April 5, 2024

Praxis Seminar: Research Colloquium in Practical Philosophy 2023/24, Session 17

Christine Habbard

University of Lille

The Power of Representation, or The Representation of Power

16 April 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

The term “Representation” is ambiguous: it refers both to an image (the iconic meaning) and to the act of speaking or acting on behalf of someone (the political or legal meaning). These two meanings are usually not envisaged together, especially in political philosophy. My lecture will on the contrary focus on how, in early Modernity, the two meanings were intertwined, and the birth of the Nation-State (the epitome of political representation), was made possible by its graphic construction on the map. The visual representation of the State on the map enabled its conceptualisation as a unified, sovereign power over a bounded territory, which in turn allowed it to act in the stead of, or on behalf of its people. The State had to be seen, visualised and represented (in maps, but also through paintings, sculptures…) in order to be a legitimate representative of its emerging nation. In other words, representation is what gave power to this representative power. This will in turn allow me to look at how cartography (and State cartography in particular) enabled the enduring switch from one meaning of representation (the likeness of an image) to the other (semiotic – the sign, the proxy).

 

 

March 30, 2024

Praxis Seminar: Research Colloquium in Practical Philosophy 2023/24, Session 15

Sami Khatib

Oriental Institute Beirut

It speaks: Marx and commodity language

2 April 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

In Capital, vol. 1, Marx wrote: “If commodities could, speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it.” If Marx’s compelling prosopopoeia is not merely a rhetorical figure, external to what is signified by it, we are to ask what is the nature of this language in contradistinction to ‘natural’ languages like German, French, or English, or certain jargons employed by economics. Commodity language expresses the differential relation of value, a “purely social” relation. It functions as a quasi-transcendental structure that conditions economic-linguistic speech acts before and ahead of culturally situated semantic content and ‘communicated’ use-values. If every commodity actually speaks [spricht] and mis-speaks/promises [verspricht] another commodity, what is the secret of this language, which lends them their ‘universal’, that is, seemingly trans-national, trans-cultural and trans-historical communicability and commensurability? Relying on K. Karatani, W. Hamacher, F. de Saussure and W. Benjamin, my talk explores the aesthetic and political consequences of commodity language and its repressed negativity (non-identity, inversion, mismatch, asymmetry, closure, un-disclosedness et al.).

 

 

March 18, 2024

Praxis Seminar: Research Colloquium in Practical Philosophy 2023/24, Session 14

Marie Goupy

Catholic University of Paris

The government of permanent emergency and its specters

19 March 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

The reflection I’d like to propose is based on works on emergency powers and emergency law, which have become increasingly more common in liberal states, giving rise to the polemic term “permanent state of exception”. This notion, first introduced by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, has given rise to a great deal of debates. Jurists have almost observed that, while the term is supposed to describe a situation of suspension of law, or a legal vacuum, the exact opposite is true: in liberal states, the management of emergency situations has given rise to a kind of normative proliferation, an acceleration in the production of legal norms, which tends to embrace the emergency. An emergency that itself tends to have no end in sight. In this presentation, I would like to use those works on the law of emergency as the basis for a reflection on a dominant conception of time, which is perfectly legible in some important theories of exception. To do this, I will draw specifically on the work of two American jurists, almost unknown in France, but famous in the United States, E. Posner and A. Vermeule. I will show that their conception of emergency law, which is very developed, if not dominant in administrations in liberal states, can be described as a technicist and continuous management of emergency – and in this sense, it reflects a presentist conception of time (in François Hartog’s sense). But on the other hand, the authors fail to rid themselves of the very concept of “crisis”, as a dangerous and radical break with the existing order, and above all as a specter – the specter of a shift towards an illiberal regime, or perhaps even more radically, the specter of general crisis.

