The Ecological Turn of Metaphysics – Seminar with Anne Sauvagnargues and Gregory Flaxman
“The Ecological Turn of Metaphysics”
Tuesday, April 9th, 2019
9am-12pm
La Maison Française
16 Washington Mews
In the waning days of the anthropocene, the challenge to define new subjectivities induces us to return to an anti-phenomenological lineage of modern French philosophy. Reaching from Bergson to Deleuze, featuring Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gourhan, and Raymond Ruyer, and including a number of related thinkers, this minor philosophical tradition provides the point of departure for a new sense of historical intelligibility in which logos and muthos are no longer opposed. In this seminar, then, we endeavor to describe a new philosophy of history capable of engaging with human (and posthuman) evolution, apart from teleological assumptions, as a rhizomatic multiplicities of techno-ecological modes of existence. This will lead us to a new critic of digital capitalism.
Anne Sauvagnargues is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. A specialist in aesthetics and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, she is the author of numerous works, including Deleuze and Art (Bloomsbury 2013), Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon (Edinburgh University Press 2016), and Deleuze. L’empirisme transcendental (Presses universitaires de France 2008, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press).
Gregory Flaxman is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Director of Global Cinema Studies (GCS) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Author of Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy (Minnesota, 2011) and editor of The Brain is the Screen (Minnesota, 2000), Flaxman’s research broadly concerns the relationship between aesthetics and philosophy (especially with respect to film, literature, and fine art). More current work is dedicated to biopolitics and neoliberalism, the problem of affect theory, and the art history of the cinematic frame.
Please rsvp at jeanne.etelain@nyu.edu. The seminar is open to faculty members and graduate students. Suggested readings will be made available.