Agonism emerged three decades ago as an assault on the overemphasis in political theory on justice and consensus. It has now become the norm. But its character and relation to core values of democracy are not as unproblematic today as is often thought, an issue that becomes more pressing as contemporary politics increasingly seem locked into notions of unrelenting conflict between “friends” and “enemies.” This essay traces alternative ontological roots and ethical implications of agonism, distinguishing between “imperializing” and “tempered” modes. (...) The former, exemplified in the popular Schmitt-Mouffe formulation, is shown to be fundamentally flawed in its failure to conceive politics in a fashion that does not allow the dynamic of friend–enemy to imperially trump appeals to democratic norms. In a world of insurgent white nationalism in democratic polities, this is no small fault. “Tempered” agonists, such as William Connolly and Bonnie Honig, offer ontologies where democratic norms can gain traction. Despite the admirable qualities of these alternatives, their formulations are nevertheless not fully persuasive. The difficulty lies in their underarticulated accounts of equality. I suggest an alternative formulation of agonism that embraces a central role for the idea of the moral equality of voice, a value that resides in the seam between notions of difference, resistance, and conflict emphasized by agonists, on the one hand, and the idea of fairness emphasized by notions of democratic justice, on the other. (shrink)

Philosophos Agonistes: Imagery and Moral Psychology in Plato's Republic RICHARD PATTERSON THE COMPETITIVE IMPULSE in its simplest, first and best expression -- be best and first in everything, as Peleus advised Achilles -- seems foreign to the spirit of philosophy for a number of reasons. The most important of these finds metaphorical expression in a "Pythagorean" gnome of uncertain provenance: "Life, said [Pythagoras], is like a festival; just as some come to the festival to compete, some to ply their trade, (...) but the best people come as spectators, so in life the slavish go hunting for fame or gain, the philosophers for the truth" . Plato's celebrated tripartite soul of the Republic provides a psychological underpinning for these observations about the festival crowd, and in particu- lar the distinction between the agonistes -- the competitor hunting victory and fame -- and the philosophical seeker after truth. Bk. IV distinguishes a reason- ing, a spirited, and an appetitive part or aspect of the soul, each having its own proper function and the three together providing a basis for Socrates' discus- sion of the virtues of wisdom, courage, sophrosyne, and justice. Bk. IX is explicit about all three parts having their own particular and natural pleasures and desires: the two lower parts, "spirit" and "appetite," appear respectively as lovers of victory and glory, on the one hand, and money, food, drink, and sex, on the other;.. (shrink)

Agonistic recognition in education has three interlinked modes of aesthetic experience and self-presentation where one is related to actions in the public realm; one is related to plurality in the way in which it comes into existence in confrontation with others; and one is related to the subject-self, disclosed by ‘thinking. Arendt’s conception of ‘thinking’ is a way of getting to grips with aesthetic self-presentation in education. By action, i.e., by disclosing oneself and by taking initiatives, students and teachers (...) constitute their being. The way Arendt theorizes action (vita activa) makes it essentially unpredictable and destabilizing, which does not seem to fit into what should be expected from education. In the article I will argue that it should have a place by virtue of the debate, challenge and contest it offers. But education should also be defined from a specific kind of contemplation called ‘thinking’ to become the cultivation of a faculty of judgment in education—thinking (vita contemplativa) as a common virtue in education. Arendt’s demarcation between truth and meaning does from the point of view of agonistic recognition in education call for ‘thinking’ as a qualification of political and moral meaning–the ‘taste’ to be established in the individual, by individual judgements but always judged in relation to members of a community. (shrink)

This paper provides a critique and re-evaluation of the way that ethics is understood and promoted within mainstream Human Resource Management (HRM) discourse. We argue that the ethics located within this discourse focuses on bolstering the relevance of HRM as a key contributor to organizational strategy, enhancing an organization's sense of moral legitimacy and augmenting organizational control over employee behaviour and subjectivity. We question this discourse in that it subordinates the ethics of the employment relationship to managerial prerogative. In response, (...) we suggest a different model of the relationship between ethics and HRM—one that finds the possibility of ethics in the contestation and destabilization of HRM. Such ethics arises through resistance to moral normalization and the constraint of freedom and difference. The contribution of our paper is in theorising the possibilities of a relationship between ethics and HRM that does not place HRM at its centre, as chief intermediary of the ethics of the employment relationship, but rather sees HRM as being a powerful player in a set of what Mouffe calls 'agonistic' socio-ethical relations. (shrink)

This article considers how reconciliation might be understood as a democratic undertaking. It does so by examining the implications of the debate between theorists of ‘deliberative’ and ‘agonistic’ democracy for the practice of democracy in divided societies. I argue that, in taking consensus as a regulative idea, deliberative democracy tends to conflate moral and political community thereby representing conflict as already communal. In contrast, an agonistic theory of democracy provides a critical perspective from which to discern what is (...) at stake in the politics of reconciliation since it understands community as a contingent achievement of political action. As such, an agonistic account of democracy suggests the possibility of retrieving the concept of reconciliation from a statesanctioned project of nation-building for a democratic politics centred on the possibilities of self-determination and solidarity among citizens divided by a history of state violence. Key Words: agonism • deliberation • democracy • reconciliation • transitional justice. (shrink)

This paper assesses the claim that an agonistic model of democracy could foster greater accommodation of citizens' social, cultural and ethical differences than mainstream liberal theories. I address arguments in favor of agonistic conceptions of politics by a diverse group of democratic theorists, ranging from republican theorists - Hannah Arendt and Benjamin Barber - to postmodern democrats concerned with questions of identity and difference, such as William Connolly and Bonnie Honig. Neither Arendt's democratic agonism nor Barber's republican-inflected account (...) of strong democracy purports to include citizens' group-based cultural identities, and so cannot further the claim that agonistic politics is more inclusive of cultural and social differences. Postmodern agonistic democrats such as Connolly and Honig rely upon Arendt's account of the relationship between agonism and pluralism, and wrongly assume that her view of politics is compatible with formal respect and recognition for citizens' cultural group identities. While agonistic democracy helpfully directs us to attend to the importance of moral and political disagreement, I argue that the stronger claim that an agonistic model of democracy could more readily include culturally diverse citizens is simply unfounded. By contrast, recent liberal variants of agonistic democracy that conceive of legal and political institutions as tools for recognizing and mediating citizens' moral and cultural differences may suggest ways to deepen our democratic practices in plural societies. Key Words: agonism • agonistic democracy • Hannah Arendt • citizenship • cultural minorities • pluralism • republican theory. (shrink)

Agonizing care: care ethics, agonistic feminism and a political theory of care ‘Care’ is central to nursing theory and practice, and has been described in a variety of ways. Intense conversations about care have been developing in other fields of study as well, from the social sciences to the humanities. Care ethics has grown out of intellectual exchange between feminist thought, moral theory and the critique of traditional western political philosophy. However, care ethics is not without its critics, as (...) these accounts of care have also sparked vigorous challenges. This paper traces the construct of care through nursing theory, care ethics, feminist critiques of moral and political theory and agonistic feminism to outline a set of problematics that a political theory of care should engage. It discusses how care is conventionally posited in more or less essentialist, universalizing and naturalizing terms. It introduces the ideas of feminist theorists who resist dichotomizing care and the political, and situate care in the context of power and politics. The tensions between care feminism and agonistic feminism are highlighted in order to explore the potential of theorizing both care and nursing in political terms. (shrink)

