Straipsnyje grindžiama nuomonė, jog postmodernybė yra iš modernybės kylantis kapitalizmo sistemos būvis, kuriam būdinga gyvybės suprekinimas ir suišteklinimas. Postmodernybę charakterizuoja populiariosios ir medijų kultūros išplitimas. Tos kultūros apima ne tik kultūros prekes, bet ir vartojimo būdus, įgūdžius ir jų lavinimą. Pastaruoju metu jos kuria nemirtingumo vaizdiniams bei nuojautoms palankią kultūrinę, intelektinę ir pasaulėvaizdinę terpę, kurioje struktūriškai įsitvirtina genetinis diskursas ir jo nustatomos žmogaus ir jo gyvenamo pasaulio aiškinimo gairės. Svarbus šio diskurso bruožas yra technologinis inžinerinis jo pobūdis, išryškėjęs susiejant nano (...) ir biotechnologijas, kuriomis tikimasi įveikti gyvąją ir negyvąją gamtą skiriančią prarają, iš reikalingų atomų bei molekulių kuriant reikalingų ląstelių dalis ir klonuojant gyvas būtybes. Gyvybė suprekinama ir suišteklinama patentuojant gyvybės elementus – genus ir su jais susijusius procesus. Daroma išvada, jog visi genetikos, informatikos ir kitų mokslų laimėjimai, teikiantys žmogaus gyvenimo ilginimo galimybių, kurios palaiko gundančią nemirtingumo idėją, jau yra persmelkti prekinių santykių, tad ir pats nemirtingumas įmanomas tik kaip prekė. Aptariami kai kurie evoliuciniai ir religiniai techno sapiens sampratos aspektai. Detaliau gvildenamos dvi „nemirtingumo“ versijos: Z. Baumano, kuris nemirtingumo pažadą sieja su kompiuterinės technikos plėtra prasidėjus „Antrajai medijų erai“, ir J. Baudrillard’o, tegiančio, jog klonavimo technologijos „apgręžia“ evoliuciją ir žmogų gundo virusiniu ar vėžiniu belyčiu nemirtingumu. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: genetinis diskursas, klonavimas, medijų kultūra, nanobiotechnologijos, nemirtingumas, suprekinimas. Genetic Discourse in Media Culture: Temptation by Commodified Immorality Vytautas Rubavičius Summary Postmodernity is maintained as a stage of the development of capitalism. The difference between modernity and postmodernity is explained in relation to the new sphere of commodification and resourcification, namely, that of life and of all natural living processes. Postmodern media culture, or popular culture, is peopled by signs of immortality and various kinds of immortals – cyborgs, clones, zombies, immortal human beings and others. Thus, culture accustoms a consumer to immortals and immortality which is concidered as the main goal of a human being and evolution. By nano-bio-technologies and genetic discourse this goal is made scientifically valid, thus reachable. Genetic discourse is becoming the fundamental world-view providing focal landmarks for the emerging future. Media culture supports the spreading of genetic discourse and facilitates its understanding. The temptation by immortality can be considered as a version of modernist ideology of human liberation from various natural, social and heavenly bonds. This liberation, and also secularization, is supported by a scientific genetic technological discourse which is becoming a stimulating factor of postmodern media production. The genetic explanation of the world is particularly handy for technological reflexivity: the entire world is as if encapsulated into human genes, which become the principle explaining the mystery of life, evolution and the future of humanity, thus rendering power to produce the human proper form and the future of people. All the possibilities stemming from the new genetic and biotech discoveries fell under the regulation of property relations by patenting, thus making “immortality” – as a temptation and brand – not only an exeptional commodity, but also a political tool and a commodifying force. As the relationships of private property have penetrated natural biogenetic diversity and, having turned it into a resource, the cognitive subject has reached the goal to secularise the Universe, which he has set for himself: only he as the owner and producer of genes lures people with the eternal shapes of the clones and their genetic information, which will be sustained in any location of the Universe. The temptation by “immortality” will become even stronger when the genetic code is mastered. The future of humanity is related to the mixed forms of life, trans-genic or otherwise genetically modified organisms and techno-human forms that will help to postpone, and later to conquer, death. Even thinkers with religious tendencies perceive the technological improvement of human beings as their evolution towards the techno sapiens and consider such a development as an advancement towards the Kingdom of God. The technologization of human beings is imagined in terms of their divination. Yet in this case the character of contemporary science secularising God and obliterating the perception of divinity is overlooked. Two versions of immortality are analyzed more closely – that of Z. Bauman, who links it with the development of computer technologies, and that of J. Baudrillard, who gives a warning that by cloning technologies humanity is trying to inverse the evolution and to return to the undifferentiated state of cells. The conclusion is drawn that regardless of how we understand ‘immortality,’ argue over its reality or unreality, all possibilities to prolong human life granted by genetics, informatics and other advances in science and technologies, which support the tempting idea of immortality, have already been penetrated by commodity relationships; therefore, “immortality” itself will be available only as a commodity. Keywords: cloning, commodification, genetic discourse, immortality, media culture, nano-bio-technologies. (shrink)

