Poststructuralism

This volume brings together an international array of scholars to reconsider the meaning and place of poststructuralism historically and demonstrate some of the ways in which it continues to be relevant, especially for debates in aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The book's chapters focus on the works of Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard-in combination with those of Agamben, Luhman, Nancy, and Nietzsche-and examine issues including biopolitics, culture, embodiment, epistemology, history, music, temporality, political resistance, psychoanalysis, revolt, and the (...) visual arts. The contributors use poststructuralism as a hermeneutical strategy that rejects the traditional affirmation of unity, totality, transparency, and representation to instead focus on the foundational importance of open-ended becoming, difference, the unknowable, and expression. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of poststructuralism and helps demonstrate how it has contributed to debates across philosophy and other disciplines. Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, aesthetics, feminist theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, psychoanalysis, and sociology. (shrink)

The main purpose of this dissertation is to develop a specific perspective on the history of human thought. This goal can be achieved by critically reflecting on the dominant concept of modernity, linked with the idea of teleological and linear development, which underlies the common vision of history. The proposed approach is grounded in an in-depth analysis of the life and work of Michel de Montaigne, drawing on numerous achievements in intellectual history, conceptual history, and the history of philosophy, simultaneously (...) outlining a novel approach to the history of human thought. The first part of the dissertation revises the concept of modernity, surveys various philosophical interpretations of history (in dialogue with contemporary historiography), and finally outlines reworked notions of modernity and postmodernity. These considerations are based on discussions of history and historicity undertaken by various authors, especially Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It is especially the latter’s contribution in this area that has been so far underestimated, especially in Poland. What emerges is an image of history as a nexus of changes, neither absolutely progressive nor regressive, occurring in three dimensions: material, linguistic, and mental. Consequently, it appears necessary to take their intertwining into account in all historical research. Contrary to what the dominant notion of modernity suggests, these intersections are in fact argued to facilitate non-dogmatic thinking in any period or moment in history. The second part of the dissertation turns to Montaigne’s Essais – a work whose publication was an exceptional event in intellectual history, which is argued to confirm the previously formulated theses. First, a theoretical construct is introduced, describing the structure of human reality, termed “the structure of authority.” It defines the system of relations that shape the existence of every human being: relations of power, knowledge, and faith. This system of relations is demonstrated using the example of the early modern era. Against this background, Montaigne appears as an author who questioned or at least attenuated the structure of authority in his time because he now appears as a modern or even postmodern writer who was ahead of his time. The first part of the thesis consists of five chapters, two directly addressing the concept of modernity (chapters 1 and 5), one discussing the concept of history (chapter 2), and two other dealing with specific concepts of history developed by Foucault and Derrida (chapters 3 and 4). The second part elaborates on the concept of the structure of authority (chapter 6), and applies it in practice to discuss the early modern period (chapter 7) when Montaigne lived and wrote. His thought is analysed in two subsequent chapters (8 and 9). The author of Essais is argued to be a coherent thinker despite the numerous contradictions found in his work, as well as the originator of the “essay” method. Discussion covers many of his concepts and ideas, as well as his political and religious views. The conclusion gathers all reflections and summarizes the results. (shrink)

International Political Sociology (IPS) emerged as a subfield of International Relations (IR) in the early 2000s. IPS itself may be understood as constituted by a field of tension between the concepts of “the International,” “the Political,” and “the Social.” Against this background, the centrality of anarchy and sovereignty as the fundamental structuring principles of international politics are increasingly called into question. While IPS remains an exciting, creative and important endeavor, researchers are also exploring paths toward what might be called a (...) Global Political Sociology (GPS). Although IPS has become more global in orientation, more sociological with respect to sources, and more political in its stance, three ongoing shifts need to be made in order to transform IPS into GPS: first, insights from disciplines foreign to IR—both Western and non-Western—need to be employed in order to illustrate that specific localities have implications for the global as a whole; second, the continued engagement with causal theorizing must be replaced with contingency and undecidability as the fundamental constituting features of the political; and third, if the international that has been the nucleus of IR activities for decades, but impedes our understanding of politics instead of stimulating it, then alternative ways of theorizing global politics must be explored. (shrink)

This article develops a poststructuralist framework for the analysis of the process of threat construction or securitization. Taking on-going debates in securitization theory about the securitizing process as a starting point, the article draws on the poststructuralist discourse theory of the Essex School to theorize what makes some securitizing moves (attempts to securitize a certain issue) more effective than others, which remains a persistent and crucial gap in the current literature.

