Art, Historicity and the Contingent

Quentin Meillassoux’s “Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence” which was published in 2006 and translated into English and German in 2008 introduced a number of concepts into the philosophical debate that have since taken root in the art world. Somewhere between a radically new approach to philosophy and a return to questions posed in early modern philosophy, mathematics and theology, many of the ideas introduced by speculative realism/materialism occupy a difficult to define place in contemporary discourse—especially with regards to its critique of the arguably fundamentally “correlationist” nature of art and the historically specific distribution of power in social hierarchies …

This open seminar with Stephen Zepke and David Quigley looks to develop a discussion based first on Meillassoux’s work, then moving on to the closely related #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics, then finally taking a broader look at some parallel projects in the art world.