Daniel Colucciello Barber

Vita

Daniel Colucciello Barber received his PhD from Duke University, where he worked in Religious Studies and the Program in Literature. He has been based in New York for several years, where he has taught at New York University, Marymount Manhattan College, and The City University of New York. His recently published book, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Cascade), addresses the intersection between differential ontology, critiques of the secular, and genealogies of religion. The manuscript of another book, The Future of Immanence: Metaphilosophy and the Fabulation of Icons, is presently under review. His writing has appeared in various publications, including SubStance, The Brooklyn Rail, Symposium, Southern Journal of Philosophy, and The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.

ICI Project (2012-)

Conversion Remains: Genealogy, Contemporaneity, and Intermattering

When we think of conversion, we think of a past marked by Christianity and colonization. Less frequently addressed is the way that conversion remains—no longer as explicit Christian colonialism, but more precisely as a logic. This project examines the afterlife of the logic of conversion, one that plays itself out at various sites: the affective, embodied registers of gender and race, the demand set forth by new media for interactive flexibility, and the tendency to see our existence as secular rather than religious. I seek to unveil the disseminated modalities in which the logic of conversion remains, and to pose against them a logic of intermattering: one that articulates how co-existing descriptions of the material universe immanently and endlessly undermine, relay, or superpose each other. I do so by drawing on the concept of diaspora, the insights of queer theory, the quantum physics-based philosophy of François Laruelle, and the religio-racial politics of Malcolm X.