• Talk with Alex Campolo (10.11.2023): “Desired Behaviors” Alignment and the Emergence of a Machine Learning Ethics (Workshop: Interacting with Intelligent Systems: Decisions, Affects, and Trust. Organized by Interact! Ruhr Universität Bochum, Germany).

• Talk with Alex Campolo (08.06.2023): Making Examples: From Particulars to Generalization in Machine Learning (Conference: Nordic STS, Disruption and Repair in and Beyond STS. Panel: Agents of the General and the Particular, OSLO).

• Talk (08.12.2022): Sovereignty and Enclosure (Talk at the DFG-Graduate School Medienanthropologie GRAMA, Bauhaus Universität Weimar).

• Talk (22.11.2022): To Moderate (neue:theorie #2: Postkoloniale Theorie – (selbst-)kritisches Erzählen, Leipzig).

• Talk with Alex Campolo (15.10.2022): Example-Making: Machine Learning’s Mode of Authority (Conference: come (to) gather! Relationalität und Unabschließbarkeit des Versammelns, Abschlusstagung des DFG-Netzwerkes Versammeln: mediale, räumliche und politische Konstellationen Dresden).

• Talk (20.05.2022): Toward a Hauntology of Touch: Virtual and Haunting Touch (Talk at the DFG-Graduate School Medienanthropologie GRAMA, Bauhaus Universität Weimar).

• with Alexander Campolo (03.05.2022), From Rules to Examples: Machine Learning’s Modes of Authority (Paper presentation at the invitation of Prof. Louise Amoore at Algorithmic Societies, Department of Geography, Durham University, UK).

• Talk (09.12.2021): Undoing Predictive Algorithms. An Introduction (Online-Conference: On Future-Making, Undoing Predictive Algorithms, GRAMA, December 9–10, 2021).

• Talk with Deanna Cachoia-Schanz (10.12.2021): Surveille and Survey: Re(b)ordering the Body through DNA-Testing (Online-Conference: On Future-Making, Undoing Predictive Algorithms, GRAMA, December 9–10, 2021).

• Talk (08.07.2021): Nancy’s Law of Touch and Its Violation in the Undercommons (DFG-Graduate School ‘Medienanthropologie’ GRAMA).

• Talk with Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (09.04.2021): “One Unique You”: Passing and DNA-Testing as Ethnotechnological Apparatus (Panel: Mistaken Identities: Passing and the (In)Human at ACLA).

• Talk (21.11.2020): The Posthuman and the Shift Toward Ethics (Workshop: Entanglements. Relationality, Narrative, and the Critical Posthumanities, organized by Dana Bönisch, Universität Bonn).

• Talk with Kerry McAuliffe (09.03.2019): Spectral Matters: Virtuality and the Space of Memory (Panel: Ghostpitality II, ACLA, Georgetown University, Washington DC).

In Spectres of Marx, Derrida builds a hauntology buttressed with the language of spectrality, speculation, and ghosts. His text, however, contains its own hauntings, the phantom of materiality, the ghost of the body that hovers within the symbolic order. How might a contention with the concept of the virtual, not as “ineffective” or “insubstantial as a simulacrum,” but as deeply embodied and affective offer answers to Derrida’s driving question: “What is the effectivity or the presence of a specter…?” In the context of digital media, the virtual is a ubiquitous, yet elusive concept. We can describe it as the experience of being bodily affected by something that is here without being “actually” here, of being touched by a present absence.

This haunting presence is effective: it exerts a force that affects us in our very bodies as both material and situated. While Derrida addresses the virtual from a temporal perspective—and philosophers like Deleuze tend to understand the virtual from such a perspective—we would like to explore the rearticulation of time and space in the encounter between the virtualizing medium and the body. Experiencing the virtual prompts the impulse to turn around and look behind our back, in both a spatial and a temporal sense—as the virtual allows time to be reversed, manipulated. What consequence does the virtual yield for the archive, for an embodied understanding of memory, for the welcoming of that which is behind us, yet still to come?

• Talk (10.12.2018): The Performativity of Predictions or Why Algorithmic Tools Shouldn’t Be Used for Sentencing (MIRA Research Group, University of Pennsylvania).

• Talk (13.04.2018): ‘Coupling Parts that are not Supposed to Touch’. Performativität der Berührung in den neuen Materialismen (Conference: “Tangieren. Praktiken und Arrangements des Berührens in den performativen Künsten,” Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg).

• Talk (09.07.2017): Thinking Beyond the Ends of Philosophy – Heidegger’s and Derrida’s Understanding of the Event (ACLA, Utrecht).

If philosophy is to become something other than metaphysics, it cannot repeat the gesture of overcoming boundaries. For according to Derrida, metaphysics has always consisted of contemplating the limits in order to master them and what is beyond them. Instead, deconstruction has to navigate the limits of the onto-theological tradition so as to be simultaneously inside and outside of it. It has to temporarily adopt the metaphysical conceptuality to displace it. But, in repeating it by the means of deconstruction, aren’t we condemned to be indefinitely haunted by tradition; trapped at the end of metaphysics? Or, is a radically other philosophy thinkable? Heidegger calls this possibility the “other beginning.”

It consists in the coming of the “last god” that philosophers and poets have to prepare by listening to the way the “event” has given itself in the “first beginning” (Contributions to Philosophy). While the event in Heidegger relies on what has already happened, but has still to be properly thought of, Derrida elaborates on a concept of the event as what is coming “without horizon of expectation” (Spectres of Marx). Heidegger’s event goes with a questionable subjugation to it, whereas Derrida’s event entails the necessity of agency and justice. In my presentation, I will examine Heidegger’s and Derrida’s understandings of the “event” and their respective temporality. Finally, I will outline the political implications of both conceptions.

• Talk (02.06.2017): Pourquoi nous sommes déjà posthumains (Conference: “Le temps du posthumain?”, Université Paris-Diderot).

• Talk (26.11.2016): Question de détail, question d’affect (Workshop: “Roland Barthes, contemporanéités intempestives,” Université de Lausanne).

• Talk (16.09.2015): Einführung zur Operativität des Graphischen (Conference: “Handlungs|Spiel|Räume der Schrift, zur Operativität des Graphischen,” Zürcher Hochschule der Künste & Zentrum Künste und Kulturtheorie, Universität Zürich).

• Talk (17.12.2014): Materialität, Berührung, Ereignis. Vergleichende Untersuchung der “Ästhetik der Präsenz” im deutschen und französischen Sprachraum (International GiG Conference on “Komparative Ästhetik(en),” University of Mumbai, India).

• Talk (27.09.2012): Schrift sehen statt Schrift lesen. Die Pseudo-Schrift im Ausgang von Roland Barthes: Skizze einer Ästhetik der körperlichen Responsivität (International and interdisciplinary conference “Die Sinnlichkeit der Zeichen, Roland Barthes’ Aisthetik von Schrift und Bild,” Freie Universität Berlin & Institut für Germanistik, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität, Magdeburg).

• Talk (23.11.2010): La peau comme métaphore de l’image (Interdisciplinary workshop: “Peau|Haut|Skin,” Université de Lausanne).