“Posthumanist Processes are Already Always at Work”

The organization of the seminar into interviews, presentations, and group discussion allowed us to deeply research a challenging theory.Having the opportunity to interview a renowned scholar in the field expanded our learnings and sparked our curiosity further.We thank Iris van der Tuin for her time and energy as she sat with us for this conversation.Question 1 Sam: In the introduction of your book New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, you comment that you conducted interviews with some of the most prominent scholars of new materialism.If you were to add to the book, who are some of the other scholars you would want to interview, and what would you hope they add to the conversation?Iris: This is a fantastic question, but where to start?Maybe I should first say a little bit about why there are interviews in the book in the first place.Because actually the new materialism book that I wrote and undertook as an interviewing kind of thing, together with Rick Dolphijn, grew out of a seminar.When I met Rick, who's a Deleuze scholar, we realized that we shared ideas but not necessarily concepts.He comes from media theory, I come from feminist theory, so we compiled a list of each of our five favorite footnotes.I'm not able to write without Donna Haraway's situated knowledges or to speak without it, so that was on the list and nine other texts.And then we looked at this list, and we were like 'wow!' This is also interesting for other people, this is not just between the two of us, let's say.So we opened up the conversation about the texts to whoever wanted to join at the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University, and we really liked that conversational model in a way, because, to say it resembles new materialist ideas would not do justice to new materialism, but the generative nature of a conversation was something that interested us.So then we wanted to do something around conversation in the book and with multiple voices.Karen Barad was the first one we interviewed.It was actually an online interview, she was in California and we were in Utrecht.And it was part of a conference, not necessarily meant for publication, but when somebody had typed it all up we decided again 'oh this is interesting for more than one person.'So then Karen Barad became the first one we interviewed for our book.We chose Rosi Braidotti and Manuel DeLanda, because of the fact that they coined the term neo-materialism, as you know.And because we didn't want new materialism to be too smooth in a way, we chose Quentin Meillassoux who is somebody who doesn't self-identify as a new materialist.I don't know if he calls himself anything?Maybe a speculative materialist or speculative realist or something like that.Your actual question was: if you were to add to the book who are some of the scholars you would want to interview and so what would you hope that they add to the conversation?I would go for younger scholars, because I think that all the scholars that we have included are pretty established, so that is something that I really would want to do.And of course these younger scholars are not necessarily very known, so giving you their names wouldn't necessarily ring bells or anything.I am thinking of

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.