Link Post for September 29th

Here’s some news you can use:

• John Caputo is conducting a seminar on the future of continental philosophy of religion, using many speculative realist and contemporary materialist sources. The syllabus is available as a PDF here, while the lectures are being recorded and can be found here. Caputo even pulls some quotes from Speculations Vol. I in the first lecture.

• Speaking of audio, the recordings from the Accelerationism event have been posted and can be found here. There’s also a video on YouTube of part of Ray’s talk here.

• Alain Badiou will be speaking on his translation of Plato’s Republic in New York. Details are here.

• More participants have been added to the first Cyclonopedia Symposium, Leper Creativity, to be held at the New School in March. This looks to be a very interesting event with some great people involved (h/t Nicola).

• Also from Nicola, the new volume of Glossator is live and available here.

• Paul‘s book of interviews, Post-Continental Voices is up for preview on Amazon.com.

• There’s a call for papers for a conference relating object-oriented philosophy to geography, The Difference of Things (h/t Levi).

I’ve been tied up with writing for the past while. I should have a couple small things done over the next few days and will be trying to get back into the habit of writing here once my schedule loosens up a little.

CFP: Speculations Vol. II

Below is the call for papers for the second volume of Speculations. Please distribute to anyone who you think may be interested, especially those who are working around speculative realism within other fields.

Speculations, a journal for speculative realist thought, invites submissions for its second issue. Given the intrinsically open and unconstrained nature of the arena for speculative thought which Speculations aims at embodying—and in view of the favorable reception of the inaugural issue—our aim is to broaden the range and ambition of the Journal. In accordance with speculative realism’s mandate to open philosophy to the richness of reality, we particularly encourage scholars to engage with speculative realism from disciplinary perspectives beyond philosophy. We therefore welcome papers discussing speculative realism’s renewed philosophical concern with the non-human world from a wide array of disciplines.

Speculations is an open-access and peer-reviewed journal that hopes to provide a forum for the exploration of speculative realism and ‘post-continental’ philosophy. Our aim is to facilitate discussion about ongoing developments within and around speculative realism. We accept short position papers, full length articles and book reviews.

Potential authors should make sure to go through the ‘Submission Checklist’ before submitting. Articles should be no longer than 8,000 words and follow the Chicago Manual of Style (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html).

The deadline for submission is the 8th of January 2011.

Submissions can be sent to speculationsjournal@gmail.com

The Editors:

Paul J. Ennis
Michael Austin
Fabio Gironi
Thomas Gokey

Real Horror Symposium

This sounds like a great way to spend Halloween. Wish I weren’t across the sea!

Real Horror Symposium
Sunday, 31 October 2010
Organised by Tom Trevatt and Caryn Coleman

@ the Woodmill (London)
Speaker list and timetable coming soon

The Real Horror symposium brings into question the relation between reality and horror. The proposition is that both horror and reality share a common ground, that horrific relations occur within the realm of realism.

Real Horror extends from Graham Harman’s reading of cult gothic novelist H.P. Lovecraft in his essay “On the Horror of Phenomenology” where he suggests that a philosophy that can tell us about reality has to be judged by what it can tell us about Lovecraft. Harman develops what he describes as a Weird Realism, utilising a Lovecraftian finitism to explore an objective reality made up of strange and withdrawn objects in terrifying vistas where humans become subject to objective terrors rather than masters of them. Lovecraft’s tales tell of a world outside of human access, a world where an objective reality reigns; he is therefore the horror writer par excellence of the recent Speculative Realism movement.

Decades after Lovecraft’s death in the 1930s, post-modern horror cinema ignited in 1968 with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. These films marked the elevated refection on the societal, cultural, and political realities of everyday life and solidified that what is most frightening to us isn’t a monster in a castle but what appears in the familiar that surrounds us. This closeness of horror to everyday life exists in tension with Lovecraft’s mythic world, yet draws from it, proposing the explosion of the non-human within the realm of the human; drawing the external through into the internal.

Reflecting on this reciprocal relationship between an expression of horror and reality, organisers Tom Trevatt and Caryn Coleman have invited London-based artists, writers, and curators to address the ways in which they tackle horror as a realist subject. During the one-day symposium on Halloween a series of presentations, artist films, conversations, and a film screening will take place to expand upon the many possibilities of horror.

From here.

The Schelling Effect?: Philosophy in the Shadows

I gave a guest-lecture for one of the graduate seminars here at MUN last week. The course is a historical reading of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, providing the context necessary for a thorough reading of Schelling’s essay from Spinoza, to Kant, to Fichte, to Boehme. My lecture took the opposite strategy, making a case for taking Schelling as a significant figure by tracing his ideas and concepts through post-Schellingian thought. I’ve decided to post the handout from this otherwise unscripted lecture since I know there are people who frequent this blog who are very much interested in Schelling and his effect on philosophy. I hope this will help those interested further their study of some of Schelling’s key concepts.

I have posted the handout here on my Academia.edu page.

CFP: The Return of Metaphysics

Analecta Hermeneutica Vol. 3: The Return of Metaphysics
Edited by Michael Austin and S.J. McGrath
Editor-in-chief, Andrzej Wiercisnki

After a century of transcendental, deconstructive, logical, political and naturalist critiques, metaphysics has proven tenacious. Metaphysical questions are returning with fresh vigor in movements as diverse as environmental philosophy, psychoanalysis, political ontology, philosophy of science, phenomenology, object-oriented philosophy and process philosophy. Volume three of Analecta Hermeneutica is dedicated to a survey of the return of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy. Submissions on any aspect of contemporary metaphysics and metaphysical traditions are invited. We are especially interested in new movements in metaphysics.

Analecta Hermeneutica is the annual refereed journal of the International Institute for Hermeneutics (IIH). It provides an intellectual forum for interdisciplinary, inter-religious, and international hermeneutic research. The journal publishes research in the form of articles, reviews, and other scholarly contributions in all hermeneutically related fields, with a particular focus on philosophy, theology, and comparative literature. We invite scholars from various linguistic communities to contribute innovative and critical articles to the hermeneutic conversation. Although the primary language of Analecta Hermeneutica is English, articles in German, French, Italian, and Spanish are welcome. They will be published accompanied by an English abstract. All submissions are subject to peer review.

Submissions should be formatted according to the house style. Authors should consult the current issue of the journal.

Please send your submission as a word file to Michael Austin: mbastn[AT]gmail[DOT]com.

Deadline: 15 January 2011

Analecta Hermeneutica Vol. 2: Questioning the Absolute

Analecta Hermeneutica Vol. 2 is now live. There are some great articles here on the history of philosophical theology. There are also a few familiar faces from our little corner of the blogosphere (what a terrible word that is). There are currently three reviews available, with more being added between now and the launch of Vol. 3. The plan right now is to post three more at the end of the Fall. An affordable physical copy should be available by October. I will be posting the Call for Papers for Vol. 3 both at the AH site as well as here on the blog since it will definitely be of interest to those who read this. I’m teaching over the next couple of weeks as well as busily writing so posts will continue to be light for the next little while.

At The Mountains of Madness film script reviewed

I just came across this review of a slightly old version of the script for Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella. Read the review and weep quietly to yourself as you realize a great story built entirely on atmosphere and the protagonist’s lack of comprehension is turned into a standard Hollywood monster-chases-people movie.