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(114)
Coming Out as a Philosopher
2008

Lecture for the reception of the Siegfried Unseld Preis, Francfort, September 2008 sous une forme légèrement modifiée dans/ published in a modified form in: Social Studies of Science Vol. 40, n°4 August 2010, pp. 599-608

Abstract
For twenty years a systematic philosophical project has been pursued on the side: that is, to compare each of the ways in which truth production are being defined in the European tradition inside which philosophy has developed. Thus, to the analysis of networks that has been the main object of publications so far, another feature has to be added: the “key » in which each type of network is able to spread, this key defining for each “mode of existence » the felicity and infelicity conditions necessary to grasp it. It is this philosophical project that aims at providing a positive philosophical anthropology of the moderns in place of the only negative argument, proposed so far, that “we have never been modern”. The lecture offers an alternative intellectual biography and a sketch of the philosophy to be published later.
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Selbstporträt als Philosoph (German trans.)application/pdf icon
Translations

2008: Allemand / German
« Selbstporträt als Philosoph » - Rede anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Siegfried Unseld Preises, Frankfurt, 2008

Modes of Existence 🔗
(113)
Will Non-Humans be Saved ? An Argument on Ecotheology
2008

In Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute V. 15, 459-475, September 2008

Abstract
Using for the first time explicitly some of the results of the Inquiry into the Modes of Existence, the paper tackles the difficult question of the relations between ecology and theology. It first elicits the contrast between science –reference- and religion –presence- in their common opposition with common sense. Then, following Whitehead, it takes apart the notion of “nature » to show that it is composed of two different modes of existence (building on 99). This makes possible a reinterpretation of the debate between religion and science around the key figure of Darwin freed from the constraints imposed upon him by a false debate about “nature”. It ends by offering another connection between religion and creation –or rather creativity (building on 107 and 109).
Translations

2009 : Italien / Italian
« I non-umani saranno salvati? Una discussione in ecoteologia » in Biblioteca Husserliana. Rivista di fenomenologia, Monografie, Vol.II, 2009.

2009: Polonais/ Polish
« Czy nie-ludzie zostaną zbawieni? Argument ekoteologiczny », tłum. M. Bokiniec, [w]: Ekologia. Przewodnik Krytyki politycznej, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, Warszawa, s. 18-52, 2009.

Modes of Existence, Religion Studies 🔗
(112)
A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (With Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk)
2008

In Fiona Hackne, Jonathn Glynne and Viv Minto (editors) Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society – Falmouth, 3-6 September 2009, e-books, Universal Publishers, pp. 2-10.

Abstract
The very spread of the word "design" from daily objects to cities and ecosystems, is taken here as a symptom of an interesting switch in the theory of action that has been typical of modernism. The paper review five connotations of the verb “to design » and analyze them as an alternative to the notion of "construction" and "fabrication". It then presents the work of Peter Sloterdijk has a crucial contribution to the philosophy of design. It shows especially how Sloterdijk’ notion of explicitation allows to reconsider materiality (a materiality to which design has always been sensitive) but freed from naturalization as well as from the balancing act between form and function. Finally, it offers a challenge to the design theorists for inventing the tools that could allow this philosophy of design to “draw together » matters of concern.
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Ein Vorsichtiger Prometheus (German trans.)application/pdf icon
Un Prometeo cauto? (Italian trans.)application/pdf icon
Translations

2009: German/Allemand
« Ein Vorsichtiger Prometheus. Einige Schritte hin zu einer Philosophie des Designs, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Peter Sloterdijk » (edited by W. Fricke) in M. Jongen, S. van Tuinen and K. Hemelsoe (eds). Die Vermessung des Ungeheuren. Philosophie nach Peter Sloterdijk, München, Wilhelm Fink Verlag pp. 356-373, 2009

2009: Italien /Italian
« Un Prometeo cauto ? Primi passi verso una filosofia del design », in Il discorso del design Pratiche di progetto e saper-fare semiotico, Serie speciale rivisat dell Associazone Italiana di Studi Semiotici Anno III, n° ¾ pp. 255-263.
Republication en un volume de la traduction italienne republication in one volume of the Italian translation in Philosophy of the project. Towards a theory of design, Insege, Mimesis, sous la direction de Dario Mangano, 201-.

2011: Français/French
Traduction française partielle partial French translation by Patrice Bollon «Un Prométhée circonspect » in Architecture Aujourd’hui.

