All entries for Monday 15 May 2006

Professor Rosi Braidotti Talk Thursday 25th May

Professor Rosi Braidotti from the University of Utrecht will be giving a talk at the University of Warwick on Thursday 25th May as part of the What is Philosophy? research project. The talk will be followed by an informal discussion.

Thursday 25th May 6pm – 8pm in Presentation Room B of The Learning Grid, University House

All Welcome

Abstract

Poststructuralist philosophy in general and Deleuze's rhizomic philosophical project in particular have been charged too often with either cognitive or moral relativism. This paper challenges such charges and defends the ethics of nomadic thought. I will take as a case study the issues of extreme pain, loss and vulnerability, which are usually approached either in terms of meanings and signification or as mourning and melancholia. This paper explores another route: a more affirmative ethics that aims at the transformation of negative into positive reactions to pain and vulnerability. The precedents of Spinoza and Nietzsche, re–read with Gilles Deleuze, are important to this project which aims at an ethics of empowerment that puts the active back into activism.

: 15 May 2006 16:14 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Professor Milan Jaros Talk Thursday 18th May

Professor Milan Jaros from the Centre for Research in Knowledge, Science and Society at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne will be giving a talk at the University of Warwick this Thursday as part of the What is Philosophy? research project.

The title of his paper is ‘Towards a re-definition of space-ness in the post-mechanical age’. The talk will be followed by an informal discussion.

Thursday 18th May 6pm – 8pm in Presentation Room B of The Learning Grid, University House

All welcome

Abstract

The aim of this study is to describe a model of the dynamics constituting a living place that is peculiar to the material condition of humanity today and that lends itself to empirical studies of meta–development and sustainability of the human–made environment. The empirical point of departure is the novel characteristic of contemporary knowledge and knowing and the shift it leads to from the transparent, perspectival space to networked quasi–objects, from design to meta–design. It is argued that the self depends for its ability to recognise itself primarily on collisions that suspend the flow of spatialised complexity. The sites of such collisions are superpositions of virtual and material interactions – spatio–temporal instabilities or warps. The structure of such collisions mirrors the mechanisms characteristic of the functioning of our techno–scientific civilisation and associated with different levels of measurement, embodiment, and organisation that pattern the human unconscious, the material and knowledge systems, the ‘lifeworlds’. This proposition expands the notion of the Schmarsow–Benjamin ‘elbow room’ (Spielraum) and gives a perceptual–empirical meaning to the self’s ontology, to the ‘living place’ and its ‘sustain–ability’. The ‘elbow room’ may be viewed as a dynamic impact parameter – an effective existence radius of the self – as an assemblage of the self, place and interactive narratives binding them dynamically together.

: 15 May 2006 16:05 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem