Conference Theme
Humanity
is that form of psycho-social life which, by means of the non-living artefacts
that support it and found its historicity, extends bio-psychic animal life of
which the non-living condition is not yet the artefact but simple apoptosis
(‘cellular suicide’), and whose origin is a third form of ‘non-life’: the
chemical non-living. (Barthélémy,
“Du mort qui saisit le vif”, 2007).
Throughout
his working life Deleuze devoted a great deal of time to rethinking ‘ways to
die’ and the focus intensified in the period leading to his death. It was
explicitly addressed in his final text, which is key to understanding that
Deleuze’s affirmative vitalism, or his emphasis on life and joy, should not be
confused with the so-called search for happiness. Enduring the pain, or living
the wound, means, especially in our times, that we must thoroughly rethink
death, pain and madness. These issues are especially relevant for posthuman
subjects situated between the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth
Extinction, in the context of the Anthropocene and climate change, rising
populism, growing poverty and inequality. How does Deleuze’s ethics help us
organise rather than agonise in the face of these challenges?
The
participants of the Architectures of Life and Death conference
will examine both the structures and operations of what is alive in matter and
‘non-living’ in life. We start from the assertion that life extends beyond
its merely biological aspects through the non-living artefacts that support it
and, at times, oppose it. If an artefact, and its capacity for creating a life,
is conceptualised on the basis of its interventionist and manipulative agency,
then the very concept of technology – the production and control of artefacts –
can surpass the binaries of social and material, human and non-human, living
and non-living. The animate has always been utterly dependent on the inanimate.
Driven by the Foucauldian attitude of subsuming architectural history into a
general history of techne, the conference will examine how the
built environment and its technicities produce a style for
living and dying that may take place simultaneously. In doing so, we embrace
Guattari’s claim from his “Architectural Enunciation”
Once
it is no longer the goal of the architect to be the artist of built forms but
to offer his services in revealing the virtual desires of spaces, places,
trajectories and territories, he will have to (…) become an artist and an
artisan of sensible and relational lived experience. (Guattari,
Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 1989).
Guattari
urges us to understand architecture as a practice devoted to the processes of
subjectification. If architecture does not produce spaces but subjects, then it
is no longer a discourse on design styles. Rather, it becomes the producer of
styles to live and styles to die, beyond good and evil or any such Manichean
binaries. The only viable distinction is the one between active and reactive
subjects. Namely, those who follow a becoming that connects them to the
becoming of a world, and those who constantly retreat to segmentarity, to the
reassurance of established givens and limits. Consequently, there are two types
of subjects precisely because there are two types of deaths. A subject can nest
into its idiocy and make itself more and more rigid and progressively smaller,
or it can let itself dissipate until its disappearance. The way that one styles
one’s dissolution is not merely determined by the inevitability of entropy but
by the expressionism of becoming. It is possible that by examining the ways
architecture plunges into the infinity of experience – how it confronts chaos –
will teach us how to die without dying.
Annual Deleuze Scholarship
The
Annual National Deleuze Scholarship Conference is a working symposium intended
to bring together scholars, students, researchers, activists, artists, and
others whose work revolves around the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Each year
the conference is hosted by a different university in the Netherlands. Previous
editions addressed the following central themes:
#1 Deleuze
and Cultural Studies, University of Utrecht, 2012;
#2 Affect,
Delft University of Technology, 2013;
#3 Passions,
Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2014;
#4 Aesthetics,
Radboud University Nijmegen, 2015;
#5 Machinic
Ecologies, University of Amsterdam, 2016;
#6 Pedagogies,
AKI Academy (ArtEZ University of the Arts), Enschede, 2017;
#7 Politics
of Sustainability, University of Utrecht, 2018.
Conference Schedule
Berlagezaal
I
09:45
– 10:00 Welcome
and intro by A. Radman and S. Kousoulas
10:00
– 10:45 Opening
Keynote Lecture by A. Ballantyne
10:45
– 11:00 Coffee Break
Berlagezaal
II
11:00
– 13:00 First
Roundtable Discussion
13:00
– 14:00 Lunch Break
Berlagezaal
II
14:00
– 16:00 Roundtable
Discussion
16:00
– 16:15 Coffee Break
Berlagezaal
I
16:15
– 17:00 Closing
Keynote Lecture by R. Braidotti
Admission
Free
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