From climate change to mushrooming authoritarianisms, natural disasters to economic and humanitarian crises, contemporary ontology is overwhelmingly problematized as a multiplicity of emergencies, which calls for faster and swifter modes of action, and ostracizes any other engagement as regressive, reactionary, and unrealistic. This talk puts a question mark to the political imperative of conceptualizing social and political issues on the basis of emergencies. For that, it resuscitates Dostoevsky’s idiot. As a figure of uninitiation (a la Deleuze and Guattari), who constantly reminds us to slow down in whatever task we are undertaking (a la Isabelle Stengers), the idiot opens up the possibility of a different political engagement. Rejecting both nihilist and moralist alternatives, it instead offers the aleatory prospects of encounter in transitory spaces, and suggests to suspend time through the unknown of radical empiricism.

The Vancouver Institute for Social Research (VISR) is an independent, para-academic, theory-based free school which began in 2012. Our intent is to move beyond the borders of the traditional university and to open up a more accessible platform in the city for the engaged discussion of critical theory.

Spring 2018 Semester: The Body, Movement, Technology, Apparatus

Movement, gesture, protocol, and choreography of specific bodies are continuous in language, politics, technology and other structures that signify and organize material. This semester of the Vancouver Institute of Social Research seeks to discuss ways in which the body and systems co-articulate each other and the inertias of power that attempt to frame them and the disruptions to various sovereignties that emerge. These discussions will take place also as a way to gesture towards the morphing forms of capture that are developing within the everyday hand-to-hand combat with apparatuses.