Heidegger at Harvard

It was interesting to observe that Heidegger was very much present in both Sloterdijk and Latour’s talk during their recent joint appearance at Harvard. For Sloterdijk, it was a matter of building on Heidegger positively, by “explicitating” Heidegger’s notion of being-in. As Latour quipped, for Sloterdijk “Dasein is design,” and explicitation means rendering the material aspects of being human visible. Thus Sloterdijk shows that being-in for humans means living in bubbles, in a world that looks like foam — marvellously refreshing metaphors for facilitating a new way of imagining sociality. A host of biological and evolutionary themes were also evoked, often resulting in startling observations, such as describing women’s bodies as “architectural units” and “apartments” for “interiorising the egg.” Sloterdijk drew parallels between evolutionary biological processes and architecture, claiming that “humans are pets,” i.e. “the effects of the space they create.” He did have a few very funny lines, aided by his deadpan delivery.

REProduction, REFerence, and RELigion

Religion has figured in unusual ways in recent days. Tony Blair (as announced on the Daily Show ) started to teach a course on “Faith and Globalisation” at Yale last week. The archbishops of the Church of England were commenting on the financial technique of short selling earlier this week. And on Thursday, Bruno Latour – connecting the ecological crisis, science, and religion – asked: “Will Non-humans be Saved?” Read the text of his lecture here [PDF]. Latour addresses the standoff between creationism and neo-Darwinism by redefining what science and religion do on the basis of three ontological categories or “modes of existence:” reproduction, reference, and religion.

Bruno Latour to give Henry Myers Lecture 2008

The 2008 Henry Myers Lecture of the Royal Anthropological Institute will be given by Bruno Latour on 25 September 2008 at the British Museum in London. The lecture is entitled “Nature and Creation: What good is it for a man to gain his soul, yet forfeit the whole world?” Further details can be found on the RAI website. Here is the abstract:

Recording of Noortje Marres’s ISRF talk

Click here to listen to (1 hour 33 minutes) or download (43.2MB) the recording of Noortje Marres’s talk “Devising Affectedness: Eco-Homes and the Making of Material Publics” delivered at the Information Systems Research Forum at ISIG, LSE on 24 January 2008. The slides and a video recording of the talk are available on the ISRF page.

Noortje Marres on material practices of publicity

On Thursday 24 January 2008 from 12:00 to 13:30 Noortje Marres will be giving an ISRF talk at ISIG at the London School of Economics and Political Science entitled “Devising Affectedness: Eco-Homes and the Making of Material Publics.”