The complexity of today’s social organization, in which algorithms and big data supersede the primacy of human agency and experience, obliterated our traditional notion of the present as the structuring condition of time. Current speculative concepts such as derivative trading, financial speculation, as well as preemptive politics and personalities suggest that the present is already predetermined by the future. But what does it mean to live and think in a speculative present, ethically but also academically, let’s say as a literary theorist? And how does a non-linear conception of time affect our present-day semantics and politics? Exploring the implications of an asynchronous temporality towards a modern understanding of poetics, ontology and metaphysics, in this open seminar, excerpts from Armen Avanessian’s works on temporality will be discussed.

Armen Avanessian studied philosophy and political science in Vienna and Paris. After completing his dissertation in literature, he worked at the Free University Berlin from 2007–2014. He has previously been a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University and the German Department at Yale University as well as Visiting Professor at various art academies in Europe and the US. In Berlin, Avanessian is the editor at large at Merve Verlag and in charge of the theory program at the internationally acclaimed theatre Volksbühne.  He is a co-founder of the bilingual research platform Spekulative Poetik (www.spekulative-poetik.de), conducting a series of events, translations and publications.