The present book addresses the background, rationale, general structure, and particular aims and arguments characterizing our third and last volume about "humor" and "cruelty". A guiding foray is provided into the vast expert literature that can be retrieved in the Western humanities and social sciences on these two terms. Pivotal thinkers and crucial notions are duly identified, highlighted, and examined. Apposite subsidiary references are also included, especially with regard to psychodynamics and clinical psychology, existentialism, feminism, liberalism, Marxism, and representative recent (...) studies in the philosophy of humor and its cognates. The stage is thus set for the exploration and assessment of the conflicts between humor and cruelty unfolding in Part 2 of Volume 3. Being the philosophical terminus of our entire research project, Volume 3 counterbalances, complements, and, occasionally, complexifies the numerous forms of mutual cooperation between humor and cruelty that the preceding Volume 2 had unearthed and discussed. (shrink)

In many of his writings, Castoriadis argues that ‘the discovery of the imagination’ occurs in the works of Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Freud, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Although he has systematically encountered and interrogated the works of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Merleau-Ponty, the work of Fichte remains an enigmatic absence within the orbit of Castoriadis' work. This study is an attempt to address this enigma through a close reading of Fichte’s The Science of Knowledge.

This paper explores the constellation of fear and the social forces, assumptions and images that construct it. The paper’s underlying presupposition is that there are many locations for fear that run parallel to one another in modernity, one of which will be discussed here – the city. It begins by exploring two images and ideas of the city, around which the social theoretical tradition has revolved, both of which are linked in some way to the ideal of the metropolis and (...) the counter-ideal of the stranger. The stranger invariably accompanies the image of the city, as someone who comes to it from the outside. This co-existence between integration and the experience of being outside generates the inner tension or unease of city life, especially when we are all strangers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What is the place of compassion in politics? For Hannah Arendt, compassion – a natural fellow-feeling for a suffering other – cannot be brought into politics without damaging both the feeling and the political realm. Arendt develops this analysis in the context of her critique of the French revolution, particularly its Jacobin episode. According to Arendt, the Jacobins attempted to keep the revolution’s compass fixed on unanimity and social cohesion by deploying a discourse of compassion. My reconstruction of Arendt’s (...) argument in On Revolution looks at how the Jacobins’ moralisation and politicisation of compassion not only destroyed the nascent space of politics in the revolution but introduced new ways of justifying cruelty. I go on to show the role that Jacobin compassion has played in the revolutionary tradition more broadly. Read thus, Arendt’s critique is not limited to the French revolution but targets a possibility that is present within the political culture of modernity – one that is activated whenever public action becomes equated with displaying virtuous pity for suffering groups. (shrink)