31.3.12

CHIMÈRES revue des schizoanalyses - n°76, Écosophie



Manola Antonioli, Anne SauvagnarguesArpenter la maison du monde
DEUX LECTURES DE FÉLIX GUATTARI 
René Schérer, Les visions écosophiques de Félix 
Anne Querrien, Une lecture des Trois écologies
POLITIQUE
Fabrice Flipo, La décroissance : une pensée antimoderne ?
Salvatore Panu, Giusi Lumare, Des espaces de résistance en Italie
CLINIQUE ET POESIE
MadataoSlams
ESTHETIQUE
Roberto Barbanti, Silvia Bordini, Lorraine Verner, Art, paradigme esthétique et écosophie
Pierre Sterckx, Giuseppe Penone : de sève et de bronze
Christian Sorg, Le promeneur de la Sierra
Jean Gabriel Cosculluela, Avec (Christian Sorg)
Nathalie Brevet, Hughes Rochette,Récits d’expériences
Aliocha Wald Lasowski, Piano nomade et piano écosophique
FICTIONS
Marco Candore, Le dossier 57-C
Stéphane Hubert, De la sexualité chez les androïdes
Nicolas Zurstrassen, Dans les plis, à vie

Présentation du n°76, Écosophie. le 5 avril 2012,



En partenariat avec les éditions érès, la galerie Dufay/Bonnet accueillera
le jeudi 5 avril 2012, à partir de 18 heures
la revue Chimères pour le lancement de son n° 76, Écosophie.
Elle présentera à cette occasion du 5 au 15 avril 2012 une exposition du peintre Christian Sorg
Galerie DUFAY / BONNET
63, rue Daguerre - 75014 Paris
tél : + 33 (0)1 43 20 56 06 / + 33 (0)6 82 66 08 89
Du lundi au vendredi de 11 h à 19 h / le samedi de 15 h à 19 h
et sur rendez-vous.
CHIMÈRES
revue des schizoanalyses


Tiqqun - Elementi per una teoria della Jeune-Fille - Bollati Boringhieri, It, 2003


Figura della giovinezza e della femminilità, la Jeune-Fille (espressione che sarebbe fuorviante tradurre con fanciulla, ragazza o giovinetta) trae origine dal fallimento del femminismo, travolto dalla mercificazione totale. Buona soltanto a consumare (tempo libero o lavoro non importa) la Jeune-Fille è nello stesso tempo il più lussuoso dei beni di consumo attualmente in circolazione, la merce-faro che serve a vendere tutte le altre, il sogno finalmente realizzato del più stravagante dei commercianti: la merce autonoma, che parla e cammina, la cosa finalmente vivente. Secoli di lavoro instancabile di generazioni di bottegai trovano il loro coronamento geniale nella Jeune-Fille. Ma questa come si manifesta? Per cominciare, l’apparenza della Jeune-Fille è la Jeune-Fille stessa, tra le due non c’è niente. Poi, c’è qualcosa di professionale in tutto ciò che fa la Jeune-Fille, la quale concepisce la propria esistenza come un problema di gestione. Gelosa proprietaria del suo corpo, la Jeune-Fille («velina», indossatrice, pubblicitaria, quadro o animatrice) vende oggi la sua «forza di seduzione» come un tempo la «forza di lavoro». Anche i suoi amori sono un lavoro, e come ogni lavoro sono diventati precari... Infine, la Jeune-Fille non invecchia, si decompone. Costruito come un’alternanza di aforismi e di spunti di riflessione, questo testo, frutto di una elaborazione collettiva, propone una lettura del presente che va ben oltre la divertita notazione di costume. 


Tiqqun è il nome di un collettivo che pubblica a Parigi l’omonima rivista, «Organo di collegamento all’interno del Partito immaginario».


