On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory.
Research project by Katja Diefenbach
All seminars take place at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
Which Spinoza? Ontology of multiplicity, politics of affects
The last seminar in the framework of this research project examines, how to read Spinoza in terms of a non-substantialist metaphysics and how to deal with the internal problematics of such a reading, in particular regarding the question of immanence and the theoretical strategy used to progress from a positive ontology of multiplicity to a politics of affects.
One could conceive the Spinozian idea of immanence in the coupling of two formulas, a speculative and a practical or ethical one: Speculatively, Spinoza grasps immanence in the sentence that before all production, before all genesis and creation there is distinction. In other words, Spinoza’s substance is not like a One, from which there proceeds difference; the attributes are not emanations; the substance is thus nothing but its problematising expression through an infinity of different attributes and its solving or integrating expression through finite modes. Practically and ethically, however, Spinoza considers immanent causality as a mode of life or individuation characterised by the tension between an absolute potential defining the impersonal nature and a tendential potentialisation, a becoming-potential, so to speak, defining the individual.
In this sense, Spinoza’s Ethics is indeed a book of liberation that conceptualises the temporalities and modalities of the constitution of freedom. Key is that the free individual is grasped as a potentiality of impersonal nature itself; it is pars potentiae. Through its capacity to arrive at a certain degree of causality for itself, it expresses a part of nature: »Thus the power of man, in so far as it is explained through his own actual essence, is a part of the infinite power of God or Nature, in other words, of the essence thereof [...].« [E4p4d] This capacity reveals a dramatic torsion that can take place in the process of individuation turning a situation, in which one has only contingent, fluctuating and imaginary affective experiences, to a situation, in which one is slowly entering a selective path leading from joyful passions to active affections and adequate ideas. Taking this path, individuals increasingly participate in the infinite without ever leaving the limitations of an individual that is always affected by other individuals, never autonomous, always surpassed by the potentiality of nature. That is to say, the free individual is a tendency, a tension or threshold. It will never arrive at complete self-presence. The imaginary, the passions, the inadequate ideas will persist. Hence, Spinoza endeavours, in the ethico-political dimension of his thought, to show, how the sad passions instituted in the regimes of the priests, the despots and masters, »so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety«, though the masses are tendentially capable, by way of the joyful passions, of amplifying their potentiality to act and thus their freedom and rationality.
Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza is defined by an extreme co-articulation, even short-circuit, of the speculative and the practical formula of immanence: The very relationship itself, through which the differentiality of being is expressed, is conceived as life by Deleuze. This is one of the strategies by which he keeps at bay the anthropological figures of thought present in Spinoza by substituting anomal singularisation for emancipatory humanisation. Hence, for Deleuze, potentiality is nothing but the selective process of transmutation that opens in differential being itself, in which elements composed by infinite sets of other elements do mutually specify and singularise in infinite relations. Those relations are thought as (indeterminate) modes of life. In brief, immanence is not immanent to life, but immanence is a life itself.
08.02.2012
18:00-20:30
Marx with Spinoza
Althusser's concept of immanent causality
— Seminar
— Auditorium
08.12.2011
14:00-17:30
Samuel Beckett's "Quad II" and "The Ghost Trio"
- Screening
- New Auditorium
08.12.2011
14:00-17:30
Being out of class (Deleuze)
Exhausting politics
- Seminar
- New Auditorium
01.11.2011
19:00 - 21:00
The messianic class (Agamben)
What is an inoperativity that consists in contemplating one's own potentiality to act?
- Seminar
- Auditorium
06.10.2011
15:00-20:00
Althusser's Lesson
On the political and theoretical effects of Althusserian Marxism
- Lecture and workshop with Jacques Rancière and Emiliano Battista
- Video Studio
29.06.2011
17:00-19:00
The retreating class (Nancy)
Sharing the inappropriatable
- Seminar
- Auditorium
26.05.2011
11:00-13:00
The subtractive class II (Badiou)
The political capacity of the proletariat
- Seminar
- Auditorium
- introduced by Katja Diefenbach and Dominiek Hoens
24.05.2011
11:00 - 13:00
Walter Benjamin
Romanticism and Zivilisationskritik
- Lecture by Michael Löwy
- introduced by Nathaniel Boyd
- Auditorium
08.04.2011
11:00-20:00
The impossible encounter
Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan II
- Workshop
- organized by the JVE Theory Department
- Auditorium
07.04.2011
13:30-15:30
The subtractive class (Badiou)
The political capacity of the proletariat
- Seminar
- Auditorium
- introduced by K. Kolsek, A. Kukuljevic
07.04.2011
16:30-18:30
Deleuze's affective “thinking with”
Reading Spinoza with Nietzsche
- Lecture by Michaela Ott
- Auditorium
07.04.2011
20:00-22:00
Becoming major, becoming minor
Book presentation
- Auditorium
- with Emiliano Battista, Vanessa Brito, Jack H. Fischer
04.03.2011
15:00-17:00
The theory of politics in the young Marx
Counter-politicisation of the non-political
- Lectures by Sara Farris, Peter Thomas
03.03.2011
16:00-18:00
The supplementary class (Rancière)
Disrupting the logic of division
- Seminar
- Auditorium
- introduced by Karl Lyden
04.02.2011
15:00-17.00
The paradoxical class (Balibar)
The antinomies of proletarian politics
- Seminar
- Auditorium
02.12.2010
10:00-12:00
Retreating the political
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe on political difference
- Seminar
- Auditorium
08.11.2010
10:00-12:00
Lenin's Scenario of Class Leadership
The Unifying Theme of his Political Career
- Lecture by Lars T. Lih
- introduced by Sara Farris + Peter Thomas
- Auditorium
08.11.2010
13:30-15:30
What Is to be Done? and Bolshevism
Lars T. Lih as Reader of Lenin
- Workshop with Sara Farris, Lars. T. Lih, Peter Thomas + Katja Diefenbach
- Auditorium
07.11.2010
20:00 - 22:00
Maggots and Men
Remembering Kronstadt
- Screening of a movie by Cary Cronenwett
- Auditorium
05.10.2010
14:00-16:00
Subject, event, separation
The politics of Badiou and Deleuze/ Guattari
- Lecture by Rodrigo Nunes
- Auditorium
05.10.2010
19:00-22:30
'Stronger are the powers of the people' III
Politics, poetics and popular education in Brazilian cinema
- 'Terra em Transe', Glauber Rocha, 1967
- 'A Queda', Ruy Guerra, 1976
- Video Studio
- introduced by R. Nunes
04.10.2010
15:00-17:00
'Stronger are the powers of the people' I
Politics, poetics + popular culture in Brazilian cinema 1962-1979
- Lecture by Rodrigo Nunes
- Auditorium
04.10.2010
20:00-22:00
'Stronger are the powers of the people' II
Politics, poetics and popular education in Brazilian cinema
- Cinco vezes favela, various, 1962
- Video Studio
- introduced by R. Nunes
03.10.2010
18:00-20:00
Capitalism deterritorialized
The concept of capitalism in "Anti-Oedipus"
- Seminar introduced by Kerstin Stakemeier
- Auditorium
30.06.2010
13:00-21:00
An impossible encounter I
Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan
- Collective workshop
- Annex
- After 1968, CLiC, the Hegel seminar and the Versus Lab group
28.05.2010
19:00 - 21:00
Preparatory Meeting
An impossible encounter: Deleuze, Guattari and Lacan
- Workshop preparation
- Room 204
27.05.2010
11:00-13:00
Molecular Politics I
Micropolitics in "A thousand plateaus"
- Seminar
- Room 204
08.04.2010
18:00-20:00
Politics unbound
Reading Badiou with and against his postmarxist contemporaries
- Lecture by Thomas Seibert
- Auditorium
07.04.2010
14:00-16:00
Spinoza with Deleuze
On affectivity and potentiality
- Seminar
- Auditorium
05.03.2010
20:00-22:00
The thought of becoming
Nietzsche with Deleuze II
- Lecture by Kathrin Thiele
- Auditorium
04.03.2010
18:00 - 20:00
The negative in the positive
Nietzsche with Deleuze
- Seminar
- Auditorium
- introduced by Nathaniel Boyd
04.03.2010
22:00-00.00
Satan's brew
Fassbinder's own private Nietzsche
- Screening
- Auditorium
04.02.2010
11:00-11:30
Abécédaire
A comme animal
- Screening of a movie by Claire Parnet, F 1988
- Auditorium
- English transcript by Dominique Hurth
04.02.2010
11:00 - 13:30
Becoming
The notion of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari
- Seminar
- Auditorium
- introduced by Oxana Timofeeva
03.12.2009
05.12.2009
B. Arsic, E. Battista, K. Diefenbach, D. Hoens, E. Lecerf, O. Marchart, M. J. Mondzain, E. Pellejero, N. Perin, D. Sardinha, R. Scherer, J. Volbers
Becoming major, becoming-minor, International conference
- Auditorium
- organized by Vanessa Brito
02.12.2009
15:00 - 17:00
Global capitalism, necropolitics and contemporary art
- Lecture by Marina Gržinić
- Auditorium
01.12.2009
17:00 - 19:00
The dispositif of the person
- Lecture by Roberto Esposito
- Auditorium
- introduced by G. Bianco
04.11.2009
19:00 - 21:00
Biopotentiality
On Esposito's concept of bio/politics
- Seminar
- Auditorium
09.10.2009
11.10.2009
Encountering Althusser
Conference material: schedule, abstracts, articles
09.10.2009
11.10.2009
Encountering Althusser
International Conference
- organised by Sara Farris, Gal Kirn, Peter Thomas, and Katja Diefenbach
- Studio
08.10.2009
A selection of texts
Reading Althusser
07.10.2009
14:00 - 16:00
La leçon d'Althusser
Rancière's farewell to Althusserian Marxism
- Seminar
- Auditorium
- introduced by Emiliano Battista
06.10.2009
17:00 - 19:00
What is aleatory materialism?
