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Dante’s Queer Fathers
No full textIn 700 years of intense commentary, readers of the Comedy—at least professional readers—have almost entirely managed to avoid a crucial inquiry: what did Dante know about classical pederasty? What did he think of it? And most poignantly, did he think about Virgil in this context? After all, we have in the Comedy a classic pedagogy narrative. A younger man in desperate need of a guide encounters a much-admired elder, who takes him under his wing for mentoring instruction. That the magister in this case happens to be Virgil is no small matter. Virgil had something of a reputation in antiquity as a lover of boys. His enthusiasm for male couples, human and divine, along with fawning admiration for beautiful, often wounded, young men, is apparent to attentive readers of the Eclogues and the Aeneid—a group that must surely include Dante. Cestaro argues that Dante is not only aware of, but is subtly and strategically engaged with, his admired master’s personal proclivities and from the very opening lines of the Comedy. The talk may begin with some broad historical and theoretical considerations around intergenerational male-male desire with help from Freud and post-Freudian queer theory and will then focus attention on the remarkable presence of Virgil’s warrior-lovers Nisus and Euryalus in Inferno 1.Gary Cestaro is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and the LGBTQ Studies Program at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author of Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (2003) and editor of the collection Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film (2004). Most recently, he has contributed an essay entitled ‘Queering Dante’ to the Oxford Handbook of Dante. A member of the editorial board for the journal Dante Studies, he is currently at work on a book called Dante’s Queer Fathers
Why the Need for a Philosophical Exploration of Anarchism Today?
No full textIn this talk, Catherine Malabou will elaborate on the current crisis of horizontality, which can be attributed to the flexible architecture of the Internet and the factual anarchism it makes possible. Is it possible to genuinely differentiate political anarchism from anarcho-capitalism? Malabou will show that a new philosophical elaboration of anarchy is needed to sustain such a differentiation, and the extent to which the concepts of anarchy provided by some of the most prominent thinkers of the twentieth century (Schürmann, Foucault, or Rancière) can help with yet are ultimately insufficient for this task. Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University (UK) and in the departments of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies at UC Irvine. Her last books include Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2016, trans. Carolyn Shread), Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artifial Brains (2019, trans. Carolyn Shread), and Le Plaisir effacé. Clitoris et pensée (2020).
Anarchē:Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of the Ground
No full textConfronted with an arguably incomplete critique of the notion and history of sovereignty, contemporary lines of thinking have forcefully returned to the inquiry into political foundations. These theoretical approaches in philosophy and the humanities at large have attempted to find possibilities of dialogue concerning the critique of sovereign structures of power, the undoing of systemic violence, as well as the development of ideas of community and mutual aid. The conference ‘Anarchē’ aims to investigate the contemporary philosophical attempts at questioning traditional concepts of political foundations in order to rethink the central notion of ground or archē
Making Contact with Deeper Times
No full textThe current moment is one perhaps especially transitional, a time that is causing re-modulations of life so as to become attuned to temporalities that exist beyond the human. There exist many nonhuman entities in the world whose existences make manifest these deeper times. Perhaps some of these beings may not be of this planet at all. This workshop will stage close encounters with some of these possibly alien, deeper time-beings that dwell among us as a way to think through questions of extraterrestrial and queer resilience. Working both indoors and outdoors gathering specimens, participants will examine collected samples with a portable microscope and think together about how to communicate with the samples collected — or their far-away relatives —through the epistolary form, letters. Participants’ collective letters may then exist as a form of delay-tolerant desire for contact with the alien whose time one cannot experience. By doing so, those in the workshop will have hopefully experienced the intertwining of deeper queer temporalities, a swerve away from the linearity and determinism of western, capitalist time. Adriana Knouf, PhD (US) works as an artist, writer, and xenologist. She engages with topics such as wet media, space art, satellites, radio transmission, non-human encounters, drone flight, queer and trans futurities, machine learning, the voice, and papermaking. She is the Founding Facilitator of the tranxxenolab, a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements among entities trans and xeno. Adriana regularly presents her artistic research around the world and beyond, including a work that has flown aboard the International Space Station. Pre-circulated reading for discussion: The Introduction to Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Earth: https://nebula.tranxxenolab.net/s/EscqJgLeXnHcLS
