20th Century Continental Philosophy

This essay highlights a methodological weakness in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism often mistaken for a biographical shift in his philosophy. Naissance de la biopolitique is sometimes interpreted as evidence for Foucault’s conversion to neoliberalism, whereas its lack of critical acuity stems rather from its methodological limitations. Through a discussion of the “neoliberal conversion”-thesis, I highlight those limitations. Though Foucault’s appreciative tone in his neoliberalism lectures is surprising, his aim is mainly to defamiliarize readers from the dominant mode of neoliberal rationality (...) so that they can affirm the creative potential to foster new conducts, new identities, and new rationalities. Foucault did not convert to neoliberalism, but sought to destabilise it by revealing its historical contingency. However, as Foucault’s surprisingly positive tone shows, this strategy is insufficient for combatting neoliberalism. There is an elective affinity between Foucault’s own politics of creative self-reinvention and neoliberalism’s promise of a non-invasive, post-disciplinary government by indirect economic incentives alone. Foucault’s libertine stance toward subjectivity hence seems easily integrated into a neoliberal conduct of conducts. I propose to supplement Foucault’s genealogical method as he deploys it in Naissance de la biopolitique with an immanent critique of neoliberalism from the perspective of the governed. Rather than investigating neoliberal rationality as a promising endeavour for the future, we can study the real-life implementations of neoliberalism and their effects on subjective conducts. Neoliberal rationality is involved in a permanent struggle to shape the conduct of conducts along entrepreneurial and competitive lines, but subjects are refractory living beings whose conducts are not so simply transformed. Neoliberalism has had to give up its post-disciplinary aspirations and turn to the power of discipline and abandonment to enforce neoliberal norms of conduct. Neoliberalism has transformed into a negative biopolitics that sacrifices the lives of unproductive subjects as collateral damage to the overall welfare of the population. Immanent critique thereby reveals how subjects are pushed beyond their limits until neoliberal norms of conduct become unbearable. This intolerability of neoliberalism cannot be directly deduced from the writings of Becker, Friedman, or Hayek.111 It becomes manifest in the confrontation between neoliberal rationality and the material living bodies of finite human beings unable to be stretched in the ways neoliberalism requires. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, to conceive transcendence, Levinas retrieves the Platonic concept of “separation” and deploys it in three ways: metaphysically, semantically, and affectively. Levinas finds in the interaction between being and the Good beyond being of Republic VI 509b a certain “formal structure of transcendence”—one in which a term is conditioned by another while remaining absolutely separated from it. This formal structure is subsequently deployed metaphysically, in the relation between creator and creature; semantically, in the relation between (...) meaning and sense; and affectively, in the relation between the desiring self and its desired aim. (shrink)

The chapter explores comparatively the attention to the practical dimension that—each in his own way—Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the classic pragmatist thinker William James pay when confronted with the challenge of providing a non-skeptical response to the relativist stance on truth that arose in the post-Kantian age. Particular focus will be given to the extent to which these three authors conceived of the practical framework as the only one that allows us to meaningfully address and determine truth.

Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, often focus on managing the impact of these technologies on workers. They leave the question of how these technologies are designed or how workers can determine their own futures unanswered. This approach risks surrendering the Future of Work debate to techno-determinist imaginaries aligned with corporate interests. Using Cornelius Castoriadis’ early writings on worker struggles in French Tayloristic (...) factories and his later oeuvre on conflictual social imaginaries, I propose an agonistic approach to the Future of Work. Not merely companies implementing workplace technologies, but also workers themselves possess agency in determining the Future of Work. Workers’ frequent contestations against machinic surveillance and technologically mediated coordination of the labour process disclose an alternative Future of Work in which technologies are used to enhance worker autonomy rather than bureaucratic control. Worker struggles at Amazon Mechanical Turk illustrate this agonistic dynamic: Amazon mobilizes algorithmic management to fragment and control a workforce of globally dispersed remote workers, but the latter form online social communities and create counter-technologies to reappropriate control over the labour process. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on three aspects of Nietzsche’s art of living that have become relevant today especially in the United States (but not only here): first, regarding some facets of the economic-political conditions of any contemporary art of living; second, the widespread adoption of Nietzsche’s notion of self-overcoming and artistic self-design in entrepreneurship and individual’s lives; and third, how his notion of ‘incorporation’ has been further developed in current approaches to habit design. Eventually I will show via the example of (...) Anthony Robbins that some notions of Nietzsche’s art of living have become most popular outside of academia, namely in the commercial industries of what has been called ‘self-growth’ or ‘self-development.’. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyze the metaphorological project of Hans Blumenberg in relation to the philosophical developments of conceptual history in the mid-twentieth century. It is argued that Blumenberg, based on the study of metaphor, seeks to endow philosophy with a historical substrate that gives rise to the concept, forgotten by the inheritance of the cartesian philosophy. In this way, metaphors, but also myths and anecdotes, fulfill a pragmatic guiding function of thought and expe- rience, becoming indispensable for human life.

El 27 de septiembre de 1943, Hans-Georg Gadamer publicó un breve pero significativo ensayo en el periódico conservador Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten und Handels-Zeitung, titulado “Wissenschaft als Beruf. Über den Ruf und Beruf der Wissenschaft in unserer Zeit”. El artículo, que recuperaba en medio de la Segunda Guerra Mundial el problema del valor y posición de la ciencia y la filosofía, nunca fue reimpreso en su obra completa, ni en los diez tomos editados por la editorial Mohr Siebeck ni tampoco por (...) separado en libros o revistas. Debido a su relevancia filosófica, política e histórica, se ofrece aquí, en primer lugar, una introducción crítica al contexto y principales contenidos de este texto, especialmente por medio del análisis de su confrontación con la actualidad a través de referencias explícitas e implícitas a la conferencia Wissenschaft als Beruf de Max Weber de 1917. En segundo lugar, se ofrece aquí su primera traducción del alemán al castellano.// This article introduces the first Spanish translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s overlooked 1943 essay Wissenschaft als Beruf. Über den Ruf und Beruf der Wissenschaft in unserer Zeit. Engaging Max Weber’s seminal 1917 lecture Wissenschaft als Beruf, Gadamer criticizes the bureaucratization and instrumentalization of modern science, recovering the question of research’s value amidst World War II’s catastrophes and National Socialism’s totalitarian rule. Never reprinted in Gadamer’s complete works, the text articulates an early critique of technocratic rationalization, affirming science’s need to reclaim its originary mission. By analyzing Gadamer’s confrontation with the present through overt and covert references to Weber, the introduction situates the essay’s historical and intellectual backdrop, develops its core arguments and traces echoes in Gadamer’s later works addressing contemporary challenges. This first Spanish translation unveils a forgotten text where Gadamer confronts modern science’s distortion, calling for the recovery of its existential and cultural meaning. (shrink)

We cannot simply observe that Emile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Pierre Bourdieu all received philosophical training and subsequently asserted, in surprisingly similar terms, that escaping from philosophy or breaking away from philosophical modes of thought was a necessary condition for any research in the human and social sciences, without considering whether there might be a direct relationship between the sociological ethos and a particular attitude towards philosophy. The "rupture" with philosophyis never complete: the sociologists' conception of sociology is, on the (...) contrary, heavily influenced by the negative image they have of philosophy, which they always invoke as something to be avoided or a specter that must be exorcised. The sociological perception of philosophy thus constitutes a system of oppositions, a set of likes and dislikes deeply ingrained in the minds of practitioners in the human and social sciences, and which, so to speak, form the very foundation of the discipline and its definition of its identity. By reconstructing it, this article proposes a sociological analysis of the genesis, structure, and function of the sociological unconscious. (shrink)