This symposium explores the value of Poststructuralist (or Political) Discourse Theory (PDT) for the analysis of world politics. PDT was originally developed by the late Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau, in early works together with Chantal Mouffe, and has entered the margins of International Relations (IR) in recent years, mainly by bringing in poststructuralist concepts that had previously been ignored by the more critical strands of theorizing. Against this background, the introduction (1) discusses the disconnect between PDT and research on (...) world politics, primarily in IR, as well as PDT’s potential contribution, (2) provides an overview of PDT’s central theoretical tenets, in particular with respect to its social ontology and its theoretical concept of change, and (3) introduces the contributions to the symposium. (shrink)

Este ensaio pretende tatear uma hipótese relacional entre dois elementos heterogêneos: a obra de Christopher Isherwood e o poema elegíaco. Para tal, tomar-se-ão duas obras de Isherwood –“Christopher and His Kind” (1976) e “The Berlin Stories” (1945) –e a peculiar interpretação de Paul Veyne acerca do modo de escrita elegíaca. O que se defenderá, então, é que ao se construir a personagem de Sally Bowles, Isherwood descola o ente extra-textual (Jean Ross), assim como faz consigo mesmo quando escreve sobre si. (...) Como percurso para tal interpretação, este texto se divide em três partes: a primeira fará uma retomada biográfica de Christopher Isherwood, a segunda uma apresentação das duas personificações supracitadas, e a terceira uma explicação a partir do caráter elegíaco, tal como visto por Paul Veyne. (shrink)

Images of jumpers represent an emotionally charged symbol of 9/11, yet just after 9/11 their circulation was quickly and dramatically censored. Yet twenty years later, the 9/11 archive continues to be curated in this way. As the 9/11 archive particularly supports the justification of many military tactics and international interventions, it becomes important to look at what has been excluded and why, including photographs and video. This paper will turn to representations of jumpers in three forms – in photography, in (...) literature, and in film. It will address Richard Drew’s famous ‘Falling Man’ photo, literary representations of the photo in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, and film of jumpers in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s short film from the collection 11ʹ09”01: September 11th. This article thinks through how narratives surrounding jumpers serve to maintain governmental support for international intervention, while very few representations seek to propel another story. (shrink)

There is a kind of living that feels like dying. There is a kind of life marked—relentlessly—by death. The term social death refers to this experience, this rhythm, this walled passage. By definition, social death may belong to whoever—or indeed whatever—lives and dies in a network of relation. Even when conceived of only anthropocentrically, then, the term must apply beyond that, because the human being lives and dies in nonhuman relation. Moreover, social death always occurs out of sync with physical (...) death. As such, its temporality is unique. Social death is already and not yet, long begun and never finished, and one is never quite sure when it will strike; it is out of time. Given the way in which it eddies across existences and temporalities, social death is a chimerical, though no less powerful term. (shrink)

This article aims to grope how Paul Veyne's thought operates from his interlocutors. For this, seeking to clarify the “methodological” issues of his historiographic making and his aesthetic bases, a series of relations will be introduced between the mentioned author and Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault, and Borges. Starting from Nietzsche, in the first part, entitled “Veyne and the relational methodology”, it will be justified how it is possible to make a historiographical theory that merges philosophy and anthropology in its constitution. In (...) the second half, called “Mental categories of relational mediation in Veyne”, the possible aesthetic bases that operate within Veynian thought will be presented –for this purpose, mainly studies on the Baroque will be used. (shrink)