Straddling the divide between universalism and relativism, agonistic reason as construed by Foucault and Castoriadis dismisses universal foundations without becoming context-bound or inescapably subjectivist. It is propelled by a strong commitment to freedom and it draws flexibly on available resources and its creative potentials in order to vindicate its conditional claims. This provides a hyper-critical and liberating mode of critical reason which delves into the underlying norms of agency in order to open them up to question and to enhance (...) free self-direction. The argument that is put forward, then, is threefold. Firstly, Castoriadis’ accent on ontological reflection, the imaginative disclosure of new figures and the global intent of critique contrasts with Foucault’s account of agonistic reason and yields a more robust version of critical rationality. Secondly, this form of reflective agonism can effectively address fundamental challenges and reason across contexts, tackling moral and other issues that arise from cultural innovation and exchange. Lastly, agonistic reason need not, and should not, call upon absolute principles on any level in order to uphold its own values and do justice to its radical others. (shrink)

This dissertation develops a conception of reasonableness that can adequately respond to agonistic critiques of this concept. As an aspect of practical reason, reasonableness refers to the moral capacity of citizens to cooperate politically, especially in pluralistic societies. More specifically, the principles or rules of political association governing society ought to be acceptable to all reasonable members of that society. This relates, furthermore, to the idea of justification: the acceptability of fundamental political principles refers to their justifiability. Justification, in (...) turn, requires ideas of public reason and political deliberation: political deliberation, for example, facilitates the ability of citizens to determine what political principles are justifiable. The explication of justifiability in terms of universal acceptability (acceptable to all reasonable persons, for example) is indicative of a central concern of proponents of reasonableness (and public reason), namely, that politics at least at a fundamental level ought to be governed by consensus. However, this conception of reasonableness has been the target of critique by agonistic theories of democracy. These theorists deny that politics ought to be governed by such a consensus. Most importantly, this orientation toward consensus ignores, or at least underestimates, the antagonistic and hegemonic nature of the political. That is, the consensus orientation of proponents of reasonableness and public reason suggests that society can be given a non-hegemonic and rational foundation. This goal, in turn, leads to the suppression or exclusion of dissensus. Nonetheless, this dissertation affirms the importance of reasonableness to democratic theory and identifies an implicit commitment to reasonableness within agonistic democratic theory. This commitment is evident, for example, in the claim that that political participants must adhere to the basic principles and institutions of liberal democracy. Given this implicit commitment, this dissertation will formulate a middle ground between prominent proponents of reasonableness and their agonistic critics. The primary goal will be to construct an agonistic conception of reasonableness, or reasonable agonism, in light of agonistic critiques of this concept. The agonistic conception of reasonableness developed in this dissertation is understood primarily in terms of the deliberative relationships citizens form and maintain. This opposes accounts of reasonableness and justification that privilege the universal acceptability of political principles and related idealizations of practical reason (understood in terms of its capacity for determining universally acceptable reasons). The defining feature of an agonistic conception of reasonableness is not the universal acceptability of political principles or of the reasons offered in political deliberation, but rather the maintenance of adversarial deliberative relationships. This approach to reasonableness does not require a consensus orientation and it is more sensitive to the antagonistic nature of the political. That is, political participants are able to adhere (at one level) to a particular, partisan conception of justice, as long as (at another level) they remain committed to maintaining deliberative relationships with their political rivals. In this way, an agonistic conception of reasonableness combines the best features of reasonableness and agonism, while addressing the shortcomings involved in theories of both concepts. Additionally, this account of reasonableness has a related critical function, namely, the contestation of prevailing normative orders that can be viewed as illegitimate or unjustifiable by those excluded from such orders. (shrink)

The article shows that an uncritical view of domination is a weakness of current accounts of realist legitimacy and it argues that an agonistic supplement can help overcome that weakness. Two accounts of realist legitimacy are discussed: the moral minimum account and the acceptance account. In each case, certain modifications of the argument are needed to establish a distance from moralism, but these modifications create an indifference to domination. The incorporation of an agonistic principle into realist legitimacy can (...) solve this problem. The agonistic case for effective possibilities for contestation endows realist legitimacy with a critical stance towards arrangements that are unresponsive to criticism on the part of those who are subject to them without, however, introducing a moralist argument. (shrink)

Be aware... and you will be mindful of a notable ambiguity in semiotics as well as of those who have masterfully strived to transcend it. This event, commented on by Elize Bisanz (Texas Tech University) and chaired by William Passarini (Institute for Philosophical Studies), is part of the activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of (...) Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, Moscow State Academic University for the Humanities and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project. *** Ionut Untea is currently a fellow-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgart, where he is researching on the semioethic and aesthetic coordinates of the “social compact” and intercorporeal relationships. In 2021, he has taught a course entitled “Intercultural Philosophy: Semiotic Approaches and Aesthetic Themes” as a Visiting Professor at Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro. Since 2016, he has been teaching History of Western Philosophy and Semiotics at Southeast University, Nanjing. He previously taught at the University of La Rochelle, and was a postdoctoral fellow of the Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue (FIIRD) at the University of Geneva. He obtained his doctorate in 2013 at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), in Paris. He holds Romanian citizenship, having obtained his first degrees in philosophy and theology at the University of Bucharest. His focus is on the modern and contemporary intersections between semiotic, moral, political and religious thought. He has published recently “Peircean and Confucian Interpretations of Self-Development: Semiotic, Normative and Aesthetic Aspects,” Philosophy East and West 72.1: January 2022: 188–209. His recent work has appeared in academic journals such as The American Journal of Semiotics (2021), Semiotica (2021), Ethical Perspectives (2021, 2019), Philosophical Forum (2019), Journal of Aesthetic Education (2020), Politics and Religion (2019), The Monist (2018). *** Dr. Bisanz's education includes an MA (Philosophy) from the University of Lüneburg in Germany; Graduate Studies in Jacques Derrida's philosophy Seminars at l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; a Ph.D. (History of Communication Sciences) from the Technische University of Berlin; and a post-doc Habilitation Degree (Image Studies), from the University of Lüneburg. Bisanz has published several interdisciplinary books reflecting her educational background; these include a major European edition of Peirce's writings The Logic of Interdisciplinarity: Charles S. Peirce, The Monist Series (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 2009), which was realized with the aid of research and publication grants from State and private endowments; Prolegomena to a Science of Reasoning: Phaneroscopy, Semeiotic, Logic, which is a collection of manuscripts by Peirce on reasoning (Peter Lang Publishers, Berlin, 2016); Overcoming the Iconic Turn: Cultural Concepts of Images [in German: Die Überwindung des Ikonischen: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven der Bildwissenschaft] (transcript Verlag, Hamburg, 2010). Bisanz is a member of the advising board of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik and chair of the society's subdivision for Cultural Studies. Since her Fulbright scholarship in 2006 at Texas Tech University, Bisanz has been an active member of the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. She has organized several international congresses dedicated to Peirce and interdisciplinary research. *** Homepage: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s Auditorium: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s/auditorium *** Technical support assured by Robert Junqueira. The cover image for the video was designed by Zahra Soltani. (shrink)

