The key theme in this essay is the rethinking of the human, as inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. The human here is not a model or concept to be realised, just as community to which the human is linked is not an ideal, but a ‘community to come’. This is revealed only by paying close attention to modes of bearing witness to the human, as instanced, for example, by Agamben’s text, Remnants of Auschwitz. Current notions (...) of political community and the human thus need to be reassessed. Only by doing this will it be possible to address the crucial issues that currently confront human rights—issues such as the tension between the principle of universal human rights and that of state sovereignty, the growing problem of statelessness, and the reduction of human rights to biopolitical humanitarianism. (shrink)

Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers surveys the most important figures who have influenced post-war thought. The reader is guided through structuralism, semiotics, post-Marxism and Annales history, on to modernity and postmodernity. With its comprehensive biographical and bibliographical information, this book provides a vital reference work of the last fifty years.

This article aims to reveal aspects of the relation between the image and the victim in Georges Bataille’s writing, certainly as this applies to writings on art, but more particularly as it applies to Bataille’s relation to the victim of torture in the photographs of Chinese lingchi punishment, which entails physical dismemberment. It will be shown that Bataille does not have a ‘media specific’ approach to the image but reflects Sartre’s notion of the image. Critiques of Bataille’s relation to the (...) lingchi photos will be addressed, so as to clarify what is at stake in the relation between image and victim. (shrink)

_Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers_ surveys the most important figures who have influenced post-war thought. The reader is guided through structuralism, semiotics, post-Marxism and Annales history, on to modernity and postmodernity. With its comprehensive biographical and bibliographical information, this book provides a vital reference work of the last fifty years.

This article examines the issues surrounding transcendence, the Other and base materialism in relation to Georges Bataille’s heterology and Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the face of the Other as infinity and transcendence. The article concludes that there is no facet of human existence – including work and the economy – which is not touched by transcendence, and that the idea that there are societies based in subsistence and in nothing but a ‘struggle for existence’ is a prejudice of modernity.

Review of: How Photography Changed Philosophy, Daniel Rubinstein (2023) New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 122 pp., ISBN 978-0-36769-422-7, h/bk, GBP 130.00.

This innovative introductory text not only clearly explains Kristeva's most difficult ideas, but also provides new insights into her work.

Human rights are in crisis today. Everywhere one looks, there is violence, deprivation, and oppression, which human rights norms seem powerless to prevent. This book investigates the roots of the current crisis through the thought of Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. Human rights theory and practice must come to grips with key problems identified by Agamben "e; the violence of the sovereign state of exception and the reduction of humanity to 'bare' life. Any renewal of human rights today must involve breaking (...) decisively with the traditional coordinates of Western political thought and instead affirm a new understanding of life and political action. (shrink)

This revised second edition from our bestselling _Key Guides_ includes brand new entries on some of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth- and twenty-first century: Zizek, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Butler and Haraway. With a new introduction by the author, sections on phenomenology and the post-human, full cross-referencing and up-to-date guides to major primary and secondary texts, this is an essential resource to contemporary critical thought for undergraduates and the interested reader.

Genealogy and ontology (paradigms) -- The image in photography and cinema and its digital future.

This article is a further philosophical engagement with the human-animal relation. The argument presented is that neither animals nor humans can be reduced to a biological essence characterised as ‘bare life,’ but live according to the call of a way of life. Heidegger’s thinking on the polis in terms of the animal-human relation is addressed in order to show how he reduces animality to a biological sub-stratum, while the human becomes the privileged bearer of the word. Heidegger’s deep-seated humanism is (...) thus exposed, as is that of Bataille. The latter’s Hegelian stance on animality and humanity is revealed as the embodiment of the dialectic of necessity and freedom. The article is a critique of the view that freedom and transcendence can only be arrived after so-called basic biological needs (the needs of ‘bare life,’ or necessity) have been satisfied. (shrink)

This article is a further philosophical engagement with the human-animal relation. The argument presented is that neither animals nor humans can be reduced to a biological essence characterised as ‘bare life,’ but live according to the call of a way of life. Heidegger’s thinking on the polis in terms of the animal-human relation is addressed in order to show how he reduces animality to a biological sub-stratum, while the human becomes the privileged bearer of the word. Heidegger’s deep-seated humanism is (...) thus exposed, as is that of Bataille. The latter’s Hegelian stance on animality and humanity is revealed as the embodiment of the dialectic of necessity and freedom. The article is a critique of the view that freedom and transcendence can only be arrived after so-called basic biological needs have been satisfied. (shrink)

