This paper examines Jacques Derrida's analysis of Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ in the context of their respective theories of the university. Whereas Derrida foregrounds the complex ways that the university and law are intertwined, Benjamin claims that the ‘educative power’ stands removed from the law by identifying the university with ‘divine violence’. ‘Force of Law’ not only questions the possibility of a neutral, pre-legal space that Benjamin's theory warrants, ‘Force of Law’ also draws attention to the laws structuring the (...) colloquia that gave rise to Derrida's text. This paper claims that Derrida's analysis of justice, law, violence, and justesse is thus informed by a theory of the university, and that the ways in which Derrida's theory of law stands opposed to Benjamin's parallels the ways in which Derrida's theory of the university questions Benjamin's understanding of the ‘educative power’. This paper concludes by drawing attention to the demand posed by the absence of justice in the academy. Although the laws of the academy produce justesse in the present, this negatively affirms justice in the future, which cannot wait. (shrink)

The interest of this paper is to discover the precondition of experience. It is suggested that Walter Benjamin's meditations on Proust, as well as on the origin of the novel, lead to the verge of that discovery. A la recherche du temps perdu is less a monumental work of fiction in this view than the limit of experience – the intransmissible fact of the transience of the present – made manifest in writing. While in Proust transience gives way to its (...) recuperation as image, Thomas Bernhard's post-Proustian masterpiece Extinction mobilizes the present's destructive potential with compelling effect, and turns it upon the work of historical experience itself. (shrink)

This dissertation is situated within the field of media studies, with a particular focus on the "materialities of communication." The concept of "materialities" is oriented to the underlying conditions that allow communication to take place: the places, carriers and modes of communication that serve to shape and even alter meaning. My dissertation asks how this "material turn" can usefully be applied to and help develop the study of theatre.

Our actions, even the quietest, are liable to become occasions for inculpation. But what kind of action would remain immune to the act of judgement? Such an action is made manifest in Michelangelo’s Moses. Freud’s cinematic reading of the sculpture yields a concern with what Moses does not do. Neither the origin nor the outcome of an action proves decisive but rather “the remains of a movement that has already taken place.” Such a remainder troubles the ascription of agency to (...) action by undermining the fantasy of homogenous time which underlies it. Continuity is revealed as the semblance of an imperceptible series of temporal omissions. The paper aims not only to bring to light the radical potential harboured in Freud’s approach to the Moses but to account for the reason he arrests its appearance. (shrink)

The starting point of this essay is that there is a contradiction at the heart of our current and hyperbolic understandings of life. To be more precise, on the one hand there is the historical novelty of biology as a modern science and set of technologies. On the other hand, life is simultaneously understood according to biological protocols that seem void of history.

Principles of design composition are commonly understood to pertain to geometrical systems for arranging parts in assembling a formal whole. Connection to socio-cultural 'meaning' and relevance arguably occurs primarily via the assumed divinity or universality of these systems. In the contemporary architectural world, where explicitly held beliefs in fundamental, geometrically defined principles or values have dissipated, guiding principles of composition appear to be obsolete. This seems particularly true in relation to work that highlights process - or change, responsiveness, interactivity and (...) adaptability - since this implies that the composition remains in flux and unable to be grounded in the composition of form. While processually inflected architecture (referred to here as 'processual architecture'), has been an active field since at least the 1960s, it has been significa ntly developed since design experiments involving digital computation intensified in the 1990s. For this field of work, both highly celebrated and criticised as superficial or unethical, any connection to 'meaning' or value that might be offered by principles of composition would appear especially lost. This thesis reviews, counterpoises and reorients these assumptions, arguing a case for the value of processual architectural that has not been previously articulated. After the last 10 to 15 years of digital experimentation, it is clear that digital technology in itself is not the primary issue, but simply part of a complex equation. The thesis articulates this 'equation' through the model of emergence, which has been used in the field with increasing prominence in recent years. Through both practice-based research and theoretical development, a processually inflected theory of composition is proposed. This offers pathways through which the potential of processual architecture might be productively developed, aiming to open this field of work into a deeper engagement with pressing contemporary socio-political issues. The thesis demonstrates how the cultivation of particular modes of attention and engagement, found to hold an implicit but nevertheless amplified significance within processual architecture, make it possible to develop an embodied awareness pertaining to an 'ethico-aesthetic know-how'. This know-how is acquired and matured through attention to the affective dimensions that arise through design activity. The thesis highlight aspects of design process and products that are routinely suppressed in architectural discourse, generating new insights into the importance of affect for design process, design products and the relations between them. The ethical dimensions of such an approach become especially poignant through the explicit connection made between design activity and the practices of everyday life. Relationships between architecture and the social become re-energised, in a radically alternative manner to the social agendas of modernism or the more literary critiques of post-modernism. Through detailed discussions of the specific, local conditions with a series of design projects I have undertaken, I argue how and why close attention to the affective dimensions of design process offers new and productive ways to approach research through design practice. This offers a response to the calls for new 'post-critical' forms of research through empowering both sides of a previously held divide: theory and practice. (shrink)

