Vicki Kirby

Experimental Speculations/Speculative Experimentations # 6:
Vicki Kirby: Quantum Anthropologies
Termin: 19.6. 18h Vortrag, Senatssaal, 20.6.2014 Workshop 10.30-12.30, 14-16h
Ort: EUV
The notions of structure, difference, relation and systematicity are often understood in terms of “the language question,” or “the linguistic turn.” However, more recent methodologies - pragmatics, affective turn, objective and speculative turns - tend to dismiss the tenets of this style of analysis as overly restricted and therefore incapable of including life’s broader complexities. Thinking with and against the grain of these recent discourses, the workshop will revisit some of the foundational building blocks of semiology. The purpose is to ask if the many enduring riddles and provocations which inform this work and which cannot be circumscribed within conventional humanist analyses, have been adequately acknowledged. We will read classical texts such as Saussure and Benveniste in order to engage with Kirby’s thesis put forth in her most recent book Quantum Anthropologies (2011): deconstruction’s implications have been curtailed by assuming textuality and representation to be specific to the domain of culture. Revisiting Derrida’s claim that there is „no outside of the text,“ Kirby argues that theories of cultural construction have inadvertently reproduced the very binaries they intended to question, first and foremost that between nature and culture. What if culture was really nature all along?
Vicki Kirby is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is a renowned feminist theorist and a distinguished voice within new materialist approaches and the author of Judith Butler: Live Theory (2006) and Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (1997).
Literatur: Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large, Durham Duke University Press, 2011,