Marina Lathouri and Guest Speakers

Debate 3

Forays in Spacing: Nature, Technics, Trace

Guest speaker: Georgios Tsagdis

Friday 23 February | 4:00pm | HCT Room

Half a century after the three-fold announcement of the logic of the trace in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Voice and Phenomenon and Writing and Difference the constructive potential of deconstruction continues to grow. Authors as diverse as Bernard Stiegler and Judith Bulter continue to explore the logic of the trace (supplementarity, pharmacology, spectrality and so on) in socio-political, aesthetic, technological and architectural spaces. The reach of this spectrum is granted by the originary articulation of the trace: from its inception writing, which is nothing but the tracing of the trace, is constituted precisely as spacing: the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space.

In this seminar we will explore the structure, function and effects of spacing in the interrelation of nature and technics, termed here technophysics. Thinking through Heidegger, Derrida and Stiegler, we will depart from historical theoretical constructions of space to explore trace-topologies as well as the effects produced by different articulations of the relation of the who (subject, Dasein, human) and the how (nature, technics). In this exploration, all tropes of technē, from industrial production to literature assume a direct relevance to the future of the technological apparatus as the latter is traced back to the heart of nature. We finally examine the implications of the technophysical always already for places of dwelling, travelling and production, at a moment when an unprecedented transformation announces itself.A discussion of false or contradictory arguments among proponents of the Modern Movement and their critics

Readings:

Tsagdis, Georgios, Dispositions: the Technophysical Apparatus, in: Azimuth, Issue 10, 2017 (forthcoming)

Ross, Daniel, A Summary of Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus

Tsagdis, Georgios, The Manual: Heidegger and Fundamental Oto-cheiro-logy I

Georgios Tsagdis is Fellow at the Westminster Law & Theory Lab. He has taught at the University of Greenwich, Surrey, UCL as well at the London School of Philosophy and other institutions. His work operates across theoretical and disciplinary intersections drawing on 20th Century, Contemporary and Ancient Greek Philosophy. His Archeology of Nothing is revised for publication, while his current project examines the function of the negative in the ontology of matter from Plato to New Materialisms. In other recent research, he explores various themes in the historic encounters of philosophy and nature, from the figure of the animal in the Platonic corpus to post-humanism and parasitism. He has written on the question of love with reference to theological, political and feminist discourses. His essays have been published in various book collections and international journals, among which Parallax and Philosophy Today. Since 2014 he has been organizing the Seminar of Neoplatonic Studies, a London intercollegiate study and research group, hosted at the Warburg Institute.