. Time and the event. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 223-242.

. Time, virtuality and the Goddess. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 270-287.

The ‘French reading’ of Nietzsche crystallized almost 50 years ago at the 1972 conference at Cerisy-la-Salle, Nietzsche aujourd’hui. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, with the theme of ‘The Politics of Difference’, Newcastle University, 20–21 September 2018. Nietzsche’s fortunes have since undergone some dramatic shifts in France, but there are signs that he is once again on the ascendency, in particular the 2016 edited collection Pourquoi nous sommes Nietzschéens (a (...) direct riposte to the 1991 Pourquoi nous ne sommes pas Nietzschéens). Taking a bearing from the French readings, I want to explore the question of what ‘Nietzsche today’ might mean for us today. At Cerisy in 1972, the meaning of Nietzsche was centred on the twin critiques of humanism and capitalism. While these issues persist, several articles in the 2016 collection indicate that they are now inflected through the vast contemporary significance of technology. One of the key debates here is Nietzsche’s significance for transhumanism. For Bernard Stiegler, transhumanism is the culmination of nihilism, understood as the reign of big data and the total quantification of the self. In this regard, he alludes to a ‘hypernihilism’ of the contemporary era, characterised by the quantifying effects of information technologies, which work in conjunction with capitalism to produce an ultimate ‘averaging’ force. I will argue that Stiegler gives an essential corrective to the largely critical engagements with neonihilism of the Nietzscheans of the previous generation, but that his emphasis on the value of negentropy risks reaffirming the logic of the transhumanism he critiques. Nietzscheanism today, I will argue, requires an appreciation of the dual tendencies of nihilism – identified here as neonihilism and hypernihilism – such that we must draw on contributions from both generations of French Nietzscheans in order to think and respond to the problems of our contemporary era. (shrink)

ArgumentDarwin's narrative of the earthquake at Concepción, set within the frameworks of Lyellian uniformitarianism, romantic aesthetics, and the emergence of geology as a popular science, is suggestive of the role of the sublime in geological enquiry and theory in the early nineteenth century. Darwin'sBeaglediary and later notebooks and publications show that the aesthetic of the sublime was both a form of representing geology to a popular audience, and a crucial structure for the observation and recording of the event from the (...) beginning. The awesome spectacle of the earthquake proved in turn the magnitude of the forces at stake in earth history, and helped to make geology an epic conjoining the history of civilization with the history of the earth. (shrink)

In this paper I want to analyse the meaning of education for democracy and thinking as this is generally understood by Philosophy for Children. Although we may be inclined to applaud Philosophy for Children's emphasis on children, critical thinking, autonomy and dialogue, there is reason for scepticism too. Since we are expected as a matter of course to subscribe to the basic assumptions of Philosophy for Children, we seem to become tied, as it were, to the whole package, without reservation. (...) Following ideas of Hannah Arendt, I draw attention to the instrumentalised nature of Philosophy for Children and the loss of originality that this instrumentalisation means. This does not mean that I wish to abandon Philosophy for Children. The point is rather that I want to examine whether or not another kind of philosophy for children is possible. (shrink)