This article addresses two questions: How should a ‘practical political theory’ approach the ideological struggle between advocates of critical social justice and defenders of free speech? And, what does this conflict tell us about the deficits of one particular tradition of practical political theory — namely, agonistic democracy? The paper’s purpose, then, is to illuminate a concrete contemporary phenomenon through the lens of agonistic theory and, conversely, to use this struggle as an impetus to carve out and address (...) weaknesses in the theory of agonism.I defend an ‘agonistic approach’ to the struggle against two alternatives — first, the claim that there is, conceptually, no ‘real’ conflict between social justice and free speech, and second, the strategy to ‘take sides’ in the conflict. By taking seriously the agonistic core idea that struggle and conflict can be valuable and productive expressions of plurality and inclusivity, I argue that this struggle should be approached as an agonistic conflict — as the welcome and important expression of a diversity of views on central social, moral and political questions.I also show, however, how retaining the focus on the real-life struggle between advocates of critical social justice and free-speech sheds light on the inconsistencies of much agonistic thought. In particular, I will criticize those agonists who limit their conception of the ‘agon’ to respectful struggles, and those who see the agon merely as a tool of emancipation for oppressed groups. Against these visions of agonism, I develop an anti-perfectionist, yet radical, account of agonism with the potential to serve as a guide in complex social and political conflicts. (shrink)

In his preface to Samson Agonistes, Milton cites ?the ancients? and especially Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as his models in a tragedy ?after the Greek manner.? In this preface, Milton interprets Aristotelian catharsis in medical terms as a restoration of balance or ?just measure.? The final lines of Samson Agonistes, beginning with the words ?All is best,? are an attempt at closure, suggesting that the storms of passion should give way to a healthy, serene calmness. But the mass slaughter near (...) the end of the poem makes these closing moments deeply disturbing and problematical. Unlike the heroes of Sophocles? Oedipus at Colonus and Philoctetes, and unlike the Samson of the Book of Judges, Milton's Samson is presented throughout the poem as a free moral agent. Rather than being the plaything of a remote and cruel deity, Milton's Samson accepts his responsibility for his own downfall. His conviction that he is God's ?nurseling,? set aside from early childhood as ?a person separate to God, / Designed for great exploits,? that he has failed in his responsibilities and has been brought low by his own weaknesses is consistent with Milton's sometimes heterodox theology as set forth in De Doctrina Christiana. At the heart of Milton's tragedy is the paradox of tragic freedom, the hidden presence of a deity, who with divine foreknowledge, allows his creatures freedom on the condition that, if they fail to obey his exacting demands, they must bear the terrible consequences. (shrink)

This paper is an examination of certain assumptions that, I hold, lie in the background of MacIntyre’s conception of the formation of the intellectual schema as found, most prominently, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. A thorough examination of MacIntyre’s concept of the rational schema, I will show, reveals that the parsing he proposes to carry out on intellectual history is confronted with a problem that finds its analogue in the field of biological taxonomy. (...) In order to carry out this project of determining where the seams lie in intellectual history one must first recognize that the parsing itself is a scheme-dependent undertaking. As such it is not unlike the necessarily somewhat arbitrary identification of species and genera in the biological realm. In other words, it should be recognized that intellectual history, like the morphology of the plant and animal kingdoms, is continuous, not discreet. An almost wholly unexamined assumption that stalks through Whose Justice? and Three Rival Versions is that there are something like intellectual natural kinds in the history of ideas. Indeed, the notion that there are “traditions” at all in the sense in which MacIntyre uses the term may be a highly conventional artefact of an Enlightenment-era view of intellectual progress. This leads me to conclude that MacIntyre has failed to observe that the view of traditions and schemes neatly succeeding one another, on which much of his critique is dependent, is itself a product of the perspective he calls “encyclopedia.” This, in turn, will make manifest why it is that almost all of MacIntyre’s examples of rational scheme-switching are from the natural sciences rather than the normative, a fact I will show is connected to a paradigm of linear progression that one tends to find in the exact sciences, but not in praxis. (shrink)

The present paper puts forward a first outline of a possible agonistic theory of adjudication, conceived of as an extension of Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic theory of democracy onto the domain of the juridical, and specifically, judicial decision-making. Mouffe’s concept of the political as the dimension of inherent and unalienable conflicts (antagonisms) which, nonetheless, need to be tamed for a pluralist democracy to function, creates an excellent vantage point for a critical theory of adjudication. The paper argues for perceiving (...) all judicial decisions as having a double nature—juridical and political. Cloaked in legal form, judgments nonetheless decide on individual instances of on-going collective conflicts, opposing workers to employers, consumers to traders, tenants to landlords, moral progressives to traditionalists, minorities to majorities and so forth. Judges, when handing down judgments, enjoy a ‘relative sovereignty’, being always already inscribed into the institutional imperatives of the juridical, on one hand, and ideological influences, on the other, but at the same time called upon to decide in the terrain of the undecidable and contingent (after all, law does not ‘apply itself’ on its own). Indeed the determinacy of legal decisions is only relative: in many cases judges can, by performing a sufficient amount of legal interpretive work, reach a conclusion which will be different from theprima facieinterpretation. The collective conflicts of a various nature (economic, ideological, socio-political), once they are juridified, become the object of judicial decisions which, in light of Mouffe’s theory, can be seen as temporary hegemonic fixations. The goal of critical legal scholarship is to destabilise such hegemonies in the name of justice. This can be done not only through an external critique of the law, but also through an internal one. The methodological approach advanced in the latter part of the paper emphasises the need for a critique of judicial decisions based on the consideration of all possible alternative decisions a court could have reached, and their evaluation in the light of conflicting interests and ideologies. (shrink)

Researches over many years have examined whether levonorgestrel emergency contraception has a postfertilization effect. In a recent article in the Catholic Health Association’s journal Health Progress, Sandra Reznik, MD, asserts that “levonorgestrel acts to prevent pregnancy before, and only before, fertilization occurs.” A companion article by Ron Hamel, PhD, argues for the moral certainty that Plan B is not an abortifacient. Reznik fails to address the principal model supporting a potential postfertil­ization mechanism of action, specifically, that preovulatory administration of levonorgestrel (...) disrupts the delicate ratio of estrogen and progesterone essential to healthy endometrial development and induces the equivalent of luteal phase insufficiency, thereby jeopardizing implantation. Hamel’s argument for moral certitude is similarly inadequate. This article critically reviews both articles and the sources on which they rely. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.4 : 741–772. (shrink)