Taking a largely thematic approach, this reflection aims to demonstrate the richness of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical work in relation to questions of justice and injustice. Injustice becomes primary because a definition of justice continues to be open to debate, whereas injustice as incarnate in the scapegoat as depicted by René Girard is far less so, if at all. Through her analyses of the work of Mallarmé and the Paris of the Dreyfus affair, Céline and abjection and anti-Semitism, the ‘need to (...) believe’ as a key component of subjectivity, the foreigner as the other in ourselves, Dostoyevsky and forgiveness, a vista is opened up onto injustice and how it might be combatted. (shrink)

Review of: Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine, Yanai Toister (2020)Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, p/bk, 215 pp.,ISBN 978-1-78938-156-6, p/bk, £37.

If genuine political activity can only be undertaken by citizens in the public sphere in a nation-state, what of stateless people today – asylum seekers and refugees cut adrift on the high seas? This is what is at stake in Hannah Arendt’s political theory of necessity. This article reconsiders Arendt’s notion of the Greek oikos as the sphere of necessity with the aim of challenging the idea that there is a condition of necessity or mere subsistence, where life is reduced (...) to satisfying basic biological needs. For Arendt, the Greek oikos is the model that provides the inspiration for her theory because necessity activities were kept quite separate from action in the polis. The ordinary and the undistinguished happen in the oikos and its equivalent, with the polis being reserved for extraordinary acts done for glory without any regard for life. The exclusionary nature of this theory of the polis as action has, at best, been treated with kid gloves by Arendt’s commentators. With reference to Heidegger on the polis and Agamben’s notion of oikonomia, I endeavour to show that the so-called ordinary is embedded in a way of life that is extraordinary and the key to grasping humanness. (shrink)

Examines the concept of analytical and synthetic processes in cinema. Distinction between analytic and synthetic processes; Implications of analytic and synthetic processes for cinema; Doubts about cinema being analytical or synthetic.

Taking the Face of Sydney – which is a digital composite image – as its point of departure this article begins an investigation into the relation between August Sander’s Weimar facial typologies and the digital Face of Sydney. This leads on to a reflection on the nature of the photographic image in relation to knowledge, technology and time. The conclusion proposed is that the photographic image has to be understood as an entity that is quite distinct from the forms of (...) technicity that allow it to appear. Indeed, in following Roland Barthes, I argue that the photographic image, like the image in general, is uncoded and thus unnamed. The question raised in light of this is: what is the nature of the human in the context of such an approach to the image? (shrink)

The thought of Heidegger and Bataille has rarely been placed in proximity. However, the notion of the `ecstatic' unconsciously draws them together. Its fundamental ramifications in each thinker's oeuvre should prompt serious reflection, particularly in the age of calculation and cybernetics. The non-utilitarian aspects of the gift, exchange, sacrifice and the sacred also bring the two thinkers closer to each other in a challenge to the dominance of what Bataille calls the `restricted economy' of balanced accounts and equilibrium at all (...) costs. To allow the thought of Heidegger and Bataille to communicate is to demarcate a point of resistance to an uncritical acceptance of the postmodern age. However, this must be tempered by the recognition that the situation is immensely complex, and that there is always a risk of political regression in every essentialist orientation - as the example of Heidegger shows. (shrink)

After beginning by situating the author's (possible) relation to Derrida's expression, ‘democracy to come’, the article proceeds from the position that Derrida's phrase is to be understood as part of a political intervention. Indeed, the inseparability of democracy and deconstruction confirms this. After setting out some of the pertinent features of ‘democracy to come’ – seen, in part, in the General Will – the notion of political community in the thought of Hannah Arendt is brought into question, if not deconstructed. (...) Political community as presented by Arendt is seen to limit the inclusiveness of democracy. In the final section, the article suggests that Agamben's critique of the very structure of the nation-state opens the way for a renewal of the notion of the human in the ‘community to come’. (shrink)

Reviews : Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology ; Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture.