The flyer for the 2009 Croatian "To Have Done With Life" conference, wherein the attempted to have dialogue on going past the "Kauffman patch" emergence models of "life", as Nathan Brown summarized things, of Stuart Kauffman. [2]

● 2009 | 21st Century Materialism
● 2011 | To Have Done with Life
● 2012 | The Art of the Concept
● 2013 | Modernity: the Bitter End
● 2014 | Sophistry: the Powers of the False
● 2015 | Poiesis (Ѻ) (vid)

“‘Life’ is the site of a formidable lacuna. There is no firmly established scientific account of its constitutive properties or the process of its genesis. Varieties of “vital materialism” prone to describing physical forces in terms of an inherent “life of things” have done little to clarify the problematic nature of the concept, and insofar as “life” functions as an empty signifier concealing an absence of theoretical coherence we might be better to have done with it.”

Terrence Malick’s 2001 film The Tree of Life (Ѻ), which "To Have Done With Life" conference co-organizer Nathan Brown cites as an opening platform launching point for discussion, in respect to "issues" with the term "life" from an emergence and or metaphysical point of view. [2]

“The title of our 2009 conference at MaMa was 21st Century Materialism. The title of this year’s conference is To Have Done With Life. Let me try to frame this year’s event by thinking through the relation between these two titles or these two problems: the relation between the philosophical orientation called materialism and the philosophical and scientific concept of life.”

“A son dies, he is mourned by his family. And on the anniversary of his death, decades later, the film’s narrative focalization upon the psychological interiority of his older brother breaks into what must be one of the most remarkable “flashbacks” in the history of cinema, even more grandiose than the famous analeptic cut which opens 2001: A Space Odyssey. Malick’s film returns us to what seems to be the origin of the cosmos, and from here we follow the expansion of the universe and the formation of our galaxy through the accretion of the earth, millennia of geological time, the self-organization of RNA and DNA molecules, the emergence of mitochondria and multicellular organisms, the evolution of diverse animal species during the Cambrian explosion, the reign and extinction of the dinosaurs, and the beginning of the latest ice age during the Pliocene. We then return to the bildungsroman (Ѻ) of the eldest son, following the progress of his family romance up through the years preceding his younger brother’s death.”

“The term “emergence” is the surest index of the doubly physical and metaphysical scope of this problem. The emergence of life, we say, and what we seem to mean by this is that we do not know exactly how—at exactly what point and in exactly what way—life came into being, though we do seem to know a great deal about its properties—including, supposedly, that it exists [see: life does not exist]. The problem of “emergence” is that a modality of being came to be which was not before, and the difficulty is that tracking the physical causes of such an event leads to irresolvable aporia (Ѻ). And these aporia are too easily dissembled through reference to “complex, self-organizing processes,” as if we can at once account for and evade the radicality of the event we are trying to think by placing it within the same category as the formation of snowflakes, traffic patterns, or the activities of termite colonies. In its typical usage (the work of Stuart Kauffman, for example), the concept of “emergence” is a crypto-metaphysical concept pretending to offer physical explanations, at once allowing and accounting for gaps in the latter through reference to “complexity”.”

A diagram classifying the “life theories” of Tibor Ganti (1974), i.e. chemoton theory, and Stuart Kauffman (1995), i.e. auto-catalytic closure, as perpetual motion theories, i.e. end over unity theories, i.e. perpetual motion of the living kind; which is what Nathan Brown (2011) seems to be pointing out in in his “Introduction” talk given during the To Have Done With Life conference.

“Alone, each molecular species is dead. Jointly, once catalytic closure among them is achieved, the collective system of molecules is alive.”

— Stuart Kauffman (1995), At Home in the Universe (pg. 50)

“The problem for biology, then, is that it is constantly on the cusp of either reduction to physical chemistry or ideological capture by metaphysics. The concept of ‘life’ tends to get lost between explanations of biological organisms referring either to molecular interactions or to an irreducible systemic wholeness [e.g. Behe]. And because it gets lost, it is prone to over-extension as the je ne sais quoi (Ѻ) which accounts for the substance of the biological precisely through its indetermination.”

American political philosopher and "thing theorist" Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, wherein she seems to be selling a 21st century do-gooder type of neo-Bersonianism, or something to this effect, which was one of the goads to the 2011 "To Have Done With Life" conference. [4]

“Should we have done with life? If we deploy this concept as a means of pretending we know what we mean when we do not, then we probably should. And this is perhaps the dominant para-philosophical use of this concept today, as it is deployed by actor-network theory spin-offs and vitalist Spinozisms extolling the so-called ‘life of things’. As, for example, in the ‘vital materialism’ of Jane Bennett.”

“What counts as the material of vital materialism? Is it only human labour and the socio-economic entities made by men using raw materials? Or is materiality more potent than that? How can political theory do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in every event and every stabilization? Is there a form of theory that can acknowledge a certain ‘thing-power’, that is, the irreducibility of objects to the human meanings or agendas they also embody?”

— Jane Bennett (2009), “Agency, Nature and Emergent Properties: an Interview with Jane Bennett” [3]

“Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.”