In one of the essays in his recent book on Christianity, La déclosion (2005), Nancy discusses the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Nancy opens this discussion with a reference to Lyotard’s book on this relationship: Un trait d’union (1993). Both Lyotard and Nancy examine a very early figure in the emergence of Christianity from Judaism—whereas Lyotard focuses on the epistles of Paul, Nancy reads the epistle of James. Lyotard concludes that the hyphen in the expression ‘Judeo-Christian’ actually conceals ‘the most (...) impenetrable abyss within Western thought’. With this abyss, Lyotard refers to the point of departure of Judaism: the event in which a Voice has left behind letters, inaugurating an interminable work of interpretation. For Nancy, however, it is rather Christianity, and therefore, Western culture, which is deconstructive in nature. Its composition is co-original with a decomposition, and therefore, with an openness. In James, Nancy finds an emphasis on praxis, in such a way that existence is to be understood as transcendent within itself. With this reading of James, Nancy seems to deny that there is a fundamental difference between Judaism and Christianity. In order to clarify the differences between Lyotard and Nancy, it is shown that, in Lyotard’s view, an unsublatable alterity comes with aisthèsis, whereas in Nancy’s view, alterity comes with existence as such. (shrink)

Often associated with themes in political philosophy and aesthetics, the work of Jean-François Lyotard is most known for his infamous definition of the postmodern in his best-known book, La condition postmoderne, as incredulity towards metanarratives. The claim of this article is that this famous claim of Lyotard is actually embedded in a philosophy of technology, one that is, moreover, still relevant for understanding present technoscience. The first part of the article therefore sketches Lyotard’s philosophy of technology, mainly by correcting three (...) common misconceptions: that La condition postmoderne would only be about metanarratives, whereas in fact, it is mainly about what replaces them, namely performativity; that performativity would be shorthand for capitalism, whereas in reality, capitalism is the latest instance of a longer history of performativity; and that Lyotard’s reflections on science and technology would be restricted to this book alone, whereas in reality, a well-articulated philosophy of technology, centered around the concept of technoscience, is found in his later work. The second part of the article then aims to highlight the contemporary relevance of this philosophy of technoscience through a brief examination of two contemporary technosciences: synthetic biology and data science. (shrink)

This essay explores the relation between repetition and thought in Bergson and Deleuze. In Bergson, this relation is seen in the method of intuition by which thought is made to think in time and in the ‘rhythms’ at work in how intuition is a contact with time or life, urging conceptual precision. This framework is used to clarify Deleuze's thought without image as that contingent encounter with the persistent forces of life that demand the perseverance of thought. Far from stressing (...) difference alone, both link the repetition in life to the unsettling persistence required to develop a truly new thought. (shrink)

In this essay I contest the view that evolution can be conceived as a cosmic entity working out a plan of increasing negentropic complexification. The problems associated with this view, characteristic of a great deal of contemporary speculation, are outlined in section I. In section II I go on to further problematise current constructions of technics and machines and provide an alternative ‘machinic’ model of the play of entropy and evolution. In section III I examine the aesthetic praxis of Stelarc (...) as a site in which the ‘meaning’ of post‐human evolution can be productively contested and illuminated. (shrink)

Emancipation is a legitimate human interest. It may be said that Foucault in his last works is concerned with putting forward a strategy for emancipation. The strategy consists in an aesthetic construction of the self. It is argued that this strategy ultimately fails and that, instead of retreating to the self, we need to return to the community level and to examine the rules of discourse that operate there. Contrary to Foucault's strategy, Habermas argues that what we need is a (...) communicative rationality capable of correcting discursive distortions. Coming from a different angle, Lyotard argues that what we need at the community level is a set of rules that prevent any one discourse totalizing all others. Such rules would ensure just gaming. Together, Lyotard and Habermas offer us an ethics that has the potential to serve the human interest in emancipation. (shrink)

In this article the importance of the representational character of politics is illustrated on the basis of the philosophy of Kant. The vanishing of the noumenal in post-modern thinking seems to imply fundamental changes in the sensitive response – aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime – to politics. In the Kantian paradigm the meaning of our affective response to the violence of (human) nature is ruled by a moral perspective of practical reason. Although the representation of practical reason in (...) the empirical is only possible in an indirect way by means of a schematism of analogy, the corresponding – subjectively teleological – aesthetic feelings both of harmony in the beautiful and of resistance in the sublime do symbolize in a reflective judgement the morally determined character and the objectively conceived teleology of nature in the system of rights of a single state as well as of the cosmopolitan world order. (shrink)

