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..Gerald Raunig

Gerald Raunig
Desiring Dividuality

Monday, 7 February 2011 at 7.00 p.m.
Cankarjev dom, M3/M4 Hall

Desiring Dividuality opens a question of the terminology and its potencial in the contemporary society. How to overcome the position as a dividuum, data, samples which are more or less withouth any value.
In a section of Human, All Too Human entitled 'Morality as the Self-Division of Man', Friedrich Nietzsche points out that "in morality man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum." More than 100 years later, the concept of the dividuum turns up again in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Deleuze asserts in his Postscript on the Societies of Control, "Individuals have become 'dividuals', and masses become samples, data, markets, or 'banks'."
The sharing of personal data as a self-chosen self-division of man - this is what privacy looks like today. But what seems like perfect grounds for never-ending complaints by cultural pessimists about the loss of privacy and its partner, the public sphere, may turn out to be deeply ambivalent: dividuality is not only a threat to the old concept of privacy, it is in fact also a trace of new modes of social recomposition.

Gerald Raunig is philosopher and art theoretician. He works at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (Departement Kunst und Medien, Vertiefung Theorie) and at the eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies); co-ordinator of the transnational eipcp research projects republicart (2002-2005), transform (2005-2008) and Creating Worlds (2009-2012); habilitation and venia docendi at the Institute for Philosophy, University of Klagenfurt/A; member of the editorial board of the multilingual webjournal transversal and the Austrian journal for radical democratic cultural politics, Kulturrisse.

Recent books in English: Art and Revolution. Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, translated by Aileen Derieg, New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press 2007; Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. Reinventing Institutional Critique, London: mayflybooks 2009 (Ed., with Gene Ray); A Thousand Machines, translated by Aileen Derieg, New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press 2010.

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