Workshop: Quantities Without Scale and the Thought of Novelty

While critical thought is suspicious of quantification for good reasons, it has also invested peculiar quantities with generative potential since Immanuel Kant’s essay on negative quantities and his foundation of the anticipations of perception in intensive quantities. Building on a series of encounters that included the workshop Chaos and Infinite Judgement and the conferences Situated Knowledges and Regional Epistemologies as well as Conatus und Lebensnot, this workshop will address the role of scale and quantity in thinking novelty. Must one abandon classical theories of knowledge in order to conceive of an ever more expansive, transversal, and plural field of experience? Or is novelty rather to be thought by focusing on paradoxes in certain situated knowledges, such as intensities experienced without scale, emergence in scale invariance, or phenomena that are negative in a new sense, like a zero that is not nothing? The workshop will discuss excerpts from Kant, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud, as well as papers by Monique David-Ménard on experience and negation, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky on the transformation of experience in Benjamin, and Christoph Holzhey on the critical point of phase transitions in physics.

With
Ali Benmakhlouf
Marcus Coelen
Monique David-Ménard
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Yuri Di Liberto

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