2010: Allemand/German
Traduction allemande partielle partial German translation « Ein Vorsichtiger Prometheus ? Design im Zeitalter des Klimawandels » in ARCH+ 196-197 pp. 22-27..

2011: Anglais/English
Republication in edited by Willem Schinkel Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens In Media Res. Peter's Sloterdijk's Spherological Poetics of Being, pp. 151-165.

2014: Portugais/ Portuguese
By Daniel Portugal e Isabella Fraga « Um Prometeu cauteloso? Alguns passos rumo a uma fi losofi a do design (com especial atenção a Peter Slotedijk) » in Agitprop: Brazilian journal of design, pp. 1-21.

Design 🔗
(110)
'What’s the story?' ? Organizing as a Mode of Existence.
2008

A paper for the reception of a doctorate honoris causa granted by the University of Montreal, Montréal, May 21st (see video): « What’s organizing ? A Meditation on the Bust of Emilio Bootme »,  (unpublished).
Published in a modified form Passoth, Jan-Hendrik, Birgit Peuker and Michael Schillmeier, Agency without Actors? New Approaches to Collective Action. London: Routlegde, 2012, pp. 164-177.

Abstract
Although theories of organizations have analyzed many formal and informal types of organizations, they often fail to follow the specificity of the organizational mode of existence because they suppose the very existence of macro-actors instead of looking at how organizations attempt to solve practically this problem. This essay in organization theory reviews some of the difficulties in tracing the specific path of organizing (taken as a gerund). Using some fresh experience of the author in administration, the paper focuses on the specificity of the organizing script and attempts at isolating this specificity from what sociologists and political scientists have made of it. It shows that it is only once the sociological fallacy of a macro-actor has been put aside, that it is possible to detect the "flip-flopping" that is so peculiar with those scripts the circulation of which generates organizations in their wake without ever relying on macro-actors.
Translations

Reprinted in Daniel Robichaud and François Cooren (editors) Organization and Organizing. Materiality, Agency and Discourse, Routledge, London, pp. 37-51, 2013.

Actor-Network-Theory, Modes of Existence, Social Theory 🔗
(108)
The Migration of the Aura – or How to Explore the Original Through Its Facsimiles
2008

A chapter prepared for T. Bartscherer and R. Coover (editors) Switching Codes. Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, University of Chicago Press pp. 275-297 (with Adam Lowe), 2011.
Republication in Pasquale Gagliardi The Miracle of Cana. The Originality of the Re-production, Cierre Edizioni, Caselle di Sommacampagna, pp. 105-116, 2011.

Abstract
Following the marvelous example provided by the fac simile of Veronese’s Nozze di Cana in San Giorgio in Venice and constrasting this case of a good reproduction with the catastrophic restoration of Holbein’s Ambassadors, the paper explores the reason why common sense has so much difficulty with the notion that a fac simile may actually add new layers of originality to the original –contrary to the thesis so much popularized by Benjamin’s essay on mechanical reproduction. Contrary to this too famous essay, the paper argues that digital technologies have nothing « slavish » nor « mechanical » about them, and that fac similes allow to peel away the many layers composing the originality of a work of art –to the point when a painting too, algough so obviouvsly material, can be taken as an instance of performative art.
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Translations

Italien / Italian
« La migrazione del aura -overo come esplorare l’originale attraverso le suo copie » par Davide Borsa in Materiali di Estetica Memoria e identità del luogo. Il progetto della memoria, Maggioli Editore, Milano, pp. 49-72, 2011.

French/Français
« La migration de l'aura ou comment explorer un original par le biais de ses facsimilés ». Suivi d'une critique par Johanne Lamoureux « Autour de la migration de l'aura, le grand déménagement' ». In Intermédialités n° 17 Printemps 2011 pp. 173-205.

German/Allemand
« Das Wandern der Aura – oder wie man das Original durch seine Faksimiles erforscht » » in Tristan Thielmann & Erhard Schüttpelz (editors) Akteur-Medien-Theorie, Transcript, Bielefeld, 2013 p-511-530.

Art History, Design, Digital Humanities 🔗
(107)
It’s the Development, Stupid ! or How Can we Modernize Modernization ?
2007

Unpublished, except as an edited and shortened version “Love your monsters” in Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Love your monsters. Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene, Breakthrough Institute, 2011, pp. 17-25.

