Poststructuralism, Misc

Il tema del merito ha avuto molte vite, in tradizioni e culture diverse, trovando di recente rinnovata centralità su entrambi i lati dell’Atlantico. Il volume si prefigge l’obiettivo di analizzarne le ragioni, indagarne le condizioni di possibilità, valutarne limiti e problemi.

Legitimacy is a concept that has been largely forgotten by the deconstructive discourse on law and politics. This article seeks, on the one hand, to reassess the role of legitimacy in deconstruction and, on the other hand, to bring deconstructive thinking to bear on the concept of legitimacy. By re-reading Derrida’s “Declarations of Independence” through the lenses of his later texts on sovereignty and (counter)signature, it is argued that, rather than being deconstructible, legitimacy is deconstructing any self-founding of law and (...) power. As such, legitimacy functions not as an evaluative concept of law and order but as a constantly insisting demand that facilitates the principles of responsibility and responsiveness. (shrink)

Jane Bennett’s vital materialism develops positive ontological commitments to lively matter and resistant vitality, articulated using notions of actant and assemblage, thing-power and the out-side. I show that these ontological commitments reveal a limit for traditional modes of human knowing, favoring an emergent epistemology that attends to the ways actants and assemblages express themselves. I then argue for an account of acting that positions humans as guests of vibrant matter. Compacts of guest-friendship in Plato’s Crito and Kant’s To Perpetual Peace (...) indicate that to be a guest is to be embedded in an asymmetrical system. The compact that binds the guest in a world of vibrant matter is the prospect of friendship with nonhuman others, a prospect I discuss following the work of Nick Bingham. I conclude by addressing Axelle Karera’s recent critique of Anthropocenean discourses, explaining the role guest-friendship can play in addressing certain of the weaknesses Karera identifies. (shrink)

In this essay we consider the moral claims of one branch of non-realist theory known as linguistic narrativism theory. By highlighting the moral implications of linguistic narrativism theory, we argue that the “moral vision” expressed by this theory can entail, at worst, undesirable moral agnosticism if not related to a transcendental and supra-personal normativity in our moral life. With its appeal to volitionism and intuitionism, the ethical sensitivity of this theory enters into difficulties brought about by several internal tensions as (...) to what morality and moral judgements involve. We contend that the proponents of linguistic narrativism theory must strongly recognize and take responsibility for the “moral vison” their theory professes, in so far as they want to think of their theory as a morally responsible one. (shrink)

Patterns in contemporary conflict highlight the failures of traditional views of the relationship between humanity and technology. This paper proposes that modern conflict is characterized by something called “dissimulation,” referring to numerous phenomena together emphasizing the inadequacies of conceiving man as the overseeing creator of technological advancement. It shows rather that man, particularly man in conflict, is always already implicated and concealed within complex technological networks and mediums, wherein humanity is just another player amongst others. This paper diagnoses and defines (...) the condition of “dissimulation” in drone warfare, modern partisanship and terrorism, raising further the question of the conceptualization of a technological object in doing so. It highlights the danger of an observed technological tendency too, particularly in terms of its shaping of contemporary conflict as well as our relationship to space and time. Having considered dissimulation’s characteristic phenomena and effects, a strategy for dealing with it is then suggested. (shrink)

This article interrogates a certain philosophical scene – one which constitutes itself through the position of what Jacques Derrida calls “the ethical instance of violence.” This scene supposes a certain “style” of writing or doing philosophy, and perhaps even a certain philosophical “genre” or “subgenre”: the philosophical discourse on violence. In the course of the essay, I analyze this quasi-juridical scene through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Werner Hamacher, Rodolphe Gasché, and Martin Hägglund among (...) others. The scene, built on texts on texts on violence, demands a logic of purity; it is wary of contaminations and equivocations. And yet it thrives on them. In analyzing the implications of text, writing, and trace for the philosophical discourse on violence, I follow Derrida “just to see” what could make the scene tremble. (shrink)

