Independent sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato will be at York University’s Keele campus for a two-day event featuring a screening of his audiovisual project Assemblages (2010), made with artist Angela Melitopoulos, and his upcoming book, Wars and Capitalism, co-authored with Eric Alliez.
The event on April 25 and 26 is co-sponsored by the Department of Communication Studies, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, the School of Arts, Media, Performance & Design, the Office of the Vice President of Research and Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Infoscape Lab. The event venue will be the Nat Taylor Cinema, N102 Ross Building.
Assemblages: A Screening and Intervention by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato will be held on April 25 at 2pm.
The film is a long-term audiovisual research project about Felix Guattari and his revolutionary psychiatric practice, his political activism as well as his ideas concerning ecosophy and his interest in animism, especially in the Brazilian and Japanese context. It has been shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium, at the 2011 Berlinale and at the 2012 Taipei Biennal, among others.
Lazzarato, born in Italy, lives and works in Paris. As an independent sociologist and philosopher, he specializes in studies of immaterial labor, the breakdown of the wage system, and “post-socialist” movements. He is co-founder of the magazine MULTITUDES, where he is now on the editorial board. He is the author of The Making of the Indebted Man and Signs and Machines.
Melitopoulos, born 1961 in Munich, lives and works in Berlin. She studied fine arts at the Art Academy Düsseldorf with Nam June Paik, is collaborating in political networks in Paris, Italy, Turkey and Germany, and teaches in several international academic institutions. From 1985, her work has been shown in international video and film festivals and in exhibitions and museums (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum, NY).
Financialization and War – Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality and Subjectivity: A public lecture by Maurizio Lazzarato will be held on April 26 at 2pm.
In this talk, Lazzarato will present an overview of the main themes of his upcoming book Wars and Capitalism, co-written with Eric Alliez. Building on both Carl Schmitt's argument that the economy is the continuation of war through other means and his previous work on debt economy, Lazzarato will particularly interrogate the pivotal role of financial capitalism in indexing race, class, gender, sexuality and subjectivity to the logics of both military and non-military warfare.