This paper explores the continuing relevance to education of ideas about art and resistance that Jean-François Lyotard signalled in his curated exhibition in 1985 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris entitled Les Immatériaux. The exhibition was for Lyotard the ‘staging’ of a resistance at the dawning of an information age that challenged the prioritisation of computerised ‘data’ through the very deconstruction of data as presented in artistic form. While the implications of this event for art exhibitions are still being (...) theorised and debated, it is the insight Les Immat​ériaux provides as pedagogical encounter that is the focus of this article. The paper explores the exhibition in the context of the immateriality of art and develops this argument towards a notion of artistic testimony that then culminates in an analysis for the pedagogical significance of the exhibition in the information drenched, highly networked context of contemporary education. (shrink)

This article analyses the way in which websites of conservation foundations organise the affective investments of viewers in animals by the use of webcams. Against a background of—often overly—general speculation on the influence of electronic media on our engagement with the world, it focuses on one particular practice where this issue is at stake. Phenomenological investigation is supplemented with ethnographic observation of user practice. It is argued that conservation websites provide caring spaces in two interrelated ways: by providing affective spaces (...) where users’ feelings are evoked, articulated and organised; and by opening up ethical space where the beauty of animals appears as an incentive to care. As an alternative to thinking of on- and off-line places as clearly delineated and of bodies and technologies as separate entities, the analysis focuses on trajectories of engagement that cut through these in various directions. In actual acts of looking and being affected, users, animals, places and technologies are intimately entwined. The article further suggests how focussing on trajectories of involvement can be developed to evaluate various websites and their user activity in relationship to clearly defined goals, e.g. conservation goals. (shrink)

Ex-Machina and Morgan, two recent science-fiction films that deal with the creation of humanoids, also explored the relationship between artificial intelligence, spatiality and the lingering question mark regarding artificial consciousness. In both narratives, the creators of the humanoids have tried to mimic human consciousness as closely as possible, which has resulted in the imprisonment of the humanoids due to proprietary concerns in Ex-Machina and due to the violent behavior of the humanoid in Morgan. This article addresses the dilemma of whether (...) or not the humanoids in both films possess high levels of artificial consciousness and its possible consequences regarding focalization, a narrative term that presupposes subjectivity, as well as offer two new categories of posthuman focalization—X-focalization and A-focalization. The issue of captivity also has far-reaching ethical implications when considering the underlying assumption of artificial consciousness—if humanoids are indeed endowed with a subjective inner life, then they are entitled to be treated as moral agents, equivalent to humans rather than animals. (shrink)

This paper examines the ways in which Luce Irigaray and Jean-François Lyotard critique western metaphysics by drawing on notions of birth and infancy. It shows how both thinkers position birth as an event of beginning that can be reaffirmed in every act of initiation and recommencement. Irigaray's reading of Diotima's speech from Plato's Symposium is positioned as a key text for this project alongside a number of essays by Lyotard in which he explores the potency of infancy as the condition (...) of philosophy itself. Despite this potency, however, Lyotard suggests that metaphysics is haunted by a melancholia that is inseparable from the limits of thought. I argue that Irigaray is able both to explain why western metaphysics is constitutively melancholic and to offer a shift in perspective that means we are not inevitably condemned to melancholia. The paper concludes that while Lyotard's account of infancy challenges the terms of western metaphysics from within, Irigaray's reassessment of our beginnings in birth offers the possibility of an alternative metaphysical horizon. (shrink)

Challenging the formalist critical legacy of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, this essay advocates an alternative philosophical lineage for Modernist painting through a specific focus on Barnett Newman's vertical stripe or ‘zip’. This genealogy is rooted in Newman's own self-confessed interest in painting as a disclosure of the sensation of time and Deleuze's overt break with Kant. In light of the latter, the zip takes on the function of Deleuze's Figure: the material support that generates, sustains and also disperses a (...) precise sensation. (shrink)

