Winter Programme

ECOLOGY, LOVE AND POLITICS

January - March, 2025, Parrhesia, Berlin

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Payment may be made by credit card (via Paypal), Paypal, or offline Bank Transfer.

Courses

Each course runs 2 hours per week for 5 weeks

Talks

Book Launches

Description

In this course, we will begin exploring the well-known Guattarian concepts of deterritorialization and territorialization in the light of two ideas: freedom and care. By questioning rigid conservative territories where freedom is sacrificed for stability, and capitalism’s random deterritorializations where things are exchanged on the same plane of equivalence, in his later writings – which contain his less well-known but most original thought, independent from Deleuze’s – Guattari puts forward the need to play rhythmically between territory and deterritorialization: caring for those things which are finite and fragile, and yet being free to explore the new. It is only in this way, he believes, that new values can be created to enrich our subjectivities and existential territories. Additionally, throughout the course we will also ask questions such as: What is the role of chaosmosis (the transition from chaos to cosmos) in relation to the care and freedom just mentioned? Can it open up a form of care based on something more than the acknowledgment of our relational condition – something, that is, even more essential, linked to the realization that we are inherently fragile because we spring from chaos, live for an instant and then die and dissolve back into chaos? Furthermore, can chaosmic thinking help us interact with reality in previously unimagined ways? Persuaded that it can, the later Guattari conferred increasing relevance on art, for artists, like children and lovers, and schizophrenics (in their own, if often painful, ways), feel the need to invent the world anew every day. Accordingly, he spoke of a new aesthetic paradigm; and to this expression he appended the term ethical to emphasize that, while being open-ended, any creative existential activity must also be responsible. Therefore, in parallel with freedom and care, the aesthetic and the ethical stand as the two key components of what Guattari called mental ecology, which he deemed as crucial as environmental ecology and whose own incorporeal species (love, friendship, solidarity, music, cinema, thought…) are menaced today by neoliberalism and authoritarianism alike (just as many biological species also are). The course will focus on these and other related matters and will include a practical workshop in which all participants will have a chance to play with this idea of a mental ecology after their own vital experiences.

Session 1: Life as rhythm, life as chaosmosis

Session 2: Freedom and care in a reciprocal perspective

Session 3: Towards a mental ecology

Session 4: Reimagining subjectivity

Session 5: Playing with Guattari’s cartographies

Carlos A. Segovia is an independent philosopher (born in London and currently based in Berlin) working on meta-conceptuality, contingency and worlding. His publications include Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide (with Sofya Shaikut; Brill, 2023), Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), and Félix Guattari and the Ancients: Theatrical Dialogues in Early Philosophy (with Gary Genosko; forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2025). He has been associate professor of philosophy at St Louis University Missouri (Madrid Campus), visiting professor at the University of Aarhus and the Free University of Brussels, and guest lecturer at the European Research Council, the Collège International de Philosophie, the École Normale Supérieure, the École Lacanienne de Psychanalyse, University College London, the European University at St Petersburg, Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Waseda University in Tokyo and the University of Lilongwe. Now in Berlin, he is designing an experimental, educational and research project on the production of new universes of value against the backdrop of today’s environmental challenges and shifting mental ecologies.

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