This doctoral thesis examines the phenomenon of Filipinization, specifically understood as the ideological construction of a “Filipino identity” or ‘Filipino subject-consciousness” within the highly determinate context provided by the Filipino ilustrado nationalists such as José Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar and their fellow propagandists inasmuch as it leads to the nineteenth (19th) century construction of the modern Philippine nation. Utilizing Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive thinking, this study undertakes a genealogical critique engaged on the concrete historical examination of what is meant by (...) the term “Filipino” across a select historical timeline (1864-1898) and the various notions of Filipino identity implied by the different contexts within which the term “Filipino” has been employed. More specifically, it undertakes a selective philosophical excavation of three seminal texts in the history of Filipinization, viz.: 1) the Manifiesto of Padre Jose Burgos; 2) the writings of the Filipino ilustrados in La Solidaridad; and 3) Jose Rizal’s Annotations on Dr. Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. -/- The philosophical claim of this work is the idea that Filipinization, taken as the differential construction of Filipino identity, is the effective translation of the colonial epistemic violence of Eurocentric racism and its consequent “horror of absolutism” into the homo-hegemony of Filipino nationalisms. By fetishizing the notion of a carefully constructed and essential “Filipino-identity,” Filipinization and the current nationalist discourses that utilize them, unwittingly, stands complicit with the same colonial violence and hegemony that they wish to combat. This happens precisely when the very structures of colonial oppression, on the ideological and practical levels, are transmogrified into nationalist ideals that assume legal and political power unto themselves in a self-referential and self-legitimating fashion. -/- Three processes will demonstrate the above thesis: first, by examining historical texts and setting itself against established nationalist historiographies, a genealogical analysis of the term “Filipino” reveals it as a pliable signifier whose semantics have evolved through time. From its originary referent in the Spanish criollo (creole), it has come to refer to people who would have been otherwise entirely alien to this class, viz., the mestizos (both Spanish and Chinese), the principalia (native elite), and eventually, the lowland Catholicized natives themselves. The historical hermeneutic of this identity-discourse in Padre José Burgos’ Manifiesto yields the fact that what gives the term “Filipino” its semantic consistency as a class concept is its essential constitution as a Hispanic and Catholic identity. -/- Second, from this semantic identification of the term “Filipino” as a Hispano-Catholic identity, we proceed to clarify the meaning of Filipinization in terms of the nationalist propaganda carried out by the Filipino ilustrados in the fortnightly periodical La Solidaridad. Here, the specific ilustrado construction of Filipino identity as a Spanish citizen (ciudadano Español) is revealed precisely as a political and legal construct that served as the basis for their own politics of social inclusion/exclusion. Filipinization can only be applied to those who have been hispanized and Christianized and never to those tribes who have resisted and remained outside Spanish colonial authority. Filipinization is thus revealed as a process of Hispanization and Christianization whereby the recipients of Spanish colonial hegemony are transformed into the religiously docile bodies of the Spanish Empire. -/- From this highly determinate context, the study proceeds to examine Rizal’s ontological grounding of collective Filipino-ness in the mythological construction of the pre-hispanic past as the source of a unique Filipino ancestrality. In his work on de Morga’s Sucesos, what is revealed is a mythologization that grounds a native, essential Filipino identity within a past unscathed by the Spanish colonial experience. Such mythologization, however, can only be possible through an anachronistic nationalist interpretation of historical data. Here, Filipinization is revealed as an exclusive prerogative, a nationalist program by which Rizal and the ilustrado class can combat the evils and excesses of the Spanish colonial enterprise. Ironically, though, this same struggle for emancipation also became an instrument by which the ilustrado class can retain their unjustified position of power over those who belonged to the colonial underside, thus, securing the possibility of perpetuating their own ilustrado bourgeois class interests. -/- Such discursive complicity is the essence of the myth of Filipinization: it presents nationalist identity discourse as an anti-colonial enterprise while being underlined by an economy of motives designed to cater primarily to the exclusive interests of the elite and ilustrado class. Thus, instead of securing the genuine, inclusive emancipation of all colonial subjects and a more humane existence for the poor and suffering majority, ilustrado nationalism has, ironically, merely reinforced those operative structures of colonial discrimination and oppression when the ilustrados: 1) grounded their racial theory upon the very same discourse of Eurocentric superiority that they are precisely supposed to question and 2) claimed a patrimony over Filipinas as their exclusive sovereign inheritance. These two factors illustrate how the manifest transfer of power from the Spanish Empire to the Philippine sovereign nation (and later as a nation-state) illustrate how Filipinization merely has transmogrified the face of Spanish colonialism into its new, subtle, and worse form in Filipino nationalism. -/- In this vein, the existence of the 19th century modern Philippine nation merely masked and deferred the crisis that was supposed to transfer power from the Spanish Empire to the multitude of the poor and suffering native indio majority. This crisis became all the more difficult to address be-cause of the duplicitous character of the discourse of Filipinization itself. It has not only effectively transferred power into the hands of the nationalist elite but also captured authentic emancipatory discourse within the identity-trap against which it can only hope to get out. This study concludes with the claim about the impossibility of ever escaping and overcoming the epistemic and practical violence necessarily contained within the historical discourse of colonialism. Or simply, we have no language or discourse that would enable us to overcome the complicity of Filipinization with the very (epistemic) violence against which it has set itself. (shrink)

Science fiction has served the film industry like a dreamy stepchild. It gets only scant accolades from its master but must do heavy lifting: that is, make money. While science-fiction films often emphasize spectacle and action, they also inspire philosophical contemplation. Why? Science fiction, dating back to Shelley and Verne, came into existence speculating about humanity's social and physical worlds. Many books and articles over the past several years discuss the philosophical issues that films raise. One fairly new school of (...) thought, "posthumanism," explicitly deriving from postmodernism, with touches of critical theory, has seized on science-fiction movies as support for its theorizing. This volume and its 42 authors from film theory, science and technology studies, literary criticism, media studies, and philosophy, offer an array of posthumanist scholarship. (shrink)

Il principale obiettivo teoretico di questo lavoro consiste nel tentativo di verificare, attraverso un’indagine storico-genealogica e concettuale, come nella filosofia di Gilles Deleuze si assista ad un radicale mutamento del paradigma relativo alla nozione di trascendentale. Si tratta, in altre parole, di ripercorrere alcune delle tappe fondamentali che conducono il filosofo parigino a “purificare” il trascendentale da ogni riferimento ad una coscienza soggettiva egologica che si fondi in quanto principio genetico del mondo. Si riterrà utile procedere analizzando, in primo luogo, (...) il rapporto che Deleuze intrattiene con le istanze originarie del soggettivismo trascendentale kantiano, ove il trascendentale stesso, nel pensiero del filosofo tedesco, è strettamente connesso all’Io penso in quanto facoltà appercettiva dell’intelletto che incarnerebbe le condizioni di possibilità dell’esperienza. In secondo luogo, si tratterà di orientarsi nel dibattito critico che Deleuze intrattiene con la fenomenologia di Edmund Husserl, ed in particolar modo con la lettura husserliana della Critica della Ragion Pura di Kant, ove il padre fondatore dell’indirizzo fenomenologico novecentesco è colui che fa leva sullo stretto rapporto che sussiste tra il trascendentale e la coscienza. Nonostante il percorso storico, tracciato dal concetto di trascendentale, abbia inizio con l’opera di Kant, ritengo non sia possibile evitare un pur breve confronto con il ruolo che l’ego ha avuto nella formulazione cartesiana del cogito; si dovrà, per ciò stesso, considerare la particolare lettura deleuziana che riconosce nel cogito cartesiano il “luogo” in cui confluiscono tutte le facoltà del soggetto, permettendo di identificare il cogito stesso con una forma embrionale di piano di immanenza, seppur non adeguatamente radicalizzata nella misura in cui il cogito cartesiano resta saldamente ancorato al soggetto. Ritengo, tuttavia, che il più considerevole obiettivo di questa proposta d’indagine non si risolva in una ricostruzione meramente storico-genealogica. Si tratterà, al contrario, di verificare come l’importanza degli esiti raggiunti da Deleuze mediante l’opera di purificazione della nozione di trascendentale sia da individuare su due fronti: 1. La teorizzazione del concetto di campo trascendentale permette a Deleuze di disegnare una forma di temporalità non psicologica e non cronologica fondata sul paradosso secondo cui il tempo costituirebbe un’interiorità non psicologica, o per meglio dire, una dimensione autenticamente trascendentale nella quale il soggetto vive e diviene. 2. In antitesi ai proponimenti della fenomenologia husserliana, l’esito autentico del progetto di purificazione del trascendentale da ogni istanza egologica consiste nell’interruzione della correlazione a priori tra il soggetto e il mondo, nella destituzione della filosofia da ogni pregiudizio antropocentrico, e nella rideterminazione dell’umano niente più che come un effetto, o un caso, del mondo. (shrink)