This article reviews the debate on ‘intersectionality’ as the dominant approach in gender studies, with an emphasis on the politics of representation. The debate on intersectionality officially began in the late 1980s, though the approach can be traced back to the institutionalization of women's studies in the 1970s and the feminist movement of the 1960s. Black and lesbian feminists have long advocated hyphenated identities to be the backbone of feminist thought. But in recent years, intersectionality has sustained criticism from numerous (...) angles within gender studies, ranging from feminist philosophy to applied political research. This article will use the theorization of ‘interference’ as a searchlight to produce an overview of this interdisciplinary debate, culminating in our affirmative answer to the question: should we move from intersectionality to interference? Our answer is based on onto-epistemological reflections, i.e., reflections in which being and knowing are always already entangled. -/- . (shrink)

This dissertation, located at the crossroads of Continental political philosophy, feminist theory, critical theory, intellectual history, and cultural studies, provides a critical cartography of contemporary new materialist thought in its various constellations and assemblages, while using diffractive theorizing to examine two Continental terror(ist) events. It is argued that such a critical cartography is not only a novel but also much needed undertaking, as we, more than almost two decades after the Habermas-Derrida dialogues on terror(ism), are in need of a Zeitgeist-adjusted (...) conceptual framework, and, thus, a revitalization of philosophizing as such, that could lead to an analysis of the complex ontological, epistemological, and eco-ethico-political entangled aspects of global crises, and, specifically, terrorist events, the actual terror they produce, and the bio-/necropolitical repercussions they often engender. -/- Using the new materialist methodologies of critical cartography and diffraction, this project’s first part explores what it means to “theorize from the ground up” in a feminist manner, while furthermore offering a situated critical cartography of new materialist thought. Within the contours of this Deleuzoguattarian mapping exercise, new materialist thought is shown to be grounded in foregoing materialist philosophies, transversal and trans(/)disciplinary, and, moreover, a revitalizing ever-evolving philosophical strand of thought with crisscrossing, transcontinental roots and a strong foundation in (post-)Foucauldian poststructuralist thought. Particular attention is paid to what in this project are called “critical” new materialisms, or those new materialist philosophies that take the necessity of critical power analyses seriously, and could be said to be “eco-ethico-political” in nature. This cartography is furthermore accompanied by a digital critical cartography that can be utilized for pedagogical means. -/- The second and final part of this dissertation, preceded by an excursus that accentuates the importance of Harawayan ecophilosophical thought for critical new materialist philosophies, consists of one chapter that puts the idea of diffractive theorizing into practice; subsequently exploring theorizing on terror(ism), the Habermas-Derrida dialogues with regard to 9/11, and the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks as affect-inducing events of “feeling-thinking-through.” This chapter ends with a diffractive rereading of Habermas, Derrida, Benjamin, and also partially Levinas, on the subject of the contemporary democratic state, terrorism, and the legitimacy of lockdowns and emergency state declarations. By doing so, this final chapter anticipates on this dissertation’s epilogue, in which the need for an up-to-date critical new materialist eco-ethico-political model of justice and responsiveness-as-response-ability, is highlighted. (shrink)

Whether we are said to be living in the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, or are witnessing the start of the Chthulucene, as feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway (2016) would describe the current post-anthropocentric era, there is a demonstratable need for affective, entangled, transversal forms of thinking-doing today. Writing this editorial almost a year after the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, and that as inhabitants of Belgium and South Africa—countries with complex ongoing capitalist-colonial legacies, socio-political presents, and heavily but also differently hit (...) by said pandemic—we more than ever feel that these are times of entwined crisis, chaos, and hardship, overflowing with cravings for pedagogical-philosophical responses that are affirmative, productive, and future-oriented. Reactions that are moreover part theory, part praxis, counter the nihilistic, and are future-focused while still grounded in the present, as to not defer responsibilities to future times (see Geerts & Carstens, 2019). (shrink)

Resenha do livro: GROS, Frédéric. Desobedecer. São Paulo: Ubu Editora, 2018. 224p.

Este artigo visa fazer uma possível defesa ao abolicionismo penal com base nas análises durkheimianas acerca do Crime, expostas na obra As Regras do Método Sociológico, e nas confessas leituras que Nietzsche fez das escrituras cristãs, estabelecendo um paralelo entre si e Cristo. Desta maneira, a arguição se estruturará baseada no ponto relacional Nietzsche-Jesus sobre as análises sociológicas de Émile Durkheim. Para tal, apresentar-se-á quatro perspectivas, três do Novo Testamentos e uma do Velho Testamento, à fim de se expor pontos (...) que sustentariam, com esta metodologia, o abolicionismo. Conclui-se, então, que através de Nietzsche pode-se defender uma outra estrutura argumentativa possível neste embate contra a criminologia moderna. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that even if one can justify the initial impetus to want to deconstruct a literary or philosophical text, this does not make it possible in practice. To this end, I engage with relevant aspects of Derrida’s thought and examine the motivations and purpose behind wanting to carry out a deconstruction, to then offer a pragmatic critique of the idea one might ever be able to do so. I base my argument on various factors, including deconstruction’s (...) non-methodological nature and the challenges involved in adjudicating a given deconstructive reading a success or failure, among other considerations. (shrink)

This article intends to navigate through three distinctive paths. The first of them being Ancient Greece, through Artemidorus, especially from his absorption by Foucault; The second being Ancient Rome, as worked by Paul Veyne in the Constantine’s analyses; and the third path is constituted from a series of ethnographic reports about the South American Amerindian communities. This theoretical trail will be taken to show other analytical possibilities for what is understoodas oneiromancy, that is, the analysis of dreams, that was not (...) framed by the occidental modernity. (shrink)

In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams recounts that colleagues often ask why he analyses literary texts – why can’t he use examples from “real life”? He responds that “it is a perfectly good question, and it has a short answer: what philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.” This anecdote contains an argument that would be readily embraced by any proponent of “post-structuralism.” Namely, it suggests that no (...) theory can solely be based on reason. Any rational account needs an – acknowledged or repressed – fictional support. We do not rely on pure concepts but rather on conceptual fictions. (shrink)

In this article I compare Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. I try to demonstrate the similarities (focus on language and history), but moreover the differences between them. The core issue is the problem of the other, which appears in the works of both authors. Two perspectives are applied: concerning the notion of text (or tradition), and referring to the field of the political. Gadamer strives to communicate with the other (text) in the mutual understanding, although he has (...) no hope in finding a final sensus communis. Derrida emphasizes the difference underlying every thought, as well as situations of understanding as such. As a result, their visions of democracy differ – subtly, but essentially. (shrink)

This paper considers the role of myth and phenomenology in Pierre Schaeffer’s research into music and sound, and argues that engagement with these themes allows us to rethink the legacy and contemporary value of Schaeffer’s thought in sound studies. In light of critique of Schaeffer’s project, in particular that developed by Brian Kane and Schaeffer’s own apparent self-disavowal, this paper returns to Schaeffer’s early remarks on the “myth of the seashell” in order to examine the conditions of this critique. While (...) Kane argues that Schaeffer’s recourse to myth, coupled with his adoption of Husserlian phenomenology, leads to a closure of his inquiry and a failure to accommodate the contingency of his position, this paper argues that Schaeffer’s myth of the seashell brings into focus an open-ended, motivating phenomenological problem concerning subjectivity and objectivity that runs through his thought. Drawing on the philosophical work of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze, this paper considers the epistemological significance of this moment in Schaeffer’s thought, suggesting a “problematic” account of the myth of the seashell that puts Schaeffer into conversation with contemporary work in epistemology. (shrink)

Since the 1980s, there have been many attempts to bring together Critical Theory of Frankfurtian strain and French theories generally referred to as poststructuralist. The present text seeks to readdress the problem of their tricky articulation by taking a look at some vicissitudes those two currents of thought underwent in Brazil. In addition to the risk – embedded in the Parisian passion for dissolution – of positivizing atrocious aspects of Brazilian society related to the country’s multi-secular informality and backwardness, what (...) is at stake is the adequate understanding of the meaning and relevance of dialectical criticism in a peripheral country, in other words, the capacity to weigh the influx and gravitation of foreign ideas and forms in a society of inorganic culture, the possibility, finally, of critically verifying the supposed universality of hegemonic theories and categories in light of a cultural experience amassed under a heterodox modernization. (shrink)

The question of justice in Western philosophy finds its humble beginnings in the interplay of life and death. I am referring here to Plato’s Apology. The Apology is not only a text tracing the fate of the great philosopher Socrates by recounting his final speech before the judges of Athens, but it is also a text that, on a more subtle level, announces the advent of a promising justice that is birthed from death, or, to be more precise, from a (...) specific kind of death. Socrates, here, develops a justice that does not surge from the defence of one’s determination as a singular accused, or from the reconciliation of the criminal singularity into the ethical social body through pardon or punishment, but which rather derives from a negation, a radical annihilation of the category of pure singularity. Socrates does not defend himself as an accused who is determinately and definitively singular, but rather affirms the fact that, in some sense, there is no such singular to be defended, that he is not even one (οὐδείς), less than one, nothing. It is, precisely, in this affirmation of a negative, in this opening of a chasm, that a radically other conception of justice and its relation to the singular is subtly proposed. By pushing the singular to the margins of its possibility, by challenging, bending, pushing the question of the singular and its defence to its outmost limit, Socrates redeploys justice not as a remedying balance, but as the abysmal economy of the bottomless question, a fall into the void, in which life, death, the singular and justice co-incide to burst all definitive determination, substantial opposition and the possibility of establishing a firm ground for any such categories to hold as such. In gradually shedding off the substantial presuppositions of his singularity (knowledge, self-relation and relation to others), he unleashes a modality of the singular which deploys a kind of justice, a wholly other justice, which has shaken the tradition ever since, and, as this article will seek to show, reverberates again in what Jacques Derrida called deconstruction. (shrink)

In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an (...) event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living. (shrink)

An article about violence in relation to the image.

Wie Herrschaft kritisieren, wenn Kategorien wie Staat, Souveränität und Demokratie nicht mehr funktionieren? Der Regimebegriff verspricht einen Ausweg aus diesem praktischen wie theoretischen Dilemma. Er soll nicht nur helfen, Macht und Herrschaft besser zu verstehen, sondern auch eine neue Grundlage für tiefere und radikalere Gesellschaftskritik bieten: Das Denken in Regimen bezieht Denk- und Wahrnehmungsmuster in die Analyse und Kritik von gesellschaftlichen Strukturen, (politischer) Macht und alltäglichen Normen und Praxen ein. Kurz: Regimeanalysen helfen uns zu sehen, was sonst unsichtbar bliebe, wie (...) etwa die rassistische Regulierung von Migration, die Normierung von Geschlechterverhältnissen oder die Neoliberalisierung von Universitäten. Es wundert nicht, dass ein Begriff, mit dem solch verschiedene Phänomene beschrieben werden können, »sehr weitläufig und oft ungenau und spekulativ« ist. Die AutorInnen aus dem Umfeld der Wiener Akademie der Künste führen deshalb in ihren Buchbeiträgen zunächst in die unterschiedlichen Regimebegriffe ein und möchten untersuchen, »welchen diskursiven und politischen Gewinn er verspricht und tatsächlich bringt.«. (shrink)