In this profound and yet accessible book, John Kekes discusses moral wisdom: a virtue essential to living a morally good and personally satisfying life. He advances a broad, nontechnical argument that considers the adversities inherent in the human condition and assists in the achievement of good lives. The possession of moral wisdom, Kekes asserts, is a matter of degree: more of it makes lives better, less makes them worse. Exactly what is moral wisdom, however, and how should it be sought? (...) Ancient Greek and medieval Christian philosophers were centrally concerned with it. By contrast, modern Western sensibility doubts the existence of a moral order in reality; and because we doubt it, and have developed no alternatives, we have grown dubious about the traditional idea of wisdom. Kekes returns to the classical Greek sources of Western philosophy to argue for the contemporary significance of moral wisdom. He develops a proposal that is eudaimonistic—secular, anthropocentric, pluralistic, individualistic, and agonistic. He understands moral wisdom as focusing on the human effort to create many different forms of good lives. Although the approach is Aristotelian, the author concentrates on formulating and defending a contemporary moral ideal. The importance of this ideal, he shows, lies in increasing our ability to cope with life's adversities by improving our judgment. In chapters on moral imagination, self-knowledge, and moral depth, Kekes calls attention to aspects of our inner life that have been neglected because of our cultural inattention to moral wisdom. He discusses these inner processes through the tragedies of Sophocles, which can inspire us with their enduring moral significance and help us to understand the importance of moral wisdom to living a good life. (shrink)

A good chunk of the recent discussion of hypocrisy concerned the hypocritical “moral address” where, in the simplest case, a person criticises another for $$\phi $$ -ing having engaged in $$\phi $$ -ing himself, and where the critic’s reasons are overtly moral. The debate has conceptual and normative sides to it. We ask both what hypocrisy is, and why it is wrong. In this paper I focus on the conceptual explication of hypocrisy by examining the pragmatic features of the situation (...) where accusations of hypocrisy are made. After rejecting several extant views, I defend the idea that moral criticisms are best understood as moves in an agonistic or hostile conversation, and that charges of hypocrisy are attempts to prevent the hypocrite from gaining an upper hand in a situation of conflict. I finish by linking this idea to frame-theoretic analysis and evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche's Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy by Donovan Miyasaki, and: Politics after Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left by Donovan MiyasakiJeffrey ChurchDonovan Miyasaki, Nietzsche's Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xv + 292 pp. isbn: 978-3-031-11358-1. Cloth, $54.99.Donovan Miyasaki, Politics after Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xv + 330 pp. isbn: 978-3-031-12227-9. Cloth, $54.99.Without a doubt, Nietzsche's political philosophy is (...) one of the most elusive and ambiguous features of his corpus. How else can we explain the dizzying, even contradictory, variety of interpretations of Nietzsche's politics? Some read him as anti-political or a liberal skeptical of state power. For others, he is an aristocratic radical, obsessed with using state power to entrench a new class of Übermenschen. For still others, his thought is most compatible with democracy, as his defenses of perspectivism and agonism are best realized within a democratic political system. Finally, some other scholars throw up their hands and say that Nietzsche's political thought is incoherent.In this two-volume work, Donovan Miyasaki enters this fray with a distinctive defense of the democratic Nietzsche. Two features distinguish his view from others. First, it provides a novel grounding of Nietzschean democracy—what Miyasaki calls Nietzsche's "metapolitics." This grounding is examined in the first volume, Nietzsche's Immoralism (hereafter NI). Second, it offers the most radical political vision of a left Nietzschean form of Nietzschean socialism. For Miyasaki, socialism follows from Nietzsche's fundamental commitments, rather than the aristocratic radicalism that Miyasaki sees Nietzsche inferring—wrongly—from his own commitments. [End Page 97] This extrapolation from Nietzsche's "metapolitics" is undertaken in the second volume, Politics after Morality (hereafter PM). I discuss each of these contributions in turn. In general, I found Miyasaki's work to be clear, perceptive, and bold in their interpretations. That said, with a book that critiques so much of the Nietzsche scholarship and offers such a radical take on Nietzsche's politics, I have some potential objections to raise.Nietzsche's MetapoliticsOther interpreters of a left Nietzsche ground their reading on what they take to be Nietzsche's radical epistemological views: either his perspectivism or his anti-essentialism. This was a popular approach for the postmodern and agonistic readings. By contrast, Miyasaki grounds Nietzschean democracy in a completely different way, on his metaphysics, particularly his determinism and "hard incompatibilism" (NI 25). On Miyasaki's view, Nietzsche denies that freedom and determinism are compatible and hence also that any kind of moral responsibility or moral agency is possible. This is the meaning of Nietzsche's "immoralism." For Miyasaki, Nietzsche's alternative ideal is to engender a particular feeling, namely, the love of this determinism or amor fati.This thesis of hard incompatibilism leads Miyasaki to some sweeping critiques of scholarship on Nietzsche's ethics. Against the many recent interpreters who develop a Nietzschean view of freedom, Miyasaki argues that freedom is impossible in a deterministic world. Against the perfectionist and constitutivist interpreters of Nietzsche's ethics, Miyasaki argues that ethics requires the freedom to improve or fail, and such freedom is impossible. At the same time, Miyasaki admits that Nietzsche at times appeals to and even defends freedom. Yet he explains that what Nietzsche is after in these passages is not freedom, but only the "feeling" of freedom (NI 49). Miyasaki is driven to some strained interpretive moves, such as when he argues that higher individuals' feeling of freedom is enhanced precisely to the degree to which they have abandoned the "illusion of freedom" (NI 49). How can I have the feeling of something I have come to see as an illusion?It is true that Nietzsche critiques the traditional metaphysical notion of the freedom of the will on the basis of his naturalism and determinism. Yet in recent years, scholars have argued that Nietzsche defends a novel conception of freedom that is compatible with determinism, akin to what we find in Spinoza. On this view, freedom is defined in terms of agency rather [End Page 98] than a power or faculty of choice. A free agent is... (shrink)

The revival of recognition theory has brought new energy to critical theory. In general terms, recognition theory aims to critically evaluate social structures against a standard of social freedom identified with norms of interaction which are freely recognized by all parties. Until now, attention has primarily focused on the categories and forms of recognition theory. However, the influence of contemporary French theory upon the development of theories of recognition has not yet received the consideration it merits. The book takes up (...) this task. With chapters by internationally recognized authors, the collection outlines the current state of recognition theory, studies the impact of French theory, and uses French thought to identity aspects of the recognitive process which are often overlooked. Exploring French accounts of agonistic identity construction, vulnerability, power, ethical obligation, and reflexive theory construction, this book supports the intentions of critical theory with heightened attentiveness to oppression in all of its forms. (shrink)

Review of The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious by Paul Katsafanas.

When John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice was published in 1971, it brought a strong, inspiring, and refreshing creative impetus in Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Since then, Rawls’ work has been criticized on several grounds, mainly related to its Kantian formalism. However, ideas and theories are not born and do not exist in a social and political vacuum. Read in different historical contexts they can reveal new meanings and deliver specific messages, which are tailored to specific audiences and political cultures. I argue (...) in my paper that, reflecting this reality and my own life experience, Rawls’ conception of justice and of a well-ordered society always remains actual. An important part of this actuality is revealed in the manner in which the theory inspired Romanian society in its post-communist search for models of citizenship. It is also revealed by the message it delivers to today’s divided and polarized societies, where solidarity has been corroded by neoliberalism and a sense of fairness and reasonableness has been weakened by an increasingly noxious agonistic spirit. (shrink)

US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse and coalition-building across deep (...) moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships. (shrink)