Recensioni:
Non c’è alcun luogo nel quale ci si senta più infinitamente soli che fra le braccia di una Jeune-Fille: parola di Tiqqun, collettivo politico con base a Parigi che sembra davvero usare la scrittura come azione. Il libro si legge infatti al meglio nel corridoio del treno, al bar con l’insalata o camminando per strada, dove hai sotto gli occhi le multiple incarnazioni pubblicitarie della protagonista, la persona fatta merce. (Alessandra Baduel, «D - La Repubblica delle Donne», 21 giugno 2003)
Dentro è fatto di aforismi, manco fosse un’insalata di Oscar Wilde, e insomma è chiaro che nonostante la carta opaca da saggio colto della copertina era una roba che si poteva leggere anche sotto l’ombrellone, quindi l’ho aperto e infatti ho immediatamente trovato una risposta […]. A pagina novantatré ho capito perché hanno tutte la pancia di fuori. “Di provincia, di periferia o dei quartieri alti, in quanto Jeune-Fille, tutte le Jeunes_Filles si equivalgono. (Guia Soncini, «Il Foglio», 10 luglio 2003)
Un libriccino intrigante (Giampiero Mughini, «Panorama», 10 luglio 2003)
Un’alternanza di aforismi e spunti di riflessione per un Frammenti di un discorso amoroso in chiave sociologica. (Alessandra Bonetti, «Carnet», Luglio 2003)
Questo manualetto mette a nudo l’impressionante fenomeno contemporaneo: tutto si vende con l’immagine giovanile di una donna, la merce-faro che serve a vendere tutte le altre. Libro di aforismi, alcuni fulminanti. (Corrado Augias, «Il Venerdì di Repubblica», 18 luglio 2003).
[A proposito della recensione di Giampiero Mughini su «Panorama»] « […] Posso capire la consolazione che Mughini trae da queste visioni. Però si traggono grandi soddisfazioni anche dalla visione di una corrida, ma chi pensa al toro? Il problema non è Mughini, sono le ragazze». («L’Espresso», 24 luglio 2003)
Di carne al fuoco ce n’è per chi voglia sostare entro questa teoria che spazia tra i territori esterni della mercificazione totale della realtà, a partire dal fallimento del femminismo e dalla perdita di coscienza sociale e personale. Il pensiero è talvolta folgorante e illuminante rispetto a ciò che ci circonda: la Jeune-Fille è in mezzo a noi (siamo noi!). (Rossana Sisti, «Avvenire», 29 luglio 2003)
Read more on BB website

Michael Sheringham: "Archival Memory: Foucault and After" @ Alma Mater Studiorum-Università di Bologna, 24 maggio 2012



La memoria nelle Scienze Umane - Michael Sheringham discute di 

"Archival Memory: Foucault and After"

24 maggio 2012Luogo: Sala Rossa - Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici
Via Marsala, 26
Bologna
 
Dalle 16 alle 19 presso la Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici dell'Università di Bologna (via Marsala, 26), Michael Sheringham (All Souls College-University of Oxford) terrà un seminario intitolato "Archival Memory: Foucault and After"

30.3.12

Mile Gu et alii - How quantum physics could make 'The Matrix' more efficient @ Nature + Communications - Published 27 March 2012


Quantum simulations need to store less information to predict the future than do classical simulations. The finding applies to phenomena described by stochastic processes. Credit: Mile Gu / Center for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore


Researchers have discovered a new way in which computers based on quantum physics could beat the performance of classical computers. The work, by researchers based in Singapore and the UK, implies that a Matrix-like simulation of reality would require less memory on a quantum computer than on a classical computer. It also hints at a way to investigate whether a deeper theory lies beneath quantum theory. The finding is published 27 March in Nature Communications.



