Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy

12/03/2022

Live now ... Vera Bühlmann: Bodies of Thinking and the Fascist Affect https://youtu.be/EQzrYtNQLwM

Vera Bühlmann will be presenting her talk: “Bodies of Thinking and the Fascist Affect” as part of SMR's first Special Program: "Essays on the Architectonic B...

16/02/2022

The School of Materialist Research (SMR) is proud to announce its official call for enrolment for its Spring Semester of online Intensive Study Courses (ISC) offered by the following illustrious faculty: Thomas Nail, Giuseppe Longo, Cary Wolfe, AbdouMaliq Simone and Paul Cockshott (alongside guest lecturer Keti Chukhrov). As always, our faculty will focus on their own research, and will cover such topics as: Marxist Theory, Computation, Mathematics, Ecology, Urbanism and much, much more. https://schoolofmaterialistresearch.org/Intensive-Study-Courses-Spring-2022-Call-for-Enrolment

19/01/2022

Live now ... Rick Dolphijn - Cracks, Wounds and Becoming a Target: on the Philosophy of Matter https://youtu.be/xX2yZfOiEYo

Rick Dolphijn - Cracks, Wounds and Becoming a Target: on the Philosophy of MatterJanuary 19th 18:30 CET – 12:30 ESTLink to the tickets:https://tinyurl.com/sm...

19/01/2022

There is still time to register for Rick Dolphijn free seminar tonight (Jan 19, 18:30 CET) which is part of SMR's January Open Seminar Series. The title of his talk is "Cracks, Wounds and Becoming a Target: on the Philosophy of Matter" You will not want to miss his seminar, so if you want to attend you can register on our eventbrite (link below). https://tinyurl.com/smropen

School of Materialist Research Open Seminars— January 2022 [Free of charge]

18/01/2022

There is still time to register for Rick Dolphijn free seminar tomorrow (Jan 19, 18:30 CET) which is part of SMR's January Open Seminar Series. The title of his talk is: "Cracks, Wounds and Becoming a Target: on the Philosophy of Matter" You will not want to miss his seminar, so if you want to attend you can register on our eventbrite (link below). https://tinyurl.com/smropen

School of Materialist Research Open Seminars— January 2022 [Free of charge]

18/01/2022

Live now ... Nina Power: "Gnosticism and Materialism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXyirqKNR1Q&ab_channel=SchoolofMaterialistResearch

Nina Power - Gnosticism and Materialism January 18th 18:30 CET - 12:30 ESTLink to the tickets:https://tinyurl.com/smropenTalk abstract:How can gnosticism - o...

18/01/2022

There is still time to register for Nina Power free seminar tonight (Jan 18, 18:30 CET) which is part of SMR's January Open Seminar Series. The title of his talk is " Gnosticism and Materialism" You will not want to miss his seminar, so if you want to attend you can register on our eventbrite (link below). https://tinyurl.com/smropen

School of Materialist Research Open Seminars— January 2022 [Free of charge]

17/01/2022

There is still time to register for Nina Power free seminar tomorrow (Jan 18, 18:30 CET) which is part of SMR's January Open Seminar Series. The title of his talk is: "Gnosticism and Materialism" You will not want to miss his seminar, so if you want to attend you can register on our eventbrite (link below). https://tinyurl.com/smropen

School of Materialist Research Open Seminars— January 2022 [Free of charge]

16/01/2022

Live now ... Jordanco Sekulovski - "The Immanent, the Generic and the Transhuman: A Non-standard Approach"https://youtu.be/_GTSvam6i4k

Jordanco Sekulovski - The Immanent, the Generic and the Transhuman: A Non-standard ApproachJanuary 16th 15:00 CET/9:00 ESTLink to the tickets:https://tinyurl...

16/01/2022

There is still time to register for Jordanco Sekulovski free seminar today (Jan 16, 15:00 CET) which is part of SMR's January Open Seminar Series. The title of his talk is "The Immanent, the Generic and the Transhuman: A Non-standard Approach" You will not want to miss his seminar, so if you want to attend you can register on our eventbrite (link below). https://tinyurl.com/smropen

School of Materialist Research Open Seminars— January 2022 [Free of charge]

15/01/2022

There is still time to register for Jordanco Sekulovski free seminar tomorrow (Jan 16, 15:00 CET) which is part of SMR's January Open Seminar Series. The title of his talk is: "The Immanent, the Generic and the Transhuman: A Non-standard Approach " You will not want to miss his seminar, so if you want to attend you can register on our eventbrite (link below). https://tinyurl.com/smropen

School of Materialist Research Open Seminars— January 2022 [Free of charge]

13/01/2022

Live now ... Paul Reynolds - Can we have a Marxist Erotics?https://youtu.be/MJ6Ll1p725c

Paul Reynolds - Can we have a Marxist Erotics?January 13th 18:30 CET - 9:30 AM PDTLink to the tickets:https://tinyurl.com/smropenTalk abstract:Over the past ...