Debating Althusser's philosophy of the encounter
- Seminar
- Auditorium
- introduced by Gal Kirn
03.09.2009
11:00 - 13:00
Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo
Negri on materialism
- Seminar with Matteo Mandarini
- Auditorium
- introduced by Giorgos Papadopoulos
03.09.2009
20:00 - 22:00
The Surplus of Paradoxes
Queer/ing Images of Sexuality and Economy
- Lecture by Antke Engel
- Auditorium
- introduced by Giorgos Papadopoulos
02.09.2009
10:30 - 12:30
Communists like us
Negri's encounter with Guattari: the elision of Lenin
- Lecture by Matteo Mandarini
- Auditorium
02.09.2009
14:00 - 18:00
The autonomy of the political
Tronti and Cacciari's concept of the political
- Workshop with Sara Farris, Matteo Mandarini, Peter Thomas
- Auditorium
01.09.2009
17:00 - 19:00
The cinema of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
A cinematic diagnosis of biopolitics
- Lecture by Ruth Sonderegger
- Auditorium
01.09.2009
20:00-22:00
Screening Dardenne's Rosetta
Portray of a precarious survival
- Screening & discussion with Ruth Sonderegger
- Auditorium
17.06.2009
11:00 - 13:00
Invention
"From Capital-Labor to Capital-Life" by M. Lazzarato
- Seminar
- Auditorium
- Introduced by K. Stakemeier + P. Thomas
16.06.2009
11:00 - 13:00
The Meanings of Immanence in Deleuze's Philosophy
The specter of an unsolved problematic
- Lecture by Christian Kerslake
- Auditorium
- Introduced by Peter Thomas
20.05.2009
14:00-16:00
Individuation
Reading Simondon
- Auditorium
- Seminar
- Introduction by Sara Farris
19.05.2009
14:00 - 18:00
The singular, the trans-individual and the common
A French Marx
- Auditorium
- Lectures by L. Basso + V. Morfino
- Organised by Sara Farris
09.04.2009
14:00 - 16:30
The Intruder
Screening of a film by Claire Denis
- Auditorium
- Introduction by Pietro Bianchi
09.04.2009
17:00 - 19:00
Excess
Nancy on the singularity of death
- Seminar
- Auditorium
- Introduction by Pietro Bianchi
07.04.2009
08.04.2009
Biopolitics of scale
State-space symposium no. 1
- Berlage Institute Rotterdam
- Workshop
- organised by L. Stanek
11.03.2009
14:00-16:00
Immanence
Agamben and Deleuze on pure immanence
— Seminar
— Auditorium
— Introduced by V. Brito + T. Tho
11.03.2009
16:30-18:00
Preparatory meeting
Encountering Althusser
— Room 204
11.03.2009
20:00-22:00
Preparatory meeting
Workshop: becoming-major, becoming-minor
- initiated by Vanessa Brito
- Room 204
09.03.2009
10.03.2009 10:00 - 19:00
A Workshop on Baudrillard
Against the economic: Reading Baudrillard with Bataille, Lacan, Marx, and Debord
— The Annex
— organised by Giorgos Papadopoulos
07.02.2009
10:00 - 12:00
The force of the outside II
Foucault with Deleuze
— Seminar
— Auditorium
06.02.2009
14:00-16:00
The force of the outside
Superimposing diagrams: discipline and governmentality
- Seminar
- Auditorium
06.02.2009
16:30-18:30
Preparatory Meeting
Encountering Althusser
- Group meeting
- Room 204
03.02.2009
19:30-21:30
Is Marx a Fichtean?