Nella sua riflessione filosofica sull’immagine filmica Gilles Deleuze sembra aver tradotto nella maniera più immediata, ancorché insolubilmente problematica, la presenza di uno spazio e di un tempo che giocano il proprio ruolo su di una forma passiva di soggettività: è proprio ne L’image- mouvement, infatti, che Deleuze mostra come uno dei passaggi più proficui delle sue osservazioni sul cinema sia proprio la crisi di ciò che egli definisce immagine-azione, a favore, invece, di un’immagine-tempo, o situazione ottica e sonora pura. Per (...) quanto attiene specificamente lo statuto filosofico dell’immagine, si può dire che sia proprio questo passaggio che consente a Deleuze stesso di modulare la sua riflessione riponendo maggiore attenzione all’elemento temporale rispetto invece al movimento — concetto dal quale, ciononostante, l’indagine sul cinema aveva preso abbrivio. (shrink)

Much of the contemporary thought about ecology begins with the questioning of the human exceptionality. By means of this, anthropocentrism is rejected and replaced by a post-humanist framework. In this context, Martin Heidegger‘s oeuvre is credited for its search of alternatives to humanism, particularly because of its rejection of Sartre‘s anthropocentrism. However, while post-humanisms tend to behold the role of technology positively, Heidegger‘s critiques to the technique as a consequence of the same metaphysical and anthropocentric movement are widely known. Instead (...) of considering the common Heideggerian texts about technique, in this paper I explore the relationship between Heidegger and contemporary post-humanisms from the perspective of his existential analytic. In the first place, I will briefly describe the contemporary techno-scientific context, following the insights of Wiener, Haraway and Latour. In the second place, I will consider the relationship between Dasein, cyborgs and animals, discussing the Heideggerian interpretations of Hubert Dreyfus (What Computers Can’t Do) and Steven Crowell (We Have Never Been Animals). (shrink)

Many proponents and opponents of the Corrida de Toros agree in describing the practice as a sacrifice. This surprising agreement is compounded by a further agreement that the sacrificial victim is the bull. In what follows, I contest both points. Beginning with the later, I argue that the victim is not the bull but the torero, especially the matador. Rather than seeing the corrida as the sacrifice of the bull, it is the deferred sacrifice of the torero, and the crowd (...) is on the side of the victim. Moreover, I argue that once the victim status of the matador has been appreciated, it can serve as the foundation for a new interpretation of... (shrink)

In this chapter we examine Merleau-Ponty's chapter, "The Intertwining/The Chiasm", before considering some of the criticisms made by his contemporaries and ‘successors’: Lacan, Irigaray, Levinas, Derrida and Deleuze.

Girard’s attempts to present his main ideas have been numerous and, according to himself, never fully satisfying: many problems arise when looking for the best way to explain what Mimetic Theory is about, mainly because the order of the discourse and the logic of the underlying long argument, just as the micro level of the analysis and the macro one, are twisted with one another in a hermeneutical circle that can easily be misinterpreted as vicious. A thorough work of analysis (...) of the essential logical features of Mimetic Theory main hypotheses has been done by Jean–Pierre Dupuy. In what follows, we are going to use a few of his concepts in order to set the analysis of secularization and modernity and their consequences both at a micro level, dealing with modern pathologies, and at the macro one, investigating the displacement of the sacred. (shrink)

This work is an intersection of gender studies, philosophy, culture studies, with pertinent aspects of subjectivity. Anyone interested in any of these fields or connected with the humanities should read this book to understand that the ‘non-philosophical discourse implies a constitutive entanglement of the real with the transcendental’ (146).

