to treat two ways in which this relation can be thought, the limit
and the borderland. The first one, the limit, was developed by Michel Foucault in his essay on
Kant’s What is Enlightenment?, the second one, the border-‐region is, I intend to show, a
fundamental structural element of Andrej Tarkovsky’s film Stalker.

Whereas Foucault develops the Kantian Critique through a radicalisation of the limit into a
historical dimension, Tarkovsky broadens and opens up the limitation of finite human existence
in the border region of a mysterious Zone. Both terms can be considered as reactions to the
foundational limitation of the Critique.

Foucault transforms the epistemological dimension of the Kantian Critique into an archeaological
and genealogical movement. Tarkovsky radicalizes the finitude of human existence in the waste-‐
land of the borderland but at the same time transcends it. It is in the Zone that desires become
reality, i.e. the excluded becomes manifest.

Where both Foucault and Tarkovsky coincide, I shall argue, is that they safeguard the openness,
which transformed the Critique into the unterminable project of philosophical critique.

Emma Ingala (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
Aesthetics of the Real in Jacques Lacan: Beneath or Beyond the Limit?

Neither Freud nor Lacan systematised a specifically psychoanalytic aesthetic theory. They rather
provided acute analyses, fragmented observations and remarks. Nevertheless, in his essay ‘The
Uncanny’, Freud indicates that such a psychoanalytic aesthetic theory would be concerned with
‘a rather remote region’. When Lacan talks about art in his seminars, he shows this concern. In
particular, his reflections on the aesthetic experience have more often than not to do with what
he calls the dimension of the real, the realm of what remains impossible to represent or
apprehend under the form of a discourse or an image – what lies beyond the symbolic and the
imaginary. This might initially seem paradoxical, since art has been traditionally regarded as a
representational exercise, or at least as an exercise that has to do with images and/or words.
24

However, Lacan wants to point out the liminal condition of art, the role art plays in establishing
and mapping the frontiers of the real.

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it will pull together Lacan’s observations on art to classify
them into three different – albeit complementary – ways of understanding an aesthetics of the
real: (a) in Seminar 7, art is seen as an operation that traces the outlines of the real; (b) in
Seminar 11, art appears as a way to provoke, under safe conditions, the random encounter with
the real; and (c) in Seminar 23, art is paired with what Lacan calls the sinthome, an assemblage
that the subject constructs to protect himself from the real and learn how to deal with it.
Second, it will identify contemporary elaborations of Lacan’s aesthetics of the real, such as those
of Massimo Recalcati, Julia Kristeva, Eugenio Trías, Simon Critchley and Hal Foster, to discuss
whether an aesthetics of the real needs to stay beneath the limit of the real in order, as
Recalcati, Foster and Trías hold, to remain ‘aesthetic’ and not become grotesque, or whether, as
Critchley and the aesthetics of abjection forged through Kristeva maintain, the production of an
aesthetic effect requires a going beyond that limit and a challenging of common sense forms of
thinking and sensibility. By bringing this discussion to the fore, we will show the extent to which
Lacan’s conception of the real and its frontiers is relevant to current discussions and practices
relating to art’s place and function.

Iraklis Ioannidis (University of Glasgow, UK)
The Problematic Other and the Essence of the Self’s Existential Basis

Ever since Descartes, the Other has been a problem to be solved. We cannot have a direct proof
of the existence of other minds as we do not have direct access to them or, as with Berkeley, we
do not have a clear and distinct idea of another spirit but just a notion of it. For the materialists,
as Sartre brilliantly analysed, the Other might not be an issue as they are relying only on material
criteria for existential claims. For them, a material body is sufficient proof of the existence of the
Other. Yet the problematic nature of the Other creeps back in in discussions of consciousness
where the Other can turn into a “philosophical zombie”. Even in the critical tradition, the
problem of the Other is not solved by the phenomenologists; it is bypassed transcendentally. Yet
this bypassing results in another problematic. The Other is proved as a restricting parameter of
the self’s potentialities and affordances, as a restricting being in the self’s commerce with the
world. The Other does not open up the world as horizon of horizons but is found in it. In this
paper I will challenge this individualistic Cartesian way of studying the Other which permeates
western modern philosophical traditions. I will begin by offering a phenomenological reduction
of the feeling of rejection as experienced by someone who is rejected by their partner. The
feeling of Rejection has been neglected in phenomenology while allowing phychologistic,
psychoanalytic, and utilitarian thought to standardize theories about the Other, either as an
object of pleasure or utility. These theories will be bracketed. Rejection is the experiential
phenomenon through which we apprehend directly the presence (existence AND being) of the
Other as they withdraw from the self’s possibilities of transcendence. Rejection thus forces the
shaping of new horizons of transcendence. If the reduction is successful then the Other will be
found as the foundation of the Self, the essence of the self’s existential basis; the primordial
unity that Nietzsche described in the Birth of The Tragedy and the condition of experience as
described by Jaspers. In a word, pure intersubjectivity.

25

Stacey O. Irwin (Millersville University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Postphenomenology: Exploring the Technological Texture through Digital Media

In contemporary society, we do not watch a television show on a TV or a radio program on a
radio as much as we used to and younger generations rarely participate in this kind of media
consumption at all. Today we have content, devices and screens, which collaborate to create
digital media. The separation of content from specific digital media devices has created a
proliferation of ways to use just one device producing convergence, the cooperation of many
industries. One way to think about digital media is through this idea of convergence, the
interconnection of content, digital media devices, networks and information. Digital media is
also considered by many to be “composed of three parts that distinguishes it from previous
media forms, content (discourse), channel and application”(Aarseth 2003, 419). This juncture
and its results alter the way we communicate, relate, think and act just because it is available.
Understanding convergence allows us to see into the very make up of this ubiquitous and
omnipresent technology. To be sure, there are many available texts that explore wide-‐ranging
ideas about digital media, and the associated term new media. Researchers like Dewdney &
Ride (2014), Jenkins et all (2013), Kovarkik (2011), Creeber & Martin (2009), Mark B.N. Hansen
(2006), Liestol et all (2003), and Rodowick (2001) provide depth and breadth on an historical,
cultural, artistic and aesthetic understanding of digital media. This paper delves into the
postphenomenological perspective (Ihde, 2009), namely multistability, variational theory,
microperception, and macroperception to explore the technological texture of digital media.

References
Aarseth, Espen. 2003. “We All Want to Change the World: The Ideology of Innovation.” in
Digital Media. Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovation in Digital
Domains. Boston: MIT Press. 318-‐321.
Creeber Glen, Royston Martin. 2009. Digital Culture: Understanding New Media. New York:
McGraw Hill.
Dewdney, Andrew and Peter Ride. 2014. The Digital Media Handbook. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins. Henry, Ford, Sam, Green, Joshus. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value in a
Networked Culture. New York: NYU Press.
Hansen, Mark B. N. 2006. New Philosophy for New Media. Boston: The MIT Press.
Ihde, Don. 2009. Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. New
York: SUNY Press.
Kovarkik. 2011. Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital
Age. New York: Blumsbury Academics.
Liestol, Gunner. 2003. Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovations in Digital
Domains. Boston: The MIT Press.
Rodowick. 2001. Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham, NC: Dukie
University Press.

Ian James (Cambridge University, UK)
Philosophy at the Speculative Frontier: Must Every Thing Go?

In their 2007 work Every Thing Must Go James Ladyman and Don Ross propose a defence of
scientism within philosophy and develop a scientific structural realism which argues that
structure and relation are primitive and ontologically subsistent. This metaphysical scientism or
naturalism demands that the hypotheses of philosophical thinking should be in conformity with
current consensual knowledge regarding fundamental physics. Thus contemporary metaphysics
26

should bind itself very closely to, and not deviate from, the insights of quantum theory. On this
basis Ladyman and Ross ground their argument in the mathematical formalism of quantum
physics and an interpretation of quantum field theory. According to this perspective objects or
things have no ultimate metaphysical status whatsoever since their phenomenal appearance or
manifest image is underpinned by nothing substantial but only the structures and relations of
quantum systems. Hence there is no place within a contemporary metaphysics for a thinking of
objects. As the title of Ladyman and Ross’s book suggests: every thing must go.

In his response to Ladyman and Ross speculative realist and founder of object oriented
ontology, Graham Harman, has argued against scientism within fundamental philosophy or
metaphysics, asserting that there is no reason for philosophy to: ‘limp along after the science of
its time’ and little evidence ‘that scientists even want philosophers to limp along after them’.1 In
defence of this assertion he cites scientists such as Einstein and Bohr who were themselves
influenced by philosophy (Kant, Kierkegaard) and argues that philosophy should work
speculatively ‘beyond the cutting edge’ of the contemporary sciences.2

Taking the question of the fundamental status of objects or things as its central focus this paper
will pose the question of the relation between contemporary speculative philosophy and
science. Harman’s response to Ladyman and Ross highlights the division or fracture within
speculative realism between its object-‐oriented wing and the scientism of Ray Brassier. If the
task of ontological realism today is to think speculatively beyond any anthropomorphic
correlation of thought and being then should philosophy in some way tie itself to the cutting
edge or outer frontier of scientific knowledge or should it rather range, untethered and
unfettered, wildly beyond that frontier?

Via a return to the twentieth-‐century philosophies of science of Gaston Bachelard and Georges
Canguilhem this question will be addressed in a manner which contrasts Bachelard’s scientism
(similar to that of Ladyman and Ross) with Canguihem’s more complex approach. Against this
backdrop Jean-‐Luc Nancy’s singular plural ontology and his relational account of things will be
contrasted to Harman’s OOO. On this basis I will argue for a relation of speculative ontology or
ontological realism which is neither reductively scientistic (Ladyman and Ross) nor entirely
uncoupled from the fundamental insights of contemporary science (Harman).

Maureen Junker-‐Kenny (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Religious Convictions in Civic Debate: A Comparison of the Perspectives of P. Ricoeur and J. Habermas
Panel: Ricoeur, Religion and Public Discourse

Which conceptions of the public sphere and of the foundations of state authority are at work in
current debates on the legitimacy of religious argumentations in public matters? I will compare
the approaches of J. Habermas, who represents the third phase of the Frankfurt School of
critical social theory, and of the French hermeneutical philosopher P. Ricoeur. Habermas
recognizes the “semantic potential” of religions in the “pathologies of rationalisation”. Since his
1996 exchange with J. Rawls he has called for mutual translations between secular and religious
fellow-‐citizens in the informal public sphere. While society can be seen as “post-‐secular”, the
institutions of the state remain neutral, and reasons have to be generally “accessible”.

P. Ricoeur understands distinct traditions as “co-‐founders” of the public sphere. The
institutional authority of the state finds a counterpart in their “enunciative” authority. Both

1
Harman, G. “I am also of the opinion that materialism must be destroyed” in Environment and Planning D:
2
Ibid., p. 786.
27

philosophers agree that democratic principles need plural sources of motivation and
regeneration, and that their exchanges are significant. Ricoeur explores the hermeneutical
depths of the concept of translation and uncovers the ethical dimension of citizens’
relationships to their diverse traditions of origin. Owing a “debt” to them, in their “competition
with other, heterogeneous traditions”, they are shown as “reinvigorated and driven by their
unkept promises”.

Wahida Khandker (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
Process Philosophy and Cybernetics

In the fourth chapter of his Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, Georges
Canguilhem notes the etymology of the term cybernetics, ‘first coined by Ampére in 1834 to
denote the science of government,’ and which ‘lay dormant for more than a century, awaiting
the theory that would provide it with a formal concept and enable it to transcend the
limitations of its etymology.’ (Canguilhem, 82) Canguilhem goes on to discuss its links to the
related term of regulation, used to indicate the control of certain organic functions over other
functions in the living body. He notes, finally, that any history of our understanding of the
biological processes of regulation must incorporate the histories of a range of other sciences
(e.g. physics, mathematics, population dynamics, etc.).

Studies in the histories of science, ideas, and philosophy illuminate shifting and problematic
concepts of life, mind, behaviour and learning in human and non-‐human animals. In this paper,
I will discuss intersecting concepts of life, process and regulation across philosophy and biology,
with reference to process thought, principally the work of A. N. Whitehead and Charles
Harthsorne, who shared an openness to the sciences insofar as they were believed to
complement philosophical enquiry rather than to refute or supersede it. Alongside these
thinkers, I will refer to twentieth-‐century research in the broad area of ‘cybernetics’ (e.g.
Maturana and Varela, Gregory Bateson). For example, Maturana and Varela, in The Tree of
Knowledge, compare plant ‘behaviour’ (e.g. structural changes from land to aquatic form, in
response to changes in environment) with the behaviour of an amoeba, an animal with the
most rudimentary of organic structures. This brings to mind Henri Bergson’s discussions, in
texts such as his essay ‘Life and Consciousness’, of the example of an amoeba to illustrate the
lowest level of conscious activity in animal life. Maturana and Varela argue that whilst a plant’s
movements tend to be described as ‘developmental’ and an amoeba’s movements as
‘behavioural’, both, in fact, can be legitimately described as forms of ‘behaviour’. Their analysis
progresses to their stance on the nature of learning, in which they dispute the idea that
learning and memory are processes of ‘taking in’ from the environment, this latter idea
indicating a human prejudice to think biological phenomena within the limits of human
capacities such as the capacity for language.

This is part of a broader project extending my work on philosophy and critical animal studies to
issues in environmentalism, with particular focus on theories that draw on ‘systems thinking’ in
the sciences, and the broader endeavour of cybernetics to understand system interactions.
What can enquiries into these intertwined fields tell us about human attitudes and aspirations
concerning the natural world, non-‐human life in its broadest terms, and how, if at all, do such
thinkers and texts help to broach the conflict between the ideals of environmentalism and
animal advocacy?

Fikret Kurt (Middle East Technical University, Turkey)
28

The Echoic Irony of Truth: Celan and Heidegger

As two iconic thinkers of the last century, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger reveal the zenith of
poetry and philosophy. The former as the greatest holocaust survivor poet and the latter as both
one of the greatest German philosophers and the first Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg
became the ironic figures of the century in virtue of their ironically interrelated relationship as
well. On the one hand, being an admirer of Heidegger, Celan began to read works of Heidegger
at the beginning of the 1950s. On the other hand, Heidegger was also aware of the very
significance of Celan’s poetry, for Celan is, like Hölderlin a thinking poet, poets’ poet reflecting
on the very essence of language and poetry. Nevertheless, beginning with the poem of
Todtnauberg1, written shortly after the meeting of 1967, the Jewish poet’s critique of German
philosopher was further confirmed when the draft of an unsent letter was found in June of 1970,
just two months after his suicide: “…that through your attitude, your posture, you are
weakening decisively what poetry is, and I would guess, what thought is, in their ardent urge,
both of them, toward responsibility”2.

By defining himself as the poet of image and word, Celan explores that the poetic act is the
utmost primordial vision through which truth can primordially be oriented and furnished
beyond. For Heidegger, the genuine truth is the truth of Being coming to show itself as
revelation while retreating itself. I claim that revelation of truth as retreating itself is ironically
echoic. I mull over that the visionary acts of Celan’s poetry provoke the ardent urge of toward
responsibility through which Celan assumes that both poetry and thought are inherently
revolutionary. Thus, my ultimate purpose will be to reveal how truth as the echoic irony arouses
the ardent urge of toward responsibility by awakening of further horizons through the poetic
acts beyond the weakening posture of Heidegger. Celan recognizes a lack of sense of
responsibility in Heidegger’s posture since the Todtnauberg meeting, for Heidegger fails to
uncover how truth reechoes ironically as the ardent urge of toward responsibility by means of
the visionary acts of poetry.

