Dans ces « Prolégomènes à une philosophie des catastrophes », on avance qu'une réflexion philosophique sur ces phénomènes doit s’obliger à travailler dans une extension maximum (en abordant la question du point de vue métaphysique, ontologique, épistémologique, esthétique, éthique et politique) et en explorant toutes les ressources que nous offre la pensée comme outil cognitif (décrire, comprendre, expliquer), émotionnel (sentir et ressentir, éprouver), prédictif (prévoir, imaginer) et normatif (juger, décider). Penser les catastrophes au pluriel, c’est aussi se rendre compte qu’historiquement, (...) le monde n’en finit pas de finir dans l’esprit des hommes et que cette possibilité de la fin a suscité en eux des réflexions d’une grande variété (de l’effroi le plus glaçant à l’enthousiasme le plus ardent) qui valent la peine d’être analysées chacune pour elle-même. (shrink)

In his work titled ‘Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca’, Wassily Kandisky translates two postures of the German Expressionist choreographer Gret Palucca from photographs into line drawings. The drawings are a study, but they are neither pictorial, nor straightforwardly representational. Staging an encounter between Dance Curves and Hannah Arendt’s investigation into thinking as both an interrupted and interruptive activity, this essay argues for a poetics of appearance as it is constituted by nonconforming acts of critique. Negotiating conflicts that shape (...) a politics of recognition for criticism which deliberately or implicitly refutes utility, I articulate a process of appearance of meaning with differential relation to modernist concerns for interpretation, dissenting from rationalist and objectivist traditions that have dominated theatre and performance criticism since the Enlightenment. What happens when I disavow the drawings from the images, remove them from the source? Perhaps in such a place, we might find critique as a process of deliberately mishandled translation, as an occupation of an idea shifted elsewhere, as a displacement of meaning. Appearance shapes itself around slippages of attention that depart from the work of performance. In this essay, I turn to how these slippages fold outwards from the encounter, to the political nexus between performance and its world. In Arendt, I locate a means through which forms of thinking rendered as criticism constitute a resistant poetics to normative modes of paying attention, operating beyond what Bojana Kunst calls ‘the ready-made possibilities of discourse’ under neoliberalism, that is, the ‘pre-established models of criticality and reflexivity’ to which art and artistic subjectivity often partake. (shrink)

This critical cartography surveys seven moments in critical practice/art pedagogy, which oscillate around the moment of 1968 and diffract the contemporary possibility of art education, which we associate with Halberstam’s notions of evacuation and wildness. Engaging with recent pedagogies of individual and collective self-experimentation this paper reads across Deleuzguattarian schizoanalysis and Baradian intra-action to propose an undercommons concerned with racial justice operating beyond the Neo-Liberal University in tandem everyday practices and addresses the work of Black Lives Matter Bristol, Audre Lorde, (...) Mohamed Melehi, Benjamin Patterson, and Howardena Pindell as indicative of such a pedagogy-to-come. (shrink)

This paper looks at the theoretical practice of “critique” in the work of Michel Serres and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, focusing especially on the notion of parasitism and femininity. The co-reading shines a light on the crossings of their approaches, like a critique of “laboratory” - like conditions and a masculinist understanding of rationalism. Furthermore, it brings attention to some productive divergences. With Tsing’s approach, this paper reflects critically on Serres’s understanding of femininity and extents his philosophical elaboration of parasites and (...) fungi with a feminist, ecological and anthropological perspective. Serres, on the other hand, contributes with his multi-faceted figure of the “third” crucially to structural reflections on the relation between fungi and femininity, as well as to an understanding of “critique” from the “middle”, beyond the “battle of the two”. (shrink)

This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of (...) dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts. (shrink)

In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an (...) event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living. (shrink)

Safe-by-Design (SBD) frameworks for the development of emerging technologies have become an ever more popular means by which scholars argue that transformative emerging technologies can safely incorporate human values. One such popular SBD methodology is called Value Sensitive Design (VSD). A central tenet of this design methodology is to investigate stakeholder values and design those values into technologies during early stage research and development (R&D). To accomplish this, the VSD framework mandates that designers consult the philosophical and ethical literature to (...) best determine how to weigh moral trade-offs. However, the VSD framework also concedes the universalism of moral values, particularly the values of freedom, autonomy, equality trust and privacy justice. This paper argues that the VSD methodology, particularly applied to nano-bio-info-cogno (NBIC) technologies, has an insufficient grounding for the determination of moral values. As such, an exploration of the value-investigations of VSD are deconstructed to illustrate both its strengths and weaknesses. This paper also provides possible modalities for the strengthening of the VSD methodology, particularly through the application of moral imagination and how moral imagination exceed the boundaries of moral intuitions in the development of novel technologies. (shrink)