13/01/2022

We begin in less than an hour and a half - if you haven't signed up for a zoom link by now, please, follow us online here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ6Ll1p725c&ab_channel=SchoolofMaterialistResearch

Paul Reynolds - Can we have a Marxist Erotics?January 13th 18:30 CET - 9:30 AM PDTLink to the tickets:https://tinyurl.com/smropenTalk abstract:Over the past ...

13/01/2022

There is still time to register for Paul Reynolds free seminar tonight (Jan 13, 18:30 CET) which is part of SMR's January Open Seminar Series. The title of his talk is: " Can we have a Marxist Erotics?" You will not want to miss his seminar, so if you want to attend you can register on our eventbrite (link below). https://tinyurl.com/smropen

School of Materialist Research Open Seminars— January 2022 [Free of charge]

12/01/2022

There is still time to register for Paul Reynolds free seminar tomorrow (Jan 13, 18:30 CET) which is part of SMR's January Open Seminar Series. The title of his talk is: "Can we have a Marxist Erotics?" You will not want to miss his seminar, so if you want to attend you can register on our eventbrite (link below). https://tinyurl.com/smropen

School of Materialist Research Open Seminars— January 2022 [Free of charge]

12/01/2022

Live now ... Hanno Pahl - Money and the “Metrization” of the World: On the Co-Evolution of Money, Writing, and Cognition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpST2U-pzSg&ab_channel=SchoolofMaterialistResearch

Hanno Pahl - Money and the “Metrization” of the World: On the Co-Evolution of Money, Writing, and CognitionJanuary 12th 18:30 CET - 9:30 AM PDTLink to the ti...

12/01/2022

There is still time to register for Hanno Pahl free seminar tonight (Jan 12, 18:30 CET) which is part of SMR's January Open Seminar Series. The title of his talk is: "Money and the “Metrization” of the World: On the Co-Evolution of Money, Writing, and Cognition" You will not want to miss his seminar, so if you want to attend you can register on our eventbrite (link below). https://tinyurl.com/smropen

School of Materialist Research Open Seminars— January 2022 [Free of charge]

11/01/2022

There is still time to register for Hanno Pahl free seminar tomorrow (Jan 12, 18:30 CET) which is part of SMR's January Open Seminar Series. The title of his talk is: "Money and the “Metrization” of the World: On the Co-Evolution of Money, Writing, and Cognition" You will not want to miss his seminar, so if you want to attend you can register on our eventbrite (link below). https://tinyurl.com/smropen

School of Materialist Research Open Seminars— January 2022 [Free of charge]

08/01/2022

Live now ... Rick Elmore - Deconstructive Realism and the Naturalization of Bourgeois Metaphysics https://youtu.be/nCcov5jKTvk

Rick Elmore - Deconstructive Realism and the Naturalization of Bourgeois MetaphysicsJanuary 08th 18:30 CET - 9:30 AM PDTLink to the tickets:https://tinyurl.c...

21/09/2021

Please register for School of Materialist Research's upcoming autumn promotional seminars, including Oraxiom's co-editor Jeremy R. Smith who will be presenting his talk "The ABCs of Oraxiom: Towards a Research Programme of Future Metaphysics" on October 5 at 12:30pm EST.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/promotional-seminars-autumn-2021-free-of-charge-tickets-175514307017?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

SCHOOL OF MATERIALIST RESEARCH--PROMOTIONAL SEMINARS AUTUMN: All seminars for the months of September/October are free of charge

05/08/2021

We are pleased to announce we have issued a call for papers for our special themed issue, “Non-Philosophical Encounters With Built Environments”:

Cities and their design are loci for re-imagining ways of relating and living together. The city and urban space also bring systemic challenges into sharp focus, such as, accelerating spatial injustice, climate change induced effects and capitalist exploitation. The current Covid crisis intensifies this imperative by demanding reevaluation of how the city and its design might be presently approached. Taking this provocation further, we seek to consider how the current epoch shakes the very ground of philosophical thought substantiating notions of the city, and in turn, its attendant imaginative possibilities?