This paper explores the cultural value of desiring nature through reading the travel narratives of Val Plumwood and Alphonso Lingis with the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. As Game suggests this textual practice produces different ways of writing the social that undoes the nature/culture opposition informing popular discourses and much cultural theory. Rethinking the value of nature/culture relations has tended to be the domain of environmental philosophy. Yet a cultural analysis also has much to contribute to current debates around value (...) and identity, embodiment and representations of desire. Such a shift requires rethinking the sensory relation between self and nature through the mediation of language. Two quite distinctive experiences of awe provide texts for this analysis. In the desire to know non‐human nature as other, Lingis and Plumwood are moved by a wish to become nearer, to move beyond the bounds of an identity premised on a cultural relation of mastery over nature. These are compelling narratives, for they do not simply indulge the reader in a romantic appreciation of nature's wildness, as if nature was simply an object of aesthetic contemplation and background to the unfolding drama of human identity. These journeys involve disturbing transformations of self; Plumwood travels into the dangerous waters of the crocodile's territory in Kakadu National Park, Australia, while Lingis encounters the uninhabitable terrain of the Antarctic. The reverberating effects of awe produce a movement of becoming ‐ becoming‐animal, becoming‐nature, which contests the Hegelian desire for mastery of nature and the teleological structure of desire itself aimed at unity. Awe as a profoundly disturbing relation, threatens to undo the dominant fantasy of human identity as pure culture, separate from the realm of nature, body and materiality. (shrink)

This essay sets out from the premise that the films of Jacques Rivette merit sustained reconsideration in the framework provided by Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In particular it explores the concepts of ‘the powers of the false’ and ‘fabulation’ as ways of engaging with Rivette's cinematic oeuvre, with a particular focus on his Paris-set films. On this basis the article seeks to add to the readings undertaken by Deleuze himself and, in the light of Rivette's cine-thinking, to examine in (...) tandem both films to which Deleuze directly responded, such as Le Pont du nord, and later post-Deleuze renegotiations of the city such as Secret défense. (shrink)

This article discusses the way in which a group of contemporary cultural theorists in whose work we see a “new materialism” (a term coined by Braidotti and DeLanda) at work constitutes a philosophy of difference by traversing the dualisms that form the backbone of modernist thought. Continuing the ideas of Lyotard and Deleuze they have set themselves to a rewriting of all possible forms of emancipation that are to be found. This rewriting exercise involves a movement in thought that, in (...) the words of Bergson, can be termed “pushing dualism to an extreme.” By this movement, Deleuze has stated, “difference is pushed to the limit,” that is, using Colebrook’s words, “difference is shown differing.” The article addresses the ways in which modernity’s dualisms (structured by a negative relation between terms) are traversed, and how a new conceptualization, and ontology , of difference (structured by an affirmative relation) comes to be constituted along the way. New materialism leaves behind all prioritizations (implicitly) involved in modern dualist thinking since a difference structured by affirmation does not work with predetermined relations (e.g., between mind and body) nor does it involve a (counter-)hierarchy between terms. The article makes explicit the methodology of the current-day rise of non-dualist thought, both in terms of its non-classificatory mode of (Deleuzian) thinking and in terms of the theory of the time of thought thus effectuated (Lyotard’s notion of ‘rewriting modernity’ is not a post-modernism). Throughout the article we will engage with an example in order to demonstrate the ontology that is being practiced following this methodology: How does a new (feminist) materialism traverse the sexual dualisms that structure modernist (feminist) thinking? This example also shows how a feminist post-modernism (found in the canonical work of Butler) has remained dualist, and what makes new materialism “new.” Freed from a dualist methodology, the modernist emancipatory project comes to full fruition in new materialism. (shrink)

This article discusses the way in which a group of contemporary cultural theorists in whose work we see a “new materialism” (a term coined by Braidotti and DeLanda) at work constitutes a philosophy of difference by traversing the dualisms that form the backbone of modernist thought. Continuing the ideas of Lyotard and Deleuze they have set themselves to a rewriting of all possible forms of emancipation that are to be found. This rewriting exercise involves a movement in thought that, in (...) the words of Bergson, can be termed “pushing dualism to an extreme.” By this movement, Deleuze has stated, “difference is pushed to the limit,” that is, using Colebrook’s words, “difference is shown differing.” The article addresses the ways in which modernity’s dualisms (structured by a negative relation between terms) are traversed, and how a new conceptualization, and ontology, of difference (structured by an affirmative relation) comes to be constituted along the way. New materialism leaves behind all prioritizations (implicitly) involved in modern dualist thinking since a difference structured by affirmation does not work with predetermined relations (e.g., between mind and body) nor does it involve a (counter-)hierarchy between terms. The article makes explicit the methodology of the current-day rise of non-dualist thought, both in terms of its non-classificatory mode of (Deleuzian) thinking and in terms of the theory of the time of thought thus effectuated (Lyotard’s notion of ‘rewriting modernity’ is not a post-modernism). Throughout the article we will engage with an example in order to demonstrate the ontology that is being practiced following this methodology: How does a new (feminist) materialism traverse the sexual dualisms that structure modernist (feminist) thinking? This example also shows how a feminist post-modernism (found in the canonical work of Butler) has remained dualist, and what makes new materialism “new.” Freed from a dualist methodology, the modernist emancipatory project comes to full fruition in new materialism. (shrink)

