Engaged dis-identifications, NOTES#9: we cannot not be together

1. Po-ethic inquiry: with/out modernity

How can we not turn our back to the multiple forms of violence that keep this system in place?

2. Stretching spaces

• How do we not lose sight of what we don’t want to see?
• What is it that our doings do in the world?
• What colonial affective investments could be directing our thoughts and actions? In what ways do we account for the unsconscious in our practice?
• How can we learn to decenter, to disarm and to discern?
• How can we stop insecurities and projections from limiting possibilities?
• How do we learn to let go of perceived entitlements and underlying desires that become a barrier to our ability to have difficult conversations and go into difficult spaces together?

3. Nuancing affectabilities

What do we need to lo(o)se(n), in order to experience…
ethics with/out the modern subject?
politics with/out the nation-state?
education with/out enlightenment?
welfare with/out capitalism… or socialism?
imagination with/out the intellect?
democracy with/out a single story of progress and reason?
humanity with/out good versus evil?
theology with/out an old man up above?
philosophy with/out Greece, the city or the alphabet?
psychoanalysis with/out the self?
dialogue with/out understanding?
justice with/out punishment?
hope with/out projections?
experience with/out self-actualization?
critique with/out righteousness, redeemers or virtue-signalling?
scholarship with/out posturing?
being with/out separability?
the end of the world as we know it without despair?

4. Incubating performative practices

During the ‘With/out Modernity Congress‘ a  series of artist/scholar talks and workshops invited participants to consider what infrastructures and architectures of knowing and being operationalize the denial of relational entanglement, foreclosing possibilities for orienting our existence otherwise.

Image credits:

Circles and Fishbowls held by various participants & Radical Tenderness and co(m)passion workshop, facilitated by Dani d’Emilia and Fernanda Eugenio as part of With/out Modernity: hospicing colonial habits of knowing and being, Congress held at University of British Columbia, 2-6 July 2019 (Vancouver, Canada).