11:15 – 12:00

THURSDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

Not Mandatory: When Addiction Replaces Law

“I don’t think you will ever see mandating of a vaccine particularly for the general public. If someone refuses the vaccine in the general public you cannot force someone to take it,” said Dr Anthony Fauci recently. What is the difference between recommending an action, and making it legally binding and compulsory? In my presentation, I suggest that adopting new behaviours are made possible out of new addictions much more than sheer obedience to the law. Caring for global health, becoming ecologically responsible, inventing new ways of life, preparing a possibly different post-covid world implies the development of new addictions, and not only rational decisions. What is addiction? And how is it possible to avoid the return of previous ones? Such issues demand an interdisciplinary treatment, and the collaboration of philosophy, neurology, and ecology.

17:00 – 17:45

THURSDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

Rethinking the Human Through the Philosophy of Transindividuality

In order to reimagine the human, we need to unpack the very ontological presuppositions that enabled us to put it at the top of the great chain of being in the first place. In this talk, I will argue that we need to move from a philosophy centred on the notion of individuality to a philosophy of transindividuality, where bodies are not understood as independent substances, let alone as individuals, but as processes of affective and imaginal association that happens at the infra, inter- and supra-individual level. Whereas the notion of transindividuality is most often associated with Gilbert Simondon, following Etienne Balibar, I will argue that Spinoza’s Ethics can provide an alternative and more convincing perspective. Furthermore, I will show how such philosophy of transindividuality can fruitfully be combined with recent insights from symbiotic biology and queer ecologies.

13:00 – 13:45

THURSDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

We Are Milieus

“The biological relationship between the being and its milieu is a functional relationship, and thereby a mobile one; its terms successively exchange roles” wrote George Canghuilhem. The history of the concept of milieu undergoes interesting transformations, eventually unfolding in Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy who famously proposes the concept of “associated milieus”– the networks of pre-individual relationships that cannot be separated from the individual organism –as they both condition and empower it. In fact, the milieu is a field of openness and closure; it is never fully determined, although we are always deeply embedded in the concrete setting of our closest environment of cohabitation.

One can say that the milieu constitutes the field of relations that link the individual to its potentiality. This is why the more the individual is linked to its milieu, the less it functions deterministically. Today, along the lines of Simondon’s thinking, we can not only think of organisms as directly related to milieus, but also perceive ourselves as someone else’s milieu. And – if we are always in someone’s milieu – what does it mean to co-create ourselves and others? What is this creativity that lies outside us?

12:45 – 13:30

FRIDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER

Imagination, Creativity, Art and AI

In his essay on Creativity (1978/2010) the Italian philosopher Emilio Garroni argues that, as far as an evolutionary perspective is concerned with the operations targeting the fulfilment of life needs, the difference between human and non-human creativity depends on the respective attitude in reflection while using tools. He calls the specifically human attitude “meta-operation”. Following Leroi-Gourhan, he believes indeed that only humans shows the ability of using tools for the sake of fabricating or empowering the use of other tools. Whether this hypothesis is still valid or not at a scientific stage, it is yet true that human creativity unveils the unpredictability of consequences and effects of actions, as well as the indeterminacy of properties and affordances available in nature through its free exploration. Noteworthily, this view on creativity largely depends on an original interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in particular his theory of genius. According to this reading, imagination working creatively is concerned neither exclusively nor primarily with the so-called “fine arts”, but entails all sorts of design projecting new forms of life: from this point of view, domestication, agriculture or urban housing would be trans-historical forms of creativity much more relevant to the understanding of its meta-operative import than the fine arts. What is then the place of art as creative phenomenon? Garroni argues that art is the free exercise of the meta-operative creativity for its own sake, with no goal either immediate or mediated. More interestingly, art is likely to especially deal with the anxiety engendered by the systematic exposure to unpredictability and indeterminacy. Is it through the anxiety creatively elaborated by art that imagination shapes the human identity? And is this identitarian trait relevant to the difference more between animality and machinery, rather than humans and non-humans? Is the faculty of feeling anxiety originally bound to the ability of being exposed to the contingency of events, instead of only elaborating a flux of data as AI does – by the way, incredibly better than humans? Is the conjunction of anxiety and creativity one major factor in the genesis of the human intelligence’s plasticity? And is it for this very reason that, pace Manovich, AI-driven art still looks so controversial?

