Philosophy Under Condition

Hegel remarked that ‘philosophy is its own time captured in thought’. Philosophy thus relates to the world by taking it as the condition for its own operation, whose aim is to develop the rationality of the real. The theme of conditions emerging in recent thought maintains Hegel’s idea, but reverses its direction. Philosophy stands under the injunction of its temporal horizon, not anymore to seize the rationality of its whole, but to capture singular excesses emerging in it. The present confronts philosophy not with the necessity to confirm its maturity, but with the difficult task of capturing nascent novelties, which emerge as radical exceptions to the given state of affairs.

Within the framework of a one-day workshop, we will explore with our invited guests the contemporary problem of conditions, by examining ways in which philosophy encounters revolutionary political actions, psychoanalytic practice and inventions in the fields of the sciences, as irreducible fields which reorient its own activity.