This essay responds to four critical essays by Rosemary Kellison, Ebrahim Moosa, Joseph Winters, and Martin Kavka on the author’s recent book, Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (Cambridge, 2018). Parts I and II work in tandem to further develop my accounts of strategic empathy and agonistic political friendship. I defend against criticisms that my argument for moral imagination obligates oppressed people to empathize with their oppressors. I argue, further, that healthy conflict can be motivated (...) by a kind of “secular” love. This enables my position to immanently criticize and mediate the claims that one must either love (agapically) one’s opponent in order to engage them in “healthy conflict,” on one hand, or that one must vanquish, exclude, or “cancel” one’s opponent, on the other. In Part III, I demonstrate how my account mediates the challenge of an alleged standing opposition between moral imagination and socio-theoretical critique. I defend a methodologically pragmatist account of immanent prophetic criticism, resistance, and conflict transformation. Finally, I respond to one critic’s vindication of a strong enemy/adversary opposition that takes up the case of white supremacist violence in the U.S. I argue that the time horizon for healthy conflict must be simultaneously immediate and also long-term, provided that such engagements remain socio-critically self-reflexive and seek to cultivate transformational responses. (shrink)

Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students’ capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe’s and Rawls’s conceptions of democracy and politics. To this end I (...) take Eamonn Callan’s Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative approaches to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the “left” and “right.” I propose that a radical democratic citizenship education would be an education of political adversaries. (shrink)

The Anthropocene, understood from the perspective of the creators of Earth System Science and IPCC, calls for global governance, which tends to be understood as an epistocratic, technocratic affair leaving little room for reflective rationality and politics in the agonistic sense. Using the republican repertoire, I argue that global governance thus understood is actually the last thing we need. I suggest that global environmental institutions ought to be based on ‘constitutional republicanism’. Key elements of this approach are a Machiavellian (...) appreciation of discord, agonism and ‘the political’, combined with a realistic assessment of the very diverse interests at stake in global climate politics, hence very diverse ideas about the benefits and burdens of specific global environmental strategies; and institutions based on ideas uniquely developed by republicans from Machiavelli to Mouffe allowing for human and science’s fallibility on the one hand, irreducible moral and political diversity on the other. (shrink)

This piece is written as a public service to ethics professors and students interested in learning more about honor ethics. To facilitate its use in classrooms, it’s written in the style of many contemporary textbooks: it focuses on ideas, principles, and intuitions and ignores scholarly figures and intellectual history. Readers should note this is an “opinionated” introduction, as it focuses on the agonistic conception of honor. It also takes for granted that the agonistic ethos described counts as a (...) “moral” theory. Arguments for these assumptions are in print elsewhere. Any comments or recommendations for improvement are much appreciated. (shrink)

The Anthropocene, understood from the perspective of the creators of Earth System Science and IPCC, calls for global governance, which tends to be understood as an epistocratic, technocratic affair leaving little room for reflective rationality and politics in the agonistic sense. Using the republican repertoire, I argue that global governance thus understood is actually the last thing we need. I suggest that global environmental institutions ought to be based on ‘constitutional republicanism’. Key elements of this approach are a Machiavellian (...) appreciation of discord, agonism and ‘the political’, combined with a realistic assessment of the very diverse interests at stake in global climate politics, hence very diverse ideas about the benefits and burdens of specific global environmental strategies; and institutions based on ideas uniquely developed by republicans from Machiavelli to Mouffe allowing for human and science’s fallibility on the one hand, irreducible moral and political diversity on the other. (shrink)

Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen’s (1996) influential account of “cultures of honor” speculates that honor norms are a socially-adaptive deterrence strategy. This theory has been appealed to by multiple empirically-minded philosophers, and plays an important role in John Doris and Alexandra Plakias’ (2008) antirealist argument from disagreement. In this essay, I raise four objections to the Nisbett-Cohen deterrence thesis, and offer another theory of honor in its place that sees honor as an agonistic normative system regulating prestige competitions. Since (...) my account portrays honor norms as radically different from liberal ones, it actually strengthens Doris and Plakias’ case in some respects: cultures of honor are not merely superficially different from Western liberal ones. Nonetheless, the persistent appeal of honor’s principles, and their moral plausibility in certain contexts, suggests not antirealism, but pluralism—a reply on behalf of realism that itself has considerable empirical support. (shrink)

There is growing evidence that dopamine replacement therapy (DRT) used to treat Parkinson’s Disease can cause compulsive behaviours and impulse control disorders (ICDs), such as pathological gambling, compulsive buying and hypersexuality. Like more familiar drug-based forms of addiction, these iatrogenic disorders can cause significant harm and distress for sufferers and their families. In some cases, people treated with DRT have lost their homes and businesses, or have been prosecuted for criminal sexual behaviours. In this article we first examine the evidence (...) that these disorders are caused by DRT. If it is accepted that DRT cause compulsive or addictive behaviours in a significant minority of individuals, then the following ethical and clinical questions arise: Under what circumstances is it ethical to prescribe a medication that may induce harmful compulsive behaviours? Are individuals treated with DRT morally responsible and hence culpable for harmful or criminal behaviour related to their medication? We conclude with some observations of the relevance of DRT-induced ICDs for our understanding of addiction and identify some promising directions for future research and ethical analysis. (shrink)

For Mary Wollstonecraft, the moral purpose of government is to act on the principle of equality and protect the weak against the fact of inequality. The political day-to-day is characterized by classes and groups with competing interests, some more powerful than others. Wollstonecraft was a republican thinker and so it is reasonable to expect in her writings a notion of political society as representative, but how? After placing Wollstonecraft in relation to contemporary republicanism, we can see that Wollstonecraft’s notion of (...) representation operates on different levels of right: constitutional and political. The “what” that is represented on is, respectively, authority of the people and the perspectives of groups or classes. The people as an abstract, idealized union, so crucial for many republicans, makes sense only on the constitutional level. The political field of law making and policy is an agonistic one where representation has to be practical and no unity is to be expected beyond class or group interests. That is why women and the labouring classes need to have their own interests represented by representatives who share their interests and perspectives. (shrink)

In this book, Stephen Acreman follows the development and reception of a hitherto under-analyzed concept central to modern and postmodern political theory: the Kantian ein erweiterte Denkungsart, or enlarged mentality. -/- While the enlarged mentality plays a major role in a number of key texts underpinning contemporary democratic theory, including works by Arendt, Gadamer, Habermas, and Lyotard, this is the first in-depth study of the concept encompassing and bringing together its full range of expressions. A number of attempts to place (...) the enlarged mentality at the service of particular ideals–the politics of empathy, of consensus, of agonistic contest, or of moral righteousness–are challenged and redirected. In its exploration of the enlarged mentality, the book asks what it means to assume a properly political stance, and, in giving as the answer ‘facing reality together’, it uncovers a political theory attentive to the facts and events that concern us, and uniquely well suited to the ecological politics of our time. (shrink)

Kant and Milton: fundamentals and foundations -- Kant's journey in the constellation of German Miltonism: toward the procedure of succession -- Kant's Miltonic transfer to exemplarity: the succession to Milton's "On his blindness" in the groundwork of the Metaphysics of morals -- Kantian tragic form and Kantian "storytelling" -- The Critique of practical reason and Samson agonistes -- Kant's Miltonic procedure of succession in a key moment of the Critique of judgment.

SummaryThis article reconstructs a significant historical alternative to the theories of ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘liberal’ patriotism often associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. Instead of focusing on the work of Andrew Fletcher, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume or Adam Smith, this study concentrates on the theories of sociability, patriotism and international rivalry elaborated by Adam Ferguson and Henry Home, Lord Kames. Centrally, the article reconstructs both thinkers' shared perspective on what I have called ‘unsociable’ or ‘agonistic’ patriotism, an eighteenth-century idiom which saw (...) international rivalship, antagonism, and even war as crucial in generating political cohesion and sustaining moral virtue. Placing their thinking in the context of wider eighteenth-century debates about sociability and state formation, the article's broader purpose is to highlight the centrality of controversies about human sociability to eighteenth-century debates about the nature of international relations. (shrink)

In this paper I unpack a realistic conception of politics by tightly defining its constitutive features: conflict and order. A conflict emerges when an actor is disposed to impose his/her views against the resistance of others. Conflicts are more problematic than moralists realize because they emerge unilaterally, are potentially violent, impermeable to content-based reason, and unavoidable. Order is then defined as an institutional framework that provides binding collective decisions. Order is deemed necessary because individuals need to cooperate to survive, but (...) groups cannot spontaneously secure collective decisions and are prone to conflicts. Particularly, the fact that potentially violent conflicts emerge unilaterally means that order requires coercion. I conclude that mischaracterizing conflict and order leads to undesirable normative principles, and that this criticism can be leveraged not only against Rawlsian liberals who moralize conflicts away, but also against some agonists who underestimate the need for order and some communitarians who underplay both circumstances. (shrink)

In this article, Andrew Thompson explores the tension between Gert Biesta's concept of educational purpose and education's historical function. For Biesta, the purpose of education consists of three overlapping spheres: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. While scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to Biesta's notion of subjectification, there is not enough consideration of his treatment of socialization and its limits on human freedom. Here, Thompson examines the historical role of socialization as it relates to the cultivation of self-reflecting and (...) self-governing citizens through a process Ian Hunter describes as pastoral pedagogy. Both Biesta and Hunter critique essentialist notions of subjectivity, noting that critical pedagogy in both liberal and Marxian iterations has relied upon a metaphysics informed by Kantian moral definition in which the subject must freely exercise rational autonomy toward self-realization. While Biesta suggests redefining the subject, Hunter dismisses any attempt at redefinition as irrelevant since the school's historical process of moral development is inevitably linked to the antiquated liberal ideal. In Hunter's view, all attempts to escape the school's moral teleology inexorably employ a pedagogy that is based on the moral ideal its critics wish to eliminate. This article illustrates the agonism inherent in Biesta's concept of educational purpose and explores the role of the theorist as the expression of a particular moral self that informs the ideal persona of the teacher. (shrink)

In this paper I unpack a realistic conception of politics by tightly defining its constitutive features: conflict and order. A conflict emerges when an actor is disposed to impose his/her views against the resistance of others. Conflicts are more problematic than moralists realize because they emerge unilaterally, are potentially violent, impermeable to content-based reason, and unavoidable. Order is then defined as an institutional framework that provides binding collective decisions. Order is deemed necessary because individuals need to cooperate to survive, but (...) groups cannot spontaneously secure collective decisions and are prone to conflicts. Particularly, the fact that potentially violent conflicts emerge unilaterally means that order requires coercion. I conclude that mischaracterizing conflict and order leads to undesirable normative principles, and that this criticism can be leveraged not only against Rawlsian liberals who moralize conflicts away, but also against some agonists who underestimate the need for order and some communitarians who underplay both circumstances. (shrink)

Abstract: While many commentators have remarked on Nietzsche’s admiration for the Greek historian Thucydides, most reduce the affinity between the two thinkers to their common commitments to “political realism” or “scientific naturalism.” At the same time, some of these same commentators have sought to minimize or dismiss Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for the Greek sophists. We do not deny the importance of realism or naturalism, but we suggest that, for Nietzsche, realism and naturalism are rooted in a rejection of moral absolutism and (...) its leading advocates, Socrates and Plato. Through careful exegesis of crucial sections from Daybreak, we show that, as early as 1880 (if not earlier), Nietzsche regarded the agonistic, anti-absolutist stance of the sophist Protagoras as an indispensable model both for Thucydides’s history and for his own philosophy. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 88-112 [Access article in PDF] Milton's Aesthetics Of Eating Denise Gigante It is not a little curious that, with the exception of Ben Jonson (and he did not speak gravely about it so often), the poet in our own country who has written with the greatest gusto on the subject of eating is Milton. He omits none of the pleasures of the palate, great or small. (...) In his Latin poems, when young, he speaks of the pears and chestnuts which he used to roast at the fire with his friend Diodati. Junkets and other "country-messes" are not forgotten in his "Allegro." The simple Temptation in the Wilderness, "Command that these stones be made bread" (which was quite sufficient for a hunger that had fasted "forty days"), is turned, in Paradise Regained, with more poetry than propriety, into the set out of a great feast, containing every delicacy in and out of season. The very "names" of the viands, he says, were "exquisite." And in Paradise Lost, Eve is not only described as being skilful in paradisaical cookery ("tempering dulcet creams"), but the angel Raphael is invited to dinner, and helped by his entertainers to a series of tid-bits and contrasted relishes--Taste after taste, upheld with kindliest change. --Leigh Hunt, "Eating Songs" The title of an old play gives us a direct taste and surmise of its inwards, as the first lines of the Paradise Lost smack of the great Poem. --John Keats, "On 'Retribution, or the Chieftain's Daughter'" That Milton's Romantic readers should invoke the "taste" of his epic poetry suggests an awareness beyond the anecdotal. For as this essay will show, Milton complicates the category of physiological taste in such a manner as to form the ground for the possibility of aesthetic taste, which emerges as a distinct discourse in the early years of the eighteenth century. This is not to say that Milton is the only source for this dubious meaning-in-transition. But precisely how, prior to the interventions of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and the entire tradition of post-Miltonic theorists of taste, is one to read Adam's darkly sardonic postlapsarian remark: "Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste... And Palate call judicious" [PL IX.1017-20]? Critics have observed Milton's "ruthless and relentless pressure on 'taste,'" the fact that the word and its variants appear thirty times in Book IX of Paradise Lost alone [Ricks 69]. What I would like to suggest is that just as Milton is a seminal figure for the eighteenth-century aesthetic preoccupation with the sublime, 1 he is theoretically situated at the origins of the more generic thing called taste as well. [End Page 88]Of course Milton himself was aware of the epistemological implications of taste, whereby the Latin sapere can mean both "to taste" and "to know." 2 The fruit whose "mortal taste" was the source of all our woe did, after all, grow on the tree of knowledge, knowingly described by Satan as "precious of all Trees / In Paradise, of operation blest / To Sapience" [PL I.2, IX.795-97]. So too, when Adam calls Eve "exact of taste," he adds "of Sapience no small part" [PL IX.1018]. Throughout Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Milton plays with the epistemological connotation of taste, incorporating it even into the 1671 companion piece of the latter, Samson Agonistes, whose blind hero declares, "The way to know were not to see but taste" [1091]. At the time Milton was writing, however, taste was philosophically connected not only to knowledge and pleasure, but to morality as well. At the origins of the British empirical discourse of taste, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, inheriting this link between epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, inquires: "Will it not be found... that what is beautiful is... true; and what is at once both beautiful and true is, of consequence, agreeable and good?" [2: 268-69]. For Milton as for Shaftesbury, the beautiful was the true was the good, and access to these ideals was bound up with the philosophic complexity... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article: This essay begins by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of the developmental strategy adopted in my Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morality” in relation to the contrasting approaches of Conway, Hatab, and Janaway in their studies of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. It then turns to take up a topic that, in the light of the readings of Conway, Hatab, Janaway, and myself, I now take to be much (...) more central than any of us has adequately acknowledged, namely, the relationship of GM to the Hellenistic conception of philosophy. I sketch this argument and explore its implications through Janaway’s and Hatab’s different (but not incompatible) reflections on perspectivism, before finally providing an illustration of how Nietzsche’s indebtedness to the themes of freedom and slavery in ancient philosophy illuminates our understanding of the slave revolt in morals, the psychology of the priest, and the interpretation of the sovereign individual. Given the complexity of the rhetorical and argumentative structure of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, any author presumptuousness enough to offer a study of this text needs to have a clear (and defensible) strategy for approaching it.1 Such strategies may be various, and in the cases under consideration, this is the case. Both Larry Hatab and Dan Conway offer textualist interpretations, with Hatab seeking to communicate the intensely radical character of GM by focusing strongly on the agonistic dimensions of its argument and rhetoric, while Conway reads GM as a Bildungsroman and so seeks to track and explicate Nietzsche’s efforts to guide his readers from innocence to experience. (Such readings need not be incompatible since it could be, for example, that it is through his efforts to construct an internal agon within the reader that Nietzsche seeks to overcome their innocence.) By contrast, both Chris Janaway and I offer more contextualist accounts. Janaway’s strategy is to take Nietzsche at his word and to offer a close reading of the argument of GM in relation to the two philosophical figures—Paul Rée and Arthur Schopenhauer—that Nietzsche identifies as his representative opponents. My own strategy is to adopt a developmental approach to considering GM, one that seeks to reconstruct the reasons—internal to his project of reevaluation—that lead Nietzsche to require a genealogical investigation of morality and to use this reconstruction as a way of orienting the analysis of this text. (And obviously there is some overlap here given Nietzsche’s varied relationships to Schopenhauer and Rée in the course of his philosophical development.) Although my own methodological commitments favor a contextualist approach, it is wise to avoid dogmatism on this issue—not least because one might reasonably note that Ridley’s Nietzsche’s Conscience, perhaps the most widely admired recent analysis of GM and one to which all of the authors considered here are indebted, is thoroughly textualist in its strategy of focusing on the central characters of GM.2 In what follows, I will briefly review my reasons for favoring a developmental form of contextualist account and what I take the strength and limitations of this approach (and of my performance of it) to be. I will then turn to consider what I now see as a central issue for understanding GM—namely, Nietzsche’s relationship to ancient philosophy—that has emerged in the light of further reflection on the arguments presented in these four works. I conclude by briefly reconsidering the nature of Nietzsche’s genealogical enterprise. (shrink)