16:15 – 17:00

THURSDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

Grammatology and the Sadness of Being Human

In my presentation, I will explore the relationship between human life, sadness, and writing in Derrida’s Of Grammatology. I will begin my talk by noting that like nearly all Derrida’s texts, Grammatology lacks the proper introduction into why Derrida tackles the subject of writing. My aim will be to show that for him the privilege of phone over gramme is the ground on which the metaphysical notions of meaning, self-understanding and, most importantly, good life are built. Therefore, the deconstruction of logocentrism is also a deconstruction of all of these notions. I will also claim that, notwithstanding some Nietzschean tendencies, this results in some form of quasi-transcendental sadness of the human condition. Further arguments for this claim will be provided by an analysis of the chapter of Grammatology devoted to Rousseau and an analysis of Caputo’s interpretation of Derrida in his Cold Hermeneutics. To conclude my talk, I will ask if such quasi-transcendental sadness of human condition is not a critical limitation of Derrida’s thought, because a-historicity of sadness removes any possibility of essentially changing one’s condition through history.

12:00 – 12:45

THURSDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

The Empathic Body. Embodied Simulation and Experimental Aesthetics

By exploiting the empirical approach of neuroscience and physiology, we can investigate the brain-body mechanisms enabling our interactions with man-made images, shedding light on the functional mechanisms enabling their perceptual experience. In doing so we can deconstruct some of the concepts we normally use when referring to aesthetics and art. According to Hans Gumbrecht (2004), aesthetic experience involves two components: one deals with meaning, the other one with presence. The notion of presence entails the bodily involvement of image beholders through a synesthetic multimodal relationship with the artistic/cultural artefact. I will present some of our research results, which show that the creative expressive processes characterising our species, in spite of their progressive abstraction and externalisation from the body, keep their bodily ties intact. Creative expression is tied to the body not only because the body is the instrument of creative expression, but also because it is the main medium allowing its experience.

16:30 – 17:15

FRIDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER

Settler Relations are Property Relations

My longstanding work Indigenous DNA research ethics, politics, and commercialisation in the US and Canada has segued into work on Indigenous materialisms and decolonial sexualities. My approach to examining relations between human bodies and with other-than-human entities has also been informed by critical race scholar Cheryl Harris’s ground-breaking work on whiteness as property. In that paradigm-shifting 1993 Harvard Law Review article, she explains the links between private property and white supremacy in the US settler state. My empirical work analysed in part through Harris’s lens, shows how the settler state turns all relations into property or properties – be they human or other-than-human, e.g. land, water, and “resources” including biological (re)sources. Settler relations as property are also made manifest in the cultural-regulatory bundle of marriage/monogamy/nuclear family/private property that was imposed by settler states such as the US and Canada onto Indigenous peoples and other aspiring citizens. The settler state that privileges propertied hierarchies among beings should not be our guiding hope. An ethic of Indigenous relationality or being in good relation with one another and with our other-than-human relatives is an alternative guiding narrative in this time of US empire fall and planetary transition.

11:00 – 11:45

FRIDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER

Rehumanising the Imagination: An Endless Task

Anthropocentrism is a naive cultural claim. Persistent, ingrained, but easy to dismantle. Anthropomorphism, on the contrary, is an epistemological presupposition from which one can distance oneself only after having understood its reasons without prejudice. The epistemological relevance of anthropomorphism is central to Kant's Critique of Judgment, where it is presented as part of a critical reflection on sensitivity (Aisthesis) and imagination. I will discuss two concepts of this book – “purposiveness of nature” and “schematising without concept”– in which it is highlighted that, thanks to the freedom of the imagination, the plasticity of human cognition is intimately connected with technique and its aspirations for domination. From this point of view I would like to suggest that the interweaving of the imagination with technology could correspond to an (ethical) commitment to relaunch in the context of historically dominant technologies an endless and creative project of rediscovery of the human.

11:45 – 12:30

FRIDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER

The End is Near. But for Whom?

Widely discussed, and even discarded by some, the idea of the Anthropocene as the era we are living in poses a question about the future of both humanity and the Earth in general. The prospect of self-destruction becoming more and more real in the context of climate change, mass extinction of animal and plant species, and political crises due to major power shifts within the society, results in the question of how to live and act in today’s world so that there is a tomorrow becomes increasingly urgent. One of the possible strategies to face the threat of human (and not only) extinction is proposed by Jean-Pierre Dupuy as the concept of catastrophism. Dupuy suggests thinking the future of humanity as inevitably leading to a complete self-destruction which is supposed to reactivate the present by engaging the ethical subject to do everything it takes to avoid the unavoidable. Yet the question that remains untouched by Dupuy’s catastrophism is what kind of subject is to experience the mental and consequentially practical exercise of catastrophism. Does it mean that in order to think their inevitable extinction and take upon the responsibility for their actions leading to it humanity needs to transform? And if so, in what way? In this paper, three aspects of Dupuy’s subject of catastrophism are discussed alongside Martin Heidegger’s future-oriented Dasein, Gilles Deleuze’s becoming-other, and the uncanniness of (non)human in Patricia Piccinini’s artwork: 1) the strain on imagination when thinking the unthinkable – the complete destruction of any subject whatsoever; 2) the guilt brought into action by the urge to transform oneself in the face of a catastrophe; 3) the weirding of the human as a path towards becoming more human(e).