1
Refers to the place in the Black Mountains of southern Germany where Heidegger lived.
2
Felstiner, John, Correspondance (1951-‐1970) de Paul Celan et Gisèle Celan-‐Lestrange. Editée et commentée
par Bertrand Badiou, avec le concours d’Eric Celan. Le Seuil, “La Librairie du XXIe siècle, 2 vols. (2001). The One
and Only Circle: Paul Celan’s Letters to Gisèle, p. 189.
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Pieter Lemmens (Radboud University, Netherlands)
Cognitive Enhancement in the Light of the Emerging Anthropocenic Condition

According to many climate, environmentalist and so-‐called peak-‐oil thinkers, humanity is about
to enter a phase in its history which will be characterized by huge changes in the earth's
biosphere, i.e., in the global ecological system that has up until now silently and robustly
supported its cultural-‐historical projects. Humanity's largely destructive influence on its unique
planetary life support system has gained such a momentum that geologists have declared
recently that we have entered nothing less than a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, in
which the human has become the most influential geological (f)actor, trumping the natural ones
in every respect.
Whilst the anthropocene attests to the enormous if not uncanny power of a techno-‐
scientifically potentialized humanity (a power that Dominique Janicaud has called a
‘hyperpower’) to radically disrupt the earthly ecosystem upon which it fundamentally depends
for its very survival, it simultaneously brings to light the ultimate impotence of that power.
However that may be, what is clear, as French philosopher Bernard Stiegler points out, is that,
from an organological perspective, the anthropocene reveals the toxic and entropic character of
the process of capitalist industrialization and technologization (in its current neoliberal and
purely speculative phase ruining not only ecological but also social, psychological, economic and
cultural systems) and that the big challenge it imposes on us is how to exit from it and invent a
negentropic, curative and attentive technological modus vivendi. As such, according to the
German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, it presents us with a new and unconditional ethical
imperative of global proportions: to radically change our inevitably technicized lives in order to
prevent our own self-‐destruction and possibly that of the whole biosphere as well.
In my talk I will explore, from a Stieglerian organological perspective, how new and
emerging digital network technologies could be recruited to ‘enhance’ humanity’s collective
intelligence for calling into being and maintaining not only the global eco-‐logical, eco-‐political
and eco-‐ethical consciousnes and critical intelligence that is a precondition for collectively
confronting the global multicrisis descending upon it, but also to construct the power and the
possibilities for collective ecological action in the coming age. In the light of the anthropocene,
cognitive enhancement should be rethought from being largely a quest for narcissistic individual
self-‐perfection (as in most transhumanist phantasies) into a project of collective intelligence
elevation oriented towards re-‐inventing our collective, global relationship to the planetary
ecosystem.

Patrick Levy (University of Sussex, UK)
Sleeping Well – Sleep's Ambiguous Normativity

“For sleeping “well” or “badly” comes down merely to sleeping more or less, in a more or less
continuous, or more or less perturbed fashion.” – Jean-‐Luc Nancy1

What is it to sleep well? Surely we know when someone has, or we ourselves have, slept 'badly'.
And yet when we push at this, when we refuse to be satisfied with the stock responses – 'well',
'badly', 'like a rock', 'like a baby', 'for an age' – we find that these assessments of sleep, perhaps
like sleep itself, ring hollow – they lack content, texture and form. What went well in a night of
sleeping well? Is Nancy right that “sleep itself knows only equality, the measure common to all,
which allows no differences or disparities”?2 Is it true that “Night reigns unjustified and sleep

1 Nancy, Jean-‐Luc. The Fall of Sleep, p. 17
2 ibid
30

espouses this abandonment of justification, its position offside and off-‐camera”?3 In other
words, is sleep beyond assessment, exiled from the normative, from the better or worse?
Perhaps the expression 'sleeping like a baby' expresses more than just the peacefulness that
sleep brings, and which we feel we detect in the face of the sleeper, but also the innocence of
the baby. The sleeper, like the baby, has yet to feel the pull of the categorical imperative, knows
nothing of consequentialist calculation, has yet to enter the realm of the ethical.

This paper will explore the plausibility of sleep's refusal of assessment through a critical reading
of Nancy's The Fall of Sleep and Emmanuel Levinas' parallel engagement with sleep, night and
differentiation sixty years earlier, in Existence and Existents and Time and the Other. Through
these different and differentiating readings of sleep an intriguing internal ambiguity in sleep can
be brought into view. This ambiguity is perhaps best seen through holding the intuitive
innocence of the sleeper, the sleep's removal from normativity, alongside the powerful ethical
demand to 'let sleep' which can be found in Levinas' early, and brief engagement with sleep.

Is there indeed any such obligation? Can we speak of obligation here? Through Levinas' work,
and in conversation with Nancy's, we follow the proverb 'let sleeping dogs lie', back to its Latin
root in 'quieta non movere' – 'do not move settled things', and argue that hidden beneath this
pragmatic adage lies a slumbering ethical demand to allow, facilitate, and open sleep, to give-‐up
vigilance rather than to stand-‐watch over the other. This will require a close reading of the
operation of the night in Nancy and Levinas and the role of sleep in escaping the incessant
vigilance of the il y a, of insomnia. The paper will close with a consideration of the ambiguous
normativity of sleep that follows from this analysis. An ambiguity encountered in the following
question: 'What could it mean to discover an ethical demand to allow the sinking below and out
of the ethical?'

Harry Lewendon-‐Evans (Durham University, UK)
Incommensurability and Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science

This paper examines the question of incommensurability in science from the perspective of the
hermeneutic philosophy of science. I argue for two theses: one, that incommensurability reflects
the core hermeneutical problem in natural science, and two, that a hermeneutical approach can
offer a compromise to the agōn between objectivism and relativism that incommensurability
evokes within the philosophy of science. In considering a hermeneutic approach to this issue, I
argue for a new perspective from which the question of incommensurability might usefully be
viewed.

In the first section of the paper, I provide a brief overview of the current state of the debate
concerning incommensurability and introduce my contention that the significance of the
incommensurability thesis is that it sets into relief the dichotomy between objectivism and
relativism in the philosophy of science: either we accept incommensurability and commit
ourselves to a form of relativism, or we reject incommensurability and uphold the tenets of
objectivism, such as theory comparison and the notion that, despite changes in scientific
theories and concepts, science describes a single and stable objective world. In the second
section, I outline some of the central notions that underlie hermeneutic philosophy of science.
Although my initial priority is exegetical, the central claim in this section is that recognising a
hermeneutic dimension within natural science can provide a new direction to the issue of
incommensurability. Therefore in the third section, I consider how incommensurability can be
reconstructed in the light of the hermeneutic approach. This leads me to my main claims. First, I

3 ibid, p. 24
31

argue that in facing this problem, hermeneutic philosophy of science opens up an alternative
approach that mediates between the objectivist and relativist camps. The thrust of this claim is
that in adopting a hermeneutic approach, we can reconcile what is at stake between the two
positions and retain notions of progress, theory comparison and rationality without having to
deny the contextual, relative dimension of science. However, more fundamentally, I argue that
incommensurability reflects the core problem of the hermeneutic dimension of natural science,
which attempts to give credence to the diversity of manifest, authentic scientific horizons. I
conclude by indicating some of the further issues that are immediately relevant for the
hermeneutic philosophy of science.

Nicola Liberati (Chukyo University, Japan)
New Technologies, Transparencies and the Idea of Information

The aim of the presentation is to introduce the tools and the distinctions we need in order to
analyse the new emerging digital technologies in their innovations.

This work will point out how it is mandatory to define two different transparencies into the post-‐
phenomenological analysis and what such introduction implies.

New technologies allow the subject to directly perceive digital objects created in front of them
and 32isualized as if they were part of the everyday world, like objects among other common
objects. As an example Augmented Reality and some applications in Virtual Reality for Oculus
Rift are aiming to pervasively introduce such digital objects. They are cheap devices and so they
will likely allow every citizen of the western world able to “play” with them. This will
enhance their pervasiveness.

While philosophy is struggling with the analysis of the word “information” in order to
understand how computer will shape our world, computer sciences is developing these new
devices which revolutionarily rethink the way the subject perceives the digital objects.

They are trying to make the devices “transparent” allowing the subject to directly live with the
digital objects they produce.

This novelty is not about the nature of the information which creates these digital beings, but
about the way the subject is able to perceive their content.

Imaging technologies already started this trend by enabling the subject to perceive something
which was not perceivable without it, by producing images which represents the external object.
However, the new digital technologies will bring this potentiality to a higher level by allowing the
perception of digital beings. Therefore, their impact spreads through the everyday
world enabling the subjects to live among digital entities as perceptual beings.

Using a post-‐phenomenological approach, which directly uses the concept of transparency in
order to study the relation among subject, technology and world, this work will show how we
need to develop two different transparencies in order to fully understand the impact of these
new devices.

It will be clear that it is important not only the way the subject is in such a relation, which mean
the way the technology “withdraws” allowing the subject to perceive “through” it, but also the
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way the object is produced in front of the subject as a perceptual object. Therefore, the
attention has to focus also on the way the output is produced and on its design too in order to
fully understand if and when the technology is really “transparent”.

The presentation will be structured in two main sections. The first one will focus on the
introduction of the two types of transparency in post-‐phenomenology and the reasons why we
need them.

The second one will focus on what such introduction yields and on how we need to consider
these digital objects.

They are not bundles of information, but they are perceptual objects, which mean the word
“information” has to be reframed, at least in its importance.

Beth Lord (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Spinoza and an Indeterminate Power of Thought

Pierre Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza, recently translated into English, is a key text in the French
materialist reception of Spinoza. In setting out Hegel’s profound misunderstanding of Spinoza –
as well as his peculiar closeness to his monistic ontology – Macherey contrasts Spinoza’s view
that thought is an attribute with Hegel’s view that thought is subject for itself. The key to
Hegelian idealism, he says, is the conception of a thought that returns upon itself, to itself, as a
subject, and appropriates all reality in its realization. By contrast, Spinoza makes thought an
attribute of substance, and thereby makes thought absolutely objective, removing all reference
to a subject.

Hegel’s absolute thought clearly has features that Spinoza rejects outright: its character of
subsuming all reality within itself, and its character as teleological driver of the universe. The
transcendent aspects of the subjectivity of thought are just what Spinoza rejects. Nevertheless,
in this paper I suggest, contrary to the materialist interpretation of Spinoza that prevails in
continental philosophy, that Spinoza’s concept of absolute thought is the concept of a subject,
and indeed a self-‐conscious subject. I distinguish this absolute thought from the attribute of
thought, though only for methodological purposes. That is, while for Spinoza there is no
“absolute thought” that is independent of the attributes, I suggest that the finite human mind
needs to deploy a concept of infinite thinking before it gets to the attribute of thought. This
concept is needed in order to get to the attributes in the first place. This is an “indeterminate”
power of thought, God’s power to think its own being, which determines itself as the attribute
of thought. This self-‐determining power of thinking is self-‐conscious, and relates to itself as a
subject. I set out an interpretation of Spinoza on substance and attributes which, while drawing
on the anti-‐idealist interpretations of Macherey, Deleuze, and Balibar, highlights idealist
aspects of Spinoza’s thought.

N. Gabriel Martin (University of Sussex, UK)
The Crisis of Eurocentric Sciences

Notwithstanding the importance and validity of recent movements for greater pluralism in
academia, and especially in the humanities, there is a rigidity to the university’s organization of
knowledge and enquiry that, if not Eurocentric in itself, sustains Eurocentrism. The reform of the
purpose which orients the structure of the university is even more difficult than the
33

diversification of the western canon, but it is not even clear that it should be reformed, however
culturally specific it remains in fact and irrespective of its intents.

In his critique of science, Edmund Husserl indicates the idea of truth as the organising principle
of enquiry from the hard sciences to the academic study of literary fiction. The ineluctably
philosophical idea of truth as an infinite horizon to which every consciousness, evidence, or
confirmation thereof can only approach is what must be attributed to a thing or subject matter
in order for it to be worthy of academic enquiry and dispute. It is the idea that what is said and
done is meant to be true that qualifies it for ‘serious’ enquiry. Within the academy and insofar as
the philosophico-‐scientific has permeated discourse at large, this demand is taken for granted.
However, as Husserl points out, the pursuit of truth is a peculiar cultural achievement. The
peculiarity of the attitude of the pursuit of truth may exclude other possible discourses or
approaches, or else demand that they are subordinated to the theoretical attitude. In practice,
this consists in making ‘non-‐serious’ discourses the subject of enquiry, excluding them from
eligibility to constitute a method or approach.

The costs of disrupting this hegemony of truth would be exorbitant, but perhaps the infinite task
of the pursuit of truth is more open than Husserl himself considered it. Notwithstanding the
indispensability of the ‘infinite task’ of truth, as Husserl's critical examinations of science
together with progressive concerns about the lack of interculturalism in the university show, the
investigation of the truth is still and forever far from attaining the truth itself. I will explain why it
is a mistake to defend the idea and the institution, as Husserl did, from outside influence that
may appear disruptive. In order to be serious and rigorous, the pursuit of truth must recognise
its ideality and infinity not by defending the available and problematic present expressions of
the idea, but by opening up the institution and our pursuits to the idea they seek, recognising
that it may take yet unfamiliar forms. The very idea of the idea must be open to transformation.

Neil McGinness (University of Glasgow, UK)
Distinguishing Limits and Borders: Connections between the Hawking-‐Hartle 'no boundary' Proposal
and Deleuze's Immanent Metaphysics
Panel: Limits, Borders and Cleaving

According to the Hawking-‐Hartle 'no boundary' proposal, the universe has no initial boundary
and thus admits no beyond. To use a geometric analogy that will run through this paper, the big
bang is like the North Pole, which you can walk towards but not beyond. Given that, “no
beyond!” is the cry of philosophical immanence, it seems reasonable to suppose that Deleuze's
immanent metaphysics and this conception of the frontier of the universe might have some
interesting things to say to each other. Persuaded that they do, I will forge some connections in
an attempt to clarify the concept of immanence in its own right and in relation to Deleuze's
philosophy.

In question, specifically, is the conceptual distinction between limit and border. The HH proposal
presents the big bang as a limit that is not a border. Such limits will be shown to be in operation
in Deleuze, alongside the inverse figure: a border that is not a limit. These distinct figures will be
presented as comprising an abstract configuration purporting to capture immanence. I will
sketch this configuration in the first half of the paper and argue that it finds expression in
Deleuze's virtual/actual dyad.

The second half will introduce a problem that animates the configuration: (immanent)
orientation. Without the common reference precluded by immanence how can orientation
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occur? How can such a determination be made without a ground? I will submit and and explore
an answer: spatiotemporal determination occurs according to ideal limits. This resembles the
Kantian schema divested of its categories of representation, where the immediate forms of
intuition are not space and time as such, but ideal limits (left/right, North/South,
before/after...virtual/actual) defining the dimension in which a determination occurs.

Between the above limits is a border, an object noted for its logical peculiarity by Graham Priest
and others. Its existential function is that of determination; a border determines territory. It
does so because it is its nature to – a border cannot not determine territory. To say that the
border between two countries determines each is to say that it, qua border, positively
constitutes them as territories.

Thus, in the end what is sketched is an ontological activity of constitutive determination
(ontological grounding), where everything occurs relative to the determination and according to
ideal limits that regulate it. In evidence here is an elegance demanded by immanence and
approximated by saying that the rules for the initial conditions are the same as the rules for the
dynamics (true for the HH proposal). Formulated so as to reflect philosophical immanence more
accurately, this is to say that the configuration captures conditions for determination, where
(dynamic, spatiotemporal) determination flows naturally and ineluctably from conditions that
cannot not engender it. This is the recipe for immanence set out in this paper.

