Matter, the Meta-spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson

John Ó Maoilearca (Kingston University)

The School of Materialist Research is proud to present the third of its (free) promotional lectures, which will last through May and June. Our third lecture, which will take place on May 24, 2021, at 18:30 CET and is part of a cluster called “Materialism in Philosophy and Non-philosophy: Marxian, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives” is by John Ó Maoilearca, entitled “Matter, the Meta-spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson.” The seminar will offer insight into how an ongoing research on the two Bergson’s (Mina and Henri) is actually a sequel of sorts to Ó Maoilearca’s ‘Spirit in the Materialist World’ essay in Angelaki from 2014. So it is quite Laruellean in approach, taking the idea of the ‘meta-spiritual’ as a kind of alter-ego (or essential remainder) for any materialism (not falling foul of Laruelle’s criticism of the ‘meta’, hopefully, because “meta” is not taken as a form of higher-order representation but rather as the immanent processuality, or mutativity, of thought).

John Ó Maoilearca is a Professor in the Department of Critical and Historical Studies at Kingston University, London. He has previously lectured in philosophy departments at the University of Sunderland, England, and the University of Dundee, Scotland. He has published eleven books, including (as author) Bergson and Philosophy (2000), Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006), Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010), and All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (2015). He works in the areas of Continental Philosophy (Bergson, Deleuze, Henry, Laruelle, Badiou), metaphysics (especially of time and identity), and metaphilosophy. The latter has led him to explore non-standard modes of thinking and philosophical expression, including diagrammatic thinking, animal representation, as well as film philosophy. Recently, he has directed this interest towards François Laruelle’s project of non-philosophy, and he is currently working on ordinary modes of mysticism and (so-called) ‘mental’ time-travel.

The School of Materialist Research (SMR) is an informal graduate and post-doc level program that offers seminars and workshops that address the materialisms running through contemporary science, philosophy, art, mathematics, design, architecture, and politics. SMR is an international platform, founded by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje and Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Wien that functions as a global online school combining education, research, and mentorship to advance academic study at the intersection the Social Sciences and Humanities and the STEM sciences. Two more institutions from Europe are expected to join the platform in the upcoming months. The Spring and Summer Sessions are offered for free and open to the public serving as promotional events that illustrate the programmatic commitment and style of work offered by the School for Materialist Research. Some of the confirmed speakers in the Spring/Summer series of seminars include: Paul Cockshott, Greg Michaelson, Ray Brassier, Anne-Françoise Schmid, John Ó Maoilearca, Guiseppe Longo, Agon Hamza, Adam Nocek, Katerina Kolozova, Vera Buhlman, Iris van der Tuin and many many more.