In the Panathenaic Games, there was a torch race for teams of ephebes that started from the altars of Eros and Prometheus at Plato’s Academy and finished on the Acropolis at the altar of Athena, goddess of wisdom. It was competitive, yes, but it was also sacred, aimed at a noble goal. To win, you needed to cooperate with your teammates and keep the delicate flame alive as you ran up the hill. Likewise, Plato’s philosophy combines competition and cooperation in (...) pursuit of the goal of wisdom. On one level, agonism in Plato is explicit: he taught in a gymnasium and featured gymnastic training in his educational theory. On another level, it is mimetic: Socratic dialogue resembles intellectual wrestling. On a third level, it is metaphorical: the athlete’s struggle illustrates the struggle to be morally good. And at its highest level, it is divine: the human soul is a chariot that races toward heaven. This volume explores agonism in Plato on all of these levels, inviting the reader—as Plato does—to engage in the megas agōn of life. Once in the contest, as Plato’s Socrates says, we’re allowed no excuses. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a reassessment of the influence of two disparate bodies of thought – republicanism and existentialism – on Hannah Arendt. Arendt, I argue, is not involved in an ‘agonistic appropriation’ of Heidegger. Arendt identifies two opposed attitudes in Heidegger’s work. The first Promethean moment places Heidegger squarely in the tradition of Western political philosophy, and the second seemingly correcting for this recommends a quietism. Arendt rejects both these attitudes. Machiavelli rather than Heidegger, I argue, is (...) the key influence on Arendt's political thought. Through a reading of Arendt’s published works and her unpublished 1955 lecture notes on Machiavelli I show that the central categories of Arendt’s thought emerge from her meditation on Machiavelli’s texts. Arendt finds in Machiavelli a performative understanding of politics, an accurate understanding of the connection between morality and politics, and a primacy given to politics that she thought it deserves. (shrink)

The article aims to investigate the problematic relationship between populism and democracy by comparing the conceptions of ‘the people’ and popular sovereignty which they presuppose. In the first two sections, the populist and the democratic ‘peoples’ are reconstructed, and the unbridgeable gap dividing them is highlighted. The discussion of the democratic people requires a concise analysis of the main contemporary democratic frameworks, including deliberative democracy, ‘neo-Roman’ republicanism, agonistic democracy. The article works out the implications of the incompatibility between the (...) two ‘sovereign peoples’ identified, and concludes that such an incompatibility undercuts the kinship of populism and democracy. While populism is often said to intertwine with democracy in some way, the article argues that it significantly departs from democratic theory and practice, and belongs to a distinct conceptual space. It cannot be made to overlap with ‘illiberal democracy’, a ‘democratic myth’, a crude electoral majoritarianism, nor does it amount to hiding undemocratic policies into properly democratic justifications. The boundary dividing populism and democracy, therefore, starts unfolding at the level of the conception of the people. While democratic theory invariably assumes a people intended as simultaneously heterogeneous and united, populism conceives of the people as a moral whole, internally undifferentiated, whose homogeneity and intrinsic righteousness preclude the task of specifying what popular sovereignty ultimately means. Such specification, on the other hand, is inescapable for any democrat assuming the people as a composite unity. The last section addresses four possible objections to the argument, variously formulated by Ernesto Laclau and by scholars approaching populism from a post-Laclauian or discursive-performative perspective. (shrink)

