Jordi Vivaldi

The terms ‘contagion’ and ‘contingency’ share etymological roots: both contain the Latin particles con, ‘reunion’, and tangere, ‘touch’. Being contagious and being contingent thus evoke the condition of being ‘in contact with’, whether such a contact is considered primarily as infective or as incidental. However, if the notion of contingency might be read as gaining traction from that of contact, this is only insofar as such contact is potentially contagious, that is, infective in the sense of inflective, influential with regards to an established course of events.
My talk mobilizes this figure of thought in order to consider the inclinations, jumps, ramifications, interludes, complicities, passages and cessations that temper the conceptual ‘contacts’ mediating between two PhDs. Developed in different academic set-ups—architectural and philosophical, these investigations orbit around disparate and perhaps even incompatible interests: while one intersects the architectural notions of continuity and discretism with the transformations of Western subjectivity brought by the Anthropocene, the other one questions the very notion of subjectivity in virtue of what might be philosophically described as the “constructability of the rational”, particularly in light of recent developments in animal studies, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. The methodological mobilization of, on the one side, Mies van der Rohe’s repetition of floors in the Lake Shore Drive, and on the other, Virgil’s ‘exuberant fatalism’ in the Aeneid, mark the speculative temper of both investigations. The talk will reflect on the possible points of contact—of incidental infection—between such speculations by attending to their diverging instrumentalization of a tabular mode of thinking, that is, by considering their common propensity to articulate concepts in the form of series of series that perform both a synoptic and heuristic role.