The finding emerges from fundamental consideration of how much information is needed to predict the future. Mile Gu, Elisabeth Rieper and Vlatko Vedral at the Centre for  at the National Univesity of Singapore, with Karoline Wiesner from the University of Bristol, UK, considered the simulation of "stochastic" processes, where there are several possible outcomes to a given procedure, each occurring with a calculable probability. Many phenomena, from stock market movements to the diffusion of gases, can be modelled as stochastic processes.
The details of how to simulate such processes have long occupied researchers. The minimum amount of information required to simulate a given stochastic process is a significant topic of study in the field of complexity theory, where it is known in scientific literature as statistical complexity.
Researchers know how to calculate the amount of information transferred inherently in any stochastic process. Theoretically, this sets the lowest amount of information needed to simulate the process. In reality, however, classical simulations of stochastic processes require more storage than this.
Gu, Wiesner, Rieper and Vedral, who is also affiliated with the University of Oxford, UK, showed that quantum simulators need to store less information than the optimal classical simulators. That is because quantum simulations can encode information about the probabilities in a "superposition", where one of information can represent more than one classical bit.
What surprised the researchers is that the quantum simulations are still not as efficient as they could be: they still have to store more information than the process would seem to need.
That suggests  might not yet be optimized. "What's fascinating to us is that there is still a gap. It makes you think, maybe here's a way of thinking about a theory beyond ," says Vedral.
More information: For further details, see "Quantum mechanics can reduce the complexity of classical models" Nature Communications, 3, 762 (2012).http://www.nature. … mms1761.html

"Mathematical models are an essential component of quantitative science. They generate predictions about the future, based on information available in the present. In the spirit of simpler is better; should two models make identical predictions, the one that requires less input is preferred. Yet, for almost all stochastic processes, even the provably optimal classical models waste information. The amount of input information they demand exceeds the amount of predictive information they output. Here we show how to systematically construct quantum models that break this classical bound, and that the system of minimal entropy that simulates such processes must necessarily feature quantum dynamics. This indicates that many observed phenomena could be significantly simpler than classically possible should quantum effects be involved. (...)"

Elettra Stimilli Il debito del vivente Ascesi e capitalismo - Quodlibet, It, 2011



Il debito del vivente
Ascesi e capitalismo

Questo libro si propone di indagare le radici di un fenomeno che investe l’esistenza di ciascuno tanto dal punto di vista individuale che da quello collettivo: l’essere in difetto, in colpa, in debito senza che dipenda da noi, quasi si trattasse di uno stato preliminare che nessun tipo di scelta consapevole è in grado di emendare. Si ha l’impressione che ogni forma di vita si configuri come una risposta a tale condizione, sia quella che si dedica incondizionatamente al godimento e al consumo, sia quella che sceglie i percorsi del rigore ascetico.
Che l’economia (mercati, investitori, forze produttive ecc.) sottragga ai singoli e alle comunità il controllo del proprio destino, deriva probabilmente da una malattia radicale dell’umano le cui origini di ordine materiale non possono che essere al tempo stesso declinate sul piano culturale, ovvero filosofico e religioso. Riconoscere queste origini sotto le varie maschere che hanno indossato nel corso della storia occidentale è la sfida che qui si tenta di affrontare, con la speranza di individuare almeno qualche spunto di guarigione.

Indice: Introduzione. i. Il fine in sé dell’impresa economica. ii.Oikonomía e ascetismo. iii. La costruzione teologica del governo del mondo. iv. Povertà volontaria al mercato. v. Il capitalismo come religione. vi. Per una critica filosofica dell’ascetismo. vii. «Spirito» del capitalismo e forme di vita. Bibliografia. Indice dei nomi.


Read more on Quodlibet website

Ascolta podcast Radio3Rai con intervista Elettra Stimilli con Felice Cimatti





Gilles Deleuze , Giorgio Agamben Bartleby. La formula della creazione - Quodlibet, It, 2012


Bartleby. La formula della creazione

Fin dalla sua pubblicazione nel 1853, Bartleby lo scrivano di Melville, «uno dei più bei racconti dell’epoca moderna», sta iscritto come un enigma sulla soglia della letteratura americana. La figura scialba e «incurabilmente perduta» dello scrivano che ha smesso di scrivere, ha letteralmente paralizzato i critici e tenacemente eluso ogni spiegazione. Qual è il messaggio che, senza mai proferirlo, egli sembra volerci significare con ogni suo gesto? E qual è il senso della formula che egli non si stanca di ripetere a ogni richiesta: «preferirei di no»? In questo libro, due filosofi, Gilles Deleuze e Giorgio Agamben, provano a misurarsi con l’enigma di Bartleby e a decifrare il senso della formula. In pagine straordinariamente dense l’autore dell’Anti Edipo scopre in Bartleby il paradigma della «natura prima» e, insieme, il rappresentante del «popolo a venire»; Giorgio Agamben legge nel «preferirei di no» dello scrivano la formula della potenza pura, l’algoritmo di un esperimento in cui il Possibile si emancipa da ogni ragione.


Transgression 2.0 Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age - Edited by Ted Gournelos and David J. Gunkel - Continuum, Uk, January 2012



One doesn’t need to look far to find examples of contemporary locations of cultural opposition. Digital piracy, audio mashups, The Onion and Wikipedia are all examples of transgression in our current mediascape. And as digital age transgression becomes increasingly essential, it also becomes more difficult to define and protect.
The contributions in this collection are organized into six sections that address the use of new technologies to alter existing cultural messages, the incorporation of technology and alternative media in transformation of everyday cultural practices and institutions, and the reuse and repurposing of technology to focus active political engagement and innovative social change.
Bringing together a variety of scholars and case studies, Transgression 2.0 will be the first key resource for scholars and students interested in digital culture as a transformative intervention in the types, methods and significance of cultural politics.

Table of Contents

I) Mashup/Remix/Repurpose
1. Richard Edwards – Flip the Script: Political Mashups as Transgressive Texts 
2. David Gunkel – Audible Transgressions: Art and Aesthetics after the Mashup
3. Mark Amerika – Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/ch RemiX]: A Conversation with Mark Amerika
4. Paul Booth – Saw Fandom and the Transgression of Fan Excess
II) Pornography and Beyond
5. Stephen Maddison – Is the Rectum Still a Grave? Anal Sex, Pornography and Transgression
6. Sarah Neely - Making Bodies Visible: Post-Feminism and the Pornographication of Online Identities
7. Grant Kien – BDSM and Transgression 2.0: The Case of Kink.com
8. Julian Petley – Sick Stuff: Law, Criminality, and Obscenity
III) Media 2.0—Legitimacy, Power, and Information
9. Mark Nunes – Abusing the Media: Viral Validity in a Republic of Spam
10. Ted Gournelos – Breaking the News: Wikileaks and Secrecy in the Age of the Internet
11. Vanessa Au – My day of fame on Digg.com: Race, Representation, and Resistance in Web 2.0
12. Henry Jenkins – An Interview with Henry Jenkins
IV) Law, Social Disturbance and Political Unrest
13. Jack Bratich – Sovereign Networks, Pre-emptive Transgression, Communications Warfare: Case studies in Social Movement Media
14. Debra Shaw – Monsters in the Metropolis: Pirate Utopias and the New Politics of Space
15. Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste - On the Mexican State's War on Drug Violence: Transgression in the Representation and Circulation of Los Perro Salvajes
16. Michael Truscello – Social Media and the Representation of Summit Protests: YouTube, Riot Porn, and the Anarchist Tradition

Author(s)

Ted Gournelos is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media and Cultural Studies at Rollins College, FL. He is the author of Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park and co-editor of A Decade of Dark Humor: How Comedy, Irony, and Satire Shaped Post-9/11 America.

David J. Gunkel is Presidential Teaching Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University. He's also the managing editor of the International Journal of Zizek Studies.

Transgression 2.0 is a carefully crafted and nuanced collective account of transgression in an age of social networks feeding revolutions, of the reign of software in election campaigns, of omnipresent porn and spam, the ‘triumph’ of Wikileaks, and of the endless amateur cultural production of everything. Full of tasty detail covering a range of highly contemporary issues, the book avoids hyper-optimistic or dismissive claims and offers new ways of understanding the dynamics of resistance and appropriation, creativity, emancipatory change and enclosure, that are core to transgression.
This is a rare find for anyone looking for a balanced account of today’s network- and software-reliant cultures in terms of their convoluted aesthetic and political powers.
-- Dr Olga Goriunova, Senior Lecturer in Media Practice, London Metropolitan University, and author of Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet
This is a smart, diverse collection of essays that has something to thrill -- and enrage -- everyone. Which, of course, is exactly what any good book about transgression /should/ do. If you want to be comforted, wrap yourself in a blanket and make a pot of tea. But if you want to think seriously about the promises and perils of transgressive politics in the 21st century, read this book.
--Gilbert B. Rodman, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota

27.3.12

Commonware #5. Christian Marazzi: Moneta e capitale finanziario. Bologna, 23 marzo 2012.

