Workshop "The French Connection IV: Representing Nature, Alotting the Earth"

Catherine Chaberty, ‘A common belonging to the earth: From the Parliament of Things (B. Latour) to the diplomacy of interdependencies (B. Morizot)’

Abstract: The critique of the ‘modern constitution’ developed by Bruno Latour (1991) highlights the asymmetry through which political subjectivity is reserved to humans, while non-humans remain excluded from processes of representation and decision-making. The ‘parliament of things’ thus rethinks politics as the composition of heterogeneous beings and the milieus to which they are attached. This perspective is extended by Baptiste Morizot’s notion of a ‘diplomacy ofinterdependencies’ (2020), understood as a network of mutual dependencies among forms of life, in which the figure of the diplomat operates as a mediator and shifts attention toward practices of negotiation, mediation, and cohabitation. Politics is thereby displaced from representation to the articulation of situated relations. Within this cosmopolitical horizon, in the wake of Isabelle Stengers (2003), developments such as the rights of nature (Zabalza, 2024) and critiques of the reduction of nature to its productive dimension (Charbonnier, 2020) contribute to rethinking dominant conceptual, legal, and political frameworks. Rivers, forests, and ecosystems no longer appear as passive objects, but as participants in processes of composition and coexistence. The shift from a ‘parliament of things’ to a ‘diplomacy of interdependencies’ thus points toward a transformation in how inhabiting the Earth is understood. Drawing on Sarah Vanuxem, property can be reconceived not as domination, but as a capacity to inhabit—that is, to coexist within a milieu and to engage in shared forms of action (2018).

Short bio: Catherine Chaberty is in the final year of her PhD in philosophy at Aix-Marseille University (AMU), where she has taught philosophy as a part-time lecturer. Her research focuses on the transformations of the concept of property in commons theory and the ontological, political, and legal relations between property and the living.

Cristóbal Durán Rojas, ‘To learn by heart: Rousseau and the virtual existence of Nature’

Abstract: Recently, the English philosopher Timothy Morton has discussed the concept of ‘Nature’, viewing it as an idealised image that is imposed as ‘a reified thing in the distance’, like the green of mountains that are increasingly distant from civilisation. This “Nature” may even “impede a proper relationship with the earth and its lifeforms”, insofar as it is always set in direct opposition to humankind. Three centuries earlier, Rousseau also experienced the tribulations of this object that seems to be beyond our reach. The question of that nature which ought to be grasped in its pristine state is something that also recedes for Rousseau, to the point of having to posit a “state of pure nature”, prior to what the theorists of Natural Law had envisaged. In his 1972 lecture on Rousseau, Althusser argued that in Rousseau this impossible state is grasped through the voice of the heart (or the voice of nature) yet remains confined within our innermost being. If nature appears as that “reified thing”, it is perhaps because we can no longer grasp it, because reason, as Rousseau foresaw, has made us understand it through its own laws, and has ultimately suffocated it. Today, when nature is at risk of being reduced to nothing more than a countable set of available resources, whether to be exploited or preserved, it is important to return to that moment when Rousseau anticipated the difficulties of finding that nature, yet affirmed its existence in a lingering sentiment—a nature that ‘still speaks deep within our hearts’. Rousseau, a contemporary of the invention of the steam engine, feels that this lost nature also dwells in every present moment: behind our current obsession with rewilding looms a thought that confronts us with fortuitous encounters and what has not yet taken shape, as Deleuze says of Rousseau’s state of nature. A state loaded with potentialities and virtualities, which may well provide the key to that elusive man-nature identity that leads the authors of Anti-Oedipus to say that “the unconscious is Rousseauistic”.

Short bio: Cristóbal Durán Rojas holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chile. He has taught undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral courses in areas related to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, and psychoanalytic theory at various universities in Chile, Brazil, Spain, England, and other countries. He has published several books, the most recent one was about viral images in David Cronenberg’s cinema (Imágenes virales. El cine de David Cronenberg, Metales Pesados, 2024). This year, he will publish a work on an ecology of cosmis horror (Los paisajes del Afuera: para una ecología del horror cósmico, Qual Quelle). He has also edited several books, including Desear la diferencia. Conversaciones con Félix Guattari – Encuentros en Chile, 1991 (Frontera interior, 2024), which presents different texts that emerged from Félix Guattari’s visit to Chile. He is currently the director of the Puntos Singulares book series at Pólvora in Chile. He has mainly dedicated himself to the thought of Gilles Deleuze, his interlocutors, and related topics, and is currently working around the question of the expansion of our notion of pluralism based on contemporary ecological discussions (2024-2028).

Li Zhong, ‘Token is the New Gramme – or, Of Tokenology? Towards a Machinic Deconstruction’

Abstract: In this talk, I begin with Derrida’s early engagement with cybernetics, together with his close attention to the biology (based on the cybernetic paradigm) of his time. From there I turn to aspects of his later thought that I gather under the heading of machinic deconstruction, and close by drawing out the resonances, at times uncanny, between the post-structuralist account of language and how the Transformer actually processes natural language.

Short bio: Li Zhong holds a PhD in philosophy from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Tongji University. He has developed an expertise in the thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Currently, he is realizing a postoc at East China Normal University.

Alexandra Van Laeken, ‘The importance of being singular — on the transcendental assumptions of Rancière’s political aesthetics’

Abstract: In her most recent and widely discussed philosophical essay, On immediacy, or the style of too late capitalism, Ana Kornbluh observes a contemporary trend within aesthetics according to which ‘only the subjective and singular are appropriately moderate’ (2023, 149). According to Kornbluh, a defining feature of this aesthetic shift is that we no longer dare to speak in universal terms. Everybody speaks their own truths. Kornbluh identifies this shift as characteristic of contemporary neoliberal times, which she describes as ‘too late capitalism’. Jacques Rancière’s theory is often read as part of this movement, both by its supporters and its critics. In doing so, he faces criticism for so-called ‘particularism,’ reducing art and politics to individual or personal experiences. I contend that this critique relies on a misreading that stems from ignoring the transcendental assumptions underlying Rancière’s position. Rancière indeed claims that art and politics are singular, yet his appeal to singularity draws on the transcendental framework of Kantian aesthetics rather than on any everyday sense of the term. In reaction to Lyotard’s reinvigoration of the sublime, Rancière reactivates Kant’s judgement of the beautiful as an inherently democratic mode of experience, foregrounding the emancipatory potential of art’s singularity.
In this paper, I discuss the concept of singularity, arguing that it is key to understanding what is at stake in Rancière’s political aesthetics. I juxtapose it with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s reading of the sublime, which Rancière critiques vehemently. Lyotard conceives of the sublime as a singular sensory experience that disrupts through sensation and places us in a position of subservience to it. Through a critical discussion of both Kant’s aesthetics and Rancière’s critique upon Lyotard, it becomes clear that Lyotard’s interpretation of the sublime is not only based upon a misreading but is also undesirable, as it is fundamentally aristocratic rather than democratic. Furthermore, it differs significantly from the contemporary understanding of singularity, as employed by Kornbluh. Rather than being immediate, the singular is mediated through the aesthetic judgment of beauty. And rather than personal, it distinguishes itself from the purely agreeable and appeals to subjective universality. In doing so, the singular artwork becomes constitutive itself: it installs a new universality and reframes the former. It becomes political.

Short bio: Alexandra Van Laeken is a doctoral researcher at the FWO Flanders, and Ghent University and the University of Antwerp. She investigates how art constitutes and (politically) transforms the world through the metaphor of the window. In addition, Alexandra practices writing and the parforming arts, and she is a co-founder of the art collective RuimteTuig.