Introduction

The present time is one of general disruption, in which crisis is the normal state of affairs. In a situation characterized by climate catastrophe, pandemic, war, interruptions to supply chains, and contestations of democracy, the modern Western categories of ‘progress’ and ‘History’ implode. Disruption describes contemporary socio-historical experience, in which break, interruption, discontinuity take on a very different sense than in modernity: They become hegemonic and begin to entirely dominate the onto-epistemological condition and socio-historical reality. But does the present attest solely to such immense collapse? Or is this disruptive un-worlding simultaneously a transformation, an opening to a plurality of worlds in the ruins of a formerly hegemonic world? There is, on the one hand, the very real ends of the world and the increasing threat to the possibility of any world; and, on the other hand, there is the undeniable multiplicity of worlds that reveal themselves at present, their coming to presence disrupting the unity of the one World. One is confronted by this difference between the technical homogenization of all into a worldless planet and a proliferation of techniques of world-making. It is at this tension that one encounters the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. At times, he would see only the impossibility of any world due to techno-capitalist disruption and homogenization of sense. At others, he would attest to a transformation of sense, the flipside of techno-economic hegemony, presenting a multiplicity of worlds. Does one presently find oneself at the precipice of such a transformation of the sense of the world? Or is it instead that one is outside any world, in a techno-economic disruption that is no longer existence, but which nevertheless determines it? With Nancy’s companionship, this conference proposes to take up these questions, focusing on the conceptual triad of disruption, technique, and world. Through two days of presentations and discussions, the hope will be to re-think the present, between the techno-economic disruption of world and the techniques of (re)composing worlds.

With Jean-Luc Nancy’s work as the point of departure, the hope of this conference is to re-think the present and the present status of world: between the techno-economic disruption of world and the techniques of (re)composing worlds. The aim is to take up the aforementioned questions through two days of presentations and discussions, focusing especially on the conceptual triad of disruption, technique, and world.