Is it possible to respond to the challenge of a philosopher with artistic means, rather than on the one hand by attempting to philosophize, or on the other hand by resorting to illustration or application? Perhaps it is not. This text is nevertheless an attempt at responding to the challenge posed to artists by Michael Marder who, in volume 1 of this journal, challenged philosophers and artists ‘to include the spatiality, movement, and perspective of the vegetal in their work’. The (...) artistic research project ‘Performing with plants’ could be understood as a response to this challenge. In this text I will briefly outline the plan for the project, relate it to the current interest in plant thinking, plant theory and new materialist feminist theory and then focus on some works loosely related to the project, which seem to resonate with Marder’s challenge in some sense. The variations of Resting with Pines performed in September 2017 in Nida Art Colony on the Curonian spit in Lithuania will serve as attempts to include and even emulate the vegetal, and as an example of a characteristic common to many performance practices, namely the tendency to go on, to ‘keep growing’. (shrink)

The conversation presents Prof. Em. Nina Lykke's contributions to feminist technoscience studies as well as entrance points to feminist epistemologies and methodologies.

This research project aims to accomplish two primary objectives: (1) propose an argument that a posthuman ethics in the design of technologies is sound and thus warranted and, (2) how can existent SBD approaches begin to envision principled and methodological ways of incorporating nonhuman values into design. In order to do this this MRP will provide a rudimentary outline of what constitutes SBD approaches. A particular design approach - Value Sensitive Design (VSD) - is taken up as an illustrative example (...) given that it, among the other SBD frameworks, most clearly illustrates a principled approach to the integration of values in design. -/- This explication will be followed by the strongest arguments for a posthumanist ethic, primarily drawing from the works of the Italian philosophers Leonardo Caffo and Roberto Marchesini and Francesa Ferrando. In doing so I will show how the human imperative to account for nonhuman values is a duty and as such must be continually ready-to-hand when making value-critical decision. (shrink)

The question of how the university can relate to the world is centuries old. The poles of the debate can be characterized by the plea for an increasing instrumentalization of the university as a producer and provider of useful knowledge on the one hand (cf. the knowledge factory), and the defense of the university as an autonomous space for free inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake on the other hand (cf. the ivory tower). Our current global predicament, (...) however, forces us to rethink the relation between university and world. Indeed, an easy nstrumentalization of the university for the purposes of society is no longer possible in troubled times when the future of society itself seems to be at stake. Nevertheless, urgent societal concerns do need to be addressed by the university. Hence, the disinterested position seems a highly irresponsible option. The aim of this dissertation is to reconsider the relation between the university and the world from an educational perspective by addressing the question “How to situate study in the relation between university and society?” The dissertation consists of three parts. In Part One, the existing literature on the relation between university and society will be discussed. The first chapter discerns two main approaches to this issue, namely the transcendental-philosophical approach (cf. the idea of the university) and the critical-sociological approach (cf. academic capitalism) that conceive of the university, respectively, as an idea and as an organization. By means of an excursus on the emergence of the university in the Middle Ages, the case is made for an ecological approach to the university. In the second chapter, the work of two authors who have recently adopted such an ecological approach is briefly presented. Whereas Ronald Barnett’s theory of the ecological university is situated more in the transcendental-philosophical tradition, Susan Wright’s investigations of the university in the knowledge ecology can be placed in the critical-sociological tradition. Both conceptions, however, are hinged on an institutional understanding of the university. In line with recent developments in social theory, namely the focus on practices, it is proposed to work towards an ecology of study practices. Part Two presents Isabelle Stengers’ idea of the ecology of practices. The third chapter elucidates Stengers’ work on scientific practices by first situating it within the so-called Science Wars, which provided the impetus to elaborate a theoretical framework for a civilized dialogue between scientists and the broader public. The basic tenets and concepts of her approach, such as the understanding of practice as a set of requirements and obligations, are presented, explained, and discussed. In the fourth chapter, the focus shifts from scientific practices to study practices. Assisted by Stengers’ writings on Whitehead’s speculative philosophy, this chapter aims to flesh out Whitehead’s description of the university as a ‘home of adventures’ in order to come to an educational understanding of the study practices of the university. A conceptual inquiry into how study practices activate certain worldly problems and turn them into matters of study is presented. Part Three develops the conceptual work on study practices further in relation to the activities of the Palestinian experimental university Campus in Camps. Chapter Five presents the work of Campus in Camps and explains how it relates to the theoretical discussion offered in the second part. On the basis of Stengers’ conception of practice, which discerns requirements and obligations as vital ingredients, this chapter argues that life in exile is what drives the study practices of Campus in Camps, and hence, that it is the issue of life in exile that participants are obligated to when they study. Whereas Chapter Five is focused on what is being studied in Campus in Camps, Chapter Six inquires in to the specific requirements its activities need to fulfill in order to be study practices; in other words, how the participants study. Four requirements are discerned that, taken together, seem indispensable to understand the study practices of Campus in Camps; namely, storytelling, comparing, mapmaking, and using. The concluding chapter returns to the research question and again takes up the main ideas developed in the dissertation, such as the adventure of study and the cohabitation of scientific and study practices in the university. The last two sections of the conclusion deal with two remaining issues of a more practical nature; namely, how to relate to institutionalization when working from a practice-theoretical point of view, and lastly the question of what can be done. In all, and returning to the initial problem, the dissertation asks what it means to conceive of the university as situated by and engaged with worldly questions. (shrink)