This special-themed issue examines ways François Laruelle’s non-philosophy and non-standard theory bears upon concerns within practices and theories associated with city making. Non-philosophy opens a space for radically immanent, democratic experiments with thought without subservience to the particular philosophical circularity upon which city-thinking is found. Analogous to how Laruelle (2012) posits non-philosophy as, “…not a conceptual art but a concept modelled by the art, a generic extension of art”, could we consider ‘generic extensions’ of how the city is thought?

We suggest non-philosophical encounter in this context performs a critical spatial practice potentially relating the built environment to a mode of ‘decolonised thought’. We seek to critically explore what and how this non-philosophical agency is performed or demonstrated within the built environment fields and related spatial arts and practices. We are therefore interested in how non-philosophy is used, or what it can do. Accordingly, this issue gathers ways spatial practices experiment with the modelling of concepts, and performing non-standard thought in the context of various urban histories and places. Concurrently, occasions of non-philosophy’s transmutation is of interest.

The issue will be organised across the following three tracks:

TRACK I: Non-philosophy and disciplinary knowledge: Limits and Borders

Here we question the disciplinary boundary. We ask how spatial relationships can be re-evaluated beyond any common regulation, as well as the situated meaning and expression of a heretic position within each of the fields of built environment practices. We also seek to examine how this affinity plays out to extend the capacities of creating new theoretical knowledge in this context that is indifferent to philosophy or theories external to them.

TRACK II: Non-Philosophical humanity: Ethico-ecological comportment

Here occasioning’s of non-philosophical humanity and non-ecological thought in built environment practices are opened to questions of relationality and nature beyond anthropocentric humanisms. Laruelle writes, “It is urgent that we test with new principles the knowledge we are able to have about life and recenter ethics and epistemology on the “encounter,” as we now say, with the animal and plants. This encounter calls for a new concept of MAP equality, a reevaluation of the notion of “human nature” and its degree of destruction” (Laruelle 2020). What might non-philosophical encounters avail for architectural and related practices in addressing forms of exploitation of the earth, plants and animals. How might non-philosophical humanity influence built environment practices towards greater care and equity in the city?

TRACK III: Non-philosophy as method: Thinking writing knowing designing with

Non-philosophical practice offers a method of bringing the real—pure immanence—into built environment thought, whereby the real is never claimed but is, rather, cloned. Such approach addresses legitimacy, self-assertion of identity (“The stranger”, l'Étranger) and identity-in-the-last-instance (the utmost self (the real) thereby disrupting notions of the individual and the inherited ontological contexts constructing built environments of living in the city. Here we seek to discover variants of urban thought practice that ‘bypass’ binaries defining the real and unreal and ensuing ontological categorisation. Submissions may include methodological strategies to ‘think-with-write-with-live with-design-with’ the city immanently, thereby triggering reimaginations of the city and forms of the human that exceed the possibilities of self-reflective consciousness and free-will. Questions involving truth, evidence, narratives and beliefs and how they evolve in processes of defining identity, building and living in the city are anticipated.

We welcome contributions from academia, professionals and practitioners across architecture, landscape architecture, architectural history, urban design, urban planning, environmental studies, geography and related spatial arts.

Submissions can take a variety of forms including, but not limited to:
Refereed Articles/Essays (4000-6000 words)
Provocations (~1000 words)
Visual Submissions (~300 word explanation)

Please submit your Paper by 15 October 2021 to [email protected] and [email protected]

Cities and their design are loci for re-imagining ways of relating and living together. The city and urban space also bring systemic challenges into sharp focus, such as, accelerating spatial injustice, climate change induced effects and capitalist exploitation. The current Covid crisis intensitifes...

14/05/2021

We are proud to share our first promotional video for the School of Materialist Research, and it's Spring/Summer seminars. You can register for any and all of the seminars here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/promotional-seminars-springsummer-2021-free-of-charge-tickets-150493011649?fbclid=IwAR3164SdBfd8guK146lBCZNw5h4wdksIIdIqHAHLB-eXCrQlktKCV4UsVhE

08/05/2021

Greetings everyone, we are happy to announce that we now have an official page for the School of Materialist Research where you can keep up to date with all of the relevant information for the School: https://www.facebook.com/SMResearch

As most of you probably already know by now, the School is a new and informal graduate and post-doc level program that offers seminars and workshops that address the materialisms running through contemporary science, philosophy, art, mathematics, design, architecture, and politics, and is hosting a series of (free) promotional seminars in the Spring/Summer which you can sign up for here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/promotional-seminars-springsummer-2021-free-of-charge-tickets-150493011649?fbclid=IwAR3PIr0Pe5ZULBq2Wj4T_24GywP04_alRzh4eTaHKfT4wEWje5MNAHe8ync

PROMOTIONAL SEMINARS: SPRING/SUMMER 2021 /All seminars for the months of May and June are free of charge/

04/02/2021

Call for Papers For Oraxiom Issue 2.