A Future Not/To Come:Queere Störungen reproduktiver Ordnungen
Get PDFDieser Text fragt anhand der Filme High Life (2018) und Border ( Gräns, 2018) nach queeren Momenten im Kino, die nicht als programmatische Setzungen, sondern als Verstörungen oder mindestens als Störungen und insbesondere als Störungen in/der Reproduktion, zum Erscheinen gebracht werden
Discriminating Data
No full textIn her book ‘Discriminating Data‘ (2021), Wendy Chun reveals how polarization is a goal — not an error — within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Hito Steyerl and Wendy Chun will discuss how can people release themselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data and consider alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute which was launched in 2019. She studied Systems Design Engineering and English Literature and is author of Control and Freedom (2006), Programmed Visions (2011), and Updating to Remain the Same (2016). Hito Steyerl works as a filmmaker, philosopher, and cultural critic. Her work takes the form of essays, lectures, installations, video, and photography. She is professor for experimental film and video and the co-founder of the Research Center for Proxy Politics at the Berlin University of the Arts
Materialism and Politics
No full textIs materialism still relevant to critically think politics? Throughout modernity, the concept of materialism was associated with fatalism and naturalism, when it was not simply dismissed as heresy and atheism. In the nineteenth century, materialism evolved into a central concept of progressive politics, reappearing again in the past decades through renewed Marxist and Spinoza-based approaches, New Materialism, and feminist discourses. This volume inquires these contrasting uses from theoretical and historical perspectives.AbbreviationsAcknowledgmentsFrom ‘Materialism’ towards ‘Materialities’ | THE EDITORS | 1-18I. THE ACTUALITY OF SPINOZA’S MATERIALISMIntroduction to Part i | STEFAN HAGEMANN | 21-23Materialist Variations on Spinoza: Theoretical Alliances and Political Strategies | MARIANA DE GAINZA | 25-37Non Defuit Materia: Freedom and Necessity in Spinoza’s Democratic Theory | STEFANO VISENTIN | 39-54Temporality and History in Spinoza: The Refusal of Teleological Thought | ERICKA MARIE ITOKAZU | 55-72Spinozist Moments in Deleuze: Materialism as Immanence | MAURICIO ROCHA | 73-90Are there One or Two Aleatory Materialisms? | VITTORIO MORFINO | 91-106II. THE MATERIALITY OF THE MILIEU AND THE MATERIALIST EDUCATIONIntroduction to Part ii | MARLENE KIENBERGER AND BRUNO PACE | 109-112Language Follows Labour: Nikolai Marr’s Materialist Palaeontology of Speech | ELENA VOGMAN | 113-132Materialism and Capitalism Today: Zoo-aesthetics and a Critique of the Social Bond after Marcel Mauss and André Leroi-Gourhan | CATHERINE PERRET | 133-144The Product of Circumstances: Towards a Materialist and Situated Pedagogy | MARLON MIGUEL | 145-162In the Labyrinth of Emancipation: An Inquiry into the Relationship between Knowledge and Politics | BERNARDO BIANCHI | 163-180A Materialist Education: Thinking with Spinoza | PASCAL SÉVÉRAC | 181-196III. CRITICAL MATERIALITIES IN FEMINISM AND NEW MATERIALISMIntroduction to Part iii | ALISON SPERLING | 199-202Materialism, Matter, Matrix, and Mater: Contesting Notions in Feminist and Gender Studies | CORNELIA MÖSER | 203-214Anarchafeminism & the Ontology of the Transindividual | CHIARA BOTTICI | 215-231Psychodynamism of Individuation and New Materialism: Possible Encounters | ÉMILIE FILION-DONATO | 233-252Emergence that Matters and Emergent Irrelevance: On the Political Use of Fundamental Physics | CHRISTOPH F. E. HOLZHEY | 253-268IV. TOWARDS A RENEWED HISTORICAL MATERIALISMIntroduction to Part iv | DANIEL LIU | 271-276Materialism against Materialism: Taking up Marx’s Break with Reductionism | FRIEDER OTTO WOLF | 277-292Materialism, Politics, and the History of Philosophy: French, German, and Turkish Materialist Authors in the Nineteenth Century | AYŞE YUVA | 293-312The Historicity of Materialism and the Critique of Politics | ALEX DEMIROVIĆ | 313-326On Populist Illusion: Impasses of Political Ontology, or How the Ordinary Matters | FACUNDO VEGA | 327-343Theory’s Method? Ethnography and Critical Theory | MARIANNA POYARES | 345-363ReferencesNotes on the ContributorsInde