John Meechan (Kingston University, UK)
Thresholds of Influence: Towards an ‘Alinear’ Agency

Developing what Bergson described as the ‘progressive materialisation of the immaterial’, this
paper sketches the field of ‘alinear’ agency, and uses it to frame a conception of activity in terms
of a threshold between two distinct movements.

The capital prejudice of physicalism – whether as scientific dogma or inveterate tendency of the
intellect – is its causal closure of the space-‐time world. This position resists the idea that the
causal process could produce ‘more from less’, in particular novel properties, configurations or
systems with causal powers of their own, capable of acting ‘downward’. Theories of emergence
have been challenging this closed picture for around a century, and have recently returned to
prominence in traditional sciences as well as several cross-‐disciplinary fields (cognitive science,
artificial life, complex systems studies). Such an effort was of course a central concern for
Bergson too – the idea of more coming from less characterises his understanding of a creative
evolution, as well as of mind/spirit – but as crucial a feature of his work is a concomitant
movement by which less comes from more (e.g. the channelling of the past into present action).
This position is equally rejected by the physicalist, not so much for its challenge to thinking
novelty this time, as for its ‘mystical’ appeal to a reality that overflows the present.

Affirming both these movements, I argue that together they produce a threshold – the juncture
between a movement of condensation and a movement of expansion, which in my analysis of
Bergson I refer to as a ‘contending duality’ – and use this to characterise a notion of activity
which fits into a more general conception of vitalism. I focus mainly on the condensation
movement, taking as departure point contemporary engagement with non-‐linear causation. The
latter has provided a highly fruitful approach for philosophical and biological research (amongst
others) since Prigogine and Stengers’ work on non-‐equilibrium thermodynamics in the 1970s.
My intervention centres on two points. First, that the notion of ‘non-‐linear’ apparently at work
35

here may not be sufficiently non-‐linear, remaining instead derivative of or anomalous to the
linear where it ought to be more out of joint. This feeds into the broader claim that descriptions
of dynamics often risk foregrounding an actuality of deposits at the expense of an appeal to
processual agency, offering an account of what is going on that avoids reference to where any of
it is coming from. Second, then, I outline the need for a conception of the ‘alinear’, whose logics
and influences I will propose, precisely, as characterising an agency of the whole, or more
specifically of that which is condensed at the threshold of actual events and dynamics. Such an
approach, I argue, characterises the causal unorthodoxy and ingenuity of several thinkers apart
from Bergson, such as C.G. Jung (archetype theory, synchronicity), Rupert Sheldrake (morphic
resonance), David Bohm (quantum wholeness), and Deleuze and Guattari (the machinic phylum,
pre-‐individual singularities).

I conclude by outlining three reorientations implicit in this approach. First, that we do not look
for discrete, material agents, but for threshold points at which alinear agency is able to ‘pass
through’. Second, that we use as an index of vitality the capacity of systems on such thresholds
to (re)direct this agency, tending towards either ‘buffering’ or ‘amplifying’ it (this, returning to
Bergson and the ‘more from less’ movement, is how free or conscious activity might be
understood, and is the correct context, I argue, in which to approach non-‐linear phenomena).
Third, that we might intensify vital activity by conceiving ourselves as thresholds, and in
particular by pursuing ways to allow more to pass through, such as breaking down the physicalist
limitations we tend to place on our activity by identifying it with the bounds of our bodily
movements.

Davide Monaco (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Modal and Attribute Parallelism in Spinoza’s Ethics

Spinoza’s so-‐called parallelism is one of the keystone doctrines in the Ethics: its complexity has
raised objections and different interpretations from the time of Spinoza’s contemporaries to the
present. This theory, which establishes identity and non-‐causal relation among finite modes of
different attributes (and these attributes themselves), is rich in metaphysical implications that
go far beyond the original evident purpose of serving as a critique of the conception of the mind-‐
body interaction held by Descartes.

In my paper I intend to focus on the conflicting relation between Proposition seven of the
Second part of the Ethics (IIP7) and its immediately following Scholium (IIP7S): in these textual
passages it is possible to detect at least two versions of the parallelism that do not intuitively
match each other, thus forcing any reader to doubt about their coexistence. I will argue that
their compatibility must not be questioned and provide evidence for my claim paying due
attention to Spinoza’s Latin terminology and his own reinterpretation of the parallelism in his
letters (e.g. Letter 66).

First, I will show briefly how IIP7 derives from its preceding statements (especially IIP5 and IIP6),
despite the fact that its demonstration is meant to rely solely on the theory of causality
developed in the first part of the Ethics. I will then highlight how Spinoza restates this same
doctrine from a reversed point of view: I will argue that while the parallelism of IIP7 depends on
‘lower’ ontological realities (such as the finite modes), the parallelism of IIP7S is grounded at the
‘top’ of Spinoza’s system (i.e. it springs from God himself and his attributes), thus leaving a huge
gap to be filled.

36

I will focus on one aspect that has been poorly investigated so far and that will turn out to be
essential in order to establish a solid link between the two parallelisms: i.e. the interdependence
of the concepts of identity and expression and the role they play within the ontological
difference between the attributes of the substance and its modes.

Since identity between modal sequences does not immediately equate to that among singular
modes and to that among attributes, this concept needs to be analysed extensively: I will argue
that if this notion were to be univocally understood, it would provide a stable connection
between the two different formulations of the parallelism; likewise I will show that these two
conceptions can ‘meet halfway’ if we follow Spinoza’s advice and confer the finite modes a key
property of the attributes, i.e. their expressiveness.

Josie Moore (University of Dundee, UK)
No Frontiers: Countering the ‘Imperialism of Theory’ with the Help of Whitehead and Weil

The term ‘frontier’ is suggestive of hierarchical division: in establishing a frontier we necessarily
establish a beyond or an outside, an other. It suggests that there is ‘empty’ ‘territory’ to be
‘claimed’; it calls for a pushing-‐forward, a movement-‐into—which is all too often an invasion, an
erasure of what was already there. This imperialistic notion of new, unclaimed conceptual
territories is inimical to the ethical practice of philosophy. In this paper, I will offer an alternative
to this binaristic, propositional model in the concept of the metaxú, or ‘inbetween’, which I will
situate within the process ontology of Alfred North Whitehead.

The metaxú, as developed by Simone Weil, points towards a non-‐dualistic means of relating to
others; what separates us, Weil says, is also what connects us. But to take a monolithic, static
view of ‘us’ (or of anything) returns us to the problem of imperialism, the privileging of one
perspective above all others. This is where Whitehead can help: while conventional ethical
thinking tends to rely on the propositional logic and ontological stability, process thought
directly challenges these notions. This paper will assert that anontology of unstable interrelation
suggests a flexible and responsive form of philosophical practice that can help to counter what
Derrida has termed the ‘imperialism of theory’.

John Mullarkey (Kingston University, UK)
Non-‐Philosophical Constraints: How to Remake a Thought Cinematically

For François Laruelle, there are "multiple activities of modeling between philosophy and science,
philosophy and art, leading all the way to risking a modelist explosion". Can the same be true of
non-‐philosophy itself? In order to introduce non-‐philosophy in the spirit of consistency, we have
made it our goal to think about it non-‐philosophically and through multiple models. If we are
going to have any chance of success in this, however, we will have to acknowledge a number of
constraints. Firstly, there is the necessity of extra-‐philosophical materials (from science and art)
as models for non-‐philosophy’s modes of thought -‐ what Laruelle describes as "techniques of
creation that would be pictorial, poetic, musical, architectural, informational, etc". Significantly,
when recounting his own intellectual biography, Laruelle mentions that his first university thesis
on philosophy was inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961). That the equalizing
dark night (as opposed to the enlightening of philosophy) has subsequently been such a theme
in his work is a choice morsel for any philosopher of film. That the title of this thesis was "The
Absence of Being", and that it involved a renunciation of the greatest systematizer in
philosophical history, G.W.F. Hegel, probably makes La Notte all the more apt to play the role of
37

a cinematic "key" to his thought. However, there is also the constraint of not reducing non-‐
philosophy to a set of tenets (or "keys") that are subsequently introduced through extant forms
of philosophical explanation. Indeed, in respect to this last item, Rocco Gangle has pointed out
that introducing non-‐philosophy is particularly challenging given that there is ‘a distinctive
"pedagogical" or "initiatory" problem built into the very fabric of non-‐philosophy. Likewise,
Taylor Adkins openly admits that any "proper" introduction to Laruelle "is an illusion". The
difficult reception of non-‐philosophy has, no doubt, some connection to this problem of
"initiation". The model offered here, then, will be five-‐sided, a pentalateral shape based upon a
film: not Antonioni’s La Notte, however, but Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth’s The Five
Obstructions (2003) on account of its own meditations on the question of creative constraint
and the limits of modeling or remaking. In The Five Obstructions, von Trier asks his mentor Leth
to remake his 1967 film, The Perfect Human, five times under different constraints: that no shot
is longer than 12 frames, that it be remade as a cartoon, that it be remade in the worst place in
the world, and so on. In this paper, I will argue that one way to introduce Laruelle is tangentially
in five approaches: through other philosophers (the approach that seemingly fails immediately);
through paraconsistent logic (by showing that contradictory truths can coexist); through
behaviourism (wherein the non-‐human body is seen as the best picture of human philosophy);
through animality (that the non-‐standard human stands at the centre of Laruelle’s thought); and
finally through performance (that the notions of 'posture' and 'orientation', also discussed under
the aspect of behaviourism, carry a radicality for Laruelle’s performative thought).

Sinéad Murphy (Newcastle University, UK)
Abandoned Without Reserve To Our Finitude: Virno and ‘Impact’

Paolo Virno claims that the populations of modern western societies are ‘abandoned without
reserve to our own finitude.’ This paper examines the nature and implications of Virno’s claim, in
the light of Foucault’s identification of finitude as a quintessentially modern frontier and
Gadamer’s diagnosis of modern life as having lost the simultaneous confrontation with and
denial of finitude that he regards as the frontier of human history.

This problem is considered here in relation to the current requirement that academic work have
‘impact,’ which requirement is identified as part of the ‘statization of intellect’ that Virno holds
to be a central feature of post-‐Fordist societies, in which thought is ‘put to work’ in the interests
of corporate elites. A challenge to this post-‐Fordist control over thinking is identified in the
possibility of cultivating intellectual reserve, as an antidote to the intellectual abandon that Virno
so persuasively describes and as a reanimation of the confrontation with/denial of finitude that
Gadamer identifies as the human frontier.

Chiara Musolino (University of Pisa, Italy)
Is Hope Teachable? An Answer from the Ontology of Not-‐Yet-‐Being of Ernst Bloch

Hope and utopia are core structural concepts in the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. In our everyday
language, they are used to describe expectations and projections of potential future situations.
In Bloch’s ontology of not-‐yet-‐being, hope and utopia acquire new conformations. Hope
becomes an anticipation, which drives us to go beyond reality towards a better world. Utopia
translates this trend onwards into a project, mediated by current possibilities and turned
towards a final goal. New frontiers on the role of hope in contemporary philosophical debates
could be opened by this set of claims. Hope is not just wishful thinking or a spontaneous
38

expectation of something. On the contrary, in Bloch’s view, hoping is an active practice that can
be learned and taught. My paper addresses this concept of hope with special attention to its
being teachable. In the first section, I examine the background, structure and content of the
ontology of not-‐yet-‐being. In particular, this is done by concentrating the attention on Bloch’s
explication of “real possibility”, as presented in chapter 18 of The Principle of Hope. In the
second section, I consider in more detail the relationship between reason and hope and the
Bloch’s construction of the utopian function. In the final section, I discuss two different types of
attacks on Bloch’s hope: the calls for responsibility by Hans Jonas and the eschatological hope by
Jürgen Moltmann. I argue that Bloch’s thesis can be defended by considering his definition of
hope as docta spes, educated hope. Looking to hope as a pedagogical method for turning
aspirations into actions and possibilities into realities offers not only a new perspective for
remarking on essential aspects of Bloch’s philosophy (such as community, critical thinking and
emancipation), but also for reconsidering the place of hope in society. In conclusion this paper,
by closely examining Bloch’s concept of hope, shows how a teachable hope can be possible in a
philosophical context.

Shoji Nagataki (Chukyo University, Japan)
Intelligence and Embodiment: from Classical AI to Developmental Robotics

AI researchers who were engaged with developing a chess program tried to encode every inch of
the game world. If the world we live could be described in a similar way, it would be a closed
space like a square board on which chess is played. In fact, most of AI researchers have not dealt
with the real world, but with what some critics cynically called "toy world." For example, it has
proved to be far tougher than initially expected to develop a computer program that can
understand natural languages, because they are intricately related with the real world. The
endeavor of the researchers, however, led to an important recognition that the most
indispensable aspect of human intelligence is that it is embodied (Brooks 57).

A similar point has long since been made by some phenomenologists and linguists. Cognitive
semantics has made it clear that linguistic competence cannot be regarded as autonomous
because of its essential relationship with bodily activity, including the perception of the world. In
short, language depends on the body (Lakoff and Johnson).

First, we would like to clarify how the interaction between the body and the world has
influences on human intelligence from the viewpoint of AI research (and its application to
"robotics"), philosophy, and cognitive semantics. By doing so, we expect that philosophical
implications of "embodiment" will be made clear. Secondly, we argue that AI research based on
emergentism, which supposes that human intelligence should be emergent through the
interaction between the body and the world, does not specify the basic abilities of the body
underlying intelligence. The problem of what is minimally required of the body in order for
intelligence to emerge -‐-‐-‐ the condition of what might be called "archi-‐body" -‐-‐-‐ is yet to be fully
addressed. In my view, the endeavor to tackle this problem can complement and enrich the
emergentist approach to AI. We would like to name this research topic "the archaeology of the
body".

It is true that this is simply not easy, because, as Merleau-‐Ponty says (Merleau-‐Ponty 82), our
body is already laden with culture and history; even the ability of perception is affected by
knowledge, language, culture, individual experience, and so on. We can hardly imagine what the
bodily abilities free of them are like. However, studies on the "origin" of the body which is
39

common to all humans -‐-‐-‐ the archaeology of the body -‐-‐-‐ will cast a fresh light on the
entanglement of intelligence and the body, and provide a prolific impetus to AI studies and
recent robotics which is focusing on the human developmental process (Cangelosi and
Schlesinger).

References
Brooks, Rodney, Cynthia Breazeal, Matthew Marjanovic, Brian Scassellati and Matthew
Williamson "The Cog Project: Building a Humanoid Robot", in C. Nehaniv, ed., Computation
for Metaphors, Analogy and Agents, Vol. 1562 of Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial
Intelligence, Springer-‐Verlag, 1998.
Cangelosi, Angelo and Schlesinger, Matthew, Developmental Robotics: from Babies to Robots,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: The MIT Press, 2015.
Lakoff, George and Mark L. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Searl, John R., Speech Act: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press,
1969.

Calum Neill (Edinburgh Napier University, UK)
Dangling Above the Swamps of Nothingness

Railing against Kant and assumption of free rational will, Nietzsche turns to Baron Munchausen
for an appropriate metaphor. Nietzsche’s contention is that in order to be understood to have
free will, in order to be understood to be autonomous, one would have to be causa sui. One
would, in his borrowed, evocative image, have to have “pulled oneself up into existence by the
hair, out of the swamps of nothingness” (BGE, 21). What can be easily missed in Nietzsche’s
image of the self-‐raising swamp-‐exiter is that its apparent absurdity rests upon the assumption
of the reality of the swamp of nothingness itself. To create the idea of the impossibility of
pulling oneself into existence out of the swamp of nothingness by one’s own hair, the image
might be understood to subtly rely upon the idea of the possibility of exiting the swamp in some
other way. This sleight of hand can be found, mutatis mutandis, echoing through the
contemporary neurophilosophical turn, as exemplified in Metzinger, whose phenomenal self-‐
model is similarly presented against a background of uncontested reality. This paper will argue
that it is the introduction of a Lacanian conception of subjectivity which allows a way out of this
philosophical cul-‐de-‐sac. Through understanding Lacan’s complex unravelling of the experience
of identification and the ultimately ungrounded assumption of subjectivity, we can revisit
Nietzsche’s image and tease out the productive insight it offers.