Jean-Francois Lyotard's essay `Adorno as the Devil' had argued that Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music was a `diabolic' work of `negative theology' which attributed to Schoenberg's music a secret redemptive power. However, in his later writings, such as the essays in The Inhuman, Lyotard has himself moved close to a `negative theological' position with respect to modernity, time, aesthetics and music. The paper uses the occasion of Lyotard's own theologically inspired essays on music, `God and Puppet' and `Obedience', to (...) re-evaluate the following: Adorno's claims that music transcends mere language and `reaches' for the theological; and more general claims within modern western culture on behalf of music's ability to express the inexpressible. The argument is that the music as negative theology position is not inherently metaphysical but rather that it reflects the importance of the `unsayable' to modern conceptions of reason. In resisting the `closure' of the modern narrative of reason, music, as a temporal art, has often given expression to the more radical forms of alterity present within modern forms of time. In other words, negative theology is not the discourse of the devil; it is the impossible discourse of western reason and its internal fracturing. (shrink)

The nature of culture as the symbolic expression of inarticulate matter is explored from a range of different cultural perspectives. Raymond Williams's work on culture, especially his ideas on material and symbolic production, serves to introduce an analysis of matter and its place in cultural production. The mutable nature of matter is explored through the modern physics of quantum theory as well as modern art, especially the work of Jasper Johns. Late‐modern culture is viewed in terms of a mutable space (...) of matter that resists meaning and location. The implications of this resistance for understanding the cultivation of knowledge and subject‐object relations are then pursued in the contexts of art history, the ‘social body’, the society of generalized communication, multi‐media culture, and computerization. (shrink)

The sublime in classical aesthetics arrived at a famous formulation with Kant as a subjective quality more elevated than beauty, linked to commotion and respect followed by reaffirmation. However, a new interpretation of the Schopenhauerian sublime is necessary in its transforming appreciation of the importance of this feeling as a psychological state, which is not yet metaphysical as usually understood, when dealing with struggling situations without resolution. Here the focus will be on a variety of the sonorous sublime in contemporary (...) music, which finds resonances with Schopenhauer’s sublime: Witold Lutoslawski’s Three Poems of Henri Michaux for mixed chorus and orchestra focuses on unpredictability and form-contrariness, “picturing” surrealist texts of uncertainty in Pensées, violence in Le Grand Combat, and resignation in Repos dans Malheur. (shrink)

In what senses can the academy be said to be a site of culture? Does that very idea bear much weight today? Perhaps the negative proposition has more substance, namely that the academy is no longer a place of culture. After all, we live in dark times-of unbridled power, tyranny, domination and manipulation. Some say that we have entered an age of the posthuman or even the inhuman. It just may be, however, that in such a world, the academic community (...) is needed more than ever for it offers a culture of justified revelation. It is a culture that reveals the world to us in new ways, but in ways that are attested and contested; its judgements emerge out of a critical and unworldly pedantry. With some hesitancy, we can legitimately therefore speak of not just a culture of the academic community but, indeed, the culture of the academic community. (shrink)