In this dissertation I claim that Michel Foucault is a pro-enlightenment philosopher. I argue that his critical history of thought cultivates a state of being autonomous in thought and action which is indicative of a kantian notion of maturity. In addition, I contend that, because he follows a nietzschean path to enlightenment, Foucault’s elaboration of freedom proceeds from his critique of who we are, which includes a rejection of humanism’s experiential limits. At the same time, and perhaps most importantly, I (...) also suggest that Foucault articulates a posthumanist conception of finitude and being. To begin with, I show that on humanism’s path to edghtenment, which is established by Rousseau, Kant and Hegel and currently advocated by Rawls and Taylor, a philosophy of the autonomous subject who desires self-actualisation through recogrution precedes the epistemologcal and political critiques which generate humanism’s objective, normative and subjective axes of experience. On the basis of Foucault’s archzological, genealogical and, when they operate together, critical historical critiques of these conditions of possibility for autonomy and recogrution, I maintain that humanism fails to teach us how to think or act freelythat is, as critical thought that delivers enhghtenment-and that humanism’s knowledge of the world and its justice in politics necessitate the confined exclusion of those who are different and the submission of subjectivity of those who are normal. In response to the immaturity that is at the heart of humanism, I illustrate that Foucault deploys archeology, genealogy and critical history to excavate his posthumanist, enlightenment alternatives of savoir, pouvoir and ethico-morality. After he relocates an explanation of cause and effect in the human sciences from savioir to the relations between savoir and pouvoir, I explicate how Foucault reconceives, firstly, the way pouvoir is exercised by productive mechanisms, which discipline the body and regulate the citizen, and, secondly, the nature of pouvoir, which he characterises as governmentality, or one’s action upon the actions of others. He then retlunks freedom as the vis-a-vis of pouvoir/savoir, and I demonstrate how critical history reveals that, prior to the hermeneutic relation to self wluch is at the centre of humanism’s conception of moral identity, ethical subjectivity in antiquity is formed through an ascetic, agonistic freedom that is based on a practical relation to self. Foucault uses this as a blueprint for the present, in which an ethico-political state of being autonomous in thought and action is constituted over against our limits of pouvoir/savoir. I thus claim that Foucault’s portrayal as an anti-enlightenment philosopher, who proffers nothing but anormative critique and amoral freedom, represents the perspective of those for whom to be anti-humanism is akin to being antienlightenment. These criticisms are exposed as misguided by the thesis that I verify in this dissertation, which is that critical history qua critique, thence an ontology, namely, Foucault’s critical ontology, brings about maturity and endorses an ehghtenment that is both contra- and post-humanism. (shrink)

Given its psychological and sociological importance, especially in non-liberal societies, honor may be the most undertheorized normative phenomenon. Philosophical neglect of honor is due partly to the doubtful moral bona fides of honor: honor-typical motives have been usually viewed by philosophers in both the Christian and liberal West as either non-moral or immoral but replaced by morally sounder ones. More practically, honor (and what is usually translated into the English “honor”) connotes a number of apparently contradictory meanings, further bedeviling analyses. (...) Four particularly salient conceptions of honor emerge in the anthropological, literary, and philosophical literature on honor: honor as prestige, honor as the ethos characteristic of “cultures of honor,” honor as honestas, and honor as agonism. (shrink)

Chulpforta, 1862 -- Napoleon III as president -- Saint-just -- Two-poem cycle two kings -- Louis the sixteenth -- Louis the fifteenth -- Agonistic politics, 1871-1874 -- The Greek state, 1871 -- On the future of our educational institutions, third lecture, February 27th, 1872 -- Homer's contest -- Untimely meditations -- David Strauss : the confessor and the writer, 1873 -- Schopenhauer as educator, 1874 -- The free spirit, 1878-1880 -- Human, all too human : a book for free (...) spirits, 1878 -- Miscellaneous maxims and opinions, 1879 -- The wanderer and his shadow, 1880 -- The campaign against morality, 1881-1885 -- Dawn of day thoughts on the prejudices of morality, 1881 -- The joyful wisdom, 1882 -- Thus spoke Zarathustra : a book for everyone and no one, 1883-1885 -- On the new idol -- On the rabble -- On the Tarantulas -- On old and new law tablets -- Conversation with the kings -- Nachlass fragments, 1883-1885 -- Aristocratic radical, 1886-1887 -- Beyond good and evil : prelude to a philosophy of the future, 1886 -- The joyful wisdom, book v, 1887 -- On the genealogy of morals : a polemical tract, 1887 -- First essay, good and evil, good, and bad -- Second essay, guilt, bad conscience, and related matters -- Third essay, what do ascetic ideals mean? -- Nachlass fragments, 1885-1887 -- The antichrist, 1888 -- Twilight of the idols : or how one philosophises with a hammer, 1888 -- Morality as anti-nature -- The improvers of mankind -- What the Germans lack -- Skirmishes of an untimely man -- The antichrist : a curse on Christianity, 1888 -- Ecce homo : how one becomes what one is, 1888 -- Why I am so wise -- Why I write such good books -- The case of Wagner : a musician's problem -- Why I am a destiny -- Nachlass fragments, 1887-1888. (shrink)

Imagining Dewey' features productive (re)interpretations of 21st century experience using the lens of John Dewey's 'Art as Experience', through the doubled task of putting an array of international philosophers, educators, and artists-researchers in transactional dialogue and on equal footing in an academic text. This book is a pragmatic attempt to encourage application of aesthetic learning and living, ekphrasic interpretation, critical art and agonist pluralism.0There are two foci: (a) Deweyan philosophy and educational themes with (b) analysis and examples of how educators, (...) artists, and researchers envision and enact artful meaning making. This structure meets the needs of university and high school audiences, who are accustomed to learning about challenging ideas through multimedia and aesthetic experience.00Contributors are: James M. Albrecht, Adam I. Attwood, John Baldacchino, Carolyn L. Berenato, M. Cristina Di Gregori, Holly Fairbank, Jim Garrison, Amanda Gulla, Bethany Henning, Jessica Heybach, David L. Hildebrand, Ellyn Lyle, Livio Mattarollo, Christy McConnell Moroye, Maria-Isabel Moreno-Montoro, Maria Martinez Morales, Stephen M. Noonan, Louise G. Phillips, Scott L. Pratt, Joaquin Roldan, Leopoldo Rueda, Tadd Ruetenik, Leisa Sasso, Bruce Uhrmacher, David Vessey, Ricardo Marin Viadel, Sean Wiebe, Li Xu and Martha Patricia Espiritu Zavalza. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, cosmopolitan theories have been benefiting greatly from the dialogue between defenders and critics of world citizenship. Yet, the decidedly polemic aspect of this debate, while allowing for intellectual progress, is also responsible for overdrawn generalizations. Instead of entering into the debate directly, this article attempts to refute a specific anti-cosmopolitan claim raised by Chantal Mouffe. Her realist objection to cosmopolitanism, derived from the conceptual framework of agonistic pluralism, is mistaken at a crucial point: a (...) firm dichotomy between politics and morality cannot provide an alternative to theories of world citizenship, because Mouffe’s embrace of multipolarity as a principle of global politics must equally appeal to a set of universal norms governing international relations. This article argues that even the realist model of multipolarity needs to conceive of a minimal morality to create the symbolic ground on which various power centres can be held accountable. (shrink)

Cosmopolitanism is commonly understood as a universal norm—moral and political—in the light of enduring differences, and for that reason it has historically embodied a seemingly inevitable dilemma of universality/particularity. Since its inception, cosmopolitan thinkers have struggled with the dilemma and have attempted ways to address the question of difference so that the universal norm and obligation can be justified and defended. One of the most common strategies is to give primacy to universal humanity and override difference; another recent strategy is (...) to give up universalism to take difference seriously and frame difference in agonistic terms. I argue in this article that both strategies are inadequate and unsatisfactory in conceptualising and dealing with difference. Briefly tracing some of the major cosmopolitan approaches, I argue that the conceptualisation of difference and human subjectivity is at the core of the problem as well as the solution. Drawing on Lévinas and his emphasis on the primacy of difference in the constitution of human subjectivity and community, I propose a new understanding of the self and the Other for the success of the cosmopolitan project. (shrink)