Fintan Neylan (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada)
On Meillassoux’s Several Vectorizations of the Subject

In the nine years since the publication of his debut book, After Finitude, it has become clear that
the materialism Meillassoux proposes is a particularly idiosyncratic strand. Calling it “speculative
materialism,” it is a position which aims to reaffirm primary qualities and prove that the universe
is an open set, not to be bounded by any logic of totality.

Yet with a second monograph (on Mallarmé) and further articles, the situation for speculative
materialism has become less clear, as he has determined his position to be one which is a
materialism without any definition of matter. With this has come the seemingly baffling addition
40

of aims such as the task of materializing gods and the formulation of an ethical task motivated
by the possible immortality of humanity.

What could such a materialism mean, and how might it all fit together? Littered across the
literature is a series of puzzling statements which hint towards a coherent project. This paper
will argue that on what we find in Meillassoux is a positive response to the critique of political
subjectivity. While the subject’s revolutionary status is suspect in much post-‐structuralist
thought, being considered the result of State subjectification rather than individual spontaneity,
through his speculative method Meillassoux claims to offer a reformulation of the subject on
alternate terms. In part an outcome of his thesis that thought’s speculative capacity can yield
absolute knowledge, he claims that even if the subject is intimately entangled with the terms of
its production, through speculation it can reach to possible futures permitted by his ontology
and become vectorized by them.

I shall argue that it is through Meillassoux’s concept of vectorization , one may argue for a
restitution of the subject’s position as a site of resistance, a conception which may nevertheless
take account of the post-‐structuralism’s impressive social analysis. Doing so, I shall show that
Meillassoux’s speculative project is not so much a break with previous thought, but a project
which addresses both the ontological and political questions raised by his post-‐structuralist
forebears while drawing them to different conclusions.

Benjamin Norris (The New School for Social Research, USA)
Navigating the (Philosophical) Abyss: Realism, Rationalism and Empiricism

The return of realism in contemporary thought has exposed a strange affinity between
rationalism and empiricism. The intelligibility of the world beyond experience necessitates both
an unbinding of reason and this in turn necessitates the reconsideration of the relationship
between philosophy and the empirical sciences. Thus, the either/or division between rationalism
and empiricism has slowly begun to erode. We must find a space in which rationalism and
empiricism are no longer incommensurably opposed but are instead allowed to contribute to
each other in the interest of establishing a robust form of philosophical realism. The task I
undertake herein is a preliminary elucidation of this space.

This paper investigates this intersection between realism, rationalism and empiricism through an
engagement with the work of François Laruelle, Wilfred Sellars and Ray Brassier. By focusing
primarily on the interrelation between the Sellarsian distinction between the manifest and
scientific image and Laruelle’s characterization of the philosophical Decision I will attempt to
demonstrate that the intersection of rationalism and empiricism in the name of realism occurs
within an abyss internal to philosophical practice. The experience of this abyss provides the
space and place for nonphilosophical experimentation (à la Laruelle) immanent and internal to
the gaps of philosophy itself. Sellars’ analysis of the manifest and scientific images – in
combination with the critique of the myth of the given -‐ points towards a certain philosophical
abyss that is experience itself. Laruelle’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy,
non-‐philosophy and the One, I will argue, allows us to reclaim a certain type of experience that is
situated within this abyss of philosophy. Strangely perhaps, it is by way of the rationalist lineage
of Descartes and Spinoza that we can best dramatize Laruelle’s vision-‐in-‐One as a philosophically
important gesture in relation to experience.

41

Tony O’Connor (University College, Cork, Ireland)
Historicity, Idle Talk, and Grounded Discourse

Traditional philosophy sought to identify invariant truth in its search for ideals, critical evaluation
and reflective determinations of meaning and value. But now it is commonly argued that
traditional invariantist philosophy cannot account adequately for historical change, cultural and
political variety, and for the multiplicity of explanatory concepts.

Major problems arise. Can the difficulty be resolved in favour of one side or the other? Should a
search continue for the unchanging truth about how we ought to live? Should we settle for
different, opposing, interpretations that reflect the contextual character of cultural, socio-‐
political norms and institutions within which general concepts, and perhaps even reason itself,
function?

Heidegger addresses this issue in Being and Time where he uses the notion of ‘idle talk’ (gerede)
to preserve something of the traditional philosophical model, while being sensitive to
contextuality. He holds that idle talk leads to behaviour that mostly follows the contextual
prejudices of particular socio-‐political and conceptual backgrounds. The philosopher, however,
must recognise contextual inherence as a modality of openness shared by all human beings.
Human discourse is attuned to universal conditions of meaning, and ‘genuine understanding’
arises from the appreciation of this. Truth, therefore, is linked to the underlying
communicability that underpins contextual opinions and communal systems of belief. This
opens up the world for, and to us, and allows us to interact with it and with each other.

But here we face a seemingly irresolvable paradox. Universal communicability is simultaneously
universal and contextual. If the underlying ground of discourse cannot be established
objectively or neutrally on the basis of neutral criteria of explanation, then universalist appeals
to universal communicability, or to an ultimate ground, are inevitably established in contextual
terms and as part of strategies of justification.

I will argue that a critical use of Gadamer’s account of historicity and social intentionality can
avoid Heidegger’s paradox by showing how “historically-‐effected consciousness”
(wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) can criticise and possibly modify, or change, its own
presuppositions, and appreciate the perspectives of other contexts as irreducible to those of
particular situated interpreters.

Helen Palmer (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
Profundity and Strangeness, Touching and Skin: Queer Formalism at the Borders

As the study of supposed linguistic ‘invariants’, formalism has been historically perceived as the
search for structural stasis in linguistic terms, but this paper will posit formalism in terms of a
cleaving of stasis and dynamism via the philosophy of Deleuze and others. I argue that this
cleaving operate as a liberating force, explaining how feminist thought can illuminate this
complexity using the specific examples of queer proximity and touch.

The first part of the paper presents some readings of the concept of cleavage, clivage, in the
philosophy of Deleuze. The verb ‘to cleave’, noun ‘cleavage’ or gerund ‘cleaving’– used in The
Logic of Sense, Anti-‐Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus – is a useful tool for imagining the
dynamism of Deleuze’s thought due to the enigmatic appeal of its reciprocal and paradoxical
42

definitions . ‘Cleave’ has been described in linguistic terms as an ‘antagonym’ and linked to
Derrida’s reading of Plato’s pharmakon1, but the implications for feminist and queer thought of
Deleuze’s imperative to ‘cleave things asunder’2 have not yet been explicitly examined.

As an example of the cleaving manoeuvre being put to work, then, the second part of the paper
begins by discussing the supposed ‘paradox’ of feminist thought, namely that feminism creates
the difference it seeks to eliminate, and then presents the ways that this paradox is in fact
affirmed within new materialist philosophy. The cleaving of creation and dissolution with
formalism itself is particularly relevant to queer thought in multiple ways; particularly in terms of
proximity, borders and touch. Sara Ahmed has documented the concept of queer proximity in
Queer Phenomenology, and Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy have recently discussed queer
formalisms in the art world; here I will examine proximity from the perspective of cleaving and
touch.3 I will briefly discuss some the philosophy of touch from a queer perspective as an
example which allows us to see how, in Valéry’s words echoed by Deleuze, ‘what is most deep is
the skin’.4 Finally, I draw together Russian formalist Shklovsky’s original provocations on
defamiliarisation as a methodology for perception and Braidotti’s positing of defamiliarisation as
a ‘critical distance’5 in her monistic philosophy of becoming to propose ways that we might
reinvigorate this term in contemporary thought.

Walter Pedriali (University of St. Andrews, UK)
Between Nonsense and Metaphor: Chomsky and Ricoeur on Semantic Deviance and Linguistic
Creativity

The phenomenon of semantic deviancy arises when sentences that satisfy familiar standards of
syntactic combination appear to violate equally familiar standards of semantic combination.
Deviancy in this sense incorporates both the metaphorical discourse extensively studied in
Ricoeur (1972, 1975/1977, 1983, 1986/2008) as well as what (1955-‐56/1975: 145-‐6) called
grammatical nonsense, exemplified in his famous sentence
(1) colourless green ideas sleep furiously
where all adjacent pairings of words give rise to categorial clashes (ideas cannot properly be said
to be green, and so on).
In the first two sections of my paper I argue that the widely diver-‐ gent conceptions of linguistic
competence to be found in the work of Noam Chomsky and Paul Ricoeur have their origin in the
widely divergent attitudes towards semantic deviancy adopted by these two thinkers.
For Chomsky, deviancy shows that the output of syntax is wholly autonomous of referential
considerations, since it arises when we produce parseable strings of no immediate
representational import. Moreover, deviancy also shows that an explanation of linguistic
competence is detachable from wider considerations regarding our situatedness in the world,
precisely because of the suspension of referentiality that it engenders. On this view, then,

1
David Antoine-‐Williams, ‘Poetic Antagonyms’, The Comparatist, 2013:5, pp. 169-‐85
2
Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2011), p.12.
3
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006);
Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy, ‘Queer Formalisms: Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy in Conversation’, Art
Journal Vol. 72 Issue 4, 2013
4
Paul Valéry, Idée Fixe trans J. Mathews (New York: Pantheon, 1965) p.33.
5
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p.88
43

humans qua language-‐ mongering creatures are purely syntactic engines.
By contrast, Ricoeur (1972: 71) views deviancy as the privileged moment in an explanation of our
capacity for meaningfulness, a moment (or a place) at which meaning emerges, event-‐like, “as
the unique and fleeting result” of the active deployment of our imaginative rationality. As
against Chomsky, then, our ability to intuit new combinatorial possibilities in the semantic realm
is not taken to be a modular, isolable skill. It must instead be seen as an all-‐involving ability to
open up new worlds to us, made accessible and indeed framed by the imaginative powers that
we mobilize in that event-‐like moment of meaning creation.
Accordingly, I argue that on Ricoeur’s view humans are best regarded as ethico-‐semantical
engines. This is so because I take his position to be that to construct a new meaning out of a
clash of settled semantic categories is to make available a new way of being in the world (or
equivalently: to make available new worlds in which to be). Linguistic abilities are thus subject-‐
constituting abilities, and the meaning-‐norms to which we are responsive are, in the last
analysis, deeply ethical norms.
The two conceptions of competence also give rise to diverging conceptions of linguistic
creativity. On Chomsky’s (1966: 59) approach, what is definitive of such creativity is the ability to
project meanings across contexts (in Heideggerian terminology: the ability to respond to the
displacing features of language). For Ricoeur (1972: 64) instead, it is our sensitivity to the
disclosing features of language, to its capacity to enlarge the horizons of meanignfulness, that
best characterizes our creative uses of language.
In the final section of my paper, I discuss how these opposing views of creativity again reflect
opposing conceptions of semantic deviancy. Chomsky (1955-‐56/1975: 147) takes the main
problem of linguistic theory to be “how to provide a proper description [of the set of non-‐
deviant sentences] for a fixed linguistic corpus”. And so our projective abilities are bounded by a
fixed domain of meaningfulness, by what Husserl (1900-‐01/2001: IV, §10) took to be fully
objective meaning categories grounded in “the pure essence of things”.
Given that Ricoeur’s position in this respect is not wholly clear (as noted in e.g. Townsend 1995),
the main goal of my paper is to sketch the outline of a research programme that would make
fully explicit Ricoeur’s thinking on these matters. Towards that aim, I conclude by (tendentiously)
trying to tease out a radical, anti-‐essentialist theory of meaning from Ricoeur’s explicitly stated
position. On this proposal one would take meaning itself to be ineradicably metaphorical,
ungrounded in any ultimate layer of non-‐metaphorical discourse. I argue that a “groundless”
theory of meaning would well accord with Ricoeur’s conception of hermeneutics as an open-‐
ended enterprise, never grounded in anything outside its own methods. We should therefore
view linguistic competence and creativity thus construed as the two essential leitmotifs in
Ricoeur’s sustained defence of the value and centrality of our imaginative rationality.
References
Chomsky, Noam 1955-‐56/1975. The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. New York and London:
Springer/Plenum Press. —1957. Syntactic Structures. 2nd edn. Paris: Mouton de Gruyter.
—1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 
—1966. Cartesian Linguistics. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
—2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. 
Husserl, Edmund 1900-‐01/2001. Logical Investigations. Vol 1. London and New York: Routledge
44

& Kegan.
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press.
Lasnik, Howard and Uriagereka, Juan 2005. A Course in Minimalist Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Magidor, Ofra 2013. Category Mistakes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Ricoeur, Paul 1972. ‘Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics’. In Ricoeur
(2010/2013), pp. 45–64. 
—1975/1977. The Rule of Metaphor. The Creation of Meaning in Language. London and New
York: Routledge. 
—1983. ‘On Interpretation’. In Ricoeur (1986/2008), pp. 1–20.
—1986/2008. From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics, II. London: Continuum. 
—1988. ‘The Problem of Hermeneutics’. In Ricoeur (2010/2013), pp. 1–44. 
—2010/2013. Hermeneutics. Writings and Lectures, Volume 2. Cambridge: Polity. 
Ross, J.F. 1981. Portraying Analogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Townsend, Dabney 1995. ‘Metaphor, Hermeneutics, and Situations’. In Hahn, Lewis Edwin (ed.)
The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, pp. 193–209.

45

Gavin Rae (American University in Cairo, Egypt)
Faith or Religion: Conceptualizing the Theological Aspect of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology

The theological turn in studies of Carl Schmitt introduced by Heinrich Meier’s The Lesson of Carl
Schmitt (University of Chicago Press: 2011, originally published in 1994) is pronounced. This
paper does not challenge this turn, but questions what theology means for Schmitt. Whereas
Meier argues that the theological aspect of Schmitt’s political theology is rooted in divine
revelation, I challenge this connection textually and conceptually. Textually, Schmitt rejects the
association between the political and religion in The Concept of the Political, where he is highly
critical of conceptions of the political that think from the religious because these end up
moralizing the enemy-‐other in absolute terms which leads to the attempt to annihilate not just
defeat the enemy. Because the political is defined by the existence of the friend and enemy, the
annihilation of the enemy-‐other would destroy the conditions upon which the political depends
and so contribute to the depoliticization process Schmitt aims to overcome. Furthermore, in his
last published piece, Political Theology II, Schmitt explicitly rejects the notion that his political
theology relates to religion, instead claiming that his conception of political theology deals with
‘problems in epistemology and the history of ideas.’ Conceptually, this leads to two conceptions
of theology: ‘theology in the sense of divine revelation’ and ‘theology in the sense of epistemic
faith.’ This paper argues that the theological aspect of Schmitt’s political theology is rooted in
the later: theology in the sense of epistemic faith. This ensures that Schmitt’s thinking on the
political is not grounded in divine revelation or organized religion, but in the recognition that
human cognition is limited. Political decisions are not, therefore, based in reason, revelation, or
common sense, nor are they based in certainty; because human cognition is limited, political
decisions are, ultimately, rooted in belief in the chosen course of action. Having identified that
the theological aspect of Schmitt’s political theology is rooted in epistemic faith, I support this
interpretation by discussing what it means for his account of sovereignty (at both the
constitutional and constitutional-‐making level) as well as providing an overview of Roman
Catholicism and Political Form, the text that seems to offer the strongest evidence against my
interpretation. By doing so, I not only contribute to our understanding of Schmitt’s political
theology, but, by distinguishing between two conceptions of theology, also contribute to
discussions about the nature of political theology in general.

