Recording of my recent CIPh Seminar on “Daoism, Pluritemporality, Critique” (14 March 2024)

At the kind invitation of Cécile Malaspina (CIPh / KCL / UWE) and Sha Xin Wei (Arizona State University), I recently delivered an extended lecture for the Collège International de Philosophie as part of its online seminar Experiment and Experience: A Polyphonic Seminar on the Dao of Indeterminacy. The recording can be accessed below. My intervention, entitled “Daoism, Pluritemporality, Critique,” was conceived as a “concept paper” of sorts—still preliminary (especially in the later parts, which I didn’t have time to go into in detail), but something I will be developing for a stand-alone article somewhere, inshallah. I am especially happy (for the moment!) with having managed to link various non-theories of non-action from the side of action theory (Davidson et al) and Aristotle’s to me prattein to the dao via Kant’s Erlaubnisgesetz and Benjamin’s critique of strike law.

The seminar, for which I gave the second session, is still ongoing, and I urge anyone with an appetite for interdisciplinarity and experimentation to attend. Their event page is at https://www.facebook.com/events/1080910593060361/1080910606393693. More info below the video here.

Daoism, Pluritemporality, Critique
Julia Ng | 14 March 2024
Reader in Critical Theory and founding Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought
Goldsmiths, University of London

Julia Ng is Reader in Critical Theory and founding Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has explored the links between modern mathematics and political thought, modern German-Jewish philosophy, and theories of history and language in the 20th century, particularly in the work of Walter Benjamin, whose essay “Toward the Critique of Violence” she recently translated for a critical edition she co-edited (with Peter Fenves) for Stanford UP (2021). Funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, Julia is currently completing a book on Daoism and Capitalism based around Benjamin and Weber’s respective images of China ancient and modern, which has also received support from the Leverhulme Trust, the Center for Jewish History (NYC), and the British Society for the History of Philosophy.

Session 2 of :
Experience and Experiment, A Polyphonic Seminar on the Dao of Indeterminacy and Play
Convened by Cécile Malaspina, Directrice de programme, Collège international de philosophie, Paris, Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and UWE,
& Sha Xin Wei, Professor in the School of Arts, Media + Engineering (AME) at Arizona State University
Seminar organised in partnership with Professor Patrick ffrench, King’s College London, Dr Miguel Prado Casanova, University of the West of England, and Professor Francesco Tava, University of the West of England

facebook.com/events/1080910593060361/1080910606393693

Speakers: Julia Ng, Muindi F. Miundi, Sougwen Chung, Giuseppe Longo

N.B. The featured image on this post is a detail of “From the New World” (2014), a digital artwork by Yang Yongliang. Courtesy of the artist.