The article analyses Alain Badiou`s philosophy from the point of view of his relation to postmodernity. Alain Badiou is a political activist, mathematician, writer, playwright and literary critic. However, above all, he is a philosopher of the totality who attempts to give a thoroughgoing explanation of the world. This is the sense in which he is an anti-postmodernist. His whole philosophy is directed against sophistry. Badiou consistently builds his own system in order to oppose it to the philosophy of the (...) twentieth century. He does not engage in dogmatic criticism. He goes further and repeatedly finds inspiration in the postmodern thought. Although his philosophy is evidently opposed to it, his anti-postmodernity should be considered a synthetic attempt to exceed two competing traditions. (shrink)

This paper responds to Andrew Benjamin’s recent text on Walter Benjamin by interrogating both philosophers’ conceptualizations of violence. Walter Benjamin remains one of the twentieth century’s most prescient thinkers of violence and analyses of his work, I argue, must reckon with this aspect of his work in order to ground the possibilities his texts hold for the contemporary world.

The first-ever compilation of articles that highlights the intersection of Derridean and feminist theories--a work that represents the extensive and diverse response feminist theorists have had to Derrida, particularly to the issues of gender, identity, and the construction of the subject.

Marion explores the possibility of a God who would not be, who would not have a being. He sees God in agape, Christian charity, or love and obviates the need for imagining or positing the existence or being of God. Th e second edition and a translation of the original French, this book is a volume in the series Religion and Postmodernism brought out by the University of Chicago Press.

Intellectual historians owe Nietzsche a debt for many things, not least for lending the quality of “untimeliness” a positive connotation. In the late 1990s, when Marxism was arguably at its nadir as an intellectual program, much less a political one, Warren Breckman published an insightful study of Marx’s early thought and its genesis out of a series of disputes with the Young Hegelians concerning the state and its ambiguous relationship with theological conceptions of authority. The untimeliness of Breckman’s intervention had (...) much to recommend it. Taking his distance from the pallbearers, Breckman showed that a historical inquiry into the Marxist enterprise increased rather than diminished its contemporary relevance. In the wake of the eastern bloc’s collapse, “civil society” had become the order of the day. Breckman showed that, far from being an innocuous panacea to the terror of state power, the concept had its own contested political history, one that Marx grappled with in ways whose resonance has only grown in the decade since Breckman’s first book appeared.1. (shrink)

Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the main (...) figure who introduced the work of Goldstein and his ‘phenomenology of embodiment’ into France. In this paper I inquire if we should view Canguilhem and Goldstein as ‘biochauvinists’, that is, as thinkers who consider that there is something inherently unique about biological entities as such, and if so, of what sort. (shrink)

Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance through engagement with the legacies of Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

This original study offers a timely reconsideration of the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in relation to art, performance and writing. How can we write about art, whilst acknowledging the transformation that inevitably accompanies translations of both media and temporality? That is the question that persistently dogs Lyotard's own writings on art, and to which this book responds through reference to artists from the recently-formed canon of performance art history, including the myths of seminal figures Marina Abramovic and Vito (...) Acconci, and the controlled documentation of Gina Pane's actions. Through the unstable, untranslatable element that Lyotard calls the figural, his thought is brought to bear on attempts to write a history of performance art and to question the paradoxically prescriptive demand for rules to govern 're-performance'. Kiff Bamford contextualises Lyotard's writings and approach with reference to both his contemporaries, including Deleuze and Kristeva, and the contemporary art about which they wrote, whilst arguing for the pertinence of Lyotard's provocations today. (shrink)

A response to Jean-François Lyotard’s view of postmodernism and the denial of the metanarratives.

Following François Laruelle’s nonstandard philosophy and the work of Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Luce Irigaray, and Rosi Braidotti, Katerina Kolozova reclaims the relevance of categories traditionally rendered “unthinkable” by ...

This article contests the division that, up to now, has characterized the two fundamental approaches to the philosophy of Alain Badiou. The first concentrates its attention upon the domain of being and being-there, while the other is concerned with the event and the retroactive coming-to-be of truths. As a matter of fact, it argues that this division misses Badiou’s core proposal: his attempt to renovate materialistic dialectics in order to account for the emergence of novelty in a divided situation. -/- (...) With this context in mind, the focus of the paper is Badiou’s uninterrupted confrontation with Hegel as the source of the most important concepts that build up his post-dialectical dialectics, even after the so called ‘mathematical turn’, that is to say, the notions of scission and subject. Hence, it analyses these categories as they first appear in Théorie du sujet’s dialectics between algebra and topology. Secondly, it explores how they are transposed in L’Être et l’événement, emphasising the latter’s profoundly dialectical articulation notwithstanding its overly structural and potentially misleading orientation. Thirdly, it tries to underline how Logiques des mondes supplements this one-sidedness with the topological approach of a (new) theory of the subject, where Théorie du sujet represents the ‘vanishing mediator’ between the two tomes of Badiou’s magnum opus. Finally, it concludes that Badiou finds in Hegel a doctrine of the event, motivated by the creation of a new figure of man against those of reaction and obscurantism that dominate modern democratic materialism. (shrink)