Andrea Rehberg (Middle East Technical University, Turkey)
On Affective Universality: Kant, Arendt and Lyotard on Sensus Communis

As Hannah Arendt argued in a number of texts, in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (CJ), the transition
from the philosophy of art to a moral philosophy and, ultimately, to a political philosophy is
rehearsed for the first time. In other words, CJ, as far as it goes, contains the seeds of Kant’s
political philosophy, or at least the seeds of a political thought to come.

To explain, in the first part of CJ, i.e., in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant suggests that all
the elements of the judgment of taste are ultimately united in the idea of a sensus communis,
the idea of the universal communicability or universalisability of our (pre-‐ or non-‐cognitive)
aesthetic judgments. This idea of the sensus communis can therefore be understood as the focal
point of the Analytic of the Beautiful. The demand for their universalisability as the central
feature guaranteeing the validity of our moral judgments had already been established explicitly
in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, namely in the categorical imperative.
Formulated as the demand for the universal status of our theoretical judgments,
universalisability is also the hallmark of the validity of synthetic a priori judgments in the Critique
46

of Pure Reason. Hence it is possible to see that universalisability is another one of the central
elements which gives coherence to the doctrine of judgment across Kant’s critical works.

But, and this is where the deeper meaning of the coherence of the universal can be seen to lie,
through the universalisability of our judgments we affirm our always already belonging to an
ideal universal community of judging subjects, access to which communalty is only granted each
member affectively, namely, initially, via the feeling of pleasure provoked by the beautiful.
Ultimately, then, this paper attempts to chisel out the politically progressive aspects of Kant’s
critical project insofar as they are not tied in to the primacy of reason proclaimed elsewhere by
Kant, but focus on the affective wellspring of not just reflective, but also, implicitly, constitutive
judgment. Admittedly, attention to this facet of Kant’s thought is neither interpretatively
orthodox nor hermeneutically uncontroversial, but then a careful reader of Kant such as Lyotard
has already (more than) gestured in this direction, and this paper seeks to substantiate many of
his central points in more careful argumentative and textual detail.

In other words, this paper treats Kant’s examination of aesthetic reflective judgment on the
beautiful as a ‘new frontier’, as the point of departure from which the realm of political thought
can be opened up and in response to which it can be reconceived.

William Remley (Independent Scholar, USA)
Reexamining the Political: the Anarchistic Political Philosophy of Jean-‐Paul Sartre

It is generally thought that Jean-‐Paul Sartre was not particularly political until the events of
World War II, and when he eventually turned to politics he embraced a form of Marxism tightly
connected to his conception of existentialism. The debates of the 1960’s and afterward that
tended to revolve around Marxism’s compatibility with existentialism was, no doubt, ignited by
Sartre himself when he declared that existentialism was merely a parasitic ideology to an
overriding Marxism. Even though he later admitted this was not possible, few seemed to notice.

This “common” theme fails, however, to recognize a foundational aspect of Sartre’s political
philosophy, namely his anarchism. As early as 1933 Sartre declared himself to be an anarchist, a
position he reiterated throughout his life, especially in the 1970’s when he identified his
anarchism, not with the student upheavals of 1968, but with the anarchist movements of the
nineteenth-‐century.

In this paper, I argue that Sartre espouses a far more radical anarchist political philosophy than
has been previously attributed to him. I also argue that while the Critique of Dialectical Reason is
considered the culmination of his political philosophy, Sartre developed his anarchism over a
long period of time starting with his days at the École Normale Superieure and, in fact, extending
beyond the publication of the Critique. I further claim that Sartre’s anarchism is in direct
theoretical lineage to the writings of French anarchism that emerged in the “golden age” of
nineteenth-‐century anarchism and revolved around the work of Pierre-‐Joseph Proudhon and
Mikhail Bakunin. It is in this discussion that I attempt to redirect the conversation regarding
Sartre’s political philosophy and view it through a very different lens, the aperture of which is
anarchism.

47

David Roden (Open University, UK)
Improvisation, Time and the Posthuman
Panel: Jazz Improvisation, Agency and Freedom: Between the Human and Inhuman Lies the
Assemblage

Roden uses composer Ray Brassier’s essay “Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom” (2013)
in order to move from a voluntarist model of expressive freedom initially to confront the rule-‐
forming behavior akin to “language games” that seems to govern processes of both
conventional and avant-‐garde improvisation. Roden argues that a “language games” approach
remains inadequate to describe the improvised event, stating that “musical rules….do not apply
in improvising contexts, or in contemporary compositional practice.” He then argues for a
reexamination of the model of “remorseless temporality” that Brassier argues governs the
moment of improvisation, in order to develop “an ethics or politics fit to explore Roden’s earlier
concept of “possibility spaces” from his book Posthuman Life (2014).

Raja Rosenhagen (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Murdoch on Love and Privacy

In The Sovereignty of Good,1 Iris Murdoch opposes conceptions of morality on which the agent
either institutes moral values, as the existentialist has it, or somehow brings herself to will
appropriately, as the Kantian thinks. On the former, moral facts are not publicly accessible. On
the latter, moral facts are accessible to the rational agent, but the moral individual only figures
as an isolated will, whose moral activity is reduced to deliberation and behavior in moments of
moral choice.

Both conceptions, Murdoch thinks, are mistaken. First off, there are moral facts that are
publicly accessible, even if only in principle. Our perception of morally relevant features and the
options for acting we can see depend on the quality of our moral outlook, i.e. on the
continuous workings of our moral imagination and, crucially, the quality of our attention. The
world as we perceive it is far from objective. Our moral outlook inevitably contains values that
our moral imagination puts there. Yet what threatens objectivity is not the fact that such values
do figure in our moral outlook. Rather, the threat derives from how they figure, viz. tainted by
surreptitiously selfish motifs.

How, then, can we make ourselves better? This, Murdoch holds, is one of the most important
questions moral philosophers should answer. Her suggestion: continuously purify your moral
outlook, counteract distortions of it brought about by the avaricious tentacles of the self. To
spot and reduce selfishness is to embark on the journey from appearances to reality, it is
necessary for enabling oneself to see things as they are, for acting well, i.e. in response what is,
in fact, the case. Love, Murdoch famously holds, is the very difficult realization that something
other than oneself is real. Moral agents need to acknowledge the reality of others. And the key
to seeing others clearly, Murdoch argues, is just and loving attention.

There is an apparent tension between the private and the public in Murdoch’s work. It derives
from her Platonic conception of the Good, particularly if laid alongside her understanding of
moral progress. As Kieran Setiya put it, a Platonic conception of the Good stresses convergence,
not idiosyncrasy.2 But Murdoch also claims that in morality, the movement of understanding is
onward into increasing privacy. How can this be if moral progress is a movement towards a

1
Murdoch, I. (1974): The Sovereignty of Good. London/New York: Routledge.
2
Setiya, K. (2013): Murdoch on the Sovereignty of Good. Philosopher’s Imprint, Vol. 13, No. 9, 1-‐21.
48

better understanding of the Platonic Good? How do Murdoch’s notions of love, the Good, and
just attention fit together and how do they align with her idea that moral progress leads into
the realm of the private? I address these questions by taking a close look at Murdoch’s notion
of love and at her notion of the individual. I argue that if we properly take into account her
understanding of these notions, we get a coherent and fascinating picture that accommodates
both a rich moral psychology and a notion of moral progress that reestablishes love as a notion
central to moral philosophy.

Bill Ross (Staffordshire University, UK)
Time as Retardation in Paradigms of Physical Action: Bergson, Serres, Deleuze and Smolin

The aim of this paper is to throw a spotlight on a rather submerged and paradoxical recurring
theme in certain philosophical and scientific paradigms of physical action. Quite counter to the
habitual understanding of time as that which moves all things forward, we are invited at certain
moments of the philosophical and scientific corpus, sometimes more and sometimes less
explicitly, to conceive of time as that which retards the passage of nature.

‘Time is what hinders everything from being given at once. It retards, or rather it is retardation.’
(Henri Bergson, Key Writings 224)

It is Henri Bergson who most explicitly topicalises the theme; ‘hesitation’, ‘interruption’ and
‘retardation’ characterise the form of order he identifies with ‘the vital’ in his work Creative
Evolution, contrasted with the ‘descent’ or ‘degradation’ of that counterpart form of order he
terms ‘mechanistic’. With the piece ‘The Possible and the Real’, this vital order has become
synonymous with time itself. For Bergson we must conclude that order (more precisely the
dynamic between two forms of order) constitutes more than a mere emergent phenomenon;
order and its converse, retardation, possess a kind of ontological priority associated with
duration and becoming.

With the judicious substitutions ‘entropic’ and ‘complex’ for ‘mechanistic’ and ‘vital’
respectively, licensed by Bergson’s own text, I will outline the specific ways in which this theme
of retardation and its relationship to order opens up palpable connections on the one hand to
the philosophical work of Michel Serres and Gilles Deleuze, and on the other to the scientific
paradigms offered by cosmologist Lee Smolin in particular, but more broadly to those disciplines
where the notion of symmetry-‐breaking has taken root.

Michel Serres’ work The Birth of Physics synthesises ideas from across the historical span of the
philosophy of nature, circling our theme with the (Lucretian) ideas of ‘declination’ and ‘slope’, or
‘thalweg’. Here Bergson’s ‘descending’ mechanistic order may be associated with maximal,
instantaneous ‘fall’ (of atoms through void), while complex, vital, order is furnished through
nature’s many criss-‐crossing ‘slopes’ (the bed of one river encountering its tributary). For Gilles
Deleuze, the image in Difference and Repetition of a calculating God, whose calculations
represent the unending progressive determinations of the course of time, is excluded from the
terminal ‘number continuum’ by the intractable remainder in nature. For Serres, ‘maximal fall’
returns a null universe, instantaneously exhausted, while for Deleuze, if God’s calculations ever
balanced, there would be no world. In both instances, retardation or complexity occupies an
intriguing ontological priority.

So much is true, I will argue, for Lee Smolin’s work on Quantum Loop Gravity, taking this theory
as most usefully illustrative of those which have adopted the notion of ‘symmetry-‐breaking’, and
49

finally will suggest that this theme of retardation tends to undermine any straightforward
opposition between order and disorder in favour of an endless tension between order and
complexity.

Candice Salyers (Mt. Holyoke College, USA)
Publicly Private: Efforts to Develop an Ethics of Intimacy

This paper explores intimacy as a site of transformative knowledge and considers how we share
ourselves and our embodied experiences as philosophers. Intimacy reveals a closeness that is
more than mere proximity, as it fosters a degree of open access in which all participants might
potentially be changed by their interactions. As a dancer, I find myself always working to
develop an ethics of intimacy-‐-‐that is, a type of integrity in practice that allows private self-‐
knowledge to become public as a way of exploring connections between people and our actions
together in the world. In a performance event, my body can actually become a medium of
intimacy as it creates an opportunity for a distinct type of closeness and communion between
me and audience members.

Similarly, as a philosopher, I find that the ways in which I share my personal experiences in life
as part of the articulation of philosophical thought open intimate connections between reader
and writer. Such elucidation of self-‐knowledge seeks to bring a reader closer to my experiences,
but mostly for the sake of bringing her into her own process of self-‐reflection. Social worker Bill
Herring proposes that, "the best definition of intimacy is simply into-‐me-‐see" (2013). By seeing
into me, the reader, like the audience member, can hopefully actually see beyond me into
herself, in order to consider her ways of being and acting in the world. In making my private
thoughts and experiences public, I am working to create a space that illuminates a proximity
and interpenetration between interior and exterior worlds.

Philosophy is uniquely positioned as a landscape for exploring the ways in which our interior
and exterior worlds press into and slide against one another. As both Irigaray and Levinas have
proposed, the etymology of the word philosophy itself reveals its origin not as the love of
wisdom, but rather as the wisdom of love. This significant distinction locates wisdom not simply
as the goal but as the medium of connection-‐-‐a potential site of intimacy. Furthermore,
Deleuze's assertion that a philosopher is a "friend to wisdom" (1983) offers interesting
momentum to the power of connection through philosophical thought.

With friendship comes the consideration of how to be both conscious of and responsible to the
trust inherent to connection. If philosophers are not only friends to wisdom, but as friends to
wisdom are also friends of humanity who offer the interior wisdom of love in service to exterior
worlds of action, then in what ways is an ethics for guiding this type of intimacy needed?
Braidotti considers that, "Ethics is therefore the discourse about forces, desires, and values that
act as empowering modes of being" (2006). In conjunction with her thinking, this paper
explores how my responsibility as a philosopher can be discovered not simply through imposed
rules of conduct but in continual, empowered and empowering, awareness of philosophy as an
act of friendship.

Danielle Sands (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Arendt and Thinking: The ‘Vital Tension between Philosophy and Politics’

“Concern with politics is not a matter of course of the philosopher,” (Arendt 1994, 428) begins
Hannah Arendt’s lecture ‘Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,’ a text
50

in which Arendt examines philosophy’s fledgling post-‐war political engagement for the
possibility of a rapprochement between two disciplines whose division she traces back to Plato
and Socrates. A philosopher called to political theory by historical circumstances and thenceforth
refusing her place amongst “the circle of philosophers” (Arendt 2000, 3) Arendt is a political
theorist whose concern with philosophy remains ‘a matter of course’ and whose near-‐fanatical
thinking and re-‐thinking of the relationship between philosophy and politics never ceases. For
the most part, however, she chooses to address philosophy from the outside, delineating the
things that philosophy “would have to make” and “would have to accept” (Arendt 2004, 453) in
order to bridge the disciplines and arrive at a genuinely political philosophy.

It is reasonable to ask why Arendt the political theorist is so preoccupied with this apparently
incongruous pairing: to ask why she endeavours “to construct a theoretical system” (Heller,
152), and why, repeatedly critical of philosophy’s aggrandizement of the vita contemplativa over
the vita activa, she titles her final – unfinished, posthumously published – text The Life of the
Mind, and its first volume Thinking. In openly declaring The Life of the Mind a return to
philosophy, Arendt disconcerted her commentators, particularly those who read The Human
Condition as endorsing the supersession of the vita contemplativa by the vita activa. Keen to
discredit the possibility that Arendt’s production of this “provocative and bewildering work”
(Honig, 77) might be viewed as a sign of inconsistency, critic Bonnie Honig instead perceives The
Life of the Mind as the product of a clear-‐sighted decision to write an account of ‘the life of the
mind’ from a perspective which does not assume the superiority of the internal life over the
external. Honig’s defence is persuasive, however, she is too quick to foreclose the tension
between philosophy and politics in Arendt’s work, fearing this tension might be construed as
indecision or weakness.

The question of the relationship between philosophy and politics in Arendt’s work is not new,
rather it is the question – in its various manifestations – which leaves Arendt’s staunchest
defenders struggling. Richard J. Bernstein reluctantly concludes that Arendt’s theorisation of the
link between thinking and judging is simply “unsatisfactory” (Bernstein, 173). My starting point
for this talk is the contention that this critical disappointment with Arendt exposes a limitation in
the critics’ framework rather than a shortcoming of Arendt. From this, I shall argue two things:
first, that the tension between philosophy and politics reflects a tension within philosophy itself,
created by philosophy’s divided attachments to the creation of a ‘world’ and to a practice of
thinking which is necessarily homeless. Secondly, that rather than endeavouring to foreclose this
paradox, we must acknowledge both that it is irresolvable and, counter-‐intuitively, that it is the
condition of political action, rather than an obstacle to it.