In his posthumously published Broken Hegemonies, Reiner Schürmann shows how the ‘tragic denial’ of the differend – between the universal and the singular, natality and mortality, institution and destitution – gives rise to hegemonies. When ‘the sovereign fantasm’ that grounds and anchors the hegemony expires, the hegemony gets withered away. Taking Schürmann’s insights as point of departure, this paper attempts to think of singularisation to come in messianic sense, as truly anarchic thought worthy of our time, that is, to think (...) without hegemonies. Such a messianic/eschatological tragic-anarchic thought can’t be understood as the dialectical operation of the universal’s antagonism to the particular. Beyond the dialectical opposition of the universal and the particular, differend of the singularisation to come can only be understood as the unheard of an-arché, that is, living without ‘why’. (shrink)

This article reflects on the nuances and insinuations of a conceptualisation of “lament” as an inability to appropriate any object, or to turn the lost object into a fetish. While mourning, melancholia, and fetishism ultimately remain entangled with the ego (i.e., within a narcissistic configuration), lament goes beyond that, hinting at a loss of ego, a disintegration of the autonomous self. As a sonic expression of the failure of language, lament is a manifestation of the negativity or void at the (...) core of language. However, in lament this negativity is radicalised. This extreme obstruction, which impedes all connection, imparts to lament abstractive powers, ultimately qualifying lament as a political force. The last part of the article argues that the social imaginary of Iran, steeped in numerous failed attempts to rise above domination and subjection (as evident in myriad revolts and two revolutions in the twentieth century), could serve as promising material for the concretisation of such a theory of lament. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Pandemics and plagues function rhetorically, by doing violence to the structures of discourse, sociality, hospitality, and mutual engagement that characterize ethical human interaction. They infect us, as rhetorical subjects, and reorient our capacity for engagement. The coronavirus's “novelty” renders it uncertain as to how long it will last or who will be infected next; the near-uniform response to it has been a forced distance of ourselves from others and a displacement from our itineraries and our locations. Through COVID-19 we (...) are learning that pandemic does violence to our sense of place, to how we think of respite, and has highlighted our sense of vulnerability in the midst of others. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to begin to think through the complex interlacing of Levinasian ethics, violence, terror and war. The question driving this essay is: in the midst of the harrowing debris of body parts that followed the synchronised explosions of bombs in a number of London train carriages and a bus, what can possibly remain of the ethical? This question will be examined in the context of what remains unspeakable in the face of such acts of violence. Framed (...) by the authorising rubric of declarations of law—as ‘that which speaks in the language of legislation and promises certainty in the anxious aftermath of the loss of certainty’, and the attendant concerns with the question of the ‘enemy’ —this essay seeks to examine the ‘unspeakable remainder’ of declarations of law, as that which unsettles promises of certainty in the anxious aftermath of a terrorist explosion and its ongoing trauma. In the course of this essay, I proceed to think through the contentious relation between violence and ethics in the context of a Levinasian framework, arguing for a Levinas that challenges and unsettles pietistic views of his ethical philosophy. In deploying the neologism necroethics, I attempt to examine anachronic and necrological violence and its relation to the ethical injunction to own responsibility for the dead. (shrink)

