Ecstatic Nature – Plastic Bodies and The ‘Practice of The Wild’ In Art
“[W]e look at the ancient past as if we were looking at our own future, as a call to our own irretrievable sovereignty.” Lascaux – a “religiously animal art” of homo ludens not of homo sapiens – “recalling its lost divine animality.”
A disconcerting enigma,” […] “which is closed to us.” Yet, it attracts us, is familiar to us, although it remains “unfathomable to us. “One is not born human. One becomes human.”
Lascaux opens in front of us a world where the passion for origins reveals itself connecting the human with the inhuman origins – it reflects our longing for the wild. Lascaux speaks to us, post animal-humanity, as a fundamental ground for further theoretical inquiries, especially incited by the effervescent research initiated by the philosopher Jason M. Wirth around such concepts as “The Urtümliche (the primaeval), the Ursprüngliche (Original) detected in Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature which inspired Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the wild (le sauvage). Wirth’s latest writings on The Reawakening of the Barbarian Principle in Schelling and Merleau-Ponty, and the Practice of the Wild, along fundamental texts by Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and the latest research in phenomenology and studies of plasticity (Catherine Malabou and Tom Sparrow) will guide us throughout this coming academic year during the Imaginary Lab 4: Sensations – Ineffable Archaeologies.
A series of seminars will be devoted to relevant ‘artworks’ reflecting ‘the practice of the wild’ and ‘the plasticity of bodies’ constituted as typological dossiers, challenging everything that has ever been referential until now, human and inhuman, flesh and ‘after flesh’, plastic bodies, image, body, life, death, and human freedom. Where, could one go beyond what has been thought to be quite daring: “the human is the intermediary between the nonhuman and the newly human.”? A return to the indivisible realm in which humans and nonhumans are bound by a common root in pre-objective Being? As Malabou contends, the form of a world without any exteriority is refigured […]. “This world is not simply uncanny, it is eminently strange.” (Malabou)
Imaginary Lab 4: Sensations – Ineffable Archaeologies is a forum for MA and PhD students, as well as for other young and senior scholars working on related topics within a broad interdisciplinary field in the Humanities. For more information concerning the programme, please contact Nicoletta Isar.
Fall 2023 (October-December)
The Practice of The Wild
Spring 2024 (March-May)
Plastic Bodies – Ways of Life
Selected bibliography
Jason M. Wirth, Conspiracy of Life. Meditations on Schelling and His Time, State University of New York Press, 2003.
Jason M. Wirth, The Reawakening of the Barbarian Principle in Schelling and Merleau-Ponty, State University of New York Press, 2013.
Jason M. Wirth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination, SUNY Press, 2015.
Jason M. Wirth, “Animal Desiring: Nietzsche, Bataille, and a World without Image,” Research in Phenomenology, 2001, vol. 31, 96-112.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death &Sensuality, First City Lights edition, 1986.
Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Archetexts": Lascaux, Eros, and the Anamorphic Subject,” Discourse, 2002, vol. 24, No. 2, 18-29.
>Maurice Blanchot, “The Beast of Lascaux,” Oxford Literary Review, 2000, vol. 22, 9-18.
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…,” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 232-309.
Dylan Trigg, ‘‘The indestructible, the barbaric principle’’: The Role of Schelling in Merleau-Ponty’s Psychoanalysis,” Cont Phil Rev 2016 (49).
Catherine Malabou, “Plasticity and Flexibility – For a Consciousness of the Brain,” What Should We Do with Our Brain, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, pp. 1-14.
Cathrine Malabou, Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, Edinburg University Press, 2022.
Catherine Malabou, Foreword “After the Flesh,” in Plastic Bodies; Rebuilding Sensation after Phenomenology, London: Open Humanities Press, 2014, pp. 13-120.