Focusing on his last courses at the Collège de France, the present paper aims at exploring the strategic role the notion of parrhesia plays in the elaboration of Foucault’s critical project, according to which parrhesia is what enables the pas- sage from the concept of problematization as an archaeo-genealogical target of inquiry to the idea of problematization as a verbal act of investigation. To this end, the article argues that parrhesia is the condition of possibility for the problematization of one’s (...) mode of subjectivation, whereby it comes to describe a transformative practice of resistance against the existing power regimes in charge of truth. After tracing the seminal formulation of such a form of resistance in the Socratic imperative of taking care of oneself, the paper then concludes by briefly pointing to the importance of Socrates’ parrhesiastic philosophy for the development of Foucault’s own critical ethos. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band leistet eine philosophische Untersuchung des Begriffs Ethos bei Homer. Traditionell schenken die Homer-Interpreten der konkreten Bedeutung des Begriffs allein in Bezug auf die Tiere Aufmerksamkeit und sprechen nicht uber den Zusammenhang des Wortes mit den menschlichen Figuren im Text. Auch wird deren psychologische Dimension in der Regel nicht beachtet. Die Analyse ist ein Beitrag zu einer anderen Art von Interpretation des Begriffs Ethos, in der wichtige Perspektivierungen, wie sie z. B. in der Philosophie, der Handlungspsychologie oder der (...) Gleichnistheorie unternommen werden, Berucksichtigung finden. Eine vollstandige Erfassung des Begriffs wird nicht angestrebt, vielmehr wird versucht, eine neue Lesart des Begriffs ethos im Zusammenhang mit den menschlichen Figuren bei Homer zu eroffnen. (shrink)

This paper explores the overlaps and divergences between network sociologist Harrison White’s second edition of Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge and poststructuralist theories from the past three decades. Although poststructuralist thought is barely discussed in White’s work, comparing the approaches reveals significant convergence. I detail two major overlaps: White’s ideas of control compared to Foucault’s concept of discipline, and White’s conception of identity compared to that of feminist poststructuralists. Differences are apparent also, especially as regards treatment of categorical (...) identities such as gender and race. Then, I turn to two ways poststructuralism and White can be put into productive conversation: how focusing on gender as discursive rather than attributional can help network analysts develop theories that better explain the gendered dimensions of social life, and how using blockmodeling methods can aid feminist poststructuralism in understanding what gender looks like without men’s and women’s bodies present. (shrink)

En este artículo destacamos algunos aspectos ligados a la perspectiva intercultural presente en la obra del filósofo brasileño Antonio Sidekum y del filósofo cubano-alemán R. Fornet-Betancourt. Haciendo referencia a ambos autores buscamos avanzar en una reflexión actual en torno a la ética, al recon..

Philosophy and history (with Jean Hyppolite) -- Philosophy and science (with Georges Canguilhem) -- Philosophy and sociology (with Raymond Aron) -- Philosophy and psychology (with Michel Foucault) -- Philosophy and language (with Paul Ricœur) -- Philosophy and truth (with Jean Hyppolite, Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Aron, Michel Foucault, Paul Ricœur, Alain Badiou and Dina Dreyfus) -- Philosophy and ethics (with Michel Henry) -- Model and structure (with Michel Serres) -- Teaching philosophy through television (with excerpts from Jean Hyppolite, Georges Canguilhem, Raymond (...) Aron, Michel Foucault and Paul Ricœur. Alain Badiou by telephone and Dina Dreyfus in the studio). (shrink)

This article concerns early music, the voice, and early music historiography. In his Harmonies of the World of 1619, Johannes Kepler makes an audacious construction that claims to link celestial harmonies with earthly polyphony singing. Following the lead of Gary Tomlinson, I consider this construction in the light of several ideas from poststructuralism, with a focus on the writing of Foucault, Lacan and Deleuze. Using the voice and its histories as a guide, the article culminates in a discussion of a (...) suitable ‘vocal historiography’. (shrink)