Works cited:
Arendt, Hannah. 1994. “Concern with Politics in Recent European Thought.” In Essays in
Understanding 1930-‐1954, ed. By J. Kohn, 428-‐447. NY: Schocken.
Arendt, Hannah. 2000. “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Gunter
Gaus.” In The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. by P. Baehr. 3-‐22. NY: Penguin.
Arendt, Hannah. 2004. “Philosophy and Politics.” Social Research 71.3” 427-‐454.
Bernstein, Richard J. 1996. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge: Polity.
Honig, Bonnie. 1988. “Arendt, Identity, and Difference.” Political Theory 16.1: 77-‐95.

51

Max Schaefer (University of Limerick, Ireland)
On Pain of De-‐cision: Heidegger's Path Toward an Ethics in Holy Mourning

Heidegger’s account of how thinking awakens the essence of the human being from its grounds,
as an original projecting of world anterior to human comportment, essentially ex-‐poses thinking
to its fundamental powerlessness. If thinking can no longer subsist in a subjective foundation as
a theoretical representation of being, but acts in the very heart of existence, then all ethical
concerns proper to said existence will need to face the inherent powerlessness of thinking. This
paper thus asks what it would mean to see ethics from itself in its fundamental incapacity or
powerlessness, to see it for its inability to produce effects.

As I will explore, this means that ethics can begin neither in comprehension nor
incomprehension, but only through an endurance of silence, as nearness to the changing event
of being. What this does, I show, is to effectively reveal that the play space of ethics is not
effected here or there at the will of a subject, nor has it always already been at work since time
immemorial, but is a hidden, transitive (i.e. temporal) occurrence whose dis-‐closure needs to be
prepared for.

While this serves to provide the formal structure of the origin of ethics, what reality or positive
content this originary ethics can possibly have for our particular epochal context remains unclear
to this day. In what follows, I will take some very basic steps toward seeing how such content
can be found in Heidegger’s study of the fundamental attunement of holy mourning. I show how
such mourning essentially attunes a historical people to its highest necessity: a renunciation of
the gods that have-‐been that holds them open for the gods to come. I maintain that such
attunement serves as a new grounding and paradigm for the meaningful life of a people, one
that takes place prior to the subject-‐object distinction, that is essentially communal (i.e. it ex-‐
poses each human being to world-‐disclosure and thus to others), and indeed pluralistic (i.e. it is
fundamentally open to the incommensurable paradigms of the gods of other thinking-‐locales).

From here, I move to demonstrate how the attunement of holy morning, as a relation of the
essence of the human being to the peculiar, worldly-‐otherness of these new gods, dis-‐closes
situations in which human beings can again be open for de-‐cision. For Heidegger, in other words,
decision is not purely formal; the concrete situation of a people in holy mourning is a necessary
condition for its possibility. If decision can only be made possible through an enduring of the
changing alterity of the gods (i.e. the fundamental “middle of time,” between past and future
(GA39, 262, 289.) that is undergone in holy mourning, then I maintain that the sense of
community appropriate to Heidegger’s ethics cannot be given, or seen as ‘rooted’ in a strict or
otherwise pure sense. Rather, decision, community, and ethics in general, calls for heightened
discord within each heritage.

Linnell Secomb (University of Greenwich, UK)
Brutal-‐Romance in the Age of Metropolis and Empire

Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel long ago argued that the advent of large cities transformed
not just economic and social relations but also the affective life of citizens. The blasé attitude
and anti-‐auratic love are amongst the emerging emotion formations they identified. Reading
Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs des Mal and Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus,’ this paper
distinguishes further reorganisations in the structure of love and proposes that these arise not
52

only as a result of urbanisation but also in the context of colonial encounters and relations.
‘Brutal-‐romance’, ‘arrogant-‐agape’ and ‘rancorous-‐passion’ entwine affects generally perceived
as antithetical. Yet Baudelaire’s poetry and Carter’s short story evidence emotional coalescences
that create these counter-‐intuitive, aberrant, hybrid emotional structures.

Mauro Senatore (Kingston University, UK)
Kant, Nietzsche and Derrida on Cruelty

Abstract omitted by request of the author.

Brian Smith (University of Dundee, UK)
Seeing the World Other Than It Is

The link between hominin evolution and technological development has provided a strong
narrative for human exceptionalism. André Leroi-‐Gourhan’s theory of the role of bipedalism in
the development of hominin technology and language is an influential source for the philosophy
of technology and found, most explicitly, in Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time.1 What these
theories share is the idea that technology acts as a supplement that defines the human as
something non-‐natural. The origin of the human is seen as this moment of separation from a
normal organic line of evolution to an exceptional hybrid form that incorporates a supplemental
inorganic line of technological development.

In this paper I want to suggest that this reading overemphasises the importance of technology in
defining the human, and is in danger of failing to heed Nietzsche’s warning from the second
essay of the Genealogy of Morality that the ultimate usefulness of something could be
completely separate from its origin.2 The human is often cast as being in some sense physically
deficient, with this deficiency being supplemented by intellect and technology. Stiegler, for
example, makes great use of the Prometheus myth, where Epimetheus forgets to grant human
beings a defining physical trait to allow them to survive, and Prometheus supplements this
natural physical deficiency through the technology of fire. Drawing on contemporary sources in
palaeoanthropology I want to suggest a different origin for the emergence of intelligence and
technology, one based on hominins’ physical and material dominance in their environment.

The endurance running and persistence hunting theories of the development of bipedalism will
form the backbone of my argument. Dennis M. Bramble and Daniel E. Lieberman argue that
endurance running, as much as walking, influenced the evolution of the bipedal bauplan in the
homo genus.3 While Louis Liebenberg suggests that it was the practice of persistence hunting
that drove this evolutionary path, allowing early hominins to supplement their diet with a
regular nutrient rich meat component.4

Taking this line of argument I will focus on the particular cognitive skills that hominin hunters
employ. Most techniques that animals use to hunt are based on direct identity or resemblance.

1
Bernard Steigler, Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus, (Stanford University Press, 1998)
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Essay Two, § 12
3
Dennis M. Bramble, Daniel E. Lieberman, ‘Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo’ in Nature, Vol.
432, 18 November 2004, pp. 345-‐352
4
Louis Liebenberg, ‘Persistence Hunting by Modern Hunter Gatherers’ in Current Anthropology, Vol. 47, No. 6
(December 2006), pp. 1017-‐1026. See also David Attenborough’s Life of Mammals
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o)
53

The visual hunter directly sights their prey, while an animal that tracks based on scent will again
identify the scent of its prey as identical, or resembling its prey as if it were present. The method
of persistence hunting cannot use these methods, as it involves exhausting the prey in an
extended chase, where the prey is frequently much faster over short distances and therefore out
of direct sight. Under these circumstances the hunter must learn to see the landscape other than
it is, to read the signs left in the landscape in terms of spore, footprints broken twigs etc.
Reading these signs and creating a narrative relies on a theory of difference, or non-‐resemblance
between the signs in the landscape and the eventual prey, and the narrative used to track the
animal involves extending empathy beyond the limits of the species, to other non-‐human
creatures.

This hunting technique leads to a rapid encephalization of the homo genus, which focuses on
internalized cognitive skills associated with imagination and social skills (extended beyond the
immediate social sphere of the species), rather than developing acuity of external perception,
such as sight, hearing or smell. This ability to see the world other than it is, to see something
more than what is simply presented is the essential step towards a metaphysical attitude
towards the world more generally. This originary development is not driven by technology, but
makes possible the new relationship to technology seen in the Neolithic revolutions of
civilization, domestication, agriculture and navigation. All living organisms are problem solving to
some extent, and many employ tools and technology to do so, but the genus homo is not so
much a problem solving animal as a problem creating animal, a step made possible by being able
to imagine the world other than it is, doubling the apparent world with a hidden metaphysical
world.

Dominic Smith (University of Dundee, UK)
Paying Attention: Philosophy as Strong Therapy for the Information Age

Writing-‐wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder—because nonfiction [is] based in
reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-‐blowingly huge and complex….
Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething
static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice
about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.
(Foster Wallace, Deciderization 2007).

Where is philosophy to be placed in relation to these words from contemporary American
author David Foster Wallace (1962-‐2008)? Is philosophy a form of ‘fiction’, ‘nonfiction’, or
both? Is philosophy ‘scary’, ‘hard’, or both? And why is philosophy something so apparently
negligible that Foster Wallace, himself a philosophy graduate, sees no difficulty in failing to spell
out how it relates to his chosen categories of ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’?

This paper will engage these issues by arguing that philosophy has a strongly therapeutic role to
play in relation to the ‘…overwhelming, circuit-‐blowingly huge and complex’ character of the
‘felt reality’ of the contemporary ‘Information Age’ of the Internet, networks, ‘feedback’, and
social media. Before philosophy can be characterised as ‘fiction’ or ‘nonfiction’, ‘scary’ or ‘hard’,
‘negligible’ or ‘important’, I will argue, it is more fundamentally to be characterised as a strong
and therapeutic form of openness to problems of attention (that is, to problems of how and
why attention functions or does not function, and in relation to what). I will consider the
relative merits and consequences of framing attention in, for example, economic terms (as
something to be ‘paid’), religious terms (as something to be ‘devoted’), and juridical terms (as
something to be ‘corrected’, ‘arrested’ or ‘demanded’), before arguing that it may be playful
54

and incisive to consider attention in musical terms (as something to be ‘played’, whether
concordantly or dissonantly). To make this argument, I will draw on key references such as
Crary’s work on the genealogy of attention, Blanchot’s work on ‘silence’, and Wittgenstein on
language games and therapy.

Henry Somers-‐Hall (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Sartre and Bergson: Sartre’s Logic of Multiplicities

The aim of this paper is reconstruct a reading of Sartre’s existentialist thought that highlights
Sartre’s debt to Bergson, drawing on Sartre’s early works to illuminate key concepts in his
mature philosophical position. As Sartre makes clear, his transition to philosophy was instigated
by his early reading of Bergson’s Time and Free Will. Despite Sartre’s early enthusiasm for
Bergson’s description of consciousness, and the number of references to Bergson outnumbering
those to Husserl in Sartre’s works prior to Being and Nothingness, there has been virtually no
analysis of the influence of Bergson’s thought on Sartre’s development. This paper addresses
this deficit. The first part of the paper will explore Sartre’s analysis of the function of the
imagination in his two early works on the subject, The Imagination, and The Imaginary. While
Sartre presents a number of criticisms of Bergson in these works, in each case stemming from
Bergson’s failure to recognise the intentional nature of consciousness, Sartre nonetheless
emphasises the fundamental insight of Bergson’s that images must be understood as syntheses
rather than the objects of synthesis. I will show that Sartre’s own positive vision of the
imagination as a mode of synthesis that intends towards an object, draws explicitly from
Bergson’s account of two multiplicities in Time and Free Will. In positing a difference in kind
between perceptual and imaging relations to objects, Sartre characterises perception as a
fundamentally durational relationship towards an object, claiming that perception involves
‘making a tour of objects, of waiting, as Bergson says, until the “sugar dissolves.”’1 In
comparison, the image is explicitly understood in terms of a Bergsonian discrete multiplicity,
which relates to an object through a process of abstraction and de-‐temporalisation. In doing so,
Sartre takes up the Bergsonian insight that practical activity is related to a spatialisation of the
world, but by arguing for the importance of an irreal (imaginary) object in that process, reverses
Bergson’s analysis of the nature of freedom, equating it with a fragmentation of experience,
rather than a return to duration. I will explore the implications of this reversal, particularly in the
light of Sartre’s later account of how being-‐in-‐itself is constituted as a situation by
consciousness. I will conclude by arguing that Sartre’s analysis of the imagination leads, in Being
and Nothingness, to the fundamental existential position that we are thrown into a world of
duration which we can only make sense of through spatialised categories, where the processual
nature of the real shows itself merely as a coefficient of adversity against our practical
engagements with the world and with others. Such a reading opens the way to a much closer
connection of Sartre’s work to more recent process philosophy than has often been recognised.

Ruth Sonderegger (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Austria)
Critical Exercises

In his Theory of Practice Pierre Bourdieu famously argued that habitual everyday practices are
blind, irreflexive and, therefore, without critical force. If anything, they reinforce the status quo.
This is exactly why Bourdieu believes that critical theories should focus on practices as opposed
to phenomena of false consciousness that were the focus of Marxist critical theories. In order to

1
Sartre, Jean-‐Paul, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (London: Routledge,
2010).
55

criticize and possibly change habitual practices and, likewise, the power structures accumulated
in them, habitual practices need to be analyzed, reflected, and criticized in the eyes of Bourdieu,
from a sociological distance.

Michel de Certeau, on the other hand, argued, most notably in his The Practice of Everyday Life,
that everyday practices are rife with critique and invention. Whereas de Certeau’s critique is
leveled equally against Bourdieu and Foucault I wish to show that Foucault’s late writings argue
along the lines of de Certeau (most notably Foucault’s lecture courses The Courage of Truth and
Government of Self and Others, that had not yet been written when de Certeau published his
book on everyday practices). Foucault not only acknowledges the power of resistance in habitual
practices. Moreover, he focuses on the possibility of changing naturalized habits by practical,
indeed critical, exercises of undoing them. In my view, Foucault’s insights are seminal in at least
two respects: They challenge the opposition between blind habits on the one hand and (possibly
critical) reflections and judgments on the other. Moreover, Foucault discusses (ancient) practices
of critical exercises in light of the imminent danger that exercises easily become and indeed
oftentimes are tools of disciplining and thus the opposite of critique

Far from romanticizing and overestimating the critical power of everyday practices, Foucault
provides ample material to discuss the fine line between disciplining and emancipatory exercises
and experiments with and within habitual practices. In order to defend the possibility of
emancipatory practical exercises in times when exercising is mainly a technique of hardening
neo-‐liberal subjects, I will also draw on the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa as well as on Sara
Ahmed’s On Being Included.

Susan Spaid (Independent Scholar, Belgium)
Birthing Movements: Historical Twists and Turns

In this paper, I analyze four contemporaneous art movements (Fluxus, Nouveaux Realisme, Body
Art and Pop Art) to shake out distinctions between movements and genres, in light of
philosophical work done b Catharine Abell, Gregory Currie, Kendall Walton and Bence Nanay.
Philosophers of history routinely mine fields like the archive, canon formation, genealogies, and
hagiographies, while philosophers of film and philosophers of literature have focused on genre.
Abell defines a genre as fulfilling an interpretative and evaluative role for users with a common
knowledge of both its purpose and its appropriate members, some of whom may also belong to
other genres and/or sub-‐genres. To function thusly, genres must be: 1) enduring (have histories),
2) stable across media (film, media and comics), 3) broadly accessible, and 4) useful. One
imagines no longer useful genres either dying or becoming dormant, once they go out of
fashion. Alternatively, sub-‐genres like "bromance" evolve since genres like "romance" or
"buddy" no longer convey genre-‐specific particularities, namely, male intimacy.

Philosophers alternatively focused on avant-‐gardes routinely appeal to movements, yet this
interpretative category has been totally ignored in the philosophical literature. One explanation
for this oversight is that allowing for movements is like admitting to “origins” or worse yet,
accepting the spontaneous arrival of concepts, a possibility philosophers find difficult to explain.
In Concepts (1998), philosopher Jerry Fodor argues that having a concept is prior to being a
concept, so it would be philosophically difficult to notice some preponderance of affinities
absent the affinity-‐concept. The philosophical nature of movements thus bears some
relationship to concept origination/adaption.

