Thursday, November 2, 2023 7:30 AM - 6:30 AM
Friday, November 3, 2023 7:30 AM - 6:30 AM
“Limits of the Living” is a two-day symposium hosted by the Department of Global Languages and Cultures and sponsored by the Glasscock Center and the Humanities and Anthropocene Initiative. Featuring a multidisciplinary group of philosophers, literary critics, and natural and social scientists, it considers the ontological, discursive, and historical factors that have contributed to what, today, has become the undeniable entanglement of the biological and technological.
We explore how a robust understanding of life, its histories, and its limits, forces a reconsideration of current paradigms for understanding global biotechnological and biopolitical realities. Our investigation is oriented around two critical loci: First, the adoption, in the life sciences, of a language of information and code, beginning in the 1950s. Following studies by Foucault, Kay, and Fox-Keller, we ask how the confluence of cybernetics and genetic theory following WWII continue to shape both contemporary research projects in the sciences, and biopolitical approaches to “life” in the social, economic, and political spheres. What alternative conceptual schema were, in adopting this language, suppressed, and what resources remain for us today in our effort to de-instrumentalize and de-mechanize “life”? Second, the interpenetration of organic and inorganic systems, at ever more fundamental levels, raises critical questions about the historicity of “bio-technology,” and the ontological status of “life itself.” If “life” will have always been marked by externalities and prostheses—be they evolutionary selection pressures or, more recently, medico-scientific instrumentation—what kind of revision does this force upon our understanding of its limits? Inspired by the work of philosophers Stiegler, Simondon, Haraway, Derrida, Heidegger, and Wills, astrobiologists Davies, Walker, and Cronin, and biological theorists Margulis, Godfrey-Smith, Oyama, and Stengers, we seek to articulate a scientifically and theoretically rigorous account of life able to speak to current political exigencies, including projects of eugenics and human “enhancement,” policies of genomic data storage, and global ecological and environmental crises that place “life itself” at risk.
Invited Speakers:
David Wills, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Brown University
Kelle Dhein, Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow, Santa Fe Institute, & Consulting Bioethicist, Native BioData Consortium
Katie Chenoweth, Associate Professor of French, Princeton University
Deborah Goldgaber, Associate Professor of Philosophy & Director of Ethics Institute,
Louisiana State University
Patrick Gamez, Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, Notre Dame University
Armando Mastrogiovanni, English, Baruch College
Michael Ardoline, Ethics Institute, Postdoctoral Researcher, Louisiana State University
Bruno Penteado, Assistant Professor of French, Texas Tech University
Richard Doyle, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Penn State University
Organized by: Adam R. Rosenthal, Associate Professor, Global Languages and Cultures
(arrosenthal@tamu.edu) & Michael Portal, ABD, Philosophy & Humanities (michaelportal@tamu.edu)]
Contact: Adam R. Rosenthal [arrosenthal@tamu.edu], Michael Portal [michaelportal@tamu.edu]
