The Actuality of Actuality

The Institute of Philosophy at ZRC SAZU, in collaboration with the Centre for Theoretical and Critical Research of the University of Rijeka, is pleased to invite you to the international symposium The Actuality of Actuality, to be held on 1 June 2026 in the Gosposka Hall of ZRC SAZU. Organised as part of Dr Ozren Pupovac’s visiting fellowship at the Institute, the symposium will bring together theorists from Austria, Bulgaria, Lebanon, Germany, and Slovenia.

In which way can thought respond today to the exigency of its relevance and effectivity, let alone its realisation? How can critique be of the present, in the active and not simply passive sense of the genitive – participating in its unfolding, contributing to the seizing of the emancipatory chances that offer themselves as scantly as they do subterraneously? Amidst the reigning obscurantism and disorientation signalling the defeat of any active referents of rupture – when “a present is lacking”, as Mallarmé had already diagnosed it – is it enough to take plight in projections and deferrals, in imaginings and hopes? Does it suffice, in order to affirm ruptural capacity, to place our bets on the holding fast to the “not yet” as something real, albeit inactual, on the virtual or potential as ever present subversive openings? For should one not at the same time attempt to echo that what the past century had thought and practiced in the radical registers of the real and the present: the manifest unfolding of the actuality of emancipatory action, the actuality of the revolution? But then again how to stage once more the actuality of such an idea of actuality? In which way can thought render it thinkable today? Which operators of thought, which conceptual articulations might it be necessary to evoke in this regard? From the subject and truth to the object and the act, from force and form to the void and substance, from power to effectivity, from the actuality of the present moment to the actuality of an activity of (self)constitution, from act to actuosity, from action to actual infinity – what are the categorial and conceptual moves required, as we necessarily pass through the history of philosophy in search for elements of refoundation of the concept of actuality? And, moreover, which temporal complications of actuality as present are we confronting here in the first place? For if the very notion of actuality, etymologically stemming from agere and ἄγειν, is something that draws out or pushes to the front – and does not march at the head, as ἄρχειν or ducere – something present and instantaneous, while at the same time moving and producing, albeit without being measured by its result, by its completion alone as facere – is the concept itself adequate to capture in thought such a radicality of time unfolding here?

Schedule

10:30 – 11:00 Opening remarks

11:00 – 12:00 Boyan Manchev: "The Front of the Actual"

12:00 – 13:00 Bojana Jovićević: "Hegel on Action and Actuality"

Pause

14:00 – 15:00 Ozren Pupovac: “The Actual Concept”

15:00 – 16:00 Bruno Besana: "Sketches of an Indeterminate Present"

Pause

16:30 – 17:30 Alexi Kukuljevic: "Hell’s Actuality: Pasolini’s Imperative"

17:30 – 18:30 Nadia Bou Ali: "The Actuality of Allegory"

18:30 – 20:00 Closing discussion

Follow online (Zoom link)