56

In contrast to genre's concrete features, movements exhibit emergent properties. Characterized
by a groundswell of artistic energy, movements are comparatively spontaneous, generational,
reactive to earlier events, bottom-‐up, local, and constrained by time limits. When potential
movement members are not aware of common traits or movements arise haphazardly (no
accompanying manifesto), third-‐party observers play a role by noticing patterns, giving rise to
unifying "genre-‐like" terms that temporarily enable the public to identify potential members,
which may be unassociated with any genre or movement. Dead movements become a "style," or
worse yet a pastiche. We might describe a 1925 painting's style as Cubist, even though we deny
that it is "Cubist," since that movement subsided years earlier.

Like genres, movements do not satisfy Kendall Walton's categories of art, since movements are
contra-‐categorical by definitions, so deviations are neither contra-‐standard nor variations. For
example, the plethora of late 60s site-‐specific sculpture that ushered in Post-‐Minimalism, was
indubitably an offshoot of Minimalism, yet this is hardly a sub-‐genre of Minimalism, precisely
because this movement engendered a new standard. It is not contra-‐standard.

Bence Nanay has remarked that genres, such as Nouvelle Vague, exclude prototypes. Although
few movements become genres, my characterization of movements explains why genres
necessarily exclude their prototypes. Abell's genre-‐recognizability criterion necessitates a
history, stability, and accessibility, thus relegating prototypes to movements, though not
consequential genres.

Barry Stocker (Istanbul Technical University, Turkey)
European Frontiers and Philosophies of Violence

The issue of European frontiers is apparent at present in the following ways: the frontiers of the
European Union in relation to European nations outside itself; the frontiers of Europe as a
continent; the frontiers between transnational and national sovereignty; the frontiers of
citizenship and residence rights in relation to migrants. The current situation poses both
challenges and positive possibilities for a tradition of philosophical thinking about Europe that
goes back to the German Idealists, with roots in Enlightenment and earlier thought. Recent
discussion of Europe within philosophy have included extensive reference to Arendt on refugees,
Derrida on hospitality, and Habermas’ version of a normative foundation for the European
Union, largely understood as a constitutional enterprise.The discussion of refugees and
hospitality is a way of framing the migration issue, while the discussion of normative foundations
is a way of framing sovereignty issues. The paper will build on, and attempt to go beyond, these
investigations by considering the persistence of violence at the frontiers of the European Union.
The appearance of René Girard’s work on the military theorist Clausewitz, suggests a way of
framing the resistance to transnational sovereignty and migrant rights with regard to the
persistence of mimetic violence, in its concentrated military forms, as well as its more dispersed
general social, cultural and anthropological forms, which were considered by Girard in earlier
work that should be reassessed with regard to his latest work. The militarisation of the response
to non-‐European immigration, the growth of tension with Russia, a European nation, in pushing
European countries towards security based co-‐operation even while trans-‐national sovereignty
becomes more questioned, the persistence of violent frontier disputes in the post-‐Soviet parts
of Europe, and tendencies towards political violence in Greece resulting from a European based
debt crisis, all suggest that the more ethical and constitutional hopes for Europe cannot make
progress without more attention to the mimetic logic, which becomes political violence, and
even war, when it is not adequately recognised whether in philosophical texts or everyday
discourse. The paper will investigate Girard’s relevance to these questions, and the limits of his
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emphasis on mimesis, and reflect on how other philosophical approaches to violence should be
considered in the light of Girard’s contributions and its limits. Foucault and Schmitt will be the
major points of reference here with regard to their thoughts about violence and about Europe.
In both their references to Europe and to violence, sovereignty is at issue. In Foucault,
sovereignty is understood in a dispersed way in the totality of power relations, while in Schmitt
sovereignty is given a more legalistic context, but nevertheless with an understanding of the
mobility and dispersal of issues of political sovereignty. On the basis of Girard’s most recent
work and how we might understand it in relation to Schmitt and Foucault, the paper will build
up a framework for understanding the frontier issues of Europe, along with the violence
intertwined with them, and will attempt to suggest ways forward.

Christopher Thomas (University of Aberdeen, UK)
The Creative Act: Towards a Spinozian Aesthetics

What has Spinoza to offer regarding aesthetics and art? Or, more specifically, to where can we
look in Spinoza’s philosophy in order to think a theory of art and aesthetics? To ask such a
question is already to be disingenuous to Spinoza’s historical situation. Indeed any discussion of
a Spinozian aesthetics can only be a retroactive consideration, for what we mean by aesthetics is
a resolutely post-‐ Kantian affair. And so the question becomes not whether Spinoza had a theory
of art or aesthetics, as some commentators have asked. Nor what such a theory might have
consisted in had Spinoza written it down. Rather, the question must be: to what part of
Spinoza’s philosophy can we turn so that we might think an aesthetics that is truly Spinozian
without being Spinoza’s own?

This paper will begin by presenting Spinoza’s own words on art, and what is considered to be the
object of modern aesthetics–beauty and ugliness. Following this I will turn to two secondary
commentators who have put their name to the problem of aesthetics and Spinoza. Firstly I will
consider James Morrison’s claim that Spinoza’s philosophy is ‘hostile’ towards aesthetics and art,
and secondly I will turn to Moira Gatens’ efforts to establish a Spinozian theory of art founded
on Spinoza’s concept of conatus.

From this literature on Spinoza, art, and aesthetics, I will then suggest that to think art practice
and aesthetics in a truly Spinozian way one must turn to his ontology, and not to his explicit
words on art or the beautiful. Specifically this essay will refer to certain ideas in Maurice
Blanchot’s essay The Birth of Art, in order to suggest that a truly Spinozian aesthetics is to be
found through a consideration of the cornerstone of Spinoza’s ontology: the causa sui of
Substance. By thinking the creative act that is Substance’s activity of causing itself through its
modes, this essay will find in Blanchot’s insistence that ‘art is present in each of its acts as its
own celebration’, a profoundly Spinozian concept: an idea of art that is, like Substance, affirmed
and born in each of its affections. Conceived in this way a truly Spinozian aesthetics emerges
that places affirmation at its centre and its centre in each of its affections at once. Just as the
cause is, and is sustained by its effects in Spinoza’s immanent ontology, so art is, and is
perpetually created in and through each of its affirmations. In this way a Spinozian theory of art
emerges that is understood through the immanent creativity of substance, whereby art, like
substance, is conceived as a process of infinite renewal and infinite variation without change,
goal, or model.

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Edward Thornton (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
The Division of Time in Simondon, Deleuze and Prigogine

This paper will explore the different, but connected theories of the genesis of time in the work of
Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Ilya Prigogine, and will focus on the role of division in each
of their theories.

Starting with The Physico-‐Biological Genesis of the Individual (1964) and running up until Psychic
and Collective Individuation (1989), Gilbert Simondon’s work was concerned primarily with the
question of individuation. Throughout this time he aimed to explain the generative processes by
which the process of becoming proceeds, and by which both an individual and its milieu come to
be distinguished from one another in a mutual process of separation. All of the processes of
individuation that Simondon describes, be they physical, vital, or social, rely on the existence of
a division between an inside and an outside that is the locus of individuation itself.

Deleuze was heavily influenced by the work of Simondon, explicitly referencing him in Nietzsche
and Philosophy, Difference and Repetition, and Logic of Sense, and then with Guattari in both
Anti-‐Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, praising his work as “a profoundly original theory of
individuation, which entails an entire philosophy.”1 Deleuze uses Simondon’s theory of
individuation to elaborate a philosophy of becoming that can account for the material nature of
reality without relying on the pre-‐existence of Being. Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is
not, however, concerned only with the genesis of the spatial dimensions of material reality, but
also with the genesis of time. In his theory of vital individuation, Simondon describes the way in
which the membrane that acts as the point of division between the inside and the outside of a
living individual also serves to divide the past from the future. This membrane is then operative
in the genesis of the chronological time of lived experience.

In the first section of this paper I will introduce Simondon’s theory of vital individuation and
explain how he attempts to use it to explicate both the genesis of life and the genesis of
chronological time. At this point I will also outline the way in which Deleuze draws on this theory
in Logic of Sense to describe the process by which the infinite division that occurs in the empty
form of time (Aion) generates the extended, linear points of experienced time (Chronos).

In the second section of this paper I will point out two critical weaknesses in Simondon’s theory
of the genesis of time, both of which relate to the way in which Simondon conceives of the
irreversible transformations that occur at the level of the membrane, and will show how these
weaknesses are carried over into Deleuze’s theory of time in Logic of Sense. Drawing on
Simondon’s concept of Transduction and on the theory of Dissipative Structures developed by
the chemist and Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine, I will end by offering answers to these criticisms
by which I hope to simultaneously strengthen Simondon’s theory of vital individuation and
Deleuze’s theory of the genesis of time.

Rozemund Uljée (Leiden University, Netherlands)
On the Frontiers of Thinking – Heidegger and Levinas

This paper seeks to trace the intricate and profound relationship between Martin Heidegger and
Emmanuel Levinas regarding their understanding of the frontier in relation to thinking. It seeks
to show how both thinkers conceive of a frontier of incomprehensibility that allows for the
possibility of meaning. Further, it seeks to show that the relation between these two thinkers is
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a subtle and nuanced rapport which includes both their proximity and radical difference
regarding this frontier. This rapport is to be conceived not as a confrontation but rather a
transformation in the sense that it is within thinking the frontier that we find a most radical
departure by Levinas from Heidegger. A departure that does not renounce Heidegger’s thinking
regarding truth and its deployment, but opens a space within Heidegger’s thinking itself with the
aim to liberate alterity from a subordination to the truth of Being as accepted by the history of
metaphysics.

How does this come about? For Heidegger, thinking the relation between man and Being means
an exposure to and thus a responsibility for the possibility of impossibility – the frontier of being
towards death. This relationship with the limit of thought implies an understanding of
temporality that cannot be grasped as presence but it is rather through the priority of the future
that the possibility of the question of meaning manifests itself. Levinas on the other hand
conceives of a frontier as a relation to alterity where the other person is understood as the limit
or frontier of the possibility of comprehension. It is the Other who puts my self-‐presence into
question by provoking a ‘past that has never been present.’ As such, the Other introduces a
temporality of radical asymmetry to which I am exposed and in which I am commanded to a
responsibility for justice, a justice which always belongs to the Other. For Levinas, it is thus
within and through a temporality of impossibility, in which comprehension is no longer possible,
that an infinite responsibility is located. It is in this infinite responsibility to the Other that
meaning is found – a meaning however that is never complete.

As such, this frontier of time transforms the essence and task of philosophy in its entirety as it
shifts the orientation of philosophy and the task of thinking from the deployment of truth as a
ground or foundation to a question of justice. This means that philosophy is no longer riveted to
Being and its truth, but to the ethics of its justice. It is therefore that philosophy must be
conceived of as an infinite commencement, where its impossibility to totalize meaning implies
that it can and must remain open to the alterity to transcendence

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Susana Viegas (New University of Lisbon, Portugal / University of Dundee, UK)
A Deleuzian Noology: Philosophizing and Thinking Film Otherwise

According to Gilles Deleuze, to think is not an exclusively philosophical event since we not only
think philosophically with concepts, but we also think in a non-‐philosophical way with
sensations, through percepts and affects. Diverse artistic forms of expression have the ability to
force us to think, but only philosophy can make us think it in a philosophical way. Yet, this is not a
tautological argument. Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as the creative process of
producing and thinking with concepts1. Therefore, what is tautological is to claim that to think
philosophically is to think conceptually. My quest is towards the difference between
‘philosophizing’ and ‘thinking otherwise’, as only the first would be exclusive to philosophy itself.
It is also towards the connections between thinking philosophically and thinking otherwise,
limited here to its connection with art and artistic thought (non-‐philosophy).

All thinking requires an image of thought, says Deleuze2. An image of thought is a pre-‐
philosophical plane of immanence for philosophy itself. Thus, thinking always requires
assumptions, either explicit or implicit (objective or subjective), on what it means to think, to be
oriented within thought. Rephrasing Deleuze’s well-‐known quotation, we must no longer ask
ourselves ‘What is art?’ but ‘What is philosophy?’3. This will be my first principle to distinguish an
act of thinking from an act of philosophizing: the intransmissibility of the creative conceptual
work.

The problem that I will analyse and develop regards the claim that film philosophizes. If art is a
form of thinking (Hubert Damisch and Roland Barthes), why is cinema a form of philosophizing? I
wish to demonstrate that although a movie (or another artistic form) can make us think, even
think in a philosophical way, it does not think philosophically, conceptually. Thus, what different
kinds of interferences occur between cinema and philosophy? What is the role of a philosophy of
film and of thinking film in our everyday life? The Deleuzian noology establishes a new image of
thought as a new theory of the image, in which two different elements stand out: the
intervention of the non-‐philosophical as powerlessness and constraint, and the domain of a
paradoxical logic of the disjunctive synthesis. Therefore, I will explore a noo-‐onto-‐cinematic
element of a Deleuzian philosophy-‐cinema4 by distinguishing it from what a “filmosophy”, “film
as philosophy”, and a “film-‐philosophy” theories are.

Hannah Wallenfels (Free University Berlin, Germany)
Bartleby’s Death

In recent years, Herman Melville’s Bartleby has frequently been the subject of philosophical
discussions. His ‘formula’, as Gilles Deleuze called it, “I would prefer not to”, has become a
philosophical and political slogan – even Occupy Wall Street, one might recall, had their own
Bartleby reading group, and more recently the Spanish general strike marched under Bartleby
banners. But of course this is not an altogether new development: besides Deleuze, Blanchot,

1
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson.
London/New York: Verso, 1994, 5.
2
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010, 118-‐126.
3
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Continuum, 2008, 269: “there
is always a time, midday-‐midnight, when we must no longer ask ourselves, ‘What is cinema?’ but ‘What is
philosophy?’”.
4
Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews 1975-‐1995, ed. by David Lapoujade, trans. by
Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2007, 66.
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Agamben, Negri and Hardt, Rancière, Žižek or Tiqqun have repeatedly referred themselves to
Bartleby, this strange stoic hero of passivity, employing him for their very own theoretical and
political agendas.

Oddly, however, a number (though not all) of these thinkers have seemed to obscure the fact of
Bartleby’s death at the end of Melville’s story, while others find ways of repurposing it in
support of their affirmative readings. This is especially intriguing in view of the fact that Bartleby
has become a heroic poster boy: he has been used as a key witness for the possibility of an
alternative, an escape from the system, an end to capitalist circuits of reproduction. His death,
it seems, would signify the ultimate impossibility of every escape: it would be the sign of the
absolute victory of capitalism under post-‐fordist conditions. But Bartleby’s death can be read in
many different ways: as an example of an extreme and potentially subversive
“deterritorialization” (Deleuze); as an image of a death drive that symbolizes neither physical
death nor refusal, but is instead an “excessive impulse that persists beyond mere existence”
(Žižek); or as an ultimate rejection of the coercive belief in the paramount value of futurity
(Edelman).

At the same time, other theoretical approaches have clearly positioned themselves against the
political romanticism of Bartlebyism, against the fetishization of passivity and dreams of ‘just’
exiting capitalism. Especially the so-‐called ‘accelerationists’ have indeed sought to bury
Bartleby.

Their diametrically opposed strategy of promoting a distinct belief in the future, in activity and
acceleration claims to offer an altogether different conception of political action. But whether
or not this strategy is viable and their critique of passivity is valid, remains an open question.
The concept of passivity will have to be scrutinized: after all, it may be the case that the
passivity supposedly suggested by Bartleby’s disciples and so radically rejected by
accelerationism might significantly differ from at least the more sophisticated versions of
Bartlebyan politics. In the end, strategic and conceptual differences might not be quite as
insurmountable, and the fact that both strongly rely on Deleuze might not at all be a mere
coincidence.