Was hat der Staat mit sexueller Orientierung zu tun? Eine ganze Menge, meint Gundula Ludwig, denn durch staatliche Macht in Form von „heteronormativer Hegemonie“ würden wir zu Subjekten gemacht – und zwar ‚normalerweise‘ zu männlichen bzw. weiblichen und heterosexuellen. Dabei betont Ludwig die Gegenseitigkeit des Verhältnisses von Staat und Geschlecht: Nicht nur wirke staatliche Macht konstitutiv und vergeschlechtlichend auf Subjekte, sondern der Staat selbst werde im „Prozess der vergeschlechtlichen Subjektkonstitution erst hervorgebracht“. Deshalb seien weder der Staat noch Heterosexualität natürlich gegeben, (...) sondern ihre Konstruktion sei eine Regierungstechnologie, und nicht zu trennen vom ökonomischen (Neo-)Liberalismus. Mit ihrem Buch möchte die Autorin eine Leerstelle in der Forschung füllen: Einerseits sei die Staatstheorie geschlechtsblind, andererseits ließen queer-feministische Arbeiten zur Konstruktion von Geschlecht den Staat aus. Ludwig verspricht eine poststrukturalistisch antiessentialistische Theorie, die beides beobachten kann und so den Zusammenhang von Staat und Geschlecht erklärt. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Der Artikel untersucht die in der Sozialtheorie seit der Antike gebrauchte Metapher eines sozialen Bandes im Blick auf die Religion. Mit ihr wird die Performativität sozialer Bindungen und Kohäsionskräfte und damit ihre kulturelle Hervorbringung akzentuiert. Religion kann jedoch nicht einfach mit kulturellen Akten gleichgesetzt werden, wie es oft in liberalprotestantischen Ansätzen und in Konzeptionen einer Öffentlichen Theologie der Fall ist. Alternativ wird daher das Gespräch mit poststrukturalistischen Autoren gesucht, um von ihm her einen Bezug zur offenen Metaphorik des sozialen (...) Bandes und zur These seiner Performanz zu suchen. (shrink)

Reprint of an article first appearing in Educational Philosophy and Theory (2018).

Aesthetics is thought of as not only a theory of art or beauty, but also includes sensibility, experience, judgment, and relationships. This paper is a study of Bernard Stiegler’s notion of Aesthetic War (stasis) and symbolic misery. Symbolic violence is ensued through a loss of individuation and participation in the creation of symbols. As a struggle between market values against spirit values human life and consciousness within neoliberal hyperindustrial society has become calculable, which prevents people from creating affective and meaningful (...) attachments to symbols in relation to our retentional apparatuses, technology and memory. Such tension can be thought of as a dissonance between overlapping domains of social life, private and public. New Media is a reflection of aesthetic dissonance, an experience such as being bored and entertained at the same time, between antagonistic experiences, values, and behavior. Moreover, new media is at once a medium of customizing aesthetic experience individually as well as the threat and practice of prioritizing calculability and modeling of consumer behavior in favor of capitalistic effectiveness, which results in the simultaneous categorization of an individual as a data point, putting those who do not fit an algorithm’s premises at a disadvantage. (shrink)

The Western philosophical tradition has shown a marked and perennial fondness for tragedy. From Plato and Aristotle, through the development of Christianity, to German idealism, and even to contemporary reflections on the murderous violence of the twentieth century, philosophy has repeatedly looked to tragedy for resources to make suffering, grief, and death thinkable. But what if by showing such a preference for tragedy, philosophical thought has unwittingly and unknowingly aligned itself with a form of thinking that accepts human suffering and (...) pain without protest? This collection explores possibilities for philosophical thinking that refuse the tragic model of thought and turn instead to its often-overlooked companion: comedy. Composed of a series of experiments ranging across the philosophical tradition, the essays in this volume propose to break, or at least suspend, the use of tragedy as an index of truth and philosophical worth. Instead, they explore new conceptions of solidarity, sympathy, critique, and justice. In addition, the essays collected here provide ample reason to believe that philosophical thinking, aligned with comedy, is capable of important and original insights, discoveries, and creations. The prejudicial acceptance of tragic seriousness only impoverishes the life of thought; it can be rejuvenated and renewed by laughter and the comic. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. (shrink)