The importance of The Origin of The Work of Art in Heidegger’s path of thought is notorious. Besides adding to the framework of the thematization of the question of being a reflection on art, the conference is considered a landmark of the displacement from the existential analytic of Dasein to the problem of history of being. Divided in three parts, this paper connects such a displacement to the relationship between art and truth established in the conference. In the first part, (...) it indicates how the criticism of aesthetic tradition is inserted in the project of overcoming metaphysics through the problematization of subjectivism. The second is dedicated to the theme of the origin of the work of art in its nexus to the notions of history and institution. In the third part, it discusses the idea of art as a setting-itself-into-work of truth as alétheia, bound to the tension between world and earth that would expose itself in art. In the final remarks, I suggest that, going beyond the Greek paradigm and Heidegger’s hesitations, the association between art and alétheia also applies to the experience offered by modern and contemporary works. (shrink)

In his battle against postmodernism, French structuralism appears as one of Nkolo Foé’s main philosophical opponents. It is in this respect that this school of thought is discussed in his book, 'Le Postmodernisme et Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme.' I propose to analyze the genealogy, the concepts, as well as the categories of such a critique, in order to expose it in extension and in intension.

"The Third Being" presents texts by A.V. Bronnikov, written from 2011–2019 and is devoted to issues regarding the philosophy of art, creativity and language. If the first being is the being of the eternal and divine and the second being is that of the temporary and human, then the new, third, being appears as the intersection and continuation of the first two. The third being is seen and anticipated in art—in the timeless and indestructible reality created by man, in the (...) reality of a poetic word that raises the world and its things to the level of form, image and idea. The book compares approaches to the philosophy of art and the theory of language by H.-G. Gadamer, M. Heidegger, G. Frege, R. Ingarden, R. Bart, L. Wittgenstein and J. Derrida. An important place is given to Russian religious philosophy, presented by P. A. Florensky, S. N. Bulgakov, N. A. Berdyaev and others. The publication contains essays on the life and work of poets R. M. Rilke, E. Pound and T. S. Eliot, as well as the first Russian translation of J. Derrida's “Advances,” known as the postmodern commentary on Plato's “Timaeus.” -/- Contents: Russia in Rilke / Plato's ideality of text / Word and world / Art as reality / Sacrality of art / Cosmists / Florensky space / Serial music of "Four Quartets" / Philosophy of "The Cantos" / Ezra Pound and his "Cantos" / Poetry: a breakthrough to reality / At the origin of the world / J. Derrida's "Advances". (shrink)

This article traces a logical and political thread leading from the theory of revolt in Furio Jesi's 1969 Spartakus to his later work on festivity and the “mythological machine model.” It opens by arguing that the humanist model that frames Jesi's early efforts to disarm the allure of insurgent violence, sacrificial mythology, and Manichaean politics generates insoluble aporias that spur the development of a radically different approach to the study of myth and human nature. Next, it shows how Jesi's studies (...) on festivity from the 1970s redound upon and transform the theory of revolt in Spartakus, bringing this theory more in line with current epochal conditions. In doing so, they presage and lay the groundwork for the theory of destituent power developed in recent decades by Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan was constantly and consistently motivated by the aims of carrying out, improving, and critically understanding psychoanalytic practice and theory. In his work and teaching, he examined and (re)incorporated a number of key experiences, conceptions, and insights from moral life and moral theories into psychoanalysis. -/- One particularly interesting aspect of Lacan’s work, particularly in terms of moral theory, is that while problematizing them, and reconceiving how we must understand them, his approach remains anchored by key themes, concepts, and (...) experiences of older moral theories and perspectives, such as the truth of the human subject, the nature of the good, and the processes and pitfalls of moral development. -/- Three main sets of issues are analysed and discussed in this chapter. First, we examine Lacan’s criticisms of modes and schools of psychoanalysis that converted it into a simplistically moralistic discipline such as ego-psychology. Second, we run over Lacan’s main discussions and partial appropriations of Aristotelian, Kantian, Utilitarian, Sadean, and Judeo-Christian moral perspectives. Third and finally, we go deeper into discussing the implications Lacan’s reinterpretation of selected Freudian concepts bear for ethics, particularly in terms of ethics of subjectivity. Put very briefly, we might say that Lacan is situating a process of becoming-subject within a never-complete field of ethical discourses. (shrink)

