Department of Human Sciences for Education “Riccardo Massa”

Intersubjectivity and-or transindividuality

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A two-day conference, organized by the University of Milano-Bicocca and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, to examine the relationship between the categories of intersubjectivity and transindividuality

September 28, from 9:30 am to 7:30 pm
Massa Room, U6 Agorà Building (4° floor) - Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, Milano

September 29, from 9:30 am to 7:30 pm
Fondazione Corrente, Via Carlo Porta 5, Milano

What is the relationship between the category of intersubjectivity and the category of transindividuality?

Intersubjectivity is a central category in 20th-century philosophy, introduced by Husserl in his Cartesian Meditations, and its construction retraces some of the cornerstones of the Western philosophical tradition, from Descartes Cogito to Leibniz's monadology and Kant's transcendentalism.

Transindividuality is a marginal category. Coined by Gilbert Simondon in the 1960s, it became prominent in the 1990s thanks to Spinozist Marxist interventions of authors such as Paolo Virno and Etienne Balibar. Interpretative questions about Spinoza' philosophy might rise when sharpening the concept of transindividuality and its relation to intersubjectivity today.

Are intersubjectivity and transindividuality terminological variations of the same concept, insofar as the first and second terms both seem to indicate the “social” dimension?
Of course, the term ‘intersubjectivity’ would indicate a relationship between subjects, while the term ‘transindividuality’ would indicate one between individuals, but don't the two terms ultimately point in the same direction?
Didn't Jean Paul Sartre, in Existentialism is a Humanism, use the concept of intersubjectivity to go beyond the solipsism of the Cartesian subject?
Isn't this the direction taken by post-war French phenomenology from Merleau-Ponty to Levinas and the Frankfurt critical theory of Honneth?
And didn't Lucien Goldmann in Marxisme et Sciences humaines attribute the same anti-solipsistic function to the category of transindividual?
Should the category of the transindividual be read in the wake of the philosophical work done on intersubjectivity? Or should it be read as a radical alternative to intersubjectivity, precisely because this category remains irremediably caught up in the critique of the philosophies of the subject of Althusser or Foucault?

 

The conference, promoted within the activities of the course Teoria critica della società and organized in collaboration with Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, will seek to question the relationship between these categories by investigating them both in terms of their modern prehistory, as a topos of Spinoza interpretation, and in their functioning in contemporary philosophy and in fields of anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis.

Poster

September 28, from 9:30 am to 7:30 pm
Massa Room, U6 Agorà Building (4° floor) - Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, Milan

Moderation: Stefano Pippa (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)

  • 09:30 - Greetings from the Director of the Department of Human Sciences for Education “Riccardo Massa” Monica Guerra
  • 09:35 - Introduction, Vittorio Morfino (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca) / Andrea Blättler (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
  • 09:45 - Hasana Sharp (McGill University), The Transindividual Emergence of a Problem: Slavery in Spinoza
  • 10:45 - Coffee Break
  • 11:00 - Jason Read (University of Southern Maine), Two Senses of Ingenium: Transindividuality as the Space of Politics
  • 12:00 - Warren Montag (Occidental College), Contagion, Transmission, Imitation: Thetransindividualization of affect in Malebranche and Spinoza
  • 13:00 - Lunch

Moderation: Gianluca Pozzoni (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)

  • 14:30 - Andrea Blättler (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), Transindividuality of body and mind – Materiality of reason and freedom
  • 15:20 - Vittorio Morfino (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca), Intersoggettività e transindividualita nel Capitale
  • 16:10 - Coffee Break
  • 16:30 - Andrea Bardin (Università degli Studi di Padova), The (a)political animal: for a political anthropology of the transindividual
  • 17:30 - Nicola Marcucci (Università degli Studi di RomaTre), The transpersonal. Epistemology and Politics in Georges Gurvitch
  • 18:30 - Étienne Balibar (Université de Paris-Nanterre), La transindividualité, condition de possibilité et d’impossibilité de la praxis politique: réflexions préliminaires
  • 20:00 - Dinner

September 29, from 9:30 am to 7:30 pm
Fondazione Corrente, Via Carlo Porta 5, Milano

 

Moderation: Didier Contadini (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)

  • 09:30 - Martin Saar (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), Overcoming the Subject? Three Models
  • 10:30 - Natalia Romé (Universidad de Buonos Aires), The transindividual, Objectivity, and Imagination
  • 11:30 - Coffee Break
  • 11:45 - Ivo Eichhorn (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), Difference, Otherness, Transindividuality
  • 12:45 - Carlo Capello (Università degli Studi di Torino), Etica, estetica, etnica, pathos. Appunti su alcune rifrazioni della transindividualità nell’arte pubblica e in antropologia
  • 13:45 - Lunch

Moderation: Giacomo Clemente (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)

  • 15:00 - Pascale Gillot (Université de Tours), L'intersubjectivité triadique contre l'intersubjectivité spéculaire : la lecture de Jacques Lacan
  • 16:00 - Juan Domingo Sanchez Estop (Université libre de Bruxelles), Transindividualité et critique du signe
  • 17:00 - Coffee Break
  • 17:15 - Luca Pinzolo (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca), Sopravvivenza. Un’ontologia dello scarto e dell'eccesso
  • 18:15 - Judith Revel (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Né inter-, né trans-: pensare il nesso relazione/comune