Lecture of Tom Rockmore at the International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam
- organised by Sara Farris
- Returns of Marxism Series
05.12.2008
11:00 - 13:00
Marx's Metapolitics
Reading Jacques Rancière's "Dis-agreement"
- Seminar with Martin Saar
- Paper by E. Battista
- Room 204
04.12.2008
16:00 - 18:00
Political Spinozism
Negri on Power
- Guest Lecture by Martin Saar
- Auditorium
04.11.2008
11:00 - 13:00
The non-totalizable complexity of the historical process
Reading Balibar's "The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism"
- Seminar with Steve Wright
- Paper by O. Pupovac + S. Wright
- Room 204
03.11.2008
18:00 - 20:00
Tronti's Legacy
The Refusal of Labor
- Guest Lecture by Steve Wright
- Auditorium
05.10.2008
17:00 - 19:00
Deconstructing Value Theory
Reading Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"
- Seminar
- Room 204
11.09.2008
10:00 - 12.00
Value and Capitalist Capacities
Reading Moishe Postone's "Time, Labor and Social Domination"
- Seminar
- Room 204
01.07.2008
12:30-14:30
Marx with Bataille
Debating "The mirror of production" by Jean Baudrillard
- Seminar
- Auditorium
06.06.2008
12:00 - 14:00
The coming communities of commons
- Workshop with Massimo De Angelis, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Anne Querrien
- Room 201
05.06.2008
14:00 - 16:00
The arcane of reproduction
Feminist comments on the relation between politics and labor
- Seminar, introduced by M. Vishmidt
- Auditorium
- Guest: Anne Querrien
05.06.2008
17:00 - 21:30
Communists like us
The production of commons, subjectivity and space
- Lectures
- Massimo De Angelis, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Anne Querrien
- Gallery Space
09.05.2008
11.00 - 13.00
Rancière on the inactuality of communism and the intelligence of the unqualified
- Seminar
- Room 204
07.05.2008
15:00 - 17:00
Notes on the general intellect
Virno on Marx's "Fragments on machines"
- Seminar
- Paper: Gal Kirn
- Guest: Stephan Geene
06.05.2008
17:00 - 19:00
After effect
The cool despair of young creatives. Discussion with the filmmaker S. Geene
- Screening
- Room 201
04.04.2008
11.00 - 13.00
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy? II
Virno on the concept of bio-politics in Postoperaism
- Seminar
- Room 204
03.04.2008
17.00 - 19.00
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy?
Jason Read on abstract and living labor
- Seminar
- Auditorium
07.03.2008
11:00 - 13:00
The autonomy of living labor
Reading Negri's "Twenty Theses on Marx"
- Seminar
- Room 204
06.03.2008
16.00 - 19.00
The cell - Toni Negri and the prison
Screening + Discussion with the filmmaker Angela Melitopoulos
- Auditorium
04.03.2008
20.00 - 23.00
The body of the worker as paradoxical machine and teaching aid
Happiness (1934) by Aleksandr Medvedkin + Cine-Train excerpts (Medvedkin and others)
- Screening
- Introduction by Marina Vishmidt
- Auditorium
08.02.2008
10.00 - 12.00
Porto Marghera: the last firebrands
Workers' autonomy in the Veneto in the 1960s and 70s
- Screening
- Auditorium
08.02.2008
10.00 - 12.00
The emergence of the socialised worker II
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
- Seminar & Screening
- Auditorium
07.02.2008
16:00 - 18:00
The emergence of the socialised worker
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
- Seminar
- Room 204
05.02.2008
20.00 - 22.00
Kuhle Wampe
Politics of montage
- Screening + Discussion
- Auditorium
- Introduction by Gal Kirn
07.12.2007
11.00 - 13.00
Assigning a measure to the excessive power of the state
On Badiou's concept of truth procedure
- Seminar
- Room 204
06.12.2007
14.00 - open end
A visual genealogy of bohemia
Video seminar with S. Dillemuth
- Screening
- Auditorium
05.12.2007
18.00 - 20.00
The politics of bohemia
- Lectures by S. Dillemuth and others
- Auditorium
05.12.2007
21.00 - 23.30
Politics of Bohemia