 

 

March 8, 2024

Praxis Seminar: Research Colloquium in Practical Philosophy 2023/24, Session 13

Mariana Teixeira

Praxis-CFUL

Ambiguidade e Dilaceração: Simone de Beauvoir Entre o Eco- e o Xeno-Feminismo

12 March 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

A distinção entre género como construção social e sexo como dado biológico tem implicações emancipatórias bem conhecidas: se as mulheres não são naturalmente inclinadas a determinados papéis, espaços e actividades sociais, ou seja, se estes condicionamentos são historicamente impostos, também podem ser historicamente transformados. Por mais libertadores que tenham sido os seus efeitos, esta ideia foi mais tarde contestada por uma suposta depreciação masculinista da natureza em favor da agência humana. No âmbito do feminismo, estas posições opostas são representadas pelas vertentes xeno- e ecofeminista: enquanto a primeira vê a emancipação como transcendência, como domínio da natureza, a segunda equipara-a antes à imanência, a uma ligação harmoniosa com a natureza. Em ambos os casos, no entanto, a divisão sexo/género tende a ser preservada na sua dicotomia aparentemente intransponível. Para evitar a adoção unilateral de um dos pólos – natureza ou cultura, imanência ou transcendência -, sugiro que um tratamento mais convincente da relação entre sexo e género (natureza e cultura, corpo e mente) pode ser obtido a partir dos escritos de Simone de Beauvoir. Embora critique decididamente o confinamento multissecular das mulheres à imanência, Beauvoir não equipara a emancipação ao mero aumento do controlo das mulheres sobre os seus corpos e o mundo natural, , uma vez que a imanência não é vista apenas como um limite à transcendência, mas também como a sua própria condição de possibilidade. A conceção intersubjectiva de Beauvoir da individualidade e a sua recusa de uma dualidade ontológica entre natureza e espírito permitem, assim, uma conceção da condição humana como simultaneamente sujeito e objeto. Para compreender as diferentes formas de experienciar esta tensão, proponho ainda uma distinção entre ambiguidade existencial e dilaceração contingente. Deste modo, numa perspetiva beauvoiriana, a emancipação seria concebida não como a eliminação da ambiguidade entre imanência e transcendência; em vez disso, envolveria a superação, por meio do movimento recíproco das subjectividades encarnadas, de uma dilaceração não mediada.

March 2, 2024

Praxis Seminar: Research Colloquium in Practical Philosophy 2023/24, Session 12

Jamila Mascat

Utrecht University

If I Can’t Speak For You, It’s Not My Revolution! Feminist Politics Between the Personal and the Political

5 March 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

In the genealogy of feminist and postcolonial critique, the act of “speaking for” another – that is, representing their voice on their behalf – has long been condemned as a violation, undermining the legitimacy and agency of marginalized subjects. However, as Adrienne Rich perfectly phrases it in her “Notes towards a Politics of Location” (1984), if “You cannot speak for me,” “I cannot speak for us,” and the use of pronouns becomes a “political problem,” feminist praxis risks being reduced to a collection of “ego-histories” and “singular pasts” (Traverso, 2022). Drawing from the predicament of pronouns as it emerged in contemporary feminist politics, the paper critically engages with the role of personal experience, first-person accounts, and individual feelings in feminist narratives. In conclusion, it advocates for revisiting the Hegelian form of the concrete universal to rethink radical feminist partisanship.

February 16, 2024

Praxis Seminar: Research Colloquium in Practical Philosophy 2023/24, Session 11

Carmen Madorrán Ayerra

Autonomous University of Madrid

Human Needs: Between Social Foundation and Ecological Ceiling

27 February 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

We are experiencing a multiple crisis that goes well beyond the economy. It also concerns finance, employment, health, society at large, ecology, energy and democracy. Rather than undergoing a specific crisis, we could say that the present is crisis. A defining feature of this moment is precisely that it is geared to change—once a certain threshold is crossed, business as usual is no longer possible. The social and ecological unsustainability of our present cannot be solved with small adjustments: almost everything will have to change. In this lecture, in order to think about the possibilities of a good life on Earth I would like to focus on the notion of human needs. It is key to assess what we really need in a context of social and ecological unsustainability. This is where the notion and approach of ecological humanities takes significance—with particular attention to the role of philosophy.

 

 

 

February 15, 2024

Praxis Seminar: Research Colloquium in Practical Philosophy 2023/24, Session 10

José Miranda Justo

Praxis-CFUL

A «Viúva Negra» da Filosofia: Haverá Lugar para Falar de um Conceito de Heterogeneidade em Filosofia?

