Prof. Babette B. Tischleder (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)

“Toward a Critical New Materialism: Nonhuman Agency, Narrative, and the Anthropocene (William Faulkner and Bruno Latour)”

2 February 2017
6 p.m. – 8 p.m. (18-20 c.t.)
P 6, Philosophicum

The talk will take up questions raised in current debates on materiality, the agency of objects, and concepts of the nonhuman in the Anthropocene. I critically engage with claims made in the context of object-oriented ontology and Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory, arguing that our theoretical understanding of nonhuman agency can benefit from attending to imaginary rather than just ontological or speculative modes of thinking. Exploring narrative forms of world building in Twain and Faulkner and theorizing imaginary practices of writing and reading, I mean to show that these creative registers allow us to push the imaginative boundaries of theory beyond current philosophical prohibitions.

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