On The Threshold of New Materialist Studies

This article answers a question addressed to the author during the selection procedure for a research network: if we were to be awarded funding, would we also work toward formulating (under)graduate degrees in new materialist studies? The article engages with this issue of Forum to provide an original impetus for preliminary thoughts on the institutionalisation of new materialist studies as a platform for academic research and scholarly degrees

Bergson before Bergsonism: Traversing “Bergson’s Failing” in Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy of Art

How did the philosophy of Henri Bergson look before Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism? This article provides a situated answer to that question by performing a close reading of Susanne K. Langer’s early engagement with Bergson in her monograph Feeling and Form from 1953. Both Bergson and Langer argue against polemical philosophizing. Such polemical modes of doing philosophy distort insight into the thought of the philosophers in question and in philosophical questions per se (such as questions about artistic creation). My reading of Langer’s Bergson is therefore infused with what is nowadays called a new materialist impetus of non-linearity, a non-oppositional philosophizing, and the reading follows the methodology of diffractive reading, a thinking outside fixed and fixating schools of thought. I argue that in spite of Langer’s explicit, i.e., polemical objection to Bergson’s work and to its use by artists, it is a Bergsonism with which Langer’s work is infused

Serres on Education

In this latest contribution to Temple Continental: Philosophers for our Time, Iris van der Tuin and Anouk Zuurmond introduce readers to the French philosopher Michel Serres, and his thinking on education. They cover the ‘disparateness’ of knowledge in an internet age, the ‘voyage’ of pedagogy, the inequalities inscribed in institutions, the need for education outside as much as in a library, and the importance of interdisciplinarity. For Serres, education is perhaps best compared to swimming mid-stream as one attempts to cross a river

Serres on Education

In this latest contribution to Temple Continental: Philosophers for our Time, Iris van der Tuin and Anouk Zuurmond introduce readers to the French philosopher Michel Serres, and his thinking on education. They cover the ‘disparateness’ of knowledge in an internet age, the ‘voyage’ of pedagogy, the inequalities inscribed in institutions, the need for education outside as much as in a library, and the importance of interdisciplinarity. For Serres, education is perhaps best compared to swimming mid-stream as one attempts to cross a river

From intersectionality to interference: Feminist onto-epistemological reflections on the politics of representation

This article reviews the debate on ‘intersectionality’ as the dominant approach in gender studies, with an emphasis on the politics of representation. The debate on intersectionality officially began in the late 1980s, though the approach can be traced back to the institutionalization of women's studies in the 1970s and the feminist movement of the 1960s. Black and lesbian feminists have long advocated hyphenated identities to be the backbone of feminist thought. But in recent years, intersectionality has sustained criticism from numerous angles within gender studies, ranging from feminist philosophy to applied political research. This article will use the theorization of ‘interference’ as a searchlight to produce an overview of this interdisciplinary debate, culminating in our affirmative answer to the question: should we move from intersectionality to interference? Our answer is based on onto-epistemological reflections, i.e., reflections in which being and knowing are always already entangled

Diffraction & Reading Diffractively

This short essay presents a critical cartography of the critical new materialist notion and methodology of diffraction