Speakers include artists, theoreticians etc. such as Rem Koolhaas, Lorraine Daston and John Law.

More on the event here.

‘That said, Less Than Nothing is carefully, if some­what gauchely structured, as the story of a seduction. It begins with ‘The Drink Before’ (Part I): some emblematic, fast-forward philosophical prehistory -Plato, Christianity, Fichte. It progresses to ‘The Thing Itself, in two parts: Hegel and Lacan. And it ends with ‘The Cigarette After’ (Part IV), during which smoke is puffed in the faces of some competing philosophical positions: Badiou, Heidegger and ‘The Ontology of Quantum Physics”.

‘The Conclusion – presumably ‘A Quick Exit’, before things get complicated – is a restatement of Žižek’s own version of Lacanian politics (‘The Political Suspension of the Ethical’) with various other bits and pieces thrown in along the way’.

Reblogged from ANTHEM:

In 2005, in the book and the exhibition Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (see here), Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel asked themselves how democratic politics could function better and what the role of things, objects, issues and art might be within that.  Open24 investigates the current state of affairs in the theory and practice of the ‘Politics of Things’. What does a thing like ‘art’ do in democracy, how does art make publics, how does a thing interact with other things and people, and how does it influence them?

Misses this one…Click here for more info and to read the book online!

“This book is the first monograph on the theme of “new materialism,” an emerging trend in 21st century thought that has already left its mark in such fields as philosophy, cultural theory, feminism, science studies, and the arts. The first part of the book contains elaborate interviews with some of the most prominent new materialist scholars of today: Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux. The second part situates the new materialist tradition in contemporary thought by singling out its transversal methodology, its position on sexual differing, and by developing the ethical and political consequences of new materialism.

“With the possible [..] there is the greatest difficulty in understanding its being, for it is given as prior to the being of which it is the pure possibility; and yet qua possible, at least, it necessarily must have being. [..] Since Leibniz the term “possible” is usually applied to an event which it is not engaged in an existing causal series such that the event can be surely determined and which involves no contradiction either with itself or with the system under consideration. Thus defined the possible is possible only with regard to knowledge since we are not in a position either to affirm or to deny the possible confronted. Hence we may take two attitudes in the face of the possible: We can consider, as Spinoza did, that possibilities exist only in connection with our ignorance and that they disappear when our ignorance disappears. In this case the possible is only a subjective state on the road to perfect knowledge; it has only the reality of a psychic mode; as confused or curtailed thought it has a concrete being but not as a property of the world. But it is also permissible, as Leibniz does, to make of the infinity of the possibles objects of thought for the divine understanding and so confer on them a mode of absolute reality [..] This [e.g.] means only that there exists by virtue of the thought of the divine understanding another system of co-possibles such that Adam figures there as having not eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. But is this conception so different from that of Spinoza? Actually the reality of the possible is uniquely that of the divine thought! This means that it has being as thought which has not been realized. [..] [Now] to give possibles a tendency toward being means either that the possible is already in full being and that it has the same type of being [..] or else that the possible in the bosom of the divine understanding is already an idea-force and that the maximum of idea-forces organized in a system automatically releases the divine will. But in the latter case we do not get out of the subjective. If then we define possible as non-contradictory, it can have being only as the thought of a being prior to the real world or prior to the pure consciousness of the world such as it is. In either case the possible loses its nature as possible and is reabsorbed in the subjective being of representation. But this represented-being of the possible can not account for its nature; on the contrary it destroys its nature [..] To comprehend possibility qua possibility or to be its own possible is one and the same necessity for the being such that in its being, its being is in question. But to be its own possibility – that is, to be defined by it – is precisely to be defined by that part of itself which it is not, is to be defined as an escape-from-itself towards -. (p. 96-97).

It is well worth mentioning the journal in which this article has appeared. Continent is a new (?) on-line, open source and peer-reviewed journal publishing scholarly articles, poetry, fiction, sound etc. You can login and register as either a reader, author and/or reviewer here.

See here. 

Now, Barad’s contribution consists of nuancing this somewhat unfortunate way of expressing the particular importance of quantum theory for a speculative philosophy of mattering. In a passage vaguely reminiscent of a Spinozian method of definition she states that ‘(in)determinacy is only ever partially resolved in the materialization of specific phenomena: determinacy, as materially enacted in the very constitution of a phenomenon, always entails constitutive exclusion’ (p. 7); this materialization by means of excluding-enactment is related to measurements which are ‘agential practices, which are not simply revelatory but performative: they help constitute part of what is being measured [..]  [they] are world-making’.

The attempt to use contemporary science for philosophical means is, obviously, not new. It is, nevertheless, interesting to see that the way in which this is and can be done (consider, for instance, the difference between using quantum theory (indeterminacy, contingency etc.) and biology (emergence, novelty, autopoietic systems etc.)) is also played out at the level of the similarities and differences between OOO and SR. Barad’s essay (and work in general) could contribute to further developing these positions.

+ Translations of several recent online seminars by Bernard Stiegler – e.g. on individuation and neuropolitics – can be found here and here (via Agent Swarm).