Debemos distinguir el pensamiento del conocimiento, en particular en lo que respecta a la Modernidad, desde el Renacimiento italiano, que vio emerger el conocimiento objetivante (Koyré, 1977), que es siempre nuestro ideal de conocimiento, incluso en la época de la escritura numérica. El pensamiento, como lo recuerda H. Arendt (1993), es un flujo natural ilimitado que habita a cada uno de nosotros, sin relación con la cultura, la instrucción, el género sexual, la clase social, los modos de legitimación de los (...) discursos e, incluso, las cosméticas. Es lo que indicaba Lenin cuando reivindicaba el comunismo como la posibilidad de un conserje de hacer política. Rancière no dice algo diferente cuando evoca la igualdad de las inteligencias. (shrink)

The cultural practice of flirtation has been multifariously scrutinized in various disciplines including sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis and literary studies. This paper frames the field of flirtation in Bourdieuian terms, while focusing narrowly on the semiotic economy that is defining of this cultural field. Moreover, seduction, as a uniquely varied form of discourse that is responsible for producing the cultural field of flirtation, is posited as the missing link for understanding why flirtation may be a peculiar case of non-habitus, contrary to (...) the received notion of cultural field as set of goaloriented practices and actionable habituses. This argument is pursued by highlighting the endemic traits of ambivalence and constant reversibility of signs or multimodal semiotic constellations in the discourse of seduction, while seeking to demonstrate that seduction, and by implication the cultural field of flirtation, does not necessarily partake of a teleological framework that is geared towards the consummation of sexual desire. This thesis is illustrated by recourse to a scene from the blockbuster ‘Hitch’. (shrink)

Se trata de un artículo que busca una relectura de los textos y problemas en la obra del filósofo francés Louis Althusser. Hay dos líneas argumentativa que sigue la relectura: 1) su materialismo aleatorio, y 2) su teoría del lenguaje.

This paper extends Jean-Luc Nancy’s engagement with St. Anselm. Specifically, while Nancy is primarily concerned with Anselm’s Proslogion, this paper brings Nancy’s deconstructive protocols to bear on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo. Of particular interest is Nancy’s treatment of the semiological association of economics and metaphysics. Ultimately, the “supplemental logic” developed here allows us to read Anselm’s dependence on the category of debt in the context of prayer. Finally, by stressing Nancy’s reception of French literary theory and poststructuralism, this paper offers (...) an intervention into the burgeoning theological reception of Nancy, which generally sees him as a basically anti-Christian philosopher of Heideggerian, not Derridean, immanence. (shrink)

This article seeks to offer a critical assessment of the conception of ethics underlying the growing constellation of ‘new materialist’ social theories. It argues that such theories offer little if any purchase in understanding the contemporary transformations of relations between mind and body or human and non-human natures. Taking as exemplary the work of Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, this article asserts that a continuity between ethics and ontology is central to recent theories of ‘materiality’. These theories assert (...) the primacy of matter by calling upon a spiritual or ascetic self-transformation so that one might be ‘attuned to’ or ‘register’ materiality and, conversely, portray critique as hubristic, conceited, or resentful, blinded by its anthropocentrism. It is argued that framing the grounds for ontological speculation in these ethical terms licences the omission of analysis of social forces mediating thought’s access to the world and so grants the theorist leave to sidestep any questions over the conditions of thought. In particular, the essay points to ongoing processes of the so-called primitive accumulation as constituting the relationship between mind and body, human and non-human natures. (shrink)

