Bruno Besana

Bruno Besana studied philosophy at the Paris VIII University. He is a former Fellow of the ICI Berlin, and of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL). He has taught philosophy at the Paris VIII University, and has published on ontology and aesthetics in contemporary philosophy, with a particular focus on the works of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Rancière. He is affiliated fellow of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and a member of the editorial team of S – Line of Beauty, journal of the CLIC, Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique.

He is a founding member of the Versus Laboratory research collective. The aim of the Versus Laboratory project, started in 2007, is to explore how philosophical concepts are produced at the points of adversity and tension with political, aesthetical and scientific practices; the idea is to approach philosophy not as a regulative practice that reflects upon other practices defining their fields of action, but as a battlefield whose interiority is fed by the dissensual relations that it maintains with them. Versus Laboratory has organized several conferences and seminars. Currently, together with Ozren Pupovac and Tzuchien Tho, Bruno Besana is leading a seminar – entitled Prolegomena to the Void – on the history of the concept of the void from early atomism to Hellenistic philosophy. The seminar will continue in 2014 by investigating the changes that the concept of the void undergoes in XVII century science and philosophy.

Bruno Besana is also currently working on two short books projects, the first on Gilles Deleuze's reading of Greek Stoicism, the second on some contemporary attempts to give a formal reading of the concept of the subject.