Modernism has provided a strong case for technoprogressivism, innovation and speculation on future possibilities. However, drastic and often devastating consequences have followed modernism such as global warming and mass biodiversity loss. In Leonardo Caffo and Azzurra Muzzonigro’s new book, a case for posthumanism as a means for envisioning and rethinking futures studies is argued and practical means by which those futures can be realized are outlined.

This paper addresses a potentially major shift in environmental and landscape aesthetics, which reassesses the traditional view on landscape in light of the idea of global environment. Landscaping is thus rethought as a mode of creatively being on Earth. For this purpose, the paper begins by providing a definition of Earth as a completely semiotized and therefore “plastic” space which is continuously re-shaped by traces, semantic processes and human practices. Earth-shaping practices are then investigated as gestures of poetic overwriting, capable (...) of inhabiting interconnected non-equilibrium landscapes. The paper concludes by examining the case-study of DOM-, an artistic collective that performs ways of dwelling in damaged territories and exploited environments. (shrink)

Queer Death Studies (QDS) refers to an emerging transdisciplinary field of research that critically and (self) reflexively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by death, dying, and mourning. Since its establishment as a research field in the 1970s, Death Studies has drawn attention to the questions of death, dying, and mourning as complex and multifaceted phenomena that require inter- or multi-disciplinary approaches and perspectives. Yet, the engagements with (...) death, dying and mourning, constitutive of conventional Death Studies’ investigations, tend to remain insufficient and reductive. They are often governed by the normative notions of: the subject; bonds between humans, as well as between humans and (their) animals; family relations and communities; rituals; and finally, experiences of grief, mourning, and bereavement. Moreover, these engagements are frequently embedded in constraining beliefs in life/death divides, constructed along the lines of conventional religious and/or scientific mind/body dualisms, characteristic of the Western cultural imaginaries. Against this background, QDS offers a site for ‘queering’ traditional ways of approaching death both as a subject of study and philosophical reflection, and as a phenomenon to articulate in artistic work or practices of mourning. Here, the notion of ‘queer’ conveys many meanings. It refers to researching and narrating death, dying, and mourning in the context of queer bonds and communities, where the subjects involved/studied/interviewed and the relations they are involved in are recognised as ‘queer’. Simultaneously, the term ‘queer’ can also function as an adverb and a verb, referring thus to the processes of going beyond and unsettling (subverting, exceeding) binaries and given norms, normativities, and constraining conventions. In other words, ‘queer’ becomes both a process and a methodology that is applicable and exceeds the focus on gender and sexuality as its exclusive concerns. (shrink)

Nous vivons une crise écologique qui semble être provoquée par l’humain. Elle est la conséquence de la modernité, fondée sur la prééminence d’une humanité rationnelle en opposition à une nature qui serait extérieure à celle-ci. Pour se sortir de ladite crise, le discours sur l’anthropocène propose deux solutions : d’un côté, un techno-optimisme qui propose d’investir davantage dans les sciences et les technologies ; de l’autre, un cynisme éco-apocalyptique qui n’incite pas à l’action, mais paralyse l’être humain. Ces solutions perpétuent (...) l’opposition entre nature et culture qui est à l’origine de la crise. Le présent article décrit une nouvelle ontologie posthumaniste et néomatérialiste qui permet de concevoir des alternatives en soulignant l’interdépendance entre nature et culture. Haraway propose le Chthulucène pour remplacer l’anthropocène : l’opposition entre nature et culture sera effacée et la (sur)vie humaine et non humaine deviendra possible. (shrink)