The Promise of Friendship investigates what makes friendship possible and good for human beings. In dialogue with authors ranging from Aristotle and Montaigne to Proust, Levinas, and Derrida, Sarah Horton argues that friendship is suited to our finitude—that is, to the limits within which human beings live—and proposes a novel understanding of friendship as translation: friends translate the world for each other so that each one experiences the world not as the other does but in light of the friend's always-unknowable (...) experience. The very distance between friends that makes it impossible for them to know each other wholly also makes it possible for them to be transformed by friendship. Friendship, then, is possible and good for those who love precisely that they can never wholly know the friend. Friendship is a profound, mutual self-giving that highlights the irreplaceability of each person, fundamentally shapes the self, and is one of the greatest joys of human existence. (shrink)

This essay attempt to reconstruct the notion of desire adopted in Deleuze and Guattar's "Anti-Oedipus" by focusing on some of its principal components: flow, line of flight, machine, molecular, and body without organs.

This book chapter represents one of the engagements between Catholic and Wesleyan philosophers at the 2008 Wesleyan Philosophy Society. The issue of what precisely "Wesleyan philosophy" would mean and comprise can be usefully illuminated by comparison with the positions and issues that were raised and discussed by Catholic scholars during the 1930s Christian philosophy debates in France, which included Etienne Gilson, Maurice Blondel, Jacques Maritain, and Gabriel Marcel. We also discuss how the thought on a contemporary Catholic philosopher Adriaan Peperzack, (...) specifically on affectivity, can be brought into comparison with that important theme in Wesleyan philosophy. (shrink)

Il seguente lavoro si concentra su un confronto tra la filosofia di Peirce e quella di Cassirer, con particolare attenzione alla loro trattazione del problema della semiotica e della sua rilevanza in relazione alla teoria della conoscenza.

Philosophers have cataloged a range of genealogical methods by which different sorts of normative conclusions can be established. Although such methods provide diverging ways of pursuing genealogical inquiry, they typically converge in eschewing historiographic methodology, in favor of a uniquely philosophical approach. In contrast, one genealogist who drew on historiographic methodology is Michel Foucault. This article presents the motivations and advantages of Foucault's genealogical use of such a methodology. It advances two mains claims. First, that Foucault's early 1970s work employs (...) a distinct genealogical method, which borrows from contemporary historiographic models of explanation to expand the range of objects that are proper to genealogical accounts of historical change. I demonstrate how Foucault modifies two central commitments of Nietzsche by broadening the dimensions of genealogical inquiry and explanation. Second, that historical method has normative relevance for genealogy, insofar as different historiographic choices can lead to different normative conclusions. I motivate this second claim by explaining how Foucault's multidimensional genealogical method expands both (a) the range of objects that are subject to evaluative assessment, and (b) the set of possible prescriptive recommendations that follow from such assessment. (shrink)

This “essay” aims to think with Klossowski and Foucault the notions of “parody” and “fiction” based on the elegiac gesture presented by Veyne. From this, the “relational” possibility, and the “authors” quotation (notions reframed in the course of the text) will think and open up new possibilities for how to make philosophical historiography. Thus, postulated the death of God and the author's death, how would it break the Identity relations, leading to the end of the A = A relationship between (...) the textually constructed persons and the extra-textual historical ones? This is the question operated as the guideline for the mentioned notions mapping, aiming to deepen the gray area created by the elegiac fiction used here. (shrink)

A turn from the “whither” to the “whence” of anarchism is at stake in Catherine Malabou’s interpretation of Latin American decolonial theory. This is a turn from a materialist philosophy that seeks to open the space of anarchism within the modern state toward one that discerns anarchism as already operative in the modern state given the social implications of colonial legacies. In tracing this turn, I propose a development of Malabou’s work insofar as I put her in dialogue with María (...) Lugones, who is much closer to Malabou than the more canonical decolonial figures she actively engages, especially in view of anarchism as a form of social–political plasticity. Understanding Lugones’ critique of earlier iterations of decolonial theory helps make explicit an immanent anarchic resistance to domination as an explosive inhabitation of everyday loci of tension. (shrink)

The years following Israel’s founding were formative ones for the development of philosophy as an academic discipline in this country. During this period, the distinction between philosophy seen as contiguous with the humanities and social sciences, and philosophy seen as adjacent to the natural and exact sciences began to make its presence felt in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This distinction, which was manifest in the curriculum, was by no means unique to the Hebrew University, but reflected the broader bifurcation (...) between two schools of Western philosophy in the twentieth century. In English-speaking countries, it is generally referred to as the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. What was special about the situation at the Hebrew University, however, was that the split manifested itself in a rather small department, being embodied, basically, in one prominent representative of each school – Nathan Rotenstreich and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. This article will focus on some key aspects of the lives and thought of Rotenstreich and Bar-Hillel. It will address their philosophical maturation as S.H. Bergmann’s students, their views on the goals of twentieth-century philosophy, on the philosopher’s role in public life, and the circumstances under which they started teaching in Jerusalem right after the founding of the State of Israel. (shrink)

I argue that Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego draws on Kant's theory of spontaneity to articulate its metaphysical account of consciousness's mode of being, to defend its phenomenological description of the intentional structure of self‐consciousness, and to diagnose the errors that motivate views of consciousness qua person or substance. In addition to highlighting an overlooked dimension of Sartre's early relation to Kant, this interpretation offers a fresh account of how Sartre's argument for the primacy of pre‐personal consciousness works, and brings (...) the extent of his proximity to idealist models of mind into greater relief. It also affords Sartre the resources to respond to criticisms that his account of self‐consciousness relies on a spurious distinction and that his view of freedom cannot explain how consciousness is conditioned by its world. (shrink)