20 February 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

Entendendo, em termos deleuzianos, a tarefa própria da filosofia como criação de conceitos,
mas pensando, por outro lado, os conceitos como entidades vivas e em devir constante
dentro de um plano de consistência, no qual se articulam com outros conceitos em
processos transformativos de colaboração/conflito, a minha apresentação visa perguntar se
a noção de heterogeneidade pode ser entendida como um verdadeiro conceito. Para
responder a esta questão darei alguns passos exploratórios. Primeiramente, começarei por
confrontar a heterogeneidade com duas outras figuras da diferença com as quais é
frequentemente confundida: a diversidade e a multiplicidade. Ver-se-á assim qual o modo
de agir próprio das heterogeneidades. Seguidamente, tratar-se-á de mostrar que, em
filosofia, a heterogeneidade, enquanto dispositivo heurístico, permite – em primeiro lugar –
exercer uma vasta quantidade de tarefas eminentemente críticas fundamentalmente
dirigidas contra as nefastas consequências da vocação profundamente «unitarista» da
tradição filosófica. De um modo geral, o tópico da heterogeneidade introduz uma crítica
frontal de todos os mecanismos organicamente redutores no seio das discursividades
filosóficas. De seguida, procurará evidenciar-se que a consideração de um espaço filosófico
para a heterogeneidade permite introduzir no trabalho filosófico dimensões de infinitude
potencial que apontam no sentido de um horizonte irremediavelmente mutante das
investigações nos diversos terrenos da filosofia prática e, ao mesmo tempo, dotado de uma
«abundância» previamente indeterminada. Esta abundância indeterminada abre igualmente
o caminho para uma compreensão da criação do radicalmente novo, designadamente – mas
não apenas – em arte. Finalmente, procurarei responder (provisoriamente) à difícil questão
de saber se a heterogeneidade tem uma ontologia própria ou, ao menos, uma inscrição
ontológica determinada/determinável. A tentativa de encarar este problema levar-me-á por
fim a defender que a heterogeneidade é e não é um conceito filosófico no sentido
introduzido no início da apresentação.

February 1, 2024

Praxis Seminar: Research Colloquium in Practical Philosophy 2023/24, Session 9

Fabienne Brugère

University of Paris 8

From Care Ethics to Care Politics in the Neoliberal Moment?

6 February 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

Care can be defined in different ways. In English, it refers first and foremost to the banality of “take care”, which is equivalent to “au revoir” or “à bientôt” in French. From the point of view of the activities themselves, we can take care of a child both “to take care of” and “to care about”. We care for a child, we look after him, we are concerned about him. Care begins with interpersonal relationships that seem to combine dispositions and activities, through an anchoring in ordinary life. But, understood as an ethics and then a politics, it becomes institutional, confronted with national and global crises of care: for example, the crisis of the welfare state (Urban Ward, 2020) which empties collective solidarity of its meaning, and the crisis of migrant reception in Western countries, which turns precarious foreigners into unofficial care workers (Hamington, 2010; Morgan, 2020). How can we characterize this transition from banal interpersonal relations to an ethics and a politics at a time when capitalism has taken on the face of the “neoliberal” moment (Foucault, 1979)? How is it possible to combine an ethics and a politics, a care for the self and a care for others (Foucault, 1984; Benhabib, 2004)?

January 21, 2024

Individuating Simondon

Reading Group as part of the Praxis-CFUL activities

 

Working language: English

Organizer: Dr. Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (rcanales [at] letras.ulisboa.pt)

Where: Room B112.H (Library Building)

When: Thursdays, from 14h00 to 16h00 (according to the calendar below)

NEW! during the 2nd semester, the sessions will take place on FRIDAYS, from 14h00 to 16h00

To participate, please send an e-mail to the convenor expressing your interest in taking part in the RG.

