Conference | Symposium

LCCP Symposium Memory for the Future: Thinking with Bernard Stiegler

Date: Thursday 3 December 2020 - Friday 4 December 2020
Series: Past events 2020
Location: Microsoft Teams

Bernard Stiegler’s unexpected passing away in August 2020 left many things unfinished. His philosophical work, that had started by a seminal theory of technics as memory and evolved towards an interrogation of the automatic society, now examined from the perspective of anthropic and neganthropic tendencies of the world marked by pervasive AI, ultraliberalism and climate catastrophe. His influence went also beyond philosophy to many practical engagements, earlier with the arts (IRCAM, Pompidou), and recently with civil society actors that seek to empower people in ordinary everyday life (Pleine Commune) but also to influence the course of the world on the level of the UN.

In order to commemorate the span of this multifaceted work, but above all in order to probe its future, the Leiden University Center for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) and the Institute for Science in Society of the Radboud University of Nijmegen summon a meeting of both academics and actors from civil society. The meeting will surely summarize his philosophical legacy, but above all it will explore possible futures in the spirit of Bernard Stiegler's philosophical project, both practically and theoretically. How should we take care of the world marked by ubiquitous digitalization, global ecological destruction and increasing economical turmoil? How should we face this reality in thinking? What should philosophy consist of when digitalization has entered the domain of knowledge production and cultural reflection? Is philosophy mainly a matter of concept production or also an engagement with reality? What is philosophizing for Stiegler, and how should we philosophize with Stiegler and after him?

Due to Covid restrictions the symposium will take place online. More than anybody else, Bernard Stiegler led us to interrogate both the misery and the emancipative potential of this media, so let this also be an occasion for putting this element of his thinking in practice.

Further information: Susanna Lindberg
Pieter Lemmens: p.lemmens@science.ru.nl
Conference secretary: Donovan Stewart
Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy: link

Photograph by Jean Frémiot.

Registration: mail to the conference secretary in order to get the conference weblink: DonovanStewart@protonmail.com

Program

Thursday 3 December, 2020: Stiegler’s Engagements

14:00-14:15 Susanna Lindberg: Opening of Symposium

14:15 - 15:15

Pieter Lemmens: “Bernard Stiegler in memoriam / eulogy / tribute”
Gerald Moore: “Covid-19 and the Intermittent Society”

15:30 - 16:30

Dan Ross: “From the market of information to the pharmacology of the gift”
Anaïs Nony “Scenes of disruption: future's power and the technological rules of law”

16:45 - 17:45

Mischa Twitchin: “Mnemotechnics and the Discrete Voice”
Harry Halpin & Geert Lovink: “Stiegler’s Technical Legacy: Another Social Network Is Possible. A Dialogue between Harry Halpin & Geert Lovink”

18:00 - 19:30

Judith Wambacq & Bart Buseyne: discussion with Anne Alombert (Internation), Victor Chaix (Les amis de la génération de Greta Thunberg) and Maël Montévil (Project Plaine Commune)

Friday 4 December, 2020: Thinking Through Bernard Stiegler

14:00-15:00

Jean-Luc Nancy: “Stiegler, mélancolie et négativité”
Erich Hörl: “A Thinking of Suspension”

15:15-16:15

Antoinette Rouvroy: “Postscript on Automatic Society”
Erik Bordeleau: “The Cosmo-Financial Pharmakon: Tending techniques for (non)scalable localities”

16:30-17:30

Jan Masschelein: “School as ‘otium of the people’: the letter… and the voice?”
Paul Willemarck: “Necessary default and tertiary retention”

17:45-18:45

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy: Jean-Hugues Barthélémy: “Ontological Difference, Technological Differance and Semantic Difference. The Problem of decentered Reconstruction of Philosophy after ‘Deconstruction’”
Georgios Tsagdis: “Negentropy after Stiegler”

18:45-19:00

Susanna Lindberg: Closing Remarks

Speakers

Anne Alombert

Anne Alombert teaches philosophy at the Catholic University of Lille (chair 'Éthique, technologie et transhumanismes'). She wrote a PhD thesis on Gilbert Simondon and Jacques Derrida. She participated in the conception of the contributive research program 'Plaine Commune Territoire Apprenant Contributif' and is an active member of the collective 'Internation'. Her research focuses on the relation between knowledge and technics in the work of Simondon, Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, and on the anthropological, political, psychic and social challenges implied by digital technologies.