Remembering Fassbinder
- Screening with S. Dillemuth
- Gallery Space
04.12.2007
20:00 - 24:00
The century of the self
Adam Curtis' documentary on consumerist subjectivity
- Screening
- Auditorium
- Introduction: M. Vishmidt
09.11.2007
12:00 - 14:00
The supplementary part that disconnects the people from itself
Reading Jacques Ranciere's "Ten theses on politics"
- Seminar
- Guest: Maria Muhle
08.11.2007
18:00 - 20:00
Politics, police and power
From Foucault to Rancière
- Lecture by Maria Muhle
- Auditorium
07.11.2007
18:00 - 20:00
In the figurative sense
Narrative strategies of subjectivisation in Fassbinder’s "Berlin Alexanderplatz"
- Lecture by Manfred Hermes
- Auditorium
05.10.2007
11.00 - 13.00
The poetics of knowledge
On political hegemony and militant becoming: Gramsci and Deleuze
- Lecture by Serhat Karakayali
- Room 204
04.10.2007
16:00 – 18:00
Micropolitics
Deleuze and Guattari on the concept of minoritarian struggle
- Seminar
- Room 204
07.09.2007
11.00 - 13.00
Domestic work and class struggle within the class II
On class composition and radical negativity
- Seminar
- Room 204
06.09.2007
16.00 - 18.00
Domestic work and class struggle within the class
On class composition and radical negativity
- Seminar
- Room 204
- Paper: Marina Vishmidt
02.07.2007
11.00 - 13.00
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism III
From class to minority
- Seminar
- Room 204
- Paper: Marina Vishmidt
01.07.2007
14.00 - 16.00
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism II
On the concept of the concrete universal
- Seminar
- Room 204
30.06.2007
14.00 - 16.00
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism
On Marx and Foucault
- Seminar
- Room 204
30.06.2007
20:00 - 24:00
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict
A selection of movies presented by Tsila Hassine
- Screening
- Auditorium
- Introduction: T. Hassine
29.06.2007
18:00 - 21:00
In the mood for work
The cultural producer as model of the post-fordist worker
- Lectures by R. Martinez, J. Rowan, M. Vishmidt, K. Diefenbach
- Gallery Space
30.05.2007
11:00 - 15:00
La Commune. Paris 1871 Part II
A movie by Peter Watkins
- Screening
- Studio
30.05.2007
15.00 - 17.00
The Soviet experience II
Dictatorship of the proletariat and council movement
- Seminar
- Room 204
29.05.2007
17:00 - 19:00
The Soviet experience
Rosa Luxemburg on the Russian Revolution
- Seminar
- Room 204
- Paper: Tanja Widmann
29.05.2007
20:00 - 23:00
La Commune. Paris 1871 Part I
A movie by Peter Watkins
- Screening
- Studio
06.04.2007
11.00 - 13.00
Democracy beyond law II
Negri on Lenin
- Seminar
- Room 204
05.04.2007
17.00 - 19.00
Democracy beyond law
Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of protetariat
- Seminar
- Room 204
- Guest: Grahame Lock
- Paper: Ozren Pupovac
05.04.2007
18:00 - 20:00
Dictatorship of the proletariat as political science
The actuality of Althusser's thinking
- Lecture by Grahame Lock
- Auditorium
04.04.2007
19:00 - 21:00
Hey production!
The imposition of creative work
- Lecture by Judith Hopf
- Auditorium
09.03.2007
11.00 - 13.00
To bring about the real state of exception II
Benjamin's concept of mysthic and divine violence
- Seminar
- Room 204
- Paper: Anthony Auerbach
08.03.2007
16:00 - 18:00
To bring about the real state of exception
Agamben's reading of Benjamin
- Seminar
- Auditorium
08.03.2007
18:00 - 20:00
Sovereign police
Notes on asymmetric warfare and governance
- Lecture by Raul Zelik
- Auditorium
08.03.2007
21.00 - 23.00
Road to Guantanamo
Winterbottom and Whitecross's image of exception
- Screening
- Auditorium
- Guest: Raul Zelik
09.02.2007
11.00 - 13.00
Potentiality of impotentiality II
Agamben's sovereign theoretical turn in thinking potentiality
- Seminar
- Auditorium
08.02.2007
16:00 - 18:00
Potentiality of impotentiality
Agamben's theory of autonomous potentiality
- Seminar
- Auditorium