Ben Woodard
Ben Woodard
Ben Woodard (CA) is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His work focuses on the concepts of dark vitalism and nature in German Idealism, philosophies of becoming, and speculative realism, as well as in weird, speculative, and science fiction. He has published two books: Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and The Creep of Life (2012) and On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (2013). Woodard blogs at Speculative Heresy and Naught Thought. naughtthought.wordpress.com/conferences
Ben Woodard: 'The Earth is Not the World'
Geophilosophy is a strand of thought most associated with Deleuze and Guattari who, in turn, take Nietzsche as their conceptual source. In his lecture Woodard argues that their notion of geophilosophy in fact erases the very subject (the Earth) that they hope to conceptually elucidate
Part of
Session 8: Speculative Geophilosophy
Saturday 28 February
14:00 - 15:30
Paradiso, Main Hall
The geophilosophy of Ben Woodard directs the attention of philosophy to our globe, because it has ‘contoured every aspect of our material, cultural, and noetic existence’. But what is the Earth? Earth does not care for human thoughts and human civilisation. How can we truly imagine the force of the Earth, the nonhuman forces, things that defy human comprehension?