 

 

For decades, Gilbert Simondon was just a name mentioned in a handful of footnotes in influential books by Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard or Herbert Marcuse. Although he belonged to the same generation of first-line French philosophers such as Deleuze, Foucault, or Derrida, Simondon remained almost unknown, far from fame and recognition. He soon gained a reputation as a philosopher of technology with the publication of his first and best-known work, Du mode d’existence des objects techniques (1958), which corresponds to his secondary doctoral dissertation defended that same year; but since it wasn’t a hot topic at the time, his work remained merely as a distant reference, only accessible in the French-speaking milieu. This, together with the vicissitudes of the publication of his main doctoral dissertation, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et information (split and published in two separate parts with a gap of more than thirty years between them), and the fact that Simondon’s intellectual interests were not part of the mainstream philosophies of his time and thus moved in a different direction from those of his contemporaries, confabulated against him to remain confined to a restricted field of research, so that his philosophical project, until very recently, could never be appreciated in its radical unity, consistency, breadth and depth.

Nowadays, the sustained publication of his unpublished works (accompanied by an important rhythm of translations into the most widely used philosophical languages) has made available to scholars a wider scope of his entire philosophical project, which, in a nutshell, consists in reassessing the relationship between nature and culture, describing it as process in which life and being are part of a one single operation of becoming. This ambitious task demands a profound reformulation of every philosophical field concerned with this relationship: metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, philosophical anthropology. By restoring the centrality that the paradigm of technique plays in shaping all human interaction with the world, Simondon rejects the primacy of substantialism and the hylomorphic scheme (matter-form interaction) as the bedrock of the classical Western metaphysics. Conversely, he pleas for a theory of individuation in terms of information, in which being is in a continuous process of becoming through operations of structuring and amplification.

 

The purpose of this reading group is to introduce and deepen our understanding of Simondon’s theory of individuation. To this end, we will close-read in its entirety his major work, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. The goals are: 1) to unravel together the dense web of concepts unfolded in this work (such as individuation, singularity, pre-individual, ontogenesis, operation, metastability, transduction, modulation, allagmatics, transindividuality, etc.); 2) to explore the ontological, ethical, political, and aesthetic consequences of thinking of individuation as a process that takes place in different regimes of reality (physical, biological, psychic, social); and 3) to grasp the significance of this philosophy of nature and a “genetic encyclopedism” that Simondon advocates, as well as its implications in our digital age and technological environment.

The English translation is strongly recommended as primary reading, as the sessions will be conducted in English:

Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Vol. 1. Taylor Adkins (trans.). Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

 

Other editions/translations:

(Original French edition) L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et information. 2eme. ed. Paris: J. Millon, 2013.

(Spanish) La individuation a la luz de las nociones de forma e información. 2a. ed. Pablo Ires (trad.). Buenos Aires: Cactus, 2013.

(Portuguese) A individuação à luz das noções de forma e informação. Luís Eduardo Ponciano Aragon e Guilherme Ivo (trad.). São Paulo: Editora 34, 2020.

(Italian) L’individuazione alla luce delle nozioni di forma e di informazione. 2a. ed. Giovanni Carrozzini (trad.). Milano: Mimesis, 2020.

 

 

Program

 

Session 1 | 7 December 2023

Introduction (pp. 1-17)

 

Session 2 | 14 December 2023

Part I. Chap. 1. Form and Matter. I: “Foundations of the Hylomorphic Schema: Technology of Form-Taking” (pp. 21-36)

 

Session 3 | 18 January 2023

Part I. Chap. 1. Form and Matter. II: “Physical Signification of Technical Form-Taking” (pp. 37-47)

 

Session 4 | 25 January 2024

Part I. Chap. 1. Form and Matter. III: “The Two Aspects of Individuation” (pp. 47-54)

 

Session 5 | 2 February 2024

Part I. Chap. 2. Form and Energy (pp. 55-94)

 

Session 6 | 16 February 2024

Part I. Chap. 3. Form and Substance. I: “Continuous and Discontinuous” and II: “Particle and Energy” (pp. 95-125)

 

Session 7 | 23 February 2024

Part I. Chap. 3. III: “The Non-substantial Individual: Information and Compatibility” (pp. 126-164)

 

