physical description of the Bonn event

I think I’ll wait to give any characterization of the discussions in Bonn until the whole event has finished. But in case you’re curious, here’s what the physical situation is like.

We’re in a large ground-floor room of a baroque palace, south and a bit east of the train station.

There are four long tables as if in a dining hall, with roughly 60 students sitting on them. they have to turn sideways to look at the front of the room, which is where our m.c. Prof. Markus Gabriel sits and mixes many jokes with his philosophical moderator’s role.

The faculty (roughly the original speculative realists, though with Hägglund instead of Meillassoux) sometimes join Gabriel at the front.

Today we get the Big Dog– 6 hours of Žižek. There is almost nothing I would rather do for 6 hours than listen to Žižek speak, even though I disagree with nearly every word of the reading we had to do for today (long excerpts from his Less Than Nothing).

Gabriel himself goes tomorrow, then Brassier on Wednesday, followed by a less structured day on Friday dominated by student presentations.

Incidentally, I’m told there were hundreds of student applications for this, so if you applied and were not accepted, you faced long odds and may simply have missed a lucky bounce.