Franziska Aigner

Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler have both famously argued that philosophy has hitherto been incapable of seeing, recognizing, or remembering technics. Both thinkers confronted this technical aporia by putting forward their own thought on technics, arguing to find themselves in a historically singular position from which technical thought proper can, for the first time, be questioned and invented. This article shows how both Heidegger’s and Stiegler’s conceptual projects are supported by a two-fold reading of the history of philosophy as at once devoid of technical thought proper, while at the same time harbouring, but only ever implicitly, the resources for thinking and remembering said technics. Their readings of the work of Immanuel Kant will be shown to be exemplary in this regard. This article ultimately concludes that, as a result of both Heidegger’s and Stiegler’s particular self-positioning within the history of technical thought, neither of them could recognize the tec...

espanolEl siguiente articulo es una investigacion critica sobre lo politico en los nuevos materialismos feministas. La agencia, la identidad y la subjetividad se vuelven mas complejas en las teorias del nuevo materialismo, aunque no se eliminen del todo. Se entienden como el producto complejo de una red de relaciones material y discursiva, natural y cultural, de la que podria surgir una subjetividad politica feminista representada por ejemplos siempre situados y situacionales. No obstante, mientras los nuevos materialismos feministas ofrecen perspectivas complejas respecto a la naturaleza efimera de las practicas que establecen limites, desestabilizando conceptualizaciones binarias del sujeto y el objeto, la materia y el discurso y aspectos similares, nuestro articulo se centra en como tales complejidades pueden fundamentar una politica feminista propiamente dicha, particularmente vinculada a la obra de la fisica cuantica y filosofa Karen Barad.Empleando las herramientas conceptuale...

The following essay is a critical investigation into the political within feminist new materialisms. Agency, identity and subjectivity are complexified in new materialist theories, although not entirely done away with. They are understood as the complex product of a material-discursive, nature-cultural web of relations from which a feminist political subjectivity might emerge in its always situated and situational instantiations. However, while feminist new materialisms offer complex insights into the transient nature of boundary drawing practices, destabilizing binary conceptualizations of subject and object, matter and discourse and the like, our focus in this article is on how such complexifications can ground a feminist politics proper, in particular concerning the work of feminist quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad. Using the conceptual tools developed by Peta Hinton (2014) and Catherine Malabou (2011), our argumentation works through Barad’s notions of objectivity, ...

Vivienne Newport spoke to us about the early choreographic works of Tanztheater Wuppertal under the direction of Pina Bausch, in which Newport participated as one of the seminal dancers. Furthermore, she spoke to us about the internal dynamic in the company and the particularity of Pina Bausch’s relations to the dancers.

Reinhild Hoffmann spoke to us about the slow shift in the dance studio towards equal Mitspracherecht (German for, literally, “the right to speak with”) of the dancer and author. She furthermore offered an insight into her own working method and her collaboration with Arno Wüstenhöfer, who offered choreographic directorships to Pina Bausch in Wuppertal and later to Hoffmann in Bremen.

Dominique Mercy first met Pina Bausch in the United States at a summer academy organized by the choreographer Paul Sanasardo. Telling of his experience of the New York dance scene in the beginning of the 70s, and how he perceived it as differing from both living as well as dancing in Europe, he moves on to provide a detailed account of the development of Pina Bausch’s questioning method.

William Forsythe spoke to us about being a spectator of Pina Bausch’s work and about the German Stadttheater landscape of the 1970s and 80s, as well as about the development of his particular way of working in relation to the issues and concerns he found himself immersed in.

Raimund Hoghe spoke about his work as a writer, articulating and giving form to the political and artistic climate of Germany from the 1960s onwards. Having worked with Pina Bausch as one of the first dramaturges of dance, he recalled the development of their friendship and working relation.

As is well known by now, the work of late French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) has been burdened by a somewhat difficult historical reception, both within France as well as internationally. Slowly supplemented by posthumously published philosophical fragments and lecture courses delivered at the Sorbonne, as well as interviews, and articles,1 his principal work remained the twofold 1958 doctorate L’Individuation à la lumiére des notions de forme et d’information [Individuation in light of notions of form and information; major thesis] and Du mode d’existence des objets techniques [On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; minor thesis]. Whilst a partial, unofficial English translation of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects by Ninian Mellamphy has been circulating since the late 1980s,2 Simondon’s thought was until recently mainly available to the Anglophone reader via the writings of Bernard Stiegler.3 As both monographs and considerable secondary literature on Simondon have started to appear in English over the last decade, the only books still missing were the English translations of the primary texts themselves.4 In April 2017, the first complete English translation of Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects has been completed by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Thus, fifty-nine years after its completion, the Anglophone world is at last able to read Simondon himself, at least his minor thesis. Considering that this work was conceived prior to the digital revolution and on the cusp of the cybernetisation of the world, we might well ask, what can On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects tell us about the technical world we live in today? Simondon’s approach to technics is lucid in its critique and unique in its inventive philosophical constructions. He rejects the accounts of technics provided by metaphysics, naturalistic discourse on labour and culture in general and declares them insufficient since they rely on the primitive schema of hylomorphism in order to do their bidding. Thus, at the core of Simondon’s approach lies his critique of hylomorphism (hyle – ancient Greek for matter; morphe – ancient Greek for form), the philosophical doctrine of how matter, usually taken to be passive, takes on active form. Simondon shows how this supposed universal and logical schema of the genesis of being as the process of taking form is nothing but ‘the transportation into philosophical thought of the technical operation reduced to work’ (p248). On this basis, the main critique against hylomorphism is then that it essentially leaves the active centre of the technical operation obscure. Instead, it relies on the activity 1. L’Invention dans les techniques. Cours et conférences (19651976), Cours sur la Perception (19641965), Imagination et invention (19651966), Communication et information: cours et conférences, Sur la technique, (19531983).