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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

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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