This thesis examines how designs based on a conjunction between craft and digital techniques may offer new possibilities for an architect or designer in contemporary practice. How is it relevant that what initially appear to be two distinct approaches to designing and making can be introduced to each other and coalesce to form a constructive attitude of mutually borrowed logic? The thesis champions the crafting of innovative design and the incorporation of digitally derived procedures that allow for globally efficient dissemination (...) and malleability. Such procedures have occupied the practice of architecture and design for some time, giving rise to the current sobriquet of a 'post-digital age'. I propose that at this point in time we can usefully speculate on the relationship between physical making and computer-based production. Too often the stylistic overtures popularly attached to the terms 'digital' and 'craft' narrow our perception of what each term may encompass and how they are likely to manifest. Traditionally, digitally derived design practice is attributed the efficiency of a mathematically precise mode of operation - an oscillation between zeroes and ones that produces a universal logic of smoothly rendered forms. By contrast, 'craft' is often cast into the realm of amateurish making, complete with mistakes, dropped stitches, fingerprints or other traces of human fault that are understood as being charming in the context of handmade human endeavour yet fall short when measured against 'serious' artistic categories that include architecture, design and fine art. This thesis seeks to move beyond such accepted and somewhat polarised positions. First, the thesis offers clearer and more dynamic definitions of the terms 'craft' and 'digital', seeking the ability for each to hold fast to the inherent merits of their particular logic while also finding productive opportunities to integrate with each other. Second, the thesis examines how crafted production can combine with digital tools to offer a useful direction for contemporary design practice. Case studies of contemporary architects' and designers' works are drawn on to illustrate and make observations on the different relationships that the selected practitioners have discovered in their projects, all of which conjoin the conception and manifestation of digital craft. The case studies vary in scale from fabric and furniture production to large-scale installations of significant spatial effect, to entire architectural projects. The range is useful in discussing how the concept of digital craft in architecture can be re ad from various perspectives. This reflects the numerous ways in which digitally created design is used to realise crafted results and is mindful of the fact that architectural processes often follow technological innovation first practiced at more intimate scales such as in industrial design. It is also interesting to compare the idea of the more intimately scaled relationship that craft has traditionally held with architectural practice. Finally, the thesis will speculate upon future developments for the conjunction of digital craft in architecture and design, and will pose several questions for further discussion. (shrink)

In this article I investigate the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of our contemporaneity, from the perspective of works by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres. While we often find that academia, society and governments push us towards interdisciplinarity, it is also true that those same institutions and powers, distance us from that purpose. Opposing this aporetic situation we come up against the Deleuzian concept of ‘contamination’, or the well-known ‘science of Venus’ concept of Michel Serres. In doing so, (...) we attempt ‘to put the tracing back on the map’, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, and try to see the epistemological becomings that we find in contemporary culture. The main indicators which we use to study these contaminations and hybridisations are cinema and Bio Art. In both cases we observe that the real creative production is closer to ‘contamination’ than to the ‘purification’ and deletion of metabolic and hybrid processes criticised by Bruno Latour. (shrink)

This paper proposes that Dickens’s Bleak House is symptomatic of a so-called social realm, in which neither oikos nor polis exists as a distinct, autonomous entity; therefore, neither can offer sanctuary or adequately discharge the historical role of the household – maintaining life. In this zone of indistinction, the symbolic structures of London’s law have become the city’s physical structures, leading to symptoms like Jo the outlaw, whose illness and death is attributed to the failure of both the polis and (...) the oikos – the city’s legal housekeeping and the law-as-house, respectively – to maintain life. London’s law has become so immanent that it takes on the role of religion, thus precluding God’s transcendence. Ultimately, the novel recoils from London’s threatening presence and attempts to inter the nineteenth-century anxieties associated with the city – anxieties centering around the law both as structure and religion – through redemptive repetition: Bleak House attempts to wrest the oikos from the clutches of the polis. But despite the novel’s efforts, as the divisions between oikos and polis collapse, it is ultimately impossible for either sphere to retain any semblance of itself. As a result, retreat from the polis to the oikos is impossible: there are no longer well-defined domains – of oikos or polis – into which to retreat in the growing indistinction of the social realm. (shrink)