Didier Debaise

Université Libre de Bruxelles | ULB · Department of Philosophy, Ethics and Religion Studies

In this article, I propose to take up and give new relevance to an intuition that W. James developed in Pragmatism: « things tell a story». I take this proposition as literally as possible: a physical entity, a living being, a technical object, would tell stories by themselves, in the materiality of their existence, in their very bodies. The storie...

The idea of ‘progress’ was undoubtedly at the heart of the experience of the Moderns, guiding at the same time their thought, the values that they gave themselves, the hopes that animated them and of innumerable justifications that they found for all the processes of dispossession, disqualification and dismemberment that they implemented. Starting...

In conversation ¹ with Didier Debaise, this piece thinks transversally across Nature as Event (2017a) and Speculative Empiricism (2017b) to explore some of the key stakes in his philosophy, namely: the relationship between the task of thinking a speculative empiricism and the problem of the bifurcation of nature. Engaging with the themes of nature,...

RESUMO: Neste artigo, Didier Debaise aborda a metafísica moderna, buscando propor uma metafísica alternativa, a qual qualifica de perspectivista. O autor avança a hipótese de que o conceito de Natureza foi a maneira que os modernos encontraram de habitar a terra. Na primeira parte do artigo, Os fundamentos do naturalismo metafísico, ele explica, se...

On Monday, 25 September 2017, I convened a conversation with philosopher Didier Debaise and social scientist Benedikte Zitouni in Brussels, and meandered between French and English discussing the ways in which we study and research the world. This “world” is, for Benedikte, a world of activist urban practices, nineteenth-century urban planning in B...

Can experience be thought systematically without transforming the richness of the world as it is lived into reductive philosophical generalities? Can the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with a method of systematic cosmological speculation? Didier Debaise’s reading of Whitehead shows clearly what a philosophy that makes this possible looks l...

Deleuze's text on dramatization has a peculiar place in his philosophy. In this text, he attributes, for the first time in his own name, a singular function to philosophy. I aim to show that all the notions developed in ‘The Method of Dramatization’ – such as the transformation of the status of Ideas, the first development of a theory of individuat...

Translator's introduction : At the end of July 2014 there was a week-long workshop held at the Ecole des Mines in Paris, Bruno Latour's former work-place. This was a final workshop, convened by Latour's project, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, which was not only a book, but a website that was an experiment in interactive metaphysics that had be...

The notion of interstice appears in philosophy as something empty, an in-between, with no importance in the constitution of things. I argue, on the contrary, that the concept can be retaken in a new interpretation of living subjects as a main category to interpret the spatial and temporal dimensions of a subject.

Wie wird das Leben zum Objekt des Wissens? Und wie gestaltet sich das Verhältnis von Leben, Wissenschaft und Technik? Donna J. Haraway und Georges Canguilhem verstehen diese Fragen als politische Fragen und Epistemologie als eine politische Praxis. Die besondere Aktualität von Canguilhems Denken leitet sich aus der von ihm gestellten Frage her, wie...

What is a non-human subjectivity ? The neo-monadological inheritance of B. Latour This article proposes a reading of Bruno Latour’s work by inscribing his thought within a « neomonadological » tradition. The specificity of this approach consists in simultaneously detaching the subject from anthropological questions and nature from the idea of an in...

This article proposes a reading of Bruno Latour's work by inscribing his thought within a « neomonadological » tradition. The specificity of this approach consists in simultaneously detaching the subject from anthropological questions and nature from the idea of an innate substance. In short: such a philosophy calls for a pluralistic conception of...

The main purpose of this chapter is to make sense of the homage Whitehead paid to Bergson in his preface to Process and Reality: ‘I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey.’1 There are many readers, particularly in France, who have seen this as attesting to a continuity between the two philosophers.2 This impression seems...

Zwischenräume sind jene Schnittstellen, Intervalle und Abstände, in denen sich elementare Prozesse der Wissensproduktion ansiedeln. Zwischenräume sind eine epistemologische Kategorie für sich. Das gewohnte Bild geordneter Wissenschaftlichkeit schwindet, wenn die Produktion von Wissen auf spezifische materielle Kulturen zurückgeführt wird: auf die B...

This article aims at following the construction of a "metaphysics of possession" which finds its origin in G. Tarde's philosophy. This metaphysics is characterized by a substitution : to the analysis of the foundations of power it opposes completely different kinds of questions that are more immaterial and more microscopic, such as : how can a bein...

This article aims at following the construction of a “metaphysics of possession” which finds its origin in G. Tarde’s philosophy. This metaphysics is characterized by a substitution : to the analysis of the foundations of power it opposes completely different kinds of questions that are more immaterial and more microscopic, such as : how can a bein...

In order to understand what a speculative approach of life may be, one should redefine both a function and form of philosophy around the term "speculation". The manifest qualities of "life" - novelty, innovation, continuity - seem, at first sight, to eschew all forms of conceptualization. Process and Reality attempts to offer a technical, conceptua...

Life and societies In order to understand what a speculative approach of life may be, one should redefine both a function and form of philosophy around the term « speculation ». The manifest qualities of « life » – novelty, innovation, continuity – seem, at first sight, to eschew all forms of conceptualization. Process and Reality attempts to offer...

Pragmatism presents itself as a technical reflection upon experimentation. This technique takes two forms : the evaluation of the propositions, utterances, and ideas through their effects ; the construction and invention of new propositions in charge of accounting for experimentation as a continuous movement of changes and transformations. This art...

Tomorrow’s politics will be a politics of multiplicity. Contemporary Marxism, in its political and trade-unionist manifestations, appears as a major obstacle, given its inability to escape from totalising categories (class, work, capital) and to reflect upon the political need for innovation (obsessed as it is by the conservation of acquired rights...

Modernity, in Simondon’s view, is constituted on the basis of a paradigm that runs through all the realms of experience : being- individual.It could thus be defined as a set of o p e rat i o n s,techniques,and fo rms of know l e dge that seek to extract the individual dimensions of that wh i c h , in reality, appears as essentially attached, intert...

Modernity, in Simondon’s view, is constituted on the basis of a paradigm that runs through all the realms of experience : being- individual.It could thus be defined as a set of o p e rat i o n s,techniques,and fo rms of know l e dge that seek to extract the individual dimensions of that wh i c h , in reality, appears as essentially attached, intert...

Haim Callev _The Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais_ New York: McGruer Publishing, 1997 ISBN 965-90162-0-4 250 pp.

-