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy

Ontological Difference, Technological Differance and Semantic Difference. The Problem of Decentered Reconstruction of Philosophy after Deconstruction

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy is philosopher and associatd researcher (HDR) at the University of Paris Nanterre. He is the editor and director of Cahiers Simondon and he was the director of CIDES from 2014 to 2019. He is a specialist of Gilbert Simondon and author of several subjects on him.

Erik Bordeleau

Erik Bordeleau

The Cosmo-Financial Pharmakon

Erik Bordeleau is affiliated researcher at the Art, Business and Culture center of the Stockholm School of Economics.

Bart Buseyne

Bart Buseyne studied philosophy and anthropology in Leuven and Paris, and is affiliated to the National Library of Belgium. He has translated some essays of B. Stiegler into Dutch, often in collaboration with Judith Wambacq.

Victor Chaix

Victor Chaix

Victor Chaix works at the Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation in Paris and is a founding member of the Association des amis de la génération Thunberg (AAGT), association that he worked on animating and coordinating since its launch by Bernard Stiegler and J.M.G Le Clézio in late 2019. Particularly interested by the history of philosophy and in link with environmental concerns, he studied a B.A in Liberal Arts at King's College London. After being director of the Essay section of his university’s arts and culture magazine and written a couple of papers on these issues, he wrote for the French online newspaper for the environment Reporterre. During this period, he also got engaged in the movements of Extinction Rebellion and Youth For Climate, in the UK and then in France. At the moment, he particularily interests himself on educational and generational questions that are raised by the challenges of the Anthropocene era. You can read his most recent articles, written as part of the AAGT’s activities, here : https://blogs.mediapart.fr/les-amis-de-la-generation-thunberg/blog.

Erich Hörl

Erich Hörl

A Thinking of Suspension

Erich Hörl holds the Chair of Media Culture and Media Philosophy at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He is also Vice President of Leuphana. He works on the conceptualization of a general ecology and publishes internationally on the history, the problems and challenges of the contemporary technological condition. Among his publications are Critique and the Digital (ed., Zurich / Berlin, forthcoming); General Ecology. The New Ecological Paradigm (ed., London 2017); Die technologische Bedingung (ed., Berlin 2011); Sacred Channels: On the Archaic Illusion of Communication (Amsterdam 2018); Gérard Granel: Die totale Produktion, ed. and with an introduction by Erich Hörl (Vienna 2020).

Pieter Lemmens

Bernard Stiegler in memoriam / eulogy / tribute

Pieter Lemmens teaches philosophy and ethics at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He has published on themes in the philosophy of technology and new media and on human enhancement technologies, on the work of Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk and Bernard Stiegler, on the Anthropocene as well as on post-operaist Marxism (Hardt, Negri, Berardi) and topics related to philosophical anthropology and phenomenology. Current interests include the philosophy of technology in the age of the Anthropocene and the notion of the technosphere.

Geert Lovink

Geert Lovink

The Fate of Three Billion Friends: The Concept of the Individual in the Age of Social Media. A Dialogue between Geert Lovink and Harry Halpin.

Geert Lovink is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures and a researcher at the faculty whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economical change of the new media field through events, publications and open dialogue. He is also is a researcher at the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) where he heads the Institute of Network Cultures.

Jan Masschelein

Jan Masschelein

School as ‘otium of the people’: the letter … and the voice?

Jan Masschelein is professor for educational theory and philosophy at Laboratory for Education and Society (KU Leuven Belgium). Besides a study of new global and European regimes of governing (higher) education, his research concentrates on the public role of schools and universities. He considers pedagogy as the frontline for staging an approach to societal challenges that links basic research and public engagement in public and collective study. He co-authored (with Maarten Simons): Globale Immunität (Diaphanes 2005), Jenseits der Exzellenz. Eine kleine Morphologie der Welt-Universität. (Diaphanes 2010) and In defence of the school. A public issue. (2013, free downloadable: https://ppw.kuleuven.be/ecs/les ).

