Quantities Without Scale and the Thought of Novelty

While critical thought is suspicious of quantification for good reasons, it has also invested peculiar quantities with generative potential since Immanuel Kant’s essay on negative quantities and his foundation of the anticipations of perception in intensive quantities. Building on a series of encounters that included the workshop Chaos and Infinite Judgement and the conferences Situated Knowledges and Regional Epistemologies as well as Conatus und Lebensnot, this workshop will address the role of scale and quantity in thinking novelty. Must one abandon classical theories of knowledge in order to conceive of an ever more expansive, transversal, and plural field of experience? Or is novelty rather to be thought by focusing on paradoxes in certain situated knowledges, such as intensities experienced without scale, emergence in scale invariance, or phenomena that are negative in a new sense, like a zero that is not nothing? The workshop will discuss excerpts from Kant, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Châtelet, as well as papers by Monique David-Ménard on real opposition, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky on the transformation of experience in Benjamin, and Christoph Holzhey on the critical point of phase transitions in physics.

(The texts will be pre-circulated to registered participants.)

In English

Programme

14:00 – 15:30 Part I
Introduction and Short Inputs

15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 – 17:30 Part II
Negative and Intensive Quantities

17:30 – 18:00 Coffee Break

18:00 – 19:30 Part III
Scale-invariant Criticality and Novelty Beyond Scale

With

Monique David-Ménard
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Ali Benmakhlouf
Marcus Coelen

How to Attend

At the venue (registration required): Registration opens on 16 February 2026.