The value of the arts is often measured in terms of human creativity against instrumental rationality, while art for art's sake defends against a utility of art. Such critiques of the technical and formulaic are themselves formulaic, repeating the dualism of the head and the heart. How should we account for this formula? We should do so by investigating its determination within metaphysical and social relations, ancient and modern, and by comprehending the notion of freedom carried therein. This opens up (...) the value of the arts to a modern metaphysics and modern notion of freedom. This value, and this freedom, find currency in a notion of philosophical and political education, and especially in a modern conception of liberal arts education, where freedom is to learn. (shrink)

This essay argues that nano-images would be best understood with an aesthetical approach rather than with an epistemological critique. For this aim, I propose a ‘techno-aesthetical’ approach: an enquiry into the way instruments and machines transform the logic of the sensible itself and not just the way by which it represents something else. Unlike critical epistemology, which remains self-evidently grounded on a representationalist philosophy, the approach developed here presents the advantage of providing a clear-cut distinction between image-as-representation and other modes (...) of existence of images, such as the one of ‘ imaginaction ’ that I draw from a comparison between far-field and near-field microscopies. Once this regime of imaginaction is distinguished from representation, I focus on nanotechnological percepts and argue that they follow a transmodal logic. I then draw the implications of this enquiry in terms of a new sensible condition that changes the way we think of non-living objects. Finally, I conclude that if techno-aesthetics dares to posit and articulate sensibility beyond the privileged sphere of subject/object relationships, it simultaneously engages us to consider the political character of our responsibilities towards the design of nano-engineered sensorial spaces. (shrink)

In this text I investigate the increasing usage of the Rights of Nature to approach the task of Stewardship for the Earth. The Ecuadorian constitution of 2008 introduces the indigenous concept of Pachamama and interpretes nature as a subject of rights. Reflecting the two 2017 cases of the Whanganui River and the Gangotri and Yamunotri Glaciers, my main argument is that, although the language of individual rights relies on modern subjectivity as well as the constitutionalism of the secular nation state, (...) it is obviously seen as a trans-cultural tool to justify Human Stewardship over the Earth in the Age of Anthropocene. I argue that the new Rights of Nature debate “provides” a straightforward justification of the Stewardship for the Earth and it includes two moments aimed to transcend European Modernity. The Rights Approach justifies obligations towards nature beyond human interests and it appeals to indigenous knowledge as an alternative sphere of argumentation. The relation of this endevor to the Anthropocene is twofold: The indigenous worldviews can now be translated into Rights of Nature because of the two core items of the Anthropocene that are gaining more and more acceptance: the idea of the Earth as a system and of history as a non-linear process. The scientific description of the Earth system offered by the Anthropocene supports holistic narratives of the Rights of Nature and facilitates the recognition of non-Western worldviews. At the same time the Rights of Nature help to clarify the normative claims implicit in the Anthropocene because the integrity of natural items and processes is presented as the explicit reason for a responsible human stewardship towards the Earth. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy's phenomenology of listening makes a series of claims about the sonic/auditory nature of the subject. First among these is the claim that the subject is a subject to the extent that it is listening, that it is all ears. The subject emerges on the back of the resonance of timbre in the body and the body's becoming-rhythmic. These claims are phrased often in musical terms, or making use of terms and rhetoric from the domains of music theory and (...) music psychology. This article explores the role of music in Nancy's phenomenology with a particular view to the nature of listening in the contemporary world: both how listening is figured as a part of what Nancy terms the inoperative community and how listening figures the cognitive and phenomenological constitution of the subject. (shrink)

This essay conducts a reading of Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Jacques Rancière’s respective theorizations of the image. Using Nancy’s notion of literary communism, I first show how he and Rancière conceive the image as a site of community’s open writing and contestation. My reading then demonstrates how this “communism of the image” exposes Rancière’s repetition of an ontological gesture that he has attempted to dismiss as Heideggerian.

