EVENTS

Talk

Michael Marder
Artificial, Mortal, Imperfect

Lumiar Cité
24.09.2026, 19h00

E-Flyer (eng)

Ed Atkins, Pianowork 2, 2023, video with sound

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes characterizes his sovereign as a ‘mortal god’ and an ‘artificial man’, larger and stronger than any natural body. In turn, the animating principle of this new theandric creature is an ‘artificial soul.’ But what kind of soul is manufactured rather than born, and what kind of time does it keep? In this talk, Michael Marder follows Hobbes along tracks other commentators prefer to ignore, from his conviction that nature itself is divine artifice (making every human construction a second-rate imitation of God’s craftsmanship) to his admission, in De Corpore, that time and space are mere phantasms, decaying sense masquerading as the ground of reality. With strong contemporary resonances that encompass AI and VR, the deconstruction of nature/artifice distinction and the litmus test of mortality, Hobbes becomes a proper name for the limits of sovereignty, rather than its core. Crucially, what Hobbes conveys across the centuries that separate him from us is that artifice will not save us from mortality and imperfection. The Leviathan governs a beginning it did not choose and faces an end it cannot prevent, so that everything in the sphere of sovereignty boils down to a single, necessarily fallible strategy: introducing a perpetually incomplete delay of one’s own death.

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz. An author of more than twenty books in the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought, he is currently completing a manuscript titled Fabrication: Of Intelligence and Nature.
A Philosophical Fugue. His most recent works include Of Joints and Other Articulations: The Futures of Arthrosophy (2026), Fiori di fuoco (with Anaïs Tondeur, 2025), Metamorphoses Reimagined (2025), Eco-Freud From A To Z (2025), Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal (with Edward S. Casey, 2024), Time Is a Plant (2023), and The Phoenix Com- plex: A Philosophy of Nature (2023). More information at michaelmarder.org.

The lecture will be in English. Entry is free and limited to the number of seats available.