The essay continues the discussion on democracy begun in Derrida Today 4:2, interrogating the associations between the nature of the pharmakon and democracy ‘itself’, seen as ‘the sovereignty of the people’. Starting with Derrida's notion of writing (and grammatology in general) as what he calls the ‘errant democrat’, shared by – and indeed defining – all, and at the same time prior to the demos, Bernard Stiegler makes the further claim that this foundation of democracy, the pharmakon, is not simply (...) a dialectical site of poison and remedy, as it is often seen, but rather a neutral space or referent that simultaneously connects and disconnects through Stiegler's wider sense of grammatisation, which includes Derrida's sense but extends to all tertiary memory, those external mnemonic devices that not only articulate but guide and indeed anticipate culture and its evolution. The implications of a pharmako-democracy are enormous in a hypertechnological epoch in technics as a tool has emerged as a controlling cultural force. In this sense pharmacopolitics are the only politics. The essay considers how Derrida's exploration of this pharmako-neutrality is at work in Specters of Marx as well as ‘Plato's Pharmacy’, and how it provides a frame for and a bridge to Jean-François Lyotard's related sense of desire in Libidinal Economy, where pharmacological neutrality must also be seen as excess or, in Lyotard's word for it, ‘inascribable’. (shrink)

Masculinity? This book attempts to answer this one-word question by revisiting key philosophical concepts in the construction of masculinity, not in order to re-write or debunk them again, but in order to provide a radically new departure to what masculinity means today. This new departure focuses on an understanding of sexuality and gender that is neither structured in oppositional terms nor in performative terms, but in a perpendicular relation akin to that which brings space and time together. In doing so, (...) this book doesn’t aim to establish yet another theory within the field of masculism or men’s studies, but to put forward a personal account of how a revised understanding of the relationship between space, time, and gender can thoroughly alter concepts of masculinity. virility and patriarchy. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the relationship between Lyotard’s account of the sublime in art and Kant’s own attempt at considering sublime art as a possible counterpart to fine art. Lyotard recognises the roots of modern art - and avant-garde particularly -in Kant’s account of the sublime. This is interesting, forit is generally assumed that Kant didn’t devise the notion to be applied to art as such. In the lack of any explicit consideration of artistic sublime in Kant’s text, what (...) could be the background for Lyotard’s analysis? My contention is that this reading of the Third Critique is only partially correct. Unlike what is commonly believed, much room is left in Kant’s text for consideration of the sublime in art. Kant himself envisages the possibility that the sublime be found in art and considers artistic representations of the sublime possible for art-forms. How can twentieth-century art be sublime in a Kantian way? And what role does Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas play in Lyotard’s own account? (shrink)

This essay explores the works of German artist Gustav Metzger as a potential response to Theodor W. Adorno’s dictum “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”). It argues that culture, as understood in the Adornian sense, is inextricably barbaric as a result of simply being after Auschwitz. Culture must acknowledge the finitude in its own ability to live up to an ethical demand in response to justice, whose arrival is infinitely deferred. In (...) spite of this, culture, and art in particular, must not refrain from the very act of writing. Metzger’s works are discussed as aesthetic responses to the “new categorical imperative” of Adorno, who addresses art’s failure in light of Auschwitz by pointing to aporias that constitute the inescapable condition of “barbarism.” This essay suggests that Metzger’s aesthetic articulations are nonbarbaric ruptures, in that they challenge our living on irresponsibly within the condition of barbarism via a constant confrontation with complicity. (shrink)

This work represents an interdisciplinary attempt at the development of a-- scientific theory of norms and normativity. Normativity, understood in its most general interpretation as value determinations and prescriptions, has traditionally been troublesome to account by science and difficult to “place” within a scientific worldview. Such an accomplishment is attempted by the joining in conversation of two bodies of literature. The first of these is Steve Fuller’s naturalist epistemology and the second corresponds to the situated study of cognition, along with (...) the epistemologies that have resulted from their findings. These two bodies of literature constitute the most radically naturalist attempts at developing a viable frame of epistemological and/or normative reference within their respective fields. (shrink)

This Master of Arts thesis is in two parts: a novel, An Anarchy of Man, and an exegesis which places the novel in relation to philosophical concerns about the self and the way those concerns are portrayed in selected works of Western literature. The novel is set in Canberra and Sydney and tells the story of the relationship between two characters: Joe and Gin. It explores the way we in the modern Western world think about ourselves and those around us. (...) Chapter One considers the view of the self in the work of the philosopher Rene Descartes and explores how this view is portrayed in three contemporary Australia novels, and in An Anarchy of Man. Chapter Two examines post-Cartesian views of the self, especially those in the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and then considers the way the self is portrayed in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and in my own An Anarchy of Man. Chapter Three examines postmodern conceptions of the self and considers how these conceptions are portrayed in the work of the contemporary American novelist Don DeLillo and in my own An Anarchy of Man. (shrink)