Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date: 12 January 2011
Flett Lecture Theatre
Natural History Museum
London

Dark Materialism

Jean-Jacques Lecercle – Dark Epiphanies

Jean-Jacques Lecercle is Emeritus Professor of English at the Universityof Paris, Nanterre. His work spans the fields of philosophy of language,literary theory, English literature (especially Victorian literature). His most recent book is entitled Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh,2010) and other publications include A Marxist Philosophy of Language (Brill,2006), Deleuze and Language (Palgrave, 2002), Philosophy of Nonsense(Routledge, 1994), The Violence of Language (Routledge, 1990). He iscurrently writing a book on the theory of the fantastic.

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Event Date: 12 January 2011
Flett Lecture Theatre
Natural History Museum
London

Dark Materialism

Eugene Thacker -Divine Darkness

Abstract: This presentation will trace the motif of darkness from its use in mystical literature to contemporary extremophile science. It is an enigmatic and yet omni-present concept stretching back through John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, to Dionysius the Areopagite, who talks about ‘divine darkness’ as a way of thinking about the unhuman. Our takeoff point, however, comes from Georges Bataille’s posthumous text ‘Theory of Religion,’ and the way it thinks of darkness in terms of philosophical negation – not just a privative negation, but an absolute negation, one that, in order to be thought, requires the negation of philosophy itself. This idea leads Bataille to understand mysticism (and in particular darkness mysticism) as the privileged mode of non-philosophy.

Eugene Thacker is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the New School, New York. His work ranges from contemporary media and biopolitics, theory, philosophy, and net art to medieval mysticism. His new book, After Life has recently been published (Chicago, 2010) and will be followed by Horror of Philosophy. Previous books include Biomedia (Minnesota, 2004) and the co-authored The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota 2007).

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Event Date: 12 January 2011
Flett Lecture Theatre
Natural History Museum
London

Dark Materialism

Gabriel Catren – The Thing and the Shrink

Abstract: This presentation is situated at the intersection of “object-oriented philosophy”, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and topology. At its core is an analysis of the ontological scope of some fundamental notions of contemporary mathematics, notably the topological notions of boundary and hole, and the role they play in the constitution of objectivity. Philosophically, the aim is to unpack Heidegger’s statement that “the Things’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.” The structural stability of a “thing” depends on the fact that it encloses a void. In another register, the “outside” – far from only defining the environment where the thing is located –dwells within the thing, defining what we could call an exteriorized intimacy, i.e. an “extimity” (Lacan).

Gabriel Catren holds a PhD in Physics (University of Buenos Aires) and PhD in Philosophy (University of Paris). He is Researcher of the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (Ecole Polytechnique/CNRS, Paris) and Director of the of the research program Savoir et Système at the Collège International de Philosophie. His ground-breaking research as a physicist examines general relativity and Yang-Mills and interrogates the philosophical foundations of gauge theories and quantum mechanics. He has written many influential papers for scientific audiences and for philosophers.

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Event Date: 12 January 2011
Flett Lecture Theatre
Natural History Museum
London

Dark Materialism

Dorothée Legrand – Constitutive Self-Negation

Abstract: Phenomenology has insistently contributed to the understanding of the irreducibility of two bodily dimensions: the body-as-subject anchoring one’s first-person perspective, carrying out one’s projects and the body-as-object constrained by its immersion in the material world, scrutinized by others. This presentation will unfold the idea that both these bodily dimensions participate equi-primordially to the constitution of one’s being. This may be shown by considering atypical experiences and practices of bodily self-transformation which may first appear as attempted self-eradication, but which may rather involve a form of constitutive self-negation. Following Reza Negarestani who characterizes decay as a “building process toward exteriority”, a radical subtraction from one’s body of the inert elements common to one’s body-as-object (life) and one’s corpse (death) will here be conceptualized as involving two contemporaneous processes: shedding one’s thing-hood and exposing one’s no-thingness. The former attests to the irreducibility of one’s body-as-subject and one’s body-as-object; the latter attests to their ineradicable intermeshing.

Dorothée Legrand is a researcher at CREA: Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (CNRS, Ecole polytechnique, Paris). She has a specialism in psychology and cognitive sciences and holds a Ph.D in philosophy. Her current research focuses on the notion of selfhood and subjectivity from the lens of (a)typical practices of bodily self- transformation in their relation to anchoring the ‘self’ to matter and others. Legrand’s research is at the intersection of phenomenology, cognitive (neuro)sciences and psychiatry/psychoanalysis. She is currently writing a monograph on anorexia.

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