Resumen: En La actualidad de lo bello, Gadamer hace una referencia reveladora a la improvisación musical y a la importancia de la escucha musical, además de poner en primer plano la necesidad de justificación del arte. Situando este debate a través de Goethe y Platón, junto con las Lecciones de Estética de Adorno de finales de la década de 1950 y una discusión sobre Nietzsche y la Antigüedad, es posible establecer que lo que está en juego es la afinación, así (...) como una tensión que invita a un debate ulterior tanto sobre la detención del amante en Carson como el demorarse en Heidegger. Al revisar la hermenéutica gadameriana de la programación y la interpretación musical, incluida la improvisación y el desafío de la nueva música, las reflexiones de Gadamer sobre la cultura musical en el contexto de la cultura social y su reflexión no solo pueden ser leídas a través de Platón y Goethe, sino también a partir de las concepciones de "lo bello" en Hölderlin y Rilke. Se trata de una "conversación" cultural en la que la contribución del público puede estar en tensión con la programación musical progresiva, además de la dinámica de respuesta que surge en la energeia de la improvisación tanto para el intérprete como para el oyente.// Abstract: Gadamer’s On the Relevance of the Beautiful makes telling reference to musi-cal improvisation and the importance of musical listening in addition to fore-grounding the need for justification. Situating this discussion via Goethe and Plato along with Adorno’s late 1950s lectures on Aesthetics together with a discussion of Nietzsche and antiquity, what is at stake is attunement and a tension which invites a discussion of Carson on the lover’s arrest and Heidegger on tarrying. By reviewing Gadamer’s hermeneutic of musical pro-gramming and performance, including improvisation and the challenge of new music, Gadamer may be read on music culture in the context of social culture and his reflection not only via Plato and Goethe but Hölderlin and Rilke on ‘the beautiful.’ At work is a cultural ‘conversation’ where audience input can be in tension with progressive musical programing along with the dynamic of response emergent in the energeia of improvisation for performer and listener. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the concept of culture industry developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno had a decisive influence on Jean Godefroy Bidima’s critique of black African modernity. Drawing on some of his writings, I seek to demon- strate how Bidima’s philosophical endeavor inherits the concept of culture industry and applies it to the modern context of black Africa, where it is transformed into the concept of colonial industry. In both cases, the same critical perspective is (...) at play, namely to formulate a broad critique of how cultural products (artworks in Horkheimer and Adorno, and philosophy in Bidima) are deprived of their substance to align with the mystification of the masses. The critique of the culture industry, which serves in Adorno as a fundamental criticism of the production of modern art and its decadence into mass production serves, revisited in Bidima, as a critique of the modern black African philo- sophical discourse. With the light provided by this connection, I propose a rereading of Bidima’s critique of Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, the latter being presented as a promoter of a “discourse of mastery” in black African modern philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I elucidate the significance of Heidegger’s ‘question of being’ from a topological point of view by explaining the relationship between his thought of place and language. After exploring various hermeneutic strategies of reading Heidegger’s oeuvre, I turn to Richard Capobianco’s interpretation of Heidegger and critically engage with his idea of the experience of being itself as the ‘luminous selfshowing of logos’. In doing so, I explain the later turn from ‘truth’ to ‘place’ and articulate why logos needs (...) to be conceived as the gathering site of the presencing of being. In arguing against the primacy of passive receptivity and active projection, I put forward the primacy of language as the topos and logos of being. In returning to the Capobianco-Sheehan debate, I conclude by explaining why Heidegger’s placerelated notions cannot be thought metaphorically. (shrink)

This paper investigates the cultural significance of black holes and suns as metaphors in continental European literature and art, drawing on theoretical insights from French continental authors such as Jean-François Lyotard and Ray Brassier. Lyotard suggests that black holes signify the ultimate form of the sublime, representing the displacement of humanity and our unease with our place in the cosmos. On the other hand, Brassier views black holes as a consequence of the entropic dissolution of matter, reflecting physical reality's indifference (...) to subjective or teleological significance. The study also presents a curated collection of literary works and artworks that employ black holes and suns as metaphors, examining the emergence of these metaphorical objects and identifying discursive and epistemological shifts in society. Furthermore, this collaborative research project, involving the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and the Federal Fluminense University in Brazil, and the Charles University in Prague in the Czech Republic, aims to provide a valuable resource for further academic inquiry. (shrink)

In this article I present the phenomenological tradition as a new grounding for human rights as universal rights. The hypothesis defended is to conciliate Husserl’s phenomenological method and Reinach’s a priori law in order to offer a new grounding to human rights. In order to combine Husserl and Reinach’s ideas, I propose to expand the comprehension of a priori. It would be present as eidos of each object and I name it as material a priori; it also be present in (...) the eidetic relations and I name it as formal a priori. Yet the object would have an essence, a necessary content, a material a priori, and necessary states of affairs, necessary relations and connections, a formal a priori. Reinach, in The A priori Foundations of the Civil Law, describes eidetic relations, such as, the relation between promise, claim and obligation. I propose three eidetic universalities to ground law, these are what I will call human rights. I also face a few difficulties presented by DuBois and De Vecchi derived from the amoral approach of a priori laws. Then, I highlight the difference between this proposition and Albert’s. Finally, I defend the proposition that a priori laws are beyond natural and positive laws. (shrink)

