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

Dark Materialism

This symposium draws on recent paradigms in contemporary philosophy, physics and critical theory. It assembles unique and multidisciplinary reflections on the idea of darkness in its relation to matter in diverse locations, namely: physics, astronomy, ecology, mysticism, speculative realism, psychoanalysis and literature. As a conceptual framework, dark materialism engages with matter at the thresholds of its annihilation and disappearance beyond the topographies of ‘base materialism’ and at the very edges of forms of thought where the objects, things, Things and no-things on which it depended exert their independence. Darkness, in matter, energy, ecology and life itself, in black holes in the universe and in the mind, emerges as baseless and founding, exterior and interior at once. It leaves thought in the void, enabling disruptions and speculative realignments of diverse concepts and the real itself, reshaping not only the world of ideas but also the very order of things.

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Fred Botting – Introduction .

Dorothée Legrand – Constitutive Self-Negation (AUDIO HERE)

Gabriel Catren – The Thing and the Shrink (AUDIO HERE)

Eugene Thacker -Divine Darkness (AUDIO HERE)

Jean-Jacques Lecercle  - Dark Epiphanies (AUDIO HERE)

Reza Negarestani – A veritable earth? An Afterthought in Territopic Materialism
UNAVAILABLE

Roundtable Discussion .
Chair: Stella Sandford
Ben Woodward – With a response to Reza Negarestani’s paper

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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