Paul Virilio - The Administration of Fear - Semiotext(e), Usa, 2012


The Administration of Fear

Paul Virilio
Translated by Ames Hodges
With Bertrand Richard



We are living under the administration of fear: fear has become an environment, an everyday landscape. There was a time when wars, famines, and epidemics were localized and limited by a certain timeframe. Today, it is the world itself that is limited, saturated, and manipulated, the world itself that seizes us and confines us with a stressful claustrophobia. Stock-market crises, undifferentiated terrorism, lightning pandemics, “professional” suicides . . . . Fear has become the world we live in.
The administration of fear also means that states are tempted to create policies for the orchestration and management of fear. Globalization has progressively eaten away at the traditional prerogatives of states (most notably of the welfare state), and states have to convince citizens that they can ensure their physical safety.
In this new and lengthy interview, Paul Virilio shows us how the “propaganda of progress,” the illuminism of new technologies, provide unexpected vectors for fear in the way that they manufacture frenzy and stupor. For Virilio, the economic catastrophe of 2007 was not the death knell of capitalism, as some have claimed, but just further evidence that capitalism has accelerated into turbo-capitalism, and is accelerating still. With every natural disaster, health scare, and malicious rumor now comes the inevitable “information bomb”–live feeds take over real space, and technology connects life to the immediacy of terror, the ultimate expression of speed. With the nuclear dissuasion of the Cold War behind us, we are faced with a new form of civil dissuasion: a state of fear that allows for the suspension of controversial social situations.

Paul Virilio has published twenty-five books, including Pure War (his first in English) and The Accident of Art, both written with Sylvère Lotringer, as well as the new edition of The Aesthetics of Disappearance, all published by Semiotext(e).

Tiqqun - Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl - Semiotext, Usa, 2012


    Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl

    Tiqqun, Associate Editor
    Translated by Ariana Reines



    The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality.
    –from Theory of the Young-Girl



    First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The Young-Girl is consumer society’s total product and model citizen: whatever “type” of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with the language of French women’s magazines, rooted in Proust’s figure of Albertine and the amusing misery of (teenage) romance in Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski’s notion of “living currency” and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses—and makes visible—a phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to have become transparent.
    In the years since the book’s first publication in French, the worlds of fashion, shopping, seduction plans, makeover projects, and eating disorders have moved beyond the comparatively tame domain of paper magazines into the perpetual accessibility of Internet culture. Here the Young-Girl can seek her own reflection in corporate universals and social media exchanges of “personalities” within the impersonal realm of the marketplace. Tracing consumer society’s colonization of youth and sexuality through the Young-Girl’s “freedom” (in magazine terms) to do whatever she wants with her body, Tiqqun exposes the rapaciously competitive and psychically ruinous landscape of modern love.


Matteo Pasquinelli: The biomorphic: Kurt Goldstein and the genealogy of the notion of biopolitics (abstract for Belgrade, 25 May 2012)