15:00 – 15:45

FRIDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER

Four Axioms of Existence in Toxic Late Liberalism

In my talk I shall examine four axioms of existence that have emerged in recent years across a significant segment of critical theory: the entanglement of existence; the unequal distribution of power to affect the local and transversal terrains of this entanglement; the multiplicity and collapse of the event as the sine qua non of political thought; and the racial and colonial history that informed modern western ontologies and epistemologies and the concept of the west as such. More than the axioms, I am interested in the broader anticolonial struggles from which these axioms emerged and a reactionary formation, late liberalism, which has attempted to remould, blunt, and redirect these struggles in content of contemporary climatic, environmental, viral and social collapse. Although I treat these axioms as distinct theoretical statements, they are in fact part of much broader discursive surfaces reflecting opposing currents in the direction of political thought and action in the wake of geontopower. My talk seeks to show how a seemingly casual syntactic arrangement of theoretical statements results in dramatically differing paradigms for figuring the present as a coming catastrophe (l’catastrophe à venir) and as an ancestral one (l’catastrophe ancestral/histoire).

17:15 – 18:00

FRIDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER

Holobionts: The Living Art of Becoming with the Other

Biology is undergoing a paradigm change. Animals and plants can no longer be considered individuals by the classical definitions of the term. About half the cells of a human being are bacteria and fungi, and each pore is an ecosystem. We are “holobionts” – a consortium of microbes and host eukaryotic cells working together. Moreover, these microbes are critical for our normal physiology. Mammalian blood circulation and peristalsis, for instance, depends on bacteria, which help mature our gut capillaries and neurons. Bacteria help construct our bodies. Furthermore, these microbes may play crucial roles in permitting our immune and cognitive abilities. The microbes thus help make us who we are and regulate our interactions with others. A human is both individual and biome, and microbes have opened new evolutionary trajectories for mammals. Indeed, seen from the microbe's point of view, eukaryotic organisms, including humans, are niches, made by microbes, for the propagation and speciation of more microbes.

15:30 – 16:15

THURSDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

The Challenge of the Subject in the Face of the Real

In one of her recent interviews, Catherine Malabou pointed out a problem which I deem to be pivotal in considering the question of the real with all its implications: speculative realists are indifferent to the subject. In this paper, I will present my position that in contemporary philosophy it is precisely the problem of the subject that becomes an actual challenge when raising the question “What kind of reality are we talking about?”; “What is real?” In light of treating the problem of the subject as a theoretical challenge in regard to the question of reality, two positions – that of Catherine Malabou (The New Wounded, Before Tomorrow) and Giorgio Agamben (Infanzia e storia) – will be analysed and attempted to be compared. I will endeavour to discuss how the notion of the subject, the question of its identities, its transformations, being human-non-human, correlated to the question of reality.

15:45 – 16:30

FRIDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER

Reimagining Non-Human Perspective

In a recent interview, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro said, with some irony, that it is time to take the point of view of polar bears seriously. From such point of view, according to him, we can entertain the accuracy of certain “geontological” concepts such as the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. It turns out that from the perspective of polar bears and other ecologically threatened species, Anthropocene figures as the appropriate and accurate term rather than Capitalocene. So what does it mean to take on the perspective of the other? What kind of strain does it put on imagination? What if the other is of other species or even of non-organic constitution? What does it mean to imagine a radically different perspective from that of the human, what does it entail to imagine from a radically different perspective? We are arriving at the renewal of the use of the philosophical concept of perspectivism. According to Viveiros de Castro, it follows that we don’t need to imagine the others as humans, like certain indigenous cultures do, but we can imagine them as subjects with vital interests, which hints to a type of Nietzschean perspectivism. At the same time a certain merging of the boundaries between life and non-life happens along with a radical shift of the perspective. This points to consider perspectivism and indigenous thought as defined by taking the other’s point of view in relation with epigenetics, embodied simulation and the theory of entanglement which sees living and non-living realms as interdependent entanglements and refers to the irrelevance of the separation of said realms. Is it possible to think of or simulate the perspective of non-organic entities? If the separation continues to dissipate, then the range of the possibility of taking the other’s perspective increases and at the same time becomes more available for articulation.