Sonic Acts 2019: Didier Debaise – Out of Nature. How a Concept Became a Political Power? - a podcast by Sonic Acts

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER
Didier Debaise – Out of Nature. How a Concept Became a Political Power?
22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

with an introduction by Rick Dolphijn.

The moderns have invented ‘nature’ and have made it one of their most important political institutions. Didier Debaise will revisit this very singular adventure through which a number of local inventions, gestures, and operations, namely within experimental systems, have given birth to a new political force. Disconnecting this nature from the very conditions of its emergence and existence, the moderns have instantiated it as an essential actor within the processes of normalisation of practices and as a crucial instrument justifying the extension of their impact on all other territories. Today the question then has become the following: How to resist the hegemonic tendencies of this modern version of nature in order to reinstate space and restore legitimacy to other ways of inhabiting the Earth.

Didier Debaise is a permanent researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherché Scientifique (FNRS) and the director of the Centre of Philosophy at Free University of Brussels (ULB) where he teaches contemporary philosophy. He is the co-founder, with I. Stengers, of the Groupe d’études constructivistes (Geco). His main areas of research are contemporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of events, and links between American pragmatism and the French contemporary philosophy. He is director of a collection in Presses du réel, member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes and Inflexions. He wrote three books on Whitehead’s philosophy, edited volumes on pragmatism, on the history of contemporary metaphysics, and he wrote numerous papers on Bergson, Tarde, Souriau, Simondon, and Deleuze. Two of his books are translated in English: Nature as Event and A Speculative Empiricism. He is working on a new book called Pragmatique de la terre.

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