In the philosophy of Alain Badiou, ethics can only arise in relation to an evental truth procedure that breaks from the economic logic of a situation. Further, because for Badiou there cannot be economic truths per se – rather, economic matters must be understood in their relation to one or more truths in the domain of love, art, science or politics – a Badiouian business ethics would look entirely distinct from any ethics that simply places limits on certain kinds of (...) economic activity. Although Slavoj Žižek, among others, has suggested that this marks an essential weakness in Badiou's economic/political theory, it may actually be the greatest strength of his position. Within a capitalist system, a Badiouian business ethics would then be a question of mobilizing economic resources in order to serve the ongoing construction of a truth procedure. For a business to be considered ethical on Badiou's terms, it must break – and continue to break – from the dominant logic of capitalism and its merely economic pursuit of profit maximization. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek is operating from a position of certainty, a position discovered by Jacques Lacan in Seminar XI. In this essay, I examine this position of certainty ("Gewissheit") and the ways this position is distinct from both existential phenomenology and post-structuralism, ultimately arguing that for structuralist psychoanalysis to function requires an intentional forgetting of being.

Review of Peter Gratton's 2012 book, "The State of Sovereignty".

Prompted by the prominence of incest themes in the U.S. literary canon, the author raises and explores the idea of a “democratic theory of incest.” To that end, the paper uncovers, tracks, and documents the interest in incest throughout the Western canon of political thought. It then presents and addresses a “standoff” in theoretical circles today: whereas many nonliberal political theorists have continued and developed the canonical interest in the politics of incest, contemporary liberals have largely dropped out of that (...) extended discussion. By way of a re-reading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo along with an analysis of John Sayles’s 1996 film, Lone Star, the paper outlines a possible way out of a poststructuralist versus liberal theory impasse over incest, thus proposing movement in the direction of a democratic understanding of incest concerns. (shrink)

If literary avant-garde journals and their communities have been, in the twentieth century, a space for creating, if not sustaining, major political utopias, it should help explain why this “literary communism,” as Jean-Luc Nancy called it, is not a weakened or substitutional form of politics. No myth without narration, no implementation without an instrumentation, no organic unity without a political organ voicing its claim, in short: no organicity without an organon. But can there be a (literary) community that does not (...) aim at the achievement of its own assumed truth, a form of writing in common that does not serve to convey a meaning, but bears witness, in its very form, to the fragmentation of meaning? This essay examines three attempts of an affi rmative answer to this question by reappraising three interrelated experimental cases: Jena around 1800 and the Athenaeum journal of the Early Romantics; Walter Benjamin’s journal projects, from the Angelus Novus to the prison camp journal at the end of his life; Maurice Blanchot and the failed trans-European project of what was arguably the most ambitious intellectual journal enterprise of the century, the Revue internationale in the early 1960s. (shrink)

I suggest in this article that there are several aspects of the Lacanian Real that so-called Lacanian literature has not adequately addressed, or barely did so. In this pursuit, I present a deconstructing reading of a number of Lacanian texts. My deconstructive reading suggests that three key features characterize the literature on the Real. First, there always is resistance that is involved in thinking about, and in experiencing the effects of, the Real. Second, the Real is most characteristically thought of (...) in negative terms. Third, the Real is more or less thought of as a limit that cannot be transgressed. A deconstruction of these features leads to two arguments. First, I propose that the deployment of the Real as khôra within a discourse is an originary performativity which speaks of retroactively positing of a have-always-been-there Real. Second, I argue that the Real is the impossible–possible event which is at the heart of ‘saying the Real’. The deconstruction thus leads to a reconfiguration of the Real as a ‘ saying the Real ’ qua event in the discourse. (shrink)

In 'Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot' Chris Danta takes Genesis 22 as the starting point for an investigation of the role of literary imagination. His aim is to read the Genesis story from a literary-theoretical perspective in order to show how it can 'illuminate the secular situation of the literary writer.' To do this, Danta stages a fruitful confrontation between Søren Kierkegaard as defender of religion and inwardness and Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot as (...) defenders of literature. In this review, three important points in this confrontation are highlighted. 1. The problem of identification. 2. The moment of substitution. 3. The spectrality of the writer. (shrink)