Non-Philosophy and Philosophy: Elucidating the Parenthetical


This issue of Oraxiom seeks to interrogate the past and future trajectories of non-philosophy by better understanding its relationship to the history of philosophy. Put otherwise, for this issue, we seek to explore the possibility of a non-philosophical history of philosophy. Though Laruelle is broad in his reference to philosophers, theologians, mystics and scientists, he punctuates his history of philosophy by way of proper names in parenthetical remarks: (Plato), (Kant), (Nietzsche), (Husserl), (Heidegger), (Derrida), (Deleuze), etc.. With these graphic signatures, the philosophical pierces through the non-philosophical text. These parenthetical punctuations are ripe for analysis and rigorous explication.

But first: Quid juris? By what right can we ask to drag the non-philosopher back into the history of philosophy from which they fought so hard to escape?

“But to what end?” Laruelle asks himself in the introduction to his 1985 work Biography of the Ordinary Man. An assertion precedes this question, and it is an assertion that constitutes the core of all of Laruelle’s work: “There is every reason to revolt against philosophers”. It is this conviction that provides continuity throughout each phase of the non-philosophical project. The most prominent of the reasons for rebellion from philosophy have come to the fore in the vast majority of scholarship on Laruelle and Non-Philosophy: The Principle of Sufficient Philosophy that affirms philosophy’s auto-justifying self-assuredness; the Philosophical Decision that eviscerates immanence from itself resulting in fever dreams of transcendence; and of course, the systematic degradation of man-in-person that proliferates throughout and even propels forward the history of philosophical production. Though these answers to the question “why rebel” have been mulled over and developed upon, the content of the question that precedes them has not: Towards what end does one rebel from philosophy? In addition to examination of the tactics and essence of non-philosophical rebellion, we must develop a more detail-oriented understanding of that from which the non-philosopher rebels: Philosophy. The mechanics of the philosophical text may be generalizable, but the problem of the proper name, the problem of the philosophical signature, remains within the non-philosophical text. What is the non-philosopher to make of these lingering remains?

In our current issue we seek a return to the perilous landscape of philosophy in order to better understand philosophy as Laruelle reads it. This in turn clarifies Laruelle’s own rebellions while simultaneously contextualizing future Non-Philosophical pursuits. The idea is that better understanding the philosophy from which the non-philosopher rebels draws into sharper focus the positive program of the Non-Philosophical project. Our gamble is that working through the specificity of Laruelle’s readings of the history of philosophy can point toward a more robust discursive exchange between philosophy and Non-Philosophy.



Possible Topics
• Non-Philosophical methodology.
• Non-Philosophy, Plato, Neo-Platonism and the philosophies of Late Antiquity.
• Non-Philosophy and philosophies of immanence (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc.).
• Non-Philosophy and German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel).
• Non-Philosophy and (Post-)Marxism.
• Non-Philosophy and phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Henry).
• Laruelle and his contemporaries (Derrida, Deleuze, Henry, Badiou).
• Laruelle and the Scientists (Euclid, Mandelbrot, Plank).
• Non-Philosophy, comparative philosophies (MacIntyre) and comparative historical analysis (Bendix, Skocpol)
• The philosophical “pre-history” of Non-Philosophy (e.g. philosophy in Philosophy I).
• Non-Philosophy, Theology and the history of religion.
• Non-Philosophy and philosophy of history.
• The possibility of a philosophical future of Non-Philosophy.

Essay submissions should be up to 5,000 words in length and formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style. Oraxiom also invites creative and artistic material. Poetry, manifestos, visual arts, and other non-standard experiments related to Non-Philosophy are welcome.

We also invite high quality submissions on all topics relating to Laruelle and Non-Philosophy for inclusion in this issue. We also encourage authors who reach out regarding books on topics relevant to Laruelle and Non-Philosophy for possible review.

Please send papers prepared for blind review and short biographical note with contact information to [email protected] by June 30, 2021.