Versus Laboratory recommenced in 2013 with a seminar series entitled ‘Prolegomena to the Void’. Tracing the theme of the void in terms of a history of breaks and ruptures which have defined our contemporaneity – in politics, the arts and the sciences – the seminar examined how such a topicality of the void is interlaced with its perennial treatment within philosophy, at points of productive conflict with mathematics and natural science.
In the first prolegomenon, we followed the theme of the void through two trajectories of thought in the Classical Greek and Hellenistic periods: on the one hand, the affirmation, in the Ancient atomism, of the void as a negative or indeterminate metaphysical principle, on par with the solidity of the atom in the constitution of what is; on the other hand, Aristotle’s expulsion of the void from the physical universe, as well as its reinstatement in the first Stoa, as an idea central for the determination and substantial modification of something.
Greek philosophy appeared here as an essential interlocutor of our philosophical present: through a conceptual architecture in which chance or material indetermination overturn the logic of possibility, and where the simple opposition of essence and accidents gives way to the idea of radical, evental fractures.
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An ICI Berlin event, organized by Bruno Besana, Ozren Pupovac, Tzuchien Tho
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