The biomorphic: Kurt Goldstein and the genealogy of the notion of biopolitics
Foucault’s early research on madness (and embryo of the later work on biopolitics) is critically linked with the biophilosophy originated in Germany in the XIX century and in particular with the figure of Kurt Goldstein, a German-Jewish neurologist whose influence on French thought has been crucial but rarely acknowledged. The Nazi regime forced Goldstein to leave Berlin and write his seminal book Der Aufbau des Organismus in exile in Amsterdam in 1934.
Foucault opens his first book Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954) with a critique of Goldstein’s organic medicine and definition of mental illness, surely inspired by his mentor Canguilhem. In those years Goldstein’s works are extensively recognised by Merleau-Ponty in La Structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) and by Canguilhem in Le Normal et le pathologique (1943) and La Connaissance de la vie (1952). In a bizarre circular coincidence, the last public and authorised text by Foucault is the 1985 introduction to the English edition of Le Normal et le pathologique, Canguilhem’s first publication and doctoral thesis, which draws directly from Goldstein’s distincion of normality and pathology. Along this track, in his introduction, Foucault states famously: “life is what is capable of error”.
Goldstein had so a pivotal role between Canguilhem and Foucault, with the latter committed to question and abandon the Innenwelt of neurology in order to explore the Umwelt of power apparatuses. Foucault’s epistemological turn can be easily illustrated also by the titles of their main works: Canguilhem’s La Connaissance de la vie (1952) is conceptually reversed into Foucault’s La Volonté de savoir (1976). This shift from knowledge as an expression of life to knowledge as an expression of power upon life, however, leaves on the ground the problem of the autonomy of the subject that will be faced by Foucault only in his latest years (L’Usage des plaisirs and Le Souci de soi, 1984). Here Foucault’s care of the self can be interestingly compared with the drive of self-actualisation that Goldstein recognises in any organism.
For Goldstein indeed a healthy organism is not defined by normality but by normativity — that is the power to invent continuously new norms and adapt life to new environmental conditions. Also Deleuze and Guattari’s cryptic notion of Body-without-Organs can be better understood under this light. When they write that “the organism is the enemy” (Mille Plateaux, 1980), they warn against the reactionary dangers hidden in any philosophy of the living that does not question and exceed the borders of the Organism.
Against a gothic tone recently adopted in philosophy (depicting conflict as a Manichean opposition of ‘naked life’ and sovereign power), Goldstein’s thought can be helpful to reframe a political autonomy of the living. The biomorphic is the notion introduced here against the transcendental definitions of the biopolitical in order to recognise the ab-normal yet always normative forces of life. Goldstein believed indeed that the demand for a return to nature was utopia: it is by following his quasi-Spinozian biomorphism that we can imagine so the metamorphosis of a new society out of the shell of the old and not just out of its ‘nakedness’.
- – -
Il biomorfico. Kurt Goldstein e la genealogia del concetto di biopolitica.
Le prime ricerche di Foucault sulla follia (embrione del lavoro successivo sulla biopolitica) sono legate criticamente alla biofilosofia sorta in Germania nel XIX secolo e in particolare alla figura di Kurt Goldstein, neurologo ebreo-tedesco la cui influenza sul pensiero francese è stata cruciale ma fino ad ora poco riconosciuta. Il regime nazista costrinse Goldstein a lasciare Berlino e a scrivere in esilio ad Amsterdam il suo fondamentale testo Der Aufbau des Organismus nel 1934, pubblicato poi in inglese nel 1939 e in francese nel 1951.
Foucault apre il suo primo libro Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954) con una critica della medicina organica di Goldstein e della sua definizione di malattia mentale, in un diaologo implicito con il suo maestro Canguilhem. Il lavoro di Goldstein è largamente citato in quegli anni da Merleau-Ponty in La Structure du comportement (1942) e Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) e da Canguilhem in Le Normal et le pathologique (1943) e La Connaissance de la vie(1952). In una bizzarra coincidenza circolare, l’ultimo testo a ricevere l’imprimatur di Foucault è l’introduzione all’edizione inglese (1985) di Le Normal et le pathologique, prima opera di Canguilhem e sua tesi di dottorato, che si rifà direttamente alle nozioni di normale e patologico di Goldstein. E’ su questa traccia che nella sua introduzione Foucault stesso afferma “la vita è ciò che è capace di errore”.
Goldstein ebbe così un ruolo di snodo tra Canguilhem e Foucault, con il secondo determinato ad abbandonare l’Innenwelt della neurologia per esplorare l’Umweltdei dispositivi di potere. La svolta epistemologica di Foucault può essere facilmente illustrata dai titoli delle loro opere: La Connaissance de la vie (1952) di Canguilhem viene concettualmeente rovesciata ne La Volonté de savoir (1976) di Foucault. Il passaggio dalla conoscenza come espressione della vita alla conoscenza come espressione del potere sulla vita lascia comunque sul terreno il problema dell’autonomia del soggetto, che è affrontato da Foucault solo negli ultimi anni  (L’Usage des plaisirs e Le Souci de soi, 1984). Qui la cura del sèfoucaultiana può essere confrontata in modo interessante con quella pulsione diauto-realizzazione che Goldstein riconosce in ogni organismo.
Invero per Goldstein un organismo sano non è definito dalla sua normalità quanto dalla sua normatività , ovvero dalla capacità di inventare continuamente nuove norme e adattarsi a nuove condizioni ambientali. Anche la criptica nozione di corpo-senza-organi di Deleuze e Guattari può essere meglio compresa sotto questa luce. Quando scrivono “il nemico è l’organismo” (Mille Plateaux, 1980), essi mettono in guardia contro i pericoli reazionari nascosti in ogni biofilosofia che non metta in questione ed ecceda i limiti dell’Organismo.
Contro un tono gotico di moda nella recente filosofia (che descrive il conflitto come opposizione manichea di ‘nuda vita’ e potere sovrano), il pensiero di Goldstein può essere d’aiuto per ridisegnare oggi una autonomia politica del vivente. Il biomorfico è la nozione che qui si introduce contro le definizioni transcendentali del biopolitico per riconoscere le forze anormali e semprenormative della vita. Goldstein credeva che il desiderio di tornare alla Natura fosse utopia: è seguendo il suo biomorfismo quasi spinoziano che possiamo immaginare così la metamorfosi di una nuova società dal guscio di quella precedente e non dalla sua semplice ‘nudità’.
Read more on Pasquinelli's blog

