This article offers a combined reading of Karl Löwith’s and Leo Strauss’s critique of social theory from the point of view of the natural law tradition broadly understood. Within the context of a growing interest in revisiting social theory’s debt to natural law, the piece seeks to unfold the connections between the two traditions without searching to restore any kind of natural law. Rather, it looks at their relationships as one of Aufhebung — the suspension and carrying forward — of (...) natural law premises within modern social theory. The works of these two writers point against conventional wisdom within social theory: Löwith’s secularization thesis calls into question the view of the irreligious nature of modernity’s historical break as well as its faith in immanent progress; Strauss’s reconstruction of natural law (right) gives due credit to the non-religious origins of modernity but at the price of withdrawing even more autonomy from any modern claim to self-assertion. Although some compatibility is recognizable in their critiques, I shall also be arguing that their substantive results point to opposite directions. A critical distance must also be maintained from their interpretations in the spirit of reinvigorating the project of modern social theory. (shrink)

The following paper aims to develop the theoretical and practical consequences, philosophical presuppositions, and intellectual aporias to which the reader of Rosi Braidotti is confronted in her approach of an ethics of becoming and the ethical relationships of a transposed or posthuman subject. We take for this purpose two almost marginal examples of her book Transpositions, namely, the human relationships developed with Tamagotchis and other technologies and the so-called “ethics of the penultimate cigarette” which is framed in the “transposition of (...) death.” Braidotti’s posture will be examined and criticized on the light of authors who have reflected, also almost marginally, on the same problems and their contextualization in contemporary and modern philosophy. We intend to show that the author’s claims presume to be schizophrenic and, indeed, she maintains an unfortunate schizophrenic proposal. (shrink)