Abstract
Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s book has somewhat infuriated their fellow conservationists, but it tackles just the right set of philosophical questions about the psycho social limis to be put on the notions of limits to growth and to development. The paper follows the authors in their exploration of the right set of political passions necessary to extract political ecology from its obsession with nature. It argues that it is not at the moment when humans and non humans finally clearly come into the same arenas that the notion of environment should be revived to distinguish again between a natural realm to be protected and a human realm to be shamed for its past deeds. In effect, the question is to resume modernization by accepting to take up the burden that the first modernizations had simultaneously created and denied.
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107-BREAKTHROUGH-REDUXpdf.pdfapplication/pdf icon
Translations
No Other Translations Available
Ecology & Political Ecology 🔗
(106)
Morality or Moralism, An Exercice in Sensitization
2010

« Morality or Moralism, An Exercice in Sentization » (translated by Patrick Camilier) in Common Knowledge, Vol. 16, n°2, pp. 311-330 (with responses by S. Mulhall, T. Zamir, M. Tamen & M. Rowlands pp. 331-360) Spring 2010 (avec Emilie Hache) (traduction de 106).

Original Article
Morale ou moralisme ? Un exercice de sensibilisation
Abstract
The ANT argument has often been suspected of dubious moral grounds ; the accusation is made by those who use a roughly kantian definition of what it is to occupy a moral upper ground. By following the contrasts between four different texts (Comte-Sponville, Kant, Serres et Lovelock), the paper explores what an ‘objective morality’ would look like and how to compare the Kantian axiology with the ANT’s possible definition of an object-oriented-morality. Especially important is the semiotic definition of the moral intensity of a text, this intensity bein defined by the ability for someone to feel responsible by responding to the calling of more beings than the ones expected from the moralist tradition.
Translations
No Other Translations Available
Modes of existence 🔗
(104)
The Netz-Works of Greek Deductions – A Review of Reviel Netz’s The Shaping of Deductions in Greek Mathematics
2007

In Social Studies of Science, Vol 38, n°3, pp. 441-459, 2008

Abstract
Netz’s book is, without question, the most important work in science studies since Shapin & Schaffer Leviathan and the Air Pump. By resorting to a very original semiotic and constructivist method, it manages to redescribe entirely the practice of deduction in the beginning of Greek geometry. It shows how this practice bears almost no connection with the various theories of abstraction and conviction that have been offered by philosophers from Plato onwards. It offers the first systematic non-formalist description of formalism at its early historical stage. In doing so it offers the best occasion to elaborate a metalangage to speak concretely of abstraction.
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Un livre de Reviel Netz (French trans.)application/pdf icon
Translations

2009: Français / French
« Un livre de Reviel Netz pour une approche non formaliste des formalisms » translated by Dominique Vinck and Rigas Arvanitis in Revue d'Anthropologie des Connaissances, Vol. 3, n°2, pp 185-205, 2009

Philosophy, Semiotics & Literature Studies, Technology, Viualization 🔗
(103)
Turning Around Politics – A Note on Gerard de Vries’ Paper
2007

In Social Studies of Science, Vol. 37, Issue, 5 pp. 811-820, 2007

Abstract
The criticism levelled by Gerard de Vries against the political theory implicit in science studies offers a good occasion to render more precise the different meanings the word « politics » may have in the literature on the « politics of science ». It is certainly time to use the same methods that have modified the theory of science so much, on the practice of politics. The commentary on de Vries’s paper offers just such a clarification by distinguishing five successive meanings of the adjective « political ».
Translations
No Other Translations Available
Politics 🔗
(102)
A Plea for Earthly Sciences
2007

Keynote adress at the British Sociological Association, East London, in Judith Burnett, Syd Jeffers and Graham Thomas (editors) New Social Connections: Sociology's Subjects and Objects, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 72-84 London, 2010

Abstract
The extension of ecological crisis have also extended the need for a politics of science. To the point where the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences has become moot : it might be more rewarding to direct our attention to ‘earthly sciences’ (not to be confused wiht ‘Earth science’).
Translations

2008: German
in Media Geography edited by Jörg Döring & Tristan Thielmann. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008
2016: German
Translator: Robin Cackett
Reference: « Ein Plaedoyer für irdische Wissenschaften » in Herbert Kalthoff Torsten Cress & Tobias Röhl (ed) Materalität, Herausforderungen fur die Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften Wilhelm Fink, 2016pp. 89-102

Ecology & Political Ecology 🔗

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