Life Art Biopolitics conferenceBelgrade, 25th of May 2012
Cultural Center Dom Omladine
www.lifeartbiopolitics.org


26.3.12

John Armitage - Virilio and the Media - Polity Press, Uk, May 2012


In books such as The Aesthetics of DisappearanceWar and CinemaThe Lost Dimension, and The Vision Machine, Paul Virilio has fundamentally changed how we think about contemporary media culture. Virilio’s examinations of the connections between perception, logistics, the city, and new media technologies comprise some of the most powerful texts within his hypermodern philosophy.

Virilio and the Media presents an introduction to Virilio’s important media related ideas, from polar inertia and the accident to the landscape of events, cities of panic, and the instrumental image loop of television. John Armitage positions Virilio’s essential media texts in their theoretical contexts whilst outlining their substantial influence on recent cultural thinking. Consequently, Armitage renders Virilio’s media texts accessible, priming his readers to create individual critical evaluations of Virilio’s writings. The book closes with an annotated and user-friendly Guide to Further Reading and a non-technical Glossary of Virilio’s significant concepts.

Virilio’s texts on the media are vital for everyone concerned with contemporary media culture, and Virilio and the Media offers a comprehensive and up to date introduction to the ever expanding range of his critical media and cultural works.

Table of Contents

1 The Aesthetics of Disappearance
2 Cinema, War, and the Logistics of Perception
3 New Media: Vision, Inertia, and the Mobile Phone
4 City of Panic: The Instrumental Image Loop of Television and Media Events
5 The Work of the Critic of the Art of Technology: The Museum of Accidents
Conclusion
Guide to Further Reading
Glossary

John Armitage is Professor of Media at Northumbria University.

'If Paul Virilio is the essential guide to understanding the digital future that is the 21st century, then John Amitage's brilliant account of Virilio and the Media explores the essence of Virilio's intellectual vision: its aesthetics, new media critique, political theory, cinematic analysis, and creative technological disturbance. Here, the writing of Paul Virilio becomes a vivid, haunting reminder of that which has been lost and gained with the disappearance of culture, society and politics into the language of new media.'
Arthur Kroker, Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory, University of Victoria, Canada
'Paul Virilio is a canary in the mine of contemporaneity. For him, new communications media have remade the world as speed, accident, ubiquitous militarisation and the loss of the dimension of the real. Armitage is uniquely positioned to articulate the richness and urgency of Virilio's media critique.'
Sean Cubitt, University of Southampton
'John Armitage proves himself the leading English-language interpreter of Virilio's unique body of work. Focusing on Virilio's pioneering understanding of the transformative impact of media technologies, Armitage establishes a cogent and clear-sighted trajectory, and makes a powerful argument for both the strategic and ethical value of Virilio's thought.'
Scott McQuire, University of Melbourne