The Departments of Sociology and Philosophy, Faculty or Arts, and the Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana are organising an international academic conference titled Legacies of Antihumanism, which will take place at the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Arts on December 5-7, 2024.
The programme, schedule, and other details regarding the event are available at antihumanizem.com.
The goal of the conference is to reassess the relevance of legacies of the original theoretical antihumanism, 60s French theory, imported in the 80s, which was what originally put Ljubljana on the world intellectual map. While deconstruction never really took hold and Deleuzianism developed later in different circumstances, the original two strands of Ljubljana theory were Lacanian psychoanalysis and Althusserian historical materialism and despite their differences and disagreements they both emphasised the same key antihumanist tenets: a critique of the humanist notions of the subject and subjectivity and a concept of a process without a subject.
In this sense, antihumanism presented a promising beginning of a Copernican trauma for the humanities, although one that is, in hindsight, left unfinished. The fascination with machines and cybernetics, characteristic for the 60s French theory, went unnoticed; parallel developments such as 80s media archaeology or 90s accelerationism were ignored; and potentially fruitful encounters with computational theory and neuroscience are viewed with suspicion. Consequently, contemporary Ljubljana theory feels like a theme park with harmless rides resembling its Copernican-trauma inducing origins, only without the original sense of danger.
However, the conference will not so much be obsessing over the past (neither in nostalgic nor in critical mode) as searching for ways to make the future work in the present as it did in the case of the original antihumanism. Aside from the original antihumanism and later accelerationism and media archaeology we will therefore explore contemporary inhumanist and computationalist theories; convergences between theory, popular culture and science fiction; AI as an epistemological break and a Copernican trauma; relations between runaway technics and capitalist dynamics; xenofeminism; the question of machine autonomy and much more.
The working languages of the conference are Slovenian and English.
The conference is open to the public and there will be no registration fee.
Welcome!
The conference was co-financed from the ISF FF 2024 fund within the institutional financing pillar; Departments of Sociology and Philosophy, Faculty or Arts, University of Ljubljana; Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana (ARIS-cofunded project TECHNOPST, N6-0302); and the Research programme group Problems of autonomy and identities in the time of globalisation (P6-0194), funded by ARIS (Public agency for research and innovation activity of the Republic of Slovenia).
The conference is a part of The year of legacy project at Faculty of arts, University of Ljubljana.