http://www.egs.edu/ Catherine Malabou, philosopher and writer, A philosophical approach to the proposed geological epoch called as the Anthropocene.

Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2015.

Catherine Malabou, Ph.D., is an important contemporary French philosopher. Catherine Malabou was born in 1959 and is a former student at the École normal supérieure (ENS) of Fontenay-Saint-Cloud in Lyon, France. ENS schools are regarded as some of the most prestigious French schools for humanities studies. Before that Catherine Malabou was educated in Paris at the renown Sorbonne University.

Catherine Malabou passed her agrégation in philosophy (French University high-level competitive examination for the recruitment of professors and often the gateway to Ph.D. study). Catherine Malabou wrote her dissertation on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) under the direction of the critical French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), completing it on December 15 1994. The thesis was published in 1996 under the title “L’Avenir de Hegel, plasticité, temporalité, dialectique” and was prefaced by Derrida with a text entitled “Le temps des adieux: Heidegger (lu par) Hegel (lu par) Malabou” (“A time for farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou”). Catherine Malabou’s doctoral dissertation was eventually published in both Japanese and English (2005, “The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic”).

More recently, Catherine Malabou published with the eminent American critical thinker Judith Butler (1956-) a book in French entitled “Sois mon corps” (2010), not yet published in English but which can translate as “Be My Body”. The two thinkers give us a contemporary reading of domination and servitude in Hegel. They ask about who has not ever dreamed or feared, desired or dreaded to delegate one’s body? That is to say, asking or ordering someone else: be my body, carry it in my place, feed it, cultivate it, shape it. According to Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou such request and order are those which the master gives the slave in Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807). In this way, the dialectic of domination and servitude must be understood as a scene of delegation and denial of the body. But they also want to ask two opposite and yet inextricable questions: do we ever manage to completely detach oneself from one’s body? And on the contrary, are we ever completely attached to it? From Hegel to Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Jacques Derrida and Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968), these issues are tackled in all their modalities.

http://www.egs.edu Benjamin H. Bratton, born 1968, is an American theorist, sociologist and professor of visual arts, contemporary social and political theory, philosophy, and design.

The Post-Anthropocene: The Turing-incomplete Orchid Mantis Evolves Machine Vision. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2015.

Benjamin H. Bratton, (b. 1968), is an American theorist, sociologist, and professor of visual arts, contemporary social and political theory, philosophy, and design. His research deals with computational media and infrastructure, design research management & methodologies, classical and contemporary sociological theory, architecture and urban design issues, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies.

Bratton completed his doctoral studies in the sociology of technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara​, and was the Director of the Advanced Strategies Group at Yahoo! before expanding his cross-disciplinary research and practice in academia. He taught in the Department of Design/Media Art at UCLA from 2003-2008, and at the SCI Arc​ (Southern California Institute of Architecture)​ for a decade, and continues to teach as a member of the Visiting Faculty. While at SCI Arc, Benjamin Bratton and Hernan Diaz-Alonso co-founded the XLAB courses, which placed students in laboratory settings where they could work directly and comprehensively in robotics, scripting, biogenetics, genetic codification, and cellular systems​. Currently, in addition to his professorship at EGS, Bratton is an associate professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Dieg​o, where he also directs the Center for Design and Geopolitics, partnering with the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology​.

In addition to his formal positions, Benjamin H. Bratton is a regular visiting lecturer at numerous universities and institutions including: Columbia University, Yale University, Pratt Institute, Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of California, Art Center College of Design, Parsons The New School for Design, University of Michigan, Brown University, The University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Bauhaus- University, Moscow State University, Moscow Institute for Higher Economics, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

Bratton's current projects focus on the political geography of cloud computing, massively- granular universal addressing systems, and alternate models of ecological governance. In his most recent book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015), Bratton asks the question, "What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities?​" and in response, offers the proposition "that smart grids, cloud computing, mobile software and smart cities, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing, and other types of apparently unrelated planetary-scale computation can be viewed as forming a coherent whole—an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new geopolitical architecture.​"

Other more recent texts include the following: Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics, On Apps and Elementary Forms of Interfacial Life: Object, Image, Superimposition, Deep Address, What We Do is Secrete: On Virilio, Planetarity and Data Visualization, Geoscapes & the Google Caliphate: On Mumbai Attacks, Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apohenia and Suspicious Images/ Latent Interfaces (with Natalie Jeremijenko), iPhone City, Logistics of Habitable Circulation (introduction to the 2008 edition of Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics). As well, recent online lectures include: 2 or 3 Things I Know About The Stack, at Bartlett School of Architecture, University of London, and University of Southampton;Cloud Feudalism at Proto/E/Co/Logics 002, Rovinj, Croatia; Nanoskin at Parsons School of Design; On the Nomos of the Cloud at Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, École Normale- Superiore, Paris, and MOCA, Los Angeles; Accidental Geopolitics at The Guardian Summit, New York; Ambivalence and/or Utopia at University of Michigan and UC Irvine, and Surviving the Interface at Parsons School of Design.