This article aims to explore the philosophical approach to faith after deconstruction as manifested in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy. By taking the saturated phenomenon as its focus, the analysis seeks to demonstrate that whilst Marion’s thinking proves to be an innovative re-imagining of the possibilities of phenomenology, its problematic recourse to a supplementary hermeneutic means that saturation can never be adequately applied to faith without simultaneously compromising the excessive intuition upon which it relies. The article then (...) explores whether Nancy’s suggestion that saturation be re-framed as faith can offer a viable alternative approach. Whilst the post-phenomenological modality within which Nancy operates means it may be problematic to retain the term ‘saturation’ in the exact sense Marion gives it, it is argued that Nancy’s version of saturated faith allows us to approach the binary divide between philosophy and theology from a different direction, resulting in a vision of faith that cuts across theism and atheism, destabilising them from within. Although Nancy’s thought in this area certainly does nothing to respond to persistent questions surrounding the place of institutionalized religion within secular modernity, it nevertheless serves as a powerful tool for thinking the possibilities of faith in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Der Artikel untersucht das Konzept des „Neuen Menschen“ am Beispiel der Ästhetik und Anthropologie des Bauhauses. Maßgeblich ist dafür das Verhältnis von Körper und Technik, wie es auf der Bauhausbühne für den Tanz insbesondere durch Oskar Schlemmer konzipiert, bildlich und tänzerisch dargestellt und in seinem Unterricht systematisch ausgebaut wurde. Die Idee von „Mensch und Kunstfigur“, die Relation von Mensch, Material, Umraum und Praxis wird modellhaft umgesetzt in Schlemmers „Triadischem Ballett“ und den „Bauhaustänzen“. Ausgehend von diesem Beispiel aus der Avantgarde des (...) 20. Jahrhunderts wird in dem Artikel gefragt, wie sich diese Idee des Menschen als „Gefüge“ von Körper, Technik, Umwelt im zeitgenössischen Tanz weiterentwickelt: am Beispiel von Choreographien von Gerhard Bohner („Im goldenen Schnitt“), Ola Maciejewska („Bombyx Mori“) und William Forsythe („Black Flags“). (shrink)

Touching on Nancy and Derrida offers a glimpse not only into the thesis both of Jean-Luc Nancy's critique of touch and of Derrida's Le Toucher, but also into the threshold of a technology of (the) sense to come. This glimpse is an interrogation, and one that is both historic and historical, in the sense that Derrida, in addressing Jean-Luc Nancy's work, has presented us with an encyclopedic history of touch in the philosophic tradition from Aristotle to Nancy, one in which (...) what Derrida calls “transcendental archifacticity” is accorded its proper value, and within which any seeming anthropological privilege, as an inherent aspect of the Phenomenological Reduction is, as Derrida says, ‘overshadowed.’ Such an overshadowing is both strategic, in terms of a historical phenomenological project, and tactical, in Derrida's investigative sense: tactical in terms of implementation, manifestation, manipulation (i.e. through the application of the hand, manus) and in terms of tact, tactility; to which must be tacked on, à la Nancy, con-tact, ‘with touch,’ a ‘with-touch’ in which a béance, a gash or dash, opens out in-between, ‘at the very point’ to use Derrida's repeated specification, of bifurcation and of con-tact, at the junction point of the ‘spacing out’ of a laminated différance con-noting more than it has or had ever done in Derrida's work itself. *. (shrink)

This study presents a discourse on the question of incompletion and simultaneously inaugurates the development of a critical approach to contemporary social and political questions concerning selfhood, thought and community in terms of incompletion. Such a strategy has taken place on two main levels in this work. Firstly, there is a close textual reading and analysis of texts where the question of incompletion has been engaged with. Secondly, there is a historical/social analysis of existing institutions, this is a secondary analysis (...) of how the United Nations can be conceived in terms of completion or incompletion in relation to the quest for community. A major part of the close textual reading deals with French post-structuralist writers such as Bataille, Derrida, Foucault and Jean Luc Nancy. These writers are of interest in this work to the extent that they think central problematics of the philosophical tradition as necessarily and unavoidably incomplete. An important tension in the work of these writers is explored by showing that they theorise the central concepts of the self, thought and community as being impossible to resolve in any reachable present and yet they also do not abandon these central problematics either. The theoretical task entails bridging the gap between the deconstructive and the constructive, the nihilistic and the utopian within poststructuralism itself, and this, paradoxically, is to attempt an agitated reconciliation. Such a reconciliation may only act to deepen the difficulties to be found within the thought of such writers, but the theorization of incompletion does ultimately seek to both comprehend and critique contemporary difficulties surrounding the questions of community and selfhood. (shrink)