Maës Montévil

Maës Montévil

Maël Montévil is a theoretical biologist working at the crossroad of experimental biology, mathematics, and philosophy. His work focuses on the theoretical foundations of biology and the role that mathematics can play in this field. Notably, he developed the framework of constraints closure and theorized biological historicity and its implications for theory and modelization. He also practices these general frameworks to study current issues such as endocrine disruptors and, more generally, Anthropocene's disruptions and our response to them. He is the author of more than twenty-five peer-reviewed articles and a monograph with Giuseppe Longo: “Perspectives on organisms”. He works at Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation and in Institut de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, with a grant of the Cogito Foundation. Website: https://montevil.theobio.org.

Gerald Moore

Gerald Moore

Covid-19 and the Intermittent Society

Gerald Moore is Professor of Digital Studies, Durham University (UK), and Chair of the Collège scientifique, Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation. Specialist of continental philosophy as well as of philosophy of technology and philosophy of addiction. He has published among others Thinking with Stiegler: Organology, Proletarianization, and Technical Life (edited with Martin Crowley, Ian James & Bernard Stiegler; Polity, 2020). A book titled Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy in the Age of Industrial Technology is forthcoming at Polity.

Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy

Stiegler, mélancolie et négativité

Jean-Luc Nancy is the emeritus professor of philosophy from the Université Marc Bloch of Strasbourg, France. In his numerous books he has written extensively on ontology after deconstruction, community, and Art.

Anaïs Nony

Anaïs Nony

Scenes of disruption: future’s power and the technological rules of law

Anaïs Nony is a lecturer at the department of French of the University College Cork. Before joining UCC she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate for the South African Research Chair Initiatives in Social Change, University of Fort Hare (2019-2020), an A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape (2018-2019), and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Winthrop-King Institute For Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Florida State University (2016-2018). She completed her PhD in French and Media Studies at the University of Minnesota (2016). Since 2020, She is chercheure associée with the laboratoire de recherche Histoires des Arts et des Représentations (EA 4414) at the Université Paris-Nanterre.

Daniel Ross

Daniel Ross

From the market of information to the pharmacology of the gift

Daniel Ross obtained his doctorate from Monash University in 2002. His book Violent Democracy (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2004, and the same year saw the premier at the Rotterdam International Film Festival of a feature documentary that he co-directed with David Barison entitled The Ister. Ross has published eleven volumes of translation of Stiegler’s work, most recently The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Polity, 2019) and Nanjing Lectures 2016–2019 (Open Humanities Press, 2020). His book Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics is forthcoming from Open Humanities Press next year.

Georgios Tsagdis

Georgios Tsagdis

States of Negentropy

The work of Georgios Tsagdis is situated across theoretical and disciplinary intersections drawing on 20th Century, Contemporary and Ancient Greek Philosophy. His PhD The Archaeology of Nothing revisited through Heidegger the relation of presence and absence at the inception of Greek thought, while my new project focuses on the function of the negative in the ontology of matter from Plato to New Materialisms. He teaches philosophy at the Leiden University, Erasmus Rotterdam and architectural association london.

Mischa Twitchin

Mischa Twitchin

Mnemotechnics and the Discrete Voice

Dr Mischa Twitchin is a lecturer in the Theatre and Performance Dept., at Goldsmiths, University of London: https://www.gold.ac.uk/theatre-performance/staff/twitchin-dr-mischa/. His book, The Theatre of Death – the Uncanny in Mimesis: Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg and an Iconology of the Actor is published by Palgrave Macmillan in their Performance Philosophy series; and examples of his own performance- and essay-films can be seen on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user13124826/videos.

Paul Willemarck

Paul Willemarck

Necessary default and tertiary retention

Paul Willemarc works in the aftermath of phenomenology and its continuation through poststructuralism. He works at the nootechnics collective and rudolf boehm archive.

Judith Wambacq

Judith Wamback

Judith Wambacq is a visiting professor in the School of Arts at University College Ghent (Belgium). She has written extensively on poststructuralism and phenomenology, art, and French culture and has translated, together with Bart Buseyne, several texts by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler into Dutch. She is the author of Thinking Between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty (Ohio University Press, 2017).