2018-19 Speaker Series

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March 8, 2019

Christine Daigle

Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute and Posthumanism Research Network,
and Professor of Philosophy at Brock University

"Solving the Dissolve: Collective Material Agency"

Material feminists have reconceived the human and dismantled human exceptionalism by showing how we are material bundles permeated and interconnected with their habitats and other beings. However, there is a sense in which looking so closely at matter, through the lens of quantum theory or the atomic field of energy for example, makes it dissolve as matter. If we embrace a view of the human as non-exceptional, radically material, permeable, and constituted by its habitat, one might ask whether “we” do not dissolve too. The problem is to recuperate the “itness” of our bodies and thereby some, albeit minimal, locus of agency. Indeed, if a worldview that was obsessed with the powers of the mind as separate from materiality led us to undo the world and ourselves with it, dismissing this view with a focus on materiality can be the key. However, there is a problem that remains unresolved for material feminists, namely to establish a stable enough locus of human agency. Examining Nietzsche’s notion of the “soul as subjective multiplicity” and of the body as grand reason alongside material feminist proposals, I inquire ways to conceive of agency as embedded in materiality, collective, and stable enough to effect change.

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March 14, 2019

Joan Copjec

Professor of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University

"From the Cloud to the Resistance"