This paper will therefore investigate the question of how theorists deal with Bartleby’s death,
how they ignore or emphasize it, and how it may even clear the way for a different kind of
political action, while focussing on the similarities and differences between the opposed
factions of the followers of Bartleby and their antagonists who wish to kill him for good.

Galit Wellner (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
Do Animals Have Technologies?
Panel: New Horizons in Philosophy of Technolog

Today we know that animals use technologies and even invent some innovative applications,
such as dolphins using marine sponges to protect their snouts when foraging. But it was not
long time ago that the answer was strictly negative. In philosophy of technology the negative
stance toward the question of animal’s technologies can be rooted in Karl Marx’s (1983)
assertion that man is a tool-‐making animal. Likewise, contemporary philosophers like Bernard
Stiegler (1998) explain that the human and the technological co-‐constitute each other.
Technologies are analyzed as a human characteristic.

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My claim is that in the age of the machines, animals could not have been conceived as having
tools, for such an approach would have undermined the humanity of pre-‐modern humans.
Once machines started giving way to digital technologies, it became legitimate to look for tools
at the animal kingdom. For example, biologists started noticing in the 1960s that primates were
creating brush-‐like probes to “dig” termites. Today some researchers start identifying machine-‐
usage patterns at animals, like David Attenborough’s observation on crows that reveals how
they use roads, cars and traffic light system to crack nuts. Still our ability to detect how animals
use digital technologies is limited to YouTube video clips of cats, that is, esoteric and non-‐
scientific.

Early modernity is characterized by the emergence of the machine and the conception of tools
as being uniquely for humans. The dichotomist worldview of subject-‐object resulted in the
positioning of animals on the side of non-‐humans and hence on the side of those who cannot
have tools. With the advent of a pluralistic position fracturing the subject-‐object dichotomy into
a spectrum, animals are conceived as having tools despite being non-‐human. Digital
technologies have provided us with new perspectives on the world from which we can reassess
the position of the human, and reassess the animal kingdom. We no longer need to pose the
human as superior to the animal nor ignore the tools animals use. The anthropocentric divide
between humans and animals and the humanist ontology that separates humans and their
technologies can now be rejected.
Animals can be of special importance in philosophy of technologies because they occupy the
(dynamic) border area between humans and artifacts. However, animals and technologies have
been studied as two distinct questions (Hayles (2006); Wolfe (2010)). Even when reviewed
together, as in Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" (1991), the two domains remain detached
and separated. This separation recently led Ron Broglio (2013) to think of “animal
phenomenology” in which the question of technology is implicit at best.

In the proposed paper I shall classify the answers to the question whether animals have
technologies by the technology type. I shall make a distinction between tools, machines and
digital technologies and will examine the genealogy of the animal-‐technology question from
Marx to posthumanism in order to show how the erosion of established boundaries can open
new horizons for scientific research.

Joel White (Kings College London, UK)
Skin and Bones Individuate, Individuating Skin and Bones

‘The whole thing, such and such a form in this skin and these bones, is Callias or Socrates; and
they are different owing to their matter (for this is different), but the same in species’
(Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1034a 5-‐8). In Aristotelian metaphysics individuation, the means
through which particulars are identified as distinct from other elements in the world, is
conceived of as hylemorphic. Hylemorphism, defined as the coming together of ‘matter (hyle)
and ‘form’ (morphe) produces the individual as distinct from the general as a compound of
these two notions. Despite the common sense dualism of Aristotle’s claims, and its justified
attack on Platonic realism, the concept of hylemorphism remains both materially substantive
and static. It hence considers the production of individuals as the effect of this process. The
process of individuation qua individuation is left unexplored and considered definitive.

This proposed paper will tackle the problem of how skin and bones individuate. Counter to
Aristotle, it will centre its exploration on the significant intervention of Gilbert Simondon’s
major thesis L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Through an
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engagement with Simondon’s own considerations on skin, this paper will re-‐orientate the limits
relation of the body. Skin will not be placed at the limit of the particular, as it is in Aristotelian
metaphysics, but will be considered as integral to a system of reciprocity whereby the very
notion of limit becomes problematic. Significantly, this system of reciprocity, which exists as a
network between multiple levels, including physical, vital, and psycho-‐social, will be shown to
constitute the very means through which skin and bones individuate. The individuating
characteristics of particular skins are therefore seen to emerge as self-‐constituting after-‐effects
of a network of relations that are in continual ontological processes of change.

Stephen Whitehead (University of Dundee, UK)
A Problem Shared: Philosophy, Theatre, Theatrum Mundi

Puchner(2014) make the claim that “theatre and philosophy share the problem of the ground”.
His model claims that theatre expresses this problem though the issue of real-‐world space:
theatre must occur somewhere, but in the attempt create a stage which can represent any place
and any time it “emancipates” itself from the actual ground, causing a groundlessness. The
practice of site-‐specific performance art is seen as a reaction the “rootlessness” brought about
by this emancipation, and thus “with respect to the ground, theatre…oscillates between site-‐
specific performance and emancipation from site-‐specificity.” In the field of philosophy,
meanwhile, the problem of ground is seen in terms of epistemological grounding – traditionally,
Puchner claims, philosophy has claimed that we lack proper ground and it is up to the
philosopher to supply “a new foundation”. The constant search for a philosophical ground is said
to lead to “oscillating between proving grounds and calling all grounding enterprises into
question.”

Taking Puchner’s claims as a starting point I shall argue that in fact theatre and philosophy share
not just the problem of the ground, but rather what may be dubbed the problem of
performance – that is to say the three interlinked problems of the ground, of language, and of
action. Beginning with Puchner’s analysis of Heidegger’s association of play within the theatre
and within philosophy, I shall show that the two subjects share the common burden of these
major questions and further that, as Puchner observes, “sometimes they share their solutions”.
Connecting these themes shall be the concept of theatrum mundi, “the world stage”, playing
upon the concept of “play” to draw connections between performance, games &c.

Marc Wilcox (University of Leeds, UK)
Do We Owe Dead Animals Respect?

In the 1970’s Peter Singer gave us an argument against the harming and killing of animals in
order to use their bodies as a food source and a source of clothing. Since then many
philosophers have endorsed and reiterated Singer’s arguments and argued that vegetarianism is
morally obligatory because of the pain and suffering meat eating, and the use of animal
products, inflicts upon non-‐humans. However the eating of meat and using of animal products is
generally considered permissible (at least in principle) when this doesn’t cause any individual to
suffer. In this paper I reconsider this claim, questioning whether we can wrong non-‐human
animals without causing them suffering through actions such as wearing leather clothing, or
eating animal products that would otherwise be wasted. I consider various arguments against
using human corpses in given ways and arguments in favour of respect for the dead. I argue that
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all of the arguments I consider in favour of respecting dead humans by not eating them, or using
their bodies for clothing, apply to non-‐human animals too. As such, it seems that if we accept
that we should respect human corpses in given ways by refusing to eat them, and use them to
make clothing, then we must do the same with the corpses of non-‐human animals.

Clare Woodford (University of Brighton, UK)
Living beyond the Frontier: Butler, Derrida and the Precarity of the Decision

Judith Butler’s recent turn has seen her engage with the notions of precarity and liveability (see
in particular 2006, 2010) – concerning what is classed as a liveable and unliveable life within the
normative order. This paper will note concerns raised by many about the seemingly dismissive
and at times colonial language used by Butler in both Frames of War and Precarious Lives but
will suggest that these might be circumvented by placing Butler’s recent texts in the wider
context of her writing. However, more interestingly, and perhaps problematically, Butler’s focus
on liveability raises the surprising problem that we may be required to revisit ethical questions
such as euthanasia and abortion from a new angle in order to focus on the conditions under
which life is more liveable and less precarious. However Butler herself only partially
acknowledges the implications of these arguments (2010, p.18-‐20) which can be seen to bring us
back to familiar Derridean questions about the temporality of the decision. The paper will
suggest that by considering the requirements of Derridean differance for Butler’s liveability we
end up developing it into a more powerful practical tool that take it beyond the frontiers of both
Butler’s and Derrida’s writings.

Ashley Woodward (University of Dundee, UK)
Being and Information: On the Meaning of Vattimo

The last decade has seen an increasing dissemination of the philosophy of Gianni Vattimo in the
Anglophone world. However, this dissemination has focused around Vattimo’s most recent
work, which – I argue – does not reflect the most important contributions of his distinguished
philosophical career. Indeed, this reception is likely to deflect attention away from the deepest
insights which might be found in his writings. This recent work has emphasised epistemological
and ontological nihilism – there are no truths, only interpretations, and reality is not
constituted as a stable, objective structure – as well as a “weakened” form of religious belief. As
such, Vattimo’s work appears as the kind of “postmodernism” which he was for a time happy to
embrace explicitly. In today’s philosophical climate, which is marked by a realist backlash
against postmodernism, the way Vattimo’s work is being disseminated and received in the
English speaking world is unlikely to afford it the legacy it deserves.

I propose a reading of Vattimo which seeks to refocus attention on what I believe to be the key
insights in his work. Specifically, I will focus on and develop the suggestions Vattimo makes
regarding the Heideggerian meditation on technology in relation to the history of being. In a
number of texts, but most significantly “Dialectics and Difference,” Vattimo takes up
Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of modern technology as Ge-‐Stell, paying particular
attention to those moments where he suggests that in the enframing we can catch a first
glimpse of a turning in Being. In Bestand, he suggests, beings begin to loose the characteristics
of subject and object, preparing for the Kehre to a new epoch in the history of Being. At points,
Vattimo suggests that this turn is further developed in the new information and communication
technologies (specifically digital computing) of which Heidegger was only dimly aware. I argue
then that one of Vattimo’s key contributions to post-‐Heideggerian hermeneutic ontology is to
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suggest that we may locate the turn to a new epoch in the history of Being in information,
understood as a newly emergent paradigm for the way in which beings appear. Appreciating
and developing Vattimo’s legacy then means adopting the proposal of an informational turn in
Being, and elaborating the implications of this for the ontological constitution of meaning as
such in the contemporary epoch.

4. Panel Abstracts

Please see above for abstracts of the papers in each panel.

Affect and Its Vicissitudes in the Twenty-‐first Century
• Tina Chanter (Kingston University, UK)
• Joanna Hodge (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
• Linnell Secomb (Greenwich University, UK)

The panel will approach a transformation in thinking affect arising from a double displacement
of aesthetic theory and disruption of conceptions of subjectivity, identity and genre,
demonstrated in affective intensification and dissimulation. The thinking of Benjamin and
Simmel, Irigaray and Haraway, Rancière and Nancy will be drawn on to provide three distinct
engagements with our problematic.

Frontiers of Modernity
• Francis Halsall (National College of Art and Design, Ireland)
• Sinead Murphy (Newcastle University, UK)
• Tony O'Connor (University College, Cork, Ireland)

This panel explores modernity through the metaphor of “frontier.” We ask: what is the territory
that modern life and thought occupies; and what are the edges/ limits of that territory? What,
in other words, are the frontiers of modernity?

In particular we propose three themes characterising such frontiers: Systems; Historicity;
Finitude. We use these to discuss three key conditions of modernity: its organisation; its
contexts; and its limits.

Limits, Borders and Cleaving (2 Panels)
• Neil McGinness (University of Glasgow, UK)
• John Meechan (Kingston University, UK)
• Helen Palmer (Goldsmiths University, UK)
• Edward Thornton (Royal Holloway, UK)

The papers presented celebrate the uniqueness of these notions and aim to explore their
potential to contribute towards a reorientation in thought of the kind recommended by
Deleuze. The notion of the border, for example, suggests a formal consistency rooted in, rather
than threatened by, paradox; a border simultaneously joins together and splits asunder – it
cleaves. The limit is similarly curious in that it seems to perform simultaneously the mutually
exclusive operations of opening up and closing off a beyond. Papers will, within philosophical
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and literary contexts, problematise a range of notions in relation to these concepts, including:
emergence, production of the new, chaos, immanence, and defamiliarisation.

New Horizons in Philosophy of Technology (2 Panels)
• Stacey O. Irwin (Millersville University of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Lyat Friedman (Bezalel Academy of the Arts and Design, Israel)
• Pieter Lemmens (Radboud University, Netherlands)
• Nicola Liberati (Chukyo University, Japan)
• Shoji Nagataki (Chukyo University, Japan)
• Galit Wellner (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)

The central role of technologies in our everydayness has been noticed by philosophers only in
since the 20th century. Martin Heidegger is frequently mentioned as the forerunner of
philosophy of technology, thanks to his tool analysis in Being and Time (1927). Because of the
fast evolution of technologies, even Heidegger provided a new analysis for modern
technologies some 25 years later in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953). The papers
of this panel will explore if contemporary technologies require a new analysis and will attempt
to assess the implications on philosophy of technology, and possibly on philosophy in general.

Ricoeur, Religion and Public Discourse
• Eoin Carney (University of Dundee, UK)
• Amy Daughton (Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, UK)
• Maureen Junker-‐Kenny (Trinity College Dublin, UK)

It is often assumed that the problematic role of religion in a secular society involves an
either/or dilemma in which the beliefs and narratives of religious traditions must either adapt
to the expectations of “reasoned,” public discourse or risk remaining parochial and becoming
obsolete. The hermeneutical philosophy of Paul Ricoeur provides a nuanced and entirely
distinctive approach to understanding religion. This panel will explore the ways in which
Ricoeur’s thought addresses contemporary questions and problems involving the confrontation
between religion and the public sphere.

Jazz Improvisation, Agency and Freedom: Between the Human and Inhuman Lies the Assemblage
• Tom Hewitt (Open University, UK)
• David Roden (Open University, UK)

These two papers seek to frame a discussion of the complex relationship between creativity
and agency in the performance of improvised music. Here we expand the definition of
improvisation to refer to avant-‐garde noise experimentalists as well as jazz instrumentalists
from the African-‐American classical tradition. The act of creation no longer appears to emerge
from the mystical depths of the human subject isolate, but finds itself embedded in
relationships which require recourse to theories of hybrid agency: between the embodied
subject and the musical instrument; between the instrumentalist and a digital interface;
between embodied instrumentalists networked in aural proximity or, at a distance through
digital interfaces. Even the medium of notatable musical expression, shared by the range of
improvisers who are proprioceptively altered by the distinct agency of their instruments,
requires a more nuanced view: current neuroscience experiments have found that some of the
neuronal regions that processes harmony, melody and rhythm are shared by those in the
67

cognition of language, yet, significant differences between linguistic and musical cognition
exist. Furthermore, even avant-‐garde or “free” jazz seems initially to have boundaries guided by
rules laid down by those features of the musical system that may behave like a “language
game.”

Postgraduate Panels (4)
• Amélie Berger Soraruff (University of Dundee, UK)
• Tomas Čiučelis (University of Dundee, UK)
• Alişan Genç (Middle East Technical University, Turkey)
• Iraklis Ioannidis (University of Glasgow, UK)
• Fikret Kurt (Middle East Technical University, Turkey)
• Davide Monaco (University of Aberdeen, UK)
• Fintan Neylan (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada)
• Max Schaefer (University of Limerick, Ireland)
• Christopher Thomas (University of Aberdeen, UK)
• Marc Wilcox (University of Leeds, UK)
• Stephen Whitehead (University of Dundee, UK)

These panels are intended to provide an intimate and tailored environment for postgraduates
to engage in critical discussion on their research. The organising committee would like to thank
the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities for essential funding and Dr. Beth
Lord and Prof. Mike Wheeler for their help in organising these panels.

—END—
68

2015 Sep Abstracts Final

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2015 Sep Abstracts Final

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2015

SEP-­‐FEP Joint Annual Conference

(1) colourless green ideas sleep furiously

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SEP-‐FEP Joint Annual Conference