Manuel Delanda: Lavas and Magmas

We live in a world populated by structures — a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions of materials shaped and hardened by history. Immersed as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but interact in a variety of ways with the other historical construction that surround us, and in these interactions [...]

Friday, March 16th, 2012

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Waste-Wilderness: A conversation with Peter L. Galison

Interview with Peter Galison by Smudge Studio: Peter L. Galison is a historian, writer, award winning filmmaker and the Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University.  He was appointed a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, he won the Max Planck Prize in 1999, and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in [...]

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

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Graham Harman: Rogue Planets

Planets were known to the ancient Greeks as wander stars, and those as far as Saturn could be seen with the naked eye.Thei occasional retrograde motion was explained by Plotemy through epicycles — smaller circles grafted onto larger circular orbits — a useful theoretical fiction. Rogue Planets

Friday, January 20th, 2012

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Peter Sloterdijk: Geometry in the colossal: the project of metaphysical globalization

“The fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as picture.” — Martin Heidegger,  The Age of the World Picture (2002 [1938]) “Geometry in the colossal” (Geometrie in Ungeheurem) appears as pages 47 – 72 of the second volume of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spharen — volume is entitled Globen, “Globes”. The excerpt is a [...]

Saturday, November 12th, 2011

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BRUNO LATOUR: Whose cosmos? Whose cosmopolitics?

The misunderstanding between Beck and myself may stem, in the end, from differing interpretations of the present historical situation. The “first modernization,” to use his favorite expression, came with a certain definition of cosmopolitanism, which corresponded to the great idea that the whole earth could actually fit snugly inside what Sloterdijk has called the “metaphysical [...]

Monday, November 7th, 2011

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Michel Serres: Revisiting The Natural Contract

“A satellite for speed, an atomic bomb for energy, the Internet for space, and nuclear waste for time…these are four examples of world-objects.” – Michel Serres   A leading French philosopher (and mathematician) of the humanities in the age of posthuman culture, Michel Serres’ writings represent the creative edge of a form of thought which [...]

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

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Maurizio Lazzarato: Struggle, Event, Media

Why can the paradigm of representation not function in politics, nor in artistic modes of expression, and here especially in the production of works that employ moving images? I will attempt to answer these questions by using the paradigm that imagines the constitution of the world from the relationship between event and multiplicity. Representation is [...]

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

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Sandro Mezzadra: The Gaze of Autonomy. Capitalism, Migration and Social Struggles

To engage with the autonomy of migration thus requires a ‘different sensibility’, a different gaze, I would say. It means looking at migratory movements and conflicts in terms that prioritize the subjective practices, the desires, the expectations, and the behaviours of migrants themselves. This does not imply a romanticization of migration, since the ambivalence of [...]

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

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Judith Butler: The End of Oslo

Among the many astonishing claims that Barack Obama made in his recent speech opposing the Palestinian bid for statehood was that ‘peace will not come through statements and resolutions.’ This is, at best, an odd thing to say for a president whose ascendancy to power itself depended on the compelling use of rhetoric. Indeed, his [...]

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

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Mahmood Mamdani: What does Gaddafi’s fall mean for Africa?

“In the past decade, Western powers have created a political and legal infrastructure for intervention in otherwise independent countries. Key to that infrastructure are two institutions, the United Nations Security Council and the International Criminal Court. Both work politically, that is, selectively. To that extent, neither works in the interest of creating a rule of [...]

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

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