Disruption, Technique, World: Thinking the Present with Jean-Luc Nancy (Tagung in Kooperation mit dem ICI Berlin)

29. Feb. - 01. März

A Leuphana University event in cooperation with the ICI Berlin

International conference of the Research Initiative The Disruptive Condition, organized by Erich Hörl (Leuphana), Susanna Lindberg (Leiden University), Donovan Stewart (Leuphana), Marita Tatari (University of Patras)

With: Marcia Cavalcante, Anne Gräfe, Ian James, Artemy Magun, Boyan Manchev, Michael Marder, Frédéric Neyrat, Annie O’Byrne, Aukje van Rooden, Oxana Timofeeva, Georgios Tsagdis, and others.

Our time is one of general disruption, in which crisis is the normal state of affairs. In a situation characterized by climate catastrophe, pandemic, war, interruptions to supply chains, and contestations of democracy, the modern Western categories of “progress” and “History” implode. Disruption describes our socio-historical experience, in which break, interruption, discontinuity, take on a very different sense than in modernity: They become hegemonic and begin to entirely dominate the onto-epistemological condition and socio-historical reality. But does the present attest solely to such immense collapse? Or is this disruptive un-worlding simultaneously a transformation, an opening to a plurality of worlds in the ruins of a formerly hegemonic world? There is on the one hand, the very real ends of the world and increasing threat to the possibility of any world; and on the other hand, the undeniable multiplicity of worlds that reveal themselves at present, their coming to presence disrupting the unity of the one World. This difference confronts us, between the technical homogenization of all into a worldless planet, and a proliferation of techniques of world-making. It is at this tension that we encounter the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. At times, he would see only the impossibility of any world due to techno-capitalist disruption and homogenization of sense. At others, he would attest to a transformation of sense, the flipside of technoeconomic hegemony, presenting a multiplicity of worlds. Are we at the precipice of such a transformation of the sense of the world? Or are we outside any world, in a techno-economic disruption that is no longer existence, but which nevertheless determines it? With Nancy’s companionship, we propose to take up these questions, focusing on the conceptual triad of disruption, technique and world. Through two days of presentations and discussions, we hope to re-think the present, between the techno-economic disruption of world, and the techniques of (re)composing worlds.

Programme:

Thursday, 29 February 2024

09:30–09:40 Welcome and Introduction
09:40–10:30 Erich Hörl: Mutation, Interruption, Suspension: Nancy’s Politics of Sense under the Disruptive Condition
10:30–11:20 Georgios Tsagdis: The Sense of Disruptive Innovation
11:20–11:50 Coffee Break
11:50–12:40 Anne Gräfe: The Creation of the World out of Exhaustion
12:40–13:30 Artemy Magun: Disruptions and Fragments: Approaches to Negativity between the French Deconstruction and
the German Critical Theory
13:30–15:00 Lunch Break
15:00–15:50 Donovan Stewart: The Earth: The Worlds of Others
15:50–16:40 Ian James: Worlds: Human, Non-human and the Technicity of Life
16:40–18:00 Coffee Break
18:00–19:00 Susanna Lindberg: Images of Disruption
19:00–20:00 Michael Marder: On Knees and Elbows: The Disruptions of Joints

Friday, 1 March 2024

09:30–10:20 Marita Tatari: The General Diffraction and the Possibility of its Experience
10:20–11:10 Boyan Manchev: Eros Unbound. Philosophy’s Desire and the Will to the World
11:10–11:40 Coffee Break
11:40–12:30 Anne O’Byrne: ‘The internal war of an enclosed city’: Nancy on war and democracy
12:30–13:20 Oxana Timofeeva: World Soul—World Body: On Plato’s Environment
13:20–15:00 Lunch Break
15:00–15:50 María del Rosario Acosta López: The Resistance of Testimony: Listening to Fósil Acústico in conversation with
Jean-Luc Nancy
15:50–16:40 Frédéric Neyrat: The Satellite-function: Cosmology, Planetary Technology, and Angelology
16:40–17:10 Coffee Break
17:10–18:00 Aukje van Rooden: Measuring the Interval: On Translation as the Poetic Technique of World-Formation in Times
of Globalization
18:00–18:50 Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback: The Stains of Chance: Towards a Critique of the Automation of Autonomy
18:50–19:00 Closing Remarks

Conference Poster. Flyer with the timetable.

Registration at ICI Berlin required. Open from 15 February 2024.