BERNARD STIEGLER AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

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The Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures is proud to co-sponsor

BERNARD STIEGLER AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Lecture and Mini-Seminar

1. Public lecture

TUESDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER 2015 Bernard Stiegler Invention and neganthropology in the society of hypercontrol with respondent Professor Reinhold Martin, GSAPP

6-8pm Maison Francaise, Columbia University Seating is Limited and available on a first come first served basis

Mainstream anthropology, from Lévi-Strauss to contemporary paleoanthropology, has often downplayed the fundamental role of technical development in defining the human. Opposed to that view, in accordance with André Leroi-Gourhan, Bernard Stiegler argues that human life is tightly related to a process of externalization of life into tools and artifacts: humanity is co-extensive with technics. He proposes a “neganthropology” that considers the transformations that technical development impose on our internal and external milieu. A radical example of how technics impact our environment is the way our economic system is subordinated to data in today’s absolutely computationalist 24/7 capitalism. In it, the “society of control” has become a society of hypercontrol. In this lecture Stiegler will argue that an “art of hypercontrol” would allow us to reformulate creation, politics, law, economics, science and technology through practices of invention that pertain to the order of “neganthropology.”

2. Mini Seminar (application required)

TUESDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER 2015 Bernard Stiegler Mini-Seminar: General Organology and Pharmacology

2-4pm The Heyman Center for the Humanities, Common Room Columbia University

In this seminar, we will discuss the question of technics in the contemporary world. In No Apocalypse, Not Now, Derrida writes about what he calls “the absolute pharmakon” – that is, the nuclear weapon. In Speed and Politics, Virilio shows that the Russian and American military powers convinced Brezhnev and Nixon to negotiate in order to avoid the release of a nuclear war automatically “decided” by computers. In the same vein, we are now confronted with the question of speed in emergency situations provoked by the Anthropocene, the new geological period to which we belong. To understand this periodization and sketch an answer, we need anorganological and pharmacological approach based on Canguilhem’s and Leroi-Gourhan’s works.

Reading List: -André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and speech (trans. Anna Bostock Berger, MIT Press, 1993). -Georges Canguilhem, The normal and the pathological (trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett with Robert S. Cohen, Zone Books, 1989). -Bernard Stiegler, What makes life worth living. On pharmacology (trans. Daniel Ross, Polity Press, 2013). -Paul Virilio, Speed and politics (trans. Marc Polizzotti Semiotext(e), 2006) -Jacques Derrida, No apocalypse, not now (trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics, 14(2), 1984).

TO APPLY: Please email your name, your Departmental affiliation, your year level, and 2-4 lines describing your research interests and your particular interest in Bernard Stiegler’s work.

Send applications by 22 September 2015 to m.shvartzberg@columbia.edu.

Participants will be selected by ballot, and will be notified via email by 24 September.

Open to Columbia University graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and Faculty.

Bernard Stiegler is a philosopher and social activist. He has published some thirty books on philosophy, aesthetics, technology and economy, among other subjects. His most well-known work, Technics and Time, dwells on the social, political and psychological mutations brought about by new technologies. He has taught at the Collège International de Philosophie and directs the Institut de Recherche et Innovation at the Centre Georges Pompidou. He is president of the Ars Industrialis association, which researches the role of technology for proposing a political economy beyond capitalism.

Reinhold Martin is Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Martin is a member of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought and was a founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room. Currently, Martin is working on a history of the nineteenth century American university as a media complex, and a set of theoretical essays on the contemporary city.

Co-Sponsors: GSAS; Institute for Comparative Literature and Society; Heyman Center; Maison Francaise; Center for Justice; Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture; Center for Contemporary Critical Thought; Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures; Department of Art History and Archaeology; Department of French and Romance Philology

Events organized by Nick Croggon, Manuel Shvartzberg and Roberto Valdovinos

Last Updated 4 years ago


Citation

Hispanic Institute, « BERNARD STIEGLER AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY », Hispanic Institute Bulletin, Columbia University | LAIC, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures (online), published on August 18, 2015. Full URL for this article
Hispanic Institute Bulletin
ISSN 2377-8873
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The Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, housed in Casa Hispánica (at 612 West 116th Street in New York City), has long enjoyed an international reputation as a center for Hispanic and Lusophone studies.

In addition to providing students with a commanding linguistic preparation in Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan, the department offers a flexible and varied undergraduate program that enables them to study the cultural manifestations of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds in all historical periods—from the medieval to the globalized present—and in a variety of cultural contexts: the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, the former colonies of Portugal, and the United States.

The aim of the department’s graduate program is to train students to become first-rate scholars and teachers who are theoretically sophisticated and attuned to the issues, polemics, and approaches that define the profession currently as a field of intellectual endeavor.

Casa Hispánica is also the home of the Hispanic Institute for Latin American & Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. Founded in 1920 as the Instituto de las Españas, the Institute’s central aim is to sponsor and disseminate research on Iberian and Latin American cultures. The Institute has also published since 1934 the Revista Hispánica Moderna, a distinguished journal in Latin American and Iberian criticism and theory, and recipient of the 2009 Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement.