Guest Lecture: Multiplicities of Silence

Prof. William Watkin (Brunel University)

Sigetics is the name for the philosophy of silence. It is concerned with what philosophers cannot say or name. As such it constitutes the outside of philosophy, that thinkers need to make their various systems consistent. Yet sigetics as a discipline is also marked by an essential paradox, the saying of the unsayable. In his brief history of sigetics, Prof. Watkin visits the quiet cells and still offices of many thinkers (the Gnostics, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Husserl, Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, Agamben, Ranciere and Badiou) and asks if their multiplicities of silences might be less a limit to philosophy, than a mute indication of its future. For what is silence but that which has no distinction, discernibility or difference? And what is sigetics but the philosophy of this radical indifference?

When? 11 January 2023, 6-8PM
Where? Lecture Hall JO1 (Johannisstr. 4)

Prof. William Watkin is a Professor of Contemporary Philosophy and Literature at Brunel University, West London. He is a specialist in contemporary continental philosophy and has published seven books. His most recent, Bioviolence: How the Powers That Be Make Us Do What They Want looks at contemporary geopolitics, technology and new forms of force and coercion. He is also a published journalist specialising in technology, data and the limits of truth.

This event is offered in collaboration with and supported by the Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics and the Philosophy Department (Prof. Franziska Dübgen).