Vita
Daniel Colucciello Barber is assistant professor at Pace University (New York) in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He is the author of Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (2014), On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (2011), and is currently working on a series of texts concerned with the critique of conversion.
He received his PhD from Duke University, where he worked in religious studies and the Program in Literature, and was previously a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in the Institut für Kulturwissenschaft at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a Research Fellow at the ICI Berlin.
Empty Immanence
Visiting Project 2020-21
This project addresses the question of a negative articulation of immanence through analysis of some texts by Gilles Deleuze. It does so by attending to certain ideas or logics, within these texts, that undermine the equation of immanence with worldly affirmation. The concern, however, is not to propose a new, alternative figuration of ‘Deleuze’, since this could have the effect of reproducing an inheritance that it is necessary to oppose.
Emphasis is thus given to opposition, which begins by analyzing how Deleuze seeks to resist the aforementioned undermining and how this resistance is related to anti-Blackness. The ultimate aim of such analysis is to insist on a negativity that is specifically opposed to an anti-Black world.
Literality, Vertigo,
and Remediation
Affiliate Project 2015-16
This project consists of studies organized around the concepts of literality and vertigo, which might be said to articulate modalities of reality that are incommensurable with the logic of conversion. Of specific concern are the ways in which such incommensurability problematizes and/or is foreclosed by conversion’s power of remediation.
The aim of the project is to articulate a refusal of remediation according to the ‘non.’ This non is essential without being universal: it is not that which connects, brings together, or mediates all beings; it is that which is denied through the promise of such mediation.
Conversion Remains:
Genealogy, Contemporaneity, Intermattering
ICI Project 2012-14
The thought of conversion is often linked to 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 advancement of the logic of conversion, one that plays itself out at various sites: the constructions of race, the demand set forth by new media for interactive flexibility, and the tendency to see contemporary existence as secular rather than religious.
Barber seeks to observe 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. He does so by drawing on the concept of diaspora, recent debates in queer theory, the quantum physics-inflected philosophy of François Laruelle, and the political theology of Malcolm X.