The work of Michel Serres is often presented as a radical break with the work of Gaston Bachelard. The aim of this paper is to partly correct this image, by focusing on Serres’s early Hermes series (1969-1980). In these books Serres portrays himself as a follower of Bachelard, exemplarily shown in his neologism of the ‘new new scientific spirit’ (le nouveau nouvel esprit scientifique), updating Bachelard in the light of more recent scientific developments. This allows a reinterpretation of the relation (...) between both authors, one where there is room to acknowledge how the roots of Serres’s philosophy lie not in a radical break with Bachelard, but can be partly understood as a Bachelardian criticism of Bachelard himself. This Bachelardian criticism consists in what could be called his ‘surrationalism’: the sciences do not follow the categories imposed by philosophers, but are always more flexible and open than these categories allow. Specific critiques of Serres, such as those concerning the novelty of Bachelard’s thought, the role of epistemology and finally the political dimension of science will be evaluated through a reappraisal of this Bachelardian move that underlies Serres’s criticism. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the interrelationship of regulation and private life in human rights. It argues three main points. Article 8 connects the question of protection of private lives and privacies with the question of their management. Thus, Article 8 orients regulatory practices to private lives and privacies. Article 8’s holders are autonomous to the extent that laws respect their private lives and privacies. They are not autonomous in a ‘pre-political’ sense, where we might expect legal rules to protect an (...) already autonomous private life or privacy. Article 8 does not simply prohibit or permit acts. In certain cases, it also ‘enables’ acts. Then, this essay introduces the idea of oikopolitics. This idea allows us to capture these three points in a useful manner. By this idea, this essay means the context where the interpretation of privacy reaches out to broader social practices and norms and where the status of rights-holders living their private lives makes them objects of attention. (shrink)

Revolutionary violence stems from the conatus of survival, from the appetite for life and joy rather than from the desire to destroy and the hubristic pretension to punish. It is an incursion of one's desire to affirm life and annihilate pain. Following Laruelle's methodology of nonstandard philosophy, I conclude that revolutionary violence is the product of an intensive expansion of life. Pure violence, conceived in non-philosophical terms, is a pre-lingual, presubjective force affected by the “lived,; analogous to Badiou's void and (...) it is radically revolutionary. It is fundamentally different from Benjamin's lawmaking “divine violence; and its appropriations by Žižek. Revolutionary experience is inevitably translated into language. What preserves the revolutionary substance in a post-revolution political discourse is that it is constantly checked by the sense of fidelity to the experience of the revolutionary event. Agamben, Benjamin, Schmidt and Žižek are discussed from an essentially non-philosophical stance, informed by Laruelle's theory that has been supplemented in some aspects by Badiou's concept of the pre-lingual event. (shrink)

This article proposes a philosophical reception of writer Cormac McCarthy’s work, a reception oriented specifically toward the subject of “place” as a primary ontological register in two of his novels. More than a mere appraisal of his descriptive prose or the moral weight of his themes, this reading examines the interrogative dimension of his border-country landscapes and the existential horizon distilled therein. Read with reference to the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that McCarthy’s storied concentration on (...) place seeks to retrieve the question of primordial givenness from beneath the determinations of epistemic and objectivist judgments. So doing, his orientation parallels and contributes to an important and unsettled tension in phenomenological ontology and its aftermath: the question as to whether poetic or visual modes of ontological “measure-taking” are more appropriate to the question of the meaning, truth, and history of being. Ultimately McCarthy shows us the necessary and productive interplay of both. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Diagne’s claim that the fundamental intuition of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s thought is this: African art is philosophy. Diagne argues that it is from an experience of African art and an encounter with Bergson’s philosophy that Senghor comes to formulate his philosophical thought, which is better understood as vitalist rather than essentialist. I conclude by arguing that Senghor’s vitalism is a philosophy of becoming which nevertheless lacks an account of radical political change.

This chapter shows that taboos erected around crimes inhibit individuals and nations' work of mourning for the victims of crimes. The work of mourning is the precondition that individuals and nations take responsibility for past crimes, show solidarity with the victims and their descendants, and make sure that such crimes are not repeated. I bring Theodor W. Adorno and Sigmund Freud in conversation to explain the connection between taboos and the failure to mourn. I further detail this connection with Antigone (...) as an example of taboo and denied mourning. I also explain that the taboos erected around the National Socialist genocide on Roma and Sinti ("gypsies") do not allow Austrians to mourn the loss of this population. As a result, their taking responsibility for this crime remains stifled, and they fail to show solidarity with the Roma and Sinti genocide victims. (shrink)