Esercizi Filosofici 15, 2 (2020)

The aim of the paper is to offer an analysis of the three following notions: material, immaterial and formal in Nicolai Hartmann’s Ontology. Firstly, I explore the Hartmann’s critique of the merely material and merely formal ontology. The attempt is to offer a definition of the categorial pair composed by matter and form, in the context of the entire categorial system. Furthermore, I try to describe the role of matter in the categorial laws (kategoriale Gesetze), in particular the law of matter (das Gesetz der Materie). The purpose is to show the project of a general formal ontology and the current importance of Hartmann’s ontology in continuity with the Husserl’s third logical investigation. Nonetheless, a pure formal intepretation of ontology presents limits based on the underlying immateriality expressed by the privileged form of the event (Ereignis).

The paper aims to examine the correlation between the alarming and stigmatizing narratives of the migration, spread via the new media, and the mushrooming of xenophobic speeches online. The Italian media address the migration primarily according to the frame of illegality and criminality. This dynamic contributes to colonize, in negative, the “collective imaginary”, but also to direct the relational schemes, as evidenced by the increase in hate speech against migrants. Therefore, my aim is to identify potential scenarios suitable at reorienting the public debate around the migration and also to elaborate counternarratives and/or alternative narratives to encourage a new social, political and cultural attitude towards the migration, against any form of dangerous simplification.

In this contribution I intend to demonstrate how romantic Naturphilosophie can today be an effective tool in the ecological debate, especially as an indirect source of Murray Bookchin's Social Ecology. This usefulness becomes clear if we look at the last phase of Naturphilosophie, the one that follows the “immaterialist turn” impressed by Schelling and his pupil Steffens. This turning point depends on both Schelling’s break with Fichtean and Hegelian idealism and on Schelling’s reading of theosophical and sapiential sources. Although Bookchin has elevated Hegelian logic to the main source of his philosophy of social ecology, my aim is to show how the second Naturphilosophie of Schelling and especially of Steffens seems capable of making up for some shortcomings of Hegelian thought on the anthropological side.

Images have the power to transform physical absence into iconic presence: this is where the paradox of their existence emerges. In the era of the triumph of audio-visual self-representation the debate on self-portrait shifts its focus from the produced works to the process of production itself. Based on such premises, the question of materiality can be redeemed by placing it in the gestural domain, in the act of manufacturing that the body, as a living medium, together with the technological medium, performs in the processual interaction between picture and image.

This Special Issue on “On Becoming Immaterial” features contributions coming from very different disciplinary backgrounds. In this Introduction, we first outline the main questions that inspired our enquire into the concept of immateriality. Afterward, we present the single papers constituting the issue.

In this paper, I question architecture in relation to the notions of “immaterial” and “virtual”. The cityscapes where architecture is placed become increasingly liquid, marked by immaterial structures, flows and landscapes. How does architecture fit critically in this scenario? I will consider two ways to discuss the role of the immaterial related to architecture: first, in the case of media buildings; secondly, in those forms of architecture which imbibe immateriality, focus on and represent it, as in the Sendai Mediatheque (Ito) and in the Fondation Cartier (Nouvel).

One can easily affirm that Bernard Stiegler has always criticized both the concept of immaterial – starting from the sense and the theoretical meaning of the exhibition Les immatériaux organized by Lyotard in 1985 – and the same signifier, stating on several occasions that what we refer with this term actually calls always a material dimension. The immaterial would therefore always be hyper-material, that is to say the expression of an organized mat-ter as an active support for any type of memory, cognitive, symbolic etc. On the other hand, his attitude towards the Stoic-Deleuzian concept of incorporeal – with the conceptual chain that accompanies it in The Logic of Sense: event, quasi-cause, counter-effectuation – is certainly different, given that Stiegler, at least starting from the mature phase in its pharmaco-logical perspective, seems to have adopted it as a tool for analysing the current political economy and the hyper-industrial context (therefore not at all post-industrial) of platform capitalism. Adopting the incorporeal then means transforming it, in the sense of its radical technologization. Thus, from the Stieglerian point of view, the incorporeal becomes the hyper-material expression of exosomatization, that is the technical externalization of memory and bodily gesture that accompanies humanity since its prehistory, while the Deleuzian control societies become society of hyper-control, that is, of the control that hyper-material exerts on us. The aim of the paper is then to show originality, intuitions and limits of Stiegler’s conceptual adoption, examining its effects in relation to both the reactivation of the Deleuzi-an concept of incorporeal and the same process of composition of the Stieglerian perspective.

I analyze James Turrell’s artwork Sight Unseen to investigate the dematerialization of the art object. Exploring the installation, spectators can perceive the ephemeral qualities of artificial lights as matter. As consequence of the immaterial aesthetic relations emerging from this atmospheric situation, audience experiences the spatial reorganization of the artistic environment. I assume an ecological aesthetic perspective to understand the crucial role of technologies to pursue both the materialization of light and the degradation of the art object intended by Turrell: the aesthetic experience. In conclusion, my analysis on the artistic dispositif endeavors broader considerations about the conditions affecting the daily experience related to the technical habitat in which we are immersed.

Clausewitz’s concept of material warfare is a reaction to the trend of reducing the art of war to the application of self-evident rules of engagement. By putting tactical outcomes in the perspective of strategic decision-making, the battlefield becomes the place where the trend to the extremes plays out. Based on his concept of material warfare, immateriality will be presented not as an abstraction of material circumstances but rather as the tendency to escalation that is inherent to every combat. Some conclusive remarks will be dedicated to the relation between military history and interpretations of military genius, in order to support the claim that materiality and immateriality are semantic concepts that express a state of equilibrium between evidence and decision.

Several acceptations of the term “abstract” can be found in Hegel’s works: sometimes it is used as a negative concept, referring to partial or false knowledge; other times it appears as a positive one, indicating the ability of something to become independent from empirical contingency. My aim is to argue that this ambiguity is not a logical contradiction, but rather a crucial feature of the process of abstraction itself. Therefore, I will approach the birth of writing and that of money as historical examples of the real power of abstraction, showing that, on the one hand, they involve dematerialization and decontextualization, and yet, on the other hand, they still depend on contingent aspects, such as material supports and cultural continuity.

Foucault found the starting point of modern European philosophy to be the construction of “man” as both an empirical fact and a transcendental operator. The aim is to show how this construction was made possible by an underlying strategical handling of the concept of matter. Some restrictions imposed on the materiality of knowledge-contents became key in explaining how actual men could gain access to transcendental knowledge. The paper focuses on Husserl and Kant as meaningful turning points of this transcendental discourse. However, the relevance of their dematerializing strategies will be shown to lay beyond their historic-cultural meaning, since they can also provide a way of dealing with knowledge experiences that can be critical even towards modernity’s characteristic anthropocentrism.

The process of digitalization of money is often understood solely in terms of money’s dematerialization, inscribed in the longer process of money’s transformation into pure function. This paper problematizes this assumption by showing that digital money is more material than ever. The ostensible contradiction lies in a misplaced emphasis on the substance of monetary objects as the sole locations of money’s materiality. This paper argues that infrastructures, and not monetary objects alone, are the place where money’s irreducible materiality can be retrieved. Monetary infrastructures are then shown to be deeply relational and composed of material active forms and imaginaries.