“Deleuze and The New Materialism”

Manuel De Landa speaks about the importance of Gilles Deleuze in the 21st century and the fundamentals of materialism in a seminar entitled Gilles Deleuze and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Questioning the role of structuralism and the postmodern position in philosophy, De Landa argues for a view of a materialist world autonomously removed from the concepts of our own mind. His challenge, he says, is to remove a transcendental plane from material objects, that is to remove the concept of essence from the world, without giving rise to a metaphysical position. Towards this, De Landa used the analogy of the battlefield as an example of the social material space to illustrate a plane of existence of extreme materiality. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland.