Conference: Feminism, Science & Materialism Conference, 14-15 February 2013, New York

The Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York has banded together with the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies to organise the Feminism, Science & Materialism Conference, set to take place on 14-15 February 2013. Featuring Karen Barad as a keynote speaker and focussing on "feminist perspectives on the onto-epistemological questions raised by he materialist turn", this event has positioned itself perfectly for platforming the newest developments in material feminism and other current research that cuts across the fields of science and feminism.

With the mounting interest in Barad's work, this conference will no doubt feature not only Barad's own most curent work but will also spotlight some of the ways in which her contributions (particularly on agential realism) have been taken up within other fields and areas. The organisers are currently seeking extended 1000 word abstracts, due by 1 November 2012. Topics range from reflections on the turn towards materialism to reflections on the political implications of neo-materialism for feminism and the relation of matter to the social, with a range of other issues in-between.

CUNY appears ready and willing to provide a space for new academic research in materialism, with the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies having for the last year busied itself with a fascinating series of seminars and events revolving around the theme of "embodiment" in interdisciplinary science-humanities engagements (more details of which can be found at their website). Bodies in Movement will be looking out for recordings that might be produced from this event for those of us not fortunate enough to be able to attend.

Recorded Lecture: François Laruelle, "Pour une philosophie dite ‘contemporaine’ (Towards a Philosophy Deemed ‘Contemporary’)"

Hiroshi Sugimoto Lightning Fields 168, 2009, © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Courtesy The Pace Gallery

Courtesy of the London Graduate School and the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, we can now enjoy the ambitious and compelling project canvassed by François Laruelle in his talk on 9 May of this year, entitled "Pour une philosophophie dite 'contemporaine'". Designed as a preface to a lecture he delivered at Goldsmiths the next day ("Non-photographie, vers une interprétation quantique"), Laruelle here carefully anatomises the arguments underpinning his call for a form of contemporary philosophy which rebalances the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, and predicates itself on the vectorial and the quantic rather than the object.

His talk, a most useful foreward to his other dense works (some of which have recently or will soon be published in English translation), is equally a series of departures as it is actively propositional. Concerning the arc of his project at large, he notes: "I had to limit philosophy to give way to mathematics; and I had to limit topology to give way to algebra". Indeed, Laruelle underscores decisive points of divergence away from theorists such as Deleuze, Derrida and Meillassoux alongside his deviation from the mascroscopy of the "modern" (i.e, Plato, Decartes, Spinoza, Badiou) in preference of a "contemporary" philosophy which is worked through a relation with the physical by means of "vectoriality". He enquires:

"[W]hat can be invented with history's heritage, what do we do with it? Do we reproduce, remember, smooth, clean the glass or the mirror of language, leaving as always philosophy to be reflected in itself and to auto-model itself? Or do we incline it, 'encline' it (being 'enclined towards', the inclination as Leibnizian concept) and so free up its inventive forces rather than those forces of repression? I put myself in the position of a scientist or an artist for whom philosophy is at once object and materials ... Generic humanity is not a tradition, but an orientation that comes or under-comes"

The lecture can be found archived at the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, where a pdf of the English translation (also distributed to his listeners on the day) can also be downloaded. Laruelle adds, digresses and extrapolates in the talk itself, thus it is worthwhile to both read and listen.