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.

‘They were inhabiting a city radiating with multiple and multilexical and multistratigraphic nostalgias’, the poet Donna Stonecipher writes. This literary reading externalizes these multiplicities and features poets whose forms range from the acutely lyrical to the annotational. Spanning three languages, the disparate syntactic proclivities and thematic preoccupations of these writers unambiguously constellate around matters of place. The poems to be showcased in this event, when read collectively, conjure up a variety of affective states that inform the poetic subject’s entanglement with milieu—private or urban or macrocosmic or speculative—and their articulations of embeddedness, relocation, and dislocation. Joining Stonecipher are Johannes Heldén and Jaya Jacobo: the three will offer succinct reflections about how their respective notions of space and habitation are crystallized in their literary production, and they will read a selection of their poetry.

Johannes Heldén is a writer, visual artist, and musician. His interdisciplinary works deals with poetry, ecology, algorithms, sentience, and narrative structures. Recent projects include Astroecology which was published simultaneously in three languages, made into an interdisciplinary performance at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and a digital artwork published by Bonniers Konsthall. He has published seventeen books, four music albums, and seven digital online works of poetry and visual art.

Jaya Jacobo is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at Coventry University, where she currently does work on trans feminist pedagogies in literature, art and performance. She has worked alongside travesti and transsexual women artists, academics and community workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as with trans, queer and nonbinary Filipina/x/o performers from the Philippines and its diaspora. Jacobo was a former Board Member of the Society of Trans Women of the Philippines (STRAP), a former President of the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle (YCC) of the Philippines, a Founding Co-Editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Transgressive Journal of Literary Art and Co-Editor of BKL: Bikol/Bakla, Anthology of Bikolnon Gay Trans Queer Writing. Jaya has also just released Arasahas, her debut volume of poetry in Filipino from Savage Mind Publishing House.

Donna Stonecipher grew up in Seattle and Tehran. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia (2023), which was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, and Transaction Histories (2018), which was listed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. Her poems have been translated into seven languages. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City (2018). She translates from German, and her translation of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy études, cahier, and fleurs, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, is being published by Seagull Books. She lives in Berlin.