Session 8 | 15 March 2024

Part II. Chap. 1. Information and Ontogenesis: Vital Individuation. I: “Principles toward a Study of the Individuation of the Living

Being” (pp. 167-180)

 

Session 9 | 22 March 2024

Part II. Chap. 1. Information and Ontogenesis: Vital Individuation. II: “Specific Form and Living Substance” (pp. 180-208)

 

Session 10 | 5 April 2024

Part II. Chap. 1. Information and Ontogenesis: Vital Individuation. III: “Information and Vital Individuation” (pp. 208-225)

 

Session 11 | 12 April 2024

Part II. Chap. 1. Information and Ontogenesis: Vital Individuation. IVa: “Information and Ontogenesis” (pp. 225-244)

 

Session 12 | 19 April 2024

Part II. Chap. 1. Information and Ontogenesis: Vital Individuation. IVb: “Information and Ontogenesis” (pp. 244-256)

 

Session 13 | 26 April 2024

Part II. Chap. 2. Psychical Individuation. I: “Signification and the Individuation of Perceptive Units” (pp. 257-272)

 

Session 14 | 3 May 2024

Part II. Chap. 2. Psychical Individuation. II: “Individuation and Affectivity” (pp. 272-291)

 

Session 15 | 10 May 2024

Part II. Chap. 2. Psychical Individuation. IIIa: “Psychical Individuation and the Problematic of Ontogenesis” (pp. 291-308)

 

Session 16 | 17 May 2024

Part II. Chap. 2. Psychical Individuation.  IIIb: “Psychical Individuation and the Problematic of Ontogenesis” (pp. 308-326)

 

Session 17 | 24 May 2024

Part II. Chap. 3. Collective Individuation and the Foundations of the Transindividual. I: “The Individual and the Social, Group Individuation” (pp. 327-344)

 

Session 18 | 31 May 2024

Part II. Chap. 3. Collective Individuation and the Foundations of the Transindividual. II: “The Collective as Condition of Signification” (pp. 344-355)

 

Session 19 | 7 June 2024

Conclusion (pp. 356-380)

 

 

December 6, 2023

Praxis Seminar: Research Colloquium in Practical Philosophy 2023/24, Session 8

Francesco Biagi

CIAUD-ULisboa

Henri Lefebvre: “Teoria” e “Praxis” para a Renovação do Marxismo

12 December 2023, 16h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

Henri Lefebvre (Hagetmau 1901 – Navarrenx 1991) foi um filósofo e sociólogo marxista que viveu intensamente todo o “breve século XX”. A Revolução Russa irrompeu quando o autor tinha quase dezoito anos, e ele morreu aos 90 anos, dois anos após a queda do Muro de Berlim e alguns meses antes da implosão da União Soviética. A receção portuguesa e internacional de Lefebvre tem sido inadequada e parcial, esquecendo-se frequentemente que o autor é um dos expoentes mais brilhantes, ainda que periféricos, do marxismo francês do século XX. De facto, Lefebvre inaugurou um novo tipo de filosofia, seguindo os passos de Marx e Engels, capaz de se desenvolver simultaneamente no plano teórico e prático: o marxismo deve ser uma “teoria” que ajude a compreender e a transformar a “práxis”. Esta é a perspetiva que lhe permite compreender e analisar as transformações da sociedade, desde a questão espacial, passando pela vida quotidiana, até uma teoria geral da política que abarca toda a análise da modernidade capitalista. A questão rural e a questão urbana tornam-se o “laboratório social” privilegiado para observar as evoluções do capitalismo e dar um novo impulso à tradição marxista, contra a ortodoxia dogmática propagada pelo estalinismo. Se, por um lado, Lefebvre contribuiu para revitalizar os instrumentos de investigação da crítica marxiana, por outro lado, a amplitude dos seus interesses não permitiu um reconhecimento adequado da sua contribuição original em comparação com outras figuras como Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser ou Guy Debord. A minha intervenção, após apresentar a biografia intelectual do autor, centrar-se-á em explicar como os estudos rurais e urbanos de Lefebvre são o instrumento através do qual o autor revitaliza e dá um novo significado ao pensamento marxista.