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 Gilles Châtelet, as well as papers by Monique David-Ménard on real opposition, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky on the transformation of experience in Benjamin, and Christoph Holzhey on the critical point of phase transitions in physics.
(The texts will be pre-circulated to registered participants.)
In English
14:00 – 15:30 Part I
Introduction and Short Inputs
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break
16:00 – 17:30 Part II
Negative and Intensive Quantities
17:30 – 18:00 Coffee Break
18:00 – 19:30 Part III
Scale-invariant Criticality and Novelty Beyond Scale
With
Monique David-Ménard
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Ali Benmakhlouf
Marcus Coelen
Organized by
ICI Berlin
How to Attend
- At the venue (registration required): Registration opens on 16 February 2026.
The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin.
If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.
Image Credit © Claudia Peppel