This article examines the possible contributions the existentialist tradition might make to environmentalism. I note, first, that Martin Heidegger is a questionable ally, both because his relationship to technology is ambiguous, while his affiliations with the Nazis were not. But the larger existentialist tradition is valuable for the environmental movement because it opens up a field of possibilities for human creativity. Sartre serves as exemplary for the way he struggled with the dialectic between individual autonomy in his early philosophy of (...) freedom, and the needs of the collective as he confronted them in his later turn toward Marxism. But the demands of the collective are more reasonably confronted in the larger legacy of Hegel than in the more limited form they took in Sartre's Marxism. The article concludes that Sartre's struggles can be enlightening to those of us who now seek the joyful wisdom of existential freedom for the individual even as we confront the demands that environmental degradation will place on the collective. (shrink)

This article aims to locate the connections between Hegel’s philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, with a particular focus on the model of intersubjectivity, as drawn from his Phenomenology of Spirit. The roots of the encounter between the philosophy of Hegel and psychoanalytic theory can be traced back to Jacques Lacan and the less well‐considered figure of Jean Hyppolite. Lacan, as a psychoanalyst, used Hegel’s thought in his own theory, as is well known, while Hyppolite was arguably one of the first to (...) write from a philosophical angle about the links between the two seemingly opposed systems of thinking. I will give a broad overview of the use of Hegelian philosophy in psychoanalytic theory from the Hyppolite–Lacan relationship through to contemporary thinkers in the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Although recently the figure of Slavoj Žižek has popularised the Hegel‐psychoanalysis connection, there remains much more to be explored in this branch of Hegel studies that widens the scope beyond the Lacanian‐Marxist version he employs. This article will survey existing literature (in the English language) and thus illuminate the key texts in the history of Hegel’s impact on psychoanalytic theory and the concept of intersubjectivity and gesture towards the future potential of this line of inquiry. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

The most valuable political theoretical contribution made by Marx's idea of socialism is towards the resolution of the seeming opposition of mass democracy and rational government. Marx follows Hegel's redefinition of political rationalization as the actualization of the nascent self?consciousness of the existing ethical world when he uses socialism as a statement of those tendencies of bourgeois society that will create the perspectives of social awareness that allow mass democracy. This thesis is made against aspects of the interpretation of Marx's (...) relation to Hegel in Bolshevik political theory. I claim that the Bolshevik idea of socialism as the militant political intervention of the dictatorship of the proletariat develops, through Engels, a position taken with respect to Hegel's philosophy of right in Marx's Rhenish Journal articles. This idea is, however, pre?Hegelian in the sense that it is open to a democratic criticism based on the philosophy of right understood in an alternative fashion. In his writings after leaving the Rhenish Journal and up to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx makes this alternative available, and the notion of socialism he arrives at here turns on an awareness of the contradictions which make the militant political imposition of freedom impossible. Whereas for Bolshevism socialism is to be imposed on existing society, for Marx it is more the development within that society that makes possible mass democratic freedom. (shrink)

Hyppolite stresses his proximity to Merleau-Ponty, but the received interpretation of his “anti-humanist” reading of Hegel suggests a greater distance between their projects. This paper focuses on an under-explored dimension of their philosophical relationship. I argue that Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite are both committed to formulating a mode of philosophical expression that can avoid the pitfalls of purely formal or literal and purely aesthetic or creative modes of expression. Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to navigate this dichotomy, I suggest, closely resembles Hyppolite’s interpretation of (...) Hegel’s “speculative” mode of expression. In particular, his emphasis on the “mediating” character of philosophical language, which moves between descriptive and creative expression, suggests a debt to Hyppolite. This reading provides more evidence to think that Hyppolite cannot be straightforwardly understood as an anti-humanist or post-phenomenological thinker, and paves the way for a _rapprochement_ between his work and the broader phenomenological tradition. (shrink)

This book provides the first detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of current critical and socio-cultural debates. Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production. Gramsci's achievement is discussed particularly in relation to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas), to Brecht's theoretical writings and to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition especially Merleau-Ponty. She argues for Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time of retreat from Marxist (...) positions on the postmodern left. Antonio Gramsci is distinguished by its range of philosophical grasp, its depth of specialized historical scholarship, and its keen sense of Gramsci's position as a crucial figure in the politics of contemporary cultural theory. (shrink)

My purpose in this text is to offer a general roadmap for navigating most current debates in the metaphysics of social categories regarding what sort of fact it is for a person to inhabit one social category or another—for example, what makes a person Mexican, or gay, or rich. With this goal in mind, I propose classifying the debating positions into three broad camps: common sense theories, socio-historical accounts, and performative theories. I characterise their main differences, identifying the main challenges (...) and achievements of each. I show that for persons well integrated into their categories, the differences between these three broad camps are minuscule, yet become crucial when we try to account for people not so well integrated. Then, I sketch a pluralist proposal that reconciles the three camps I have identified, while doing justice to the challenges presented by interstitial phenomena such as mestizaje, transition, passing, migration, etc. (shrink)

The aim of the work is to examine the relationship between the concepts of “immanence” and “politics” in the works of Hegel and Deleuze. Both Hegel and Deleuze are thinkers of immanence and they explicitly think this concept in relation to the problem of political practice. As I show, they attempt to “ground” politics in immanence. The purpose of this work is to prove that there exists an inherent paradox in the undertaking to “ground” politics in immanence. Both philosophers are (...) confronted with a paradox that emerges from this “grounding”. The paradox appears in the form of natural violence. Both authors fail to contain this violence through arguments. In order to show this, I examine the relationship between two further concepts: history and the state. I compare Hegel’s and Deleuze’s formulations of world-history and universal history, tracing the analogies and differences in how they think the relationship of the state to history. Based on the conclusions I then focus on the relationship of politics to immanence. The paradox of natural violence, I show, emerges from the relationship of the state at the “end of history”. (shrink)

The main purpose of the following inquiry is to emphasise the importance of a phenomenon long neglected by the majority of the human sciences, the artefact; each one of us, no matter what age, sex or culture, is in contact with artefacts every moment of our lives yet despite this they have received scant attention. The study begins by outlining a definition of the artefact, highlighting those characteristics which, in combination, ensure its centrality to social life before, through a discussion (...) of Popper's ideas, proceeding to see how material culture can be conceptualised as meaningful. In order to understand how meaning becomes attached to the artefact the notion of objectification will be analysed and, consequently, so shall the importance of both the type of activity and the physical nature of the materials involved in the artefact's production. Picking up on the theme of materiality this aspect of material culture will be shown to pose major problems to any interpretation of the artefact along semiological lines; language and material culture are evinced to possess fundamentally distinct characteristics which make comparisons between them far from straightforward. These differences will be analysed further, concentrating specifically on the role of context in the establishment of meaning. This leads on to the proposal that our understanding of artefacts can occur on three levels; three forms of knowledge are thus described of which a linguistically formulated type constitutes just one kind. The penultimate chapter tackles the ways in which artefacts affect us, how they are active elements in our relationships with them; therefore, a dialectical position is postulated in which both artefacts and agents take part. Finally, the study concludes by stressing some of its wider implications and suggests a few of the practical situations to which it can be applied. (shrink)