O presente trabalho pretende analisar as relações entre loucura e obra no jovem Foucault, isto é, no Foucault dos anos 1950 que realiza seu curso sobre antropologia (La Question Anthropologique) em Lille e na ENS entre 1952 (ou 1951) e 1955. Para estabelecer o problema, o texto começa com uma contextualização inicial sobre os inéditos de Foucault disponibilizados desde 2013 na BNF. Então o texto constrói o problema a partir de comentadores (especiamente Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod) e encontra na figura de Karl (...) Jaspers um interlocutor importante, em torno do qual Foucault gira para estabelecer suas próprias posições. Jaspers, psiquiatra e filósofo, contém teses sobre a loucura, a obra e a civilização diretamente ligadas aos interesses do jovem Foucault. Tanto a leitura de Jaspers sobre Nietzsche, quanto a das relações entre loucura e obra, serão importantes para o jovem Foucault, pois é por meio de Jaspers - dentre outros - que uma psicologia da loucura e da obra (seja qual for seu paradigma) desemboca na análise de figuras como Maurice Blanchot, na leitura singular que Foucault faz de Nietzsche e nos problemas que o levarão a uma história da loucura. *** *** -/- This article aims to analyze the relation between madness and work (oeuvre) in the “young Foucault”, focusing on the Foucault’s lessons of Anthropology taken in Lille and at the ENS between 1952 (or 1951) and 1955, under the title La Question Anthropologique. In order to place this problem, the text begins with an initial contextualization of Foucault’s unpublished works, only made available since 2013 at Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Then the article passes to the question of the madness and work according to some commentators (especially Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod) and finds in the figure of Karl Jaspers an important author, whose reference serves for Foucault to compose his own positions. Jaspers, psychiatrist, and philosopher, contains theses on madness, work and civilization directly linked to the interests of the young Foucault. Both Jaspers’ reading of Nietzsche and considerations about madness and work will be important for the young Foucault, as it is through Jaspers (among others) that the psychological and existential positions on madness and work leads Foucault to the analysis of figures like Maurice Blanchot, to his own reading of Nietzsche and the problem of a history of madness. (shrink)

In dialogue with the critiques of the modern world in Sylvia Wynter and Afrofuturism, this chapter offers a reading of Early German Romanticism as a project of universal construction, where "universal" refers at once to conceptual universality and to the post-Copernican universe. For Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and August Wilhelm Schlegel, the joint task of poetry and philosophy is to re-mediate post-Copernican reality across all of its scales. This project of cross-scalar poiesis is inherently ambivalent, entwined as it is with the (...) colonial project of modernity, including the Western-centric racialized construction of global humanity and the ambition to master reality through the human mind. This project is also constitutively impossible due to the infinite, and infinitely fragmented, nature of post-Copernican reality. This impossibility generates, I suggest, the Romantic aporias of incompletion that later come to the fore in poststructuralism, which itself emerges from a renewed crisis of global and planetary reality. Most radically, these aporias call for a no to the meta-standpoint of universal history—for a refusal and ungrounding of the world, which I explore through the non-position of Blackness in Wynter, the antagonistic inhabitation of geocosmic depths in Afrofuturism, and Friedrich Schlegel's insistence on cosmic irony, contingency, and chaos. (shrink)

Hearing the other’s voice in literary text is one of Bakhitan's main concerns. Bakhtin take the remarkable capacity of literature to concideration to express differences and break monologues. This article seeks to ponder Sadegh Chubak's novel Tangsir based on Bakhtin's views. The main character of this novel is a southern Tangsir named Zair Mohammad who seeks revenge on those who in his opinion have violated his rights. The story of the novel takes place in Bushehr after the First World War (...) and in the era of Ahmad Shah Qajar, when southern Iran was occupied by the British. Due to the political and social atmosphere of that time, the "other" can be formulated in this story in different ways: Iranian encounter with English, Muslim encounter with nonMuslim, encounter between the people and the government, And even encounter between the southern Tangsir with the non-Tangsir southern. Although in this novel, encounter with the other has a prominent role, but the main question is whether the novel Tangsir is a monophonic novel or polyphonic? In general, Bakhtin considers the novel as a genre of dialogue and polyphony. But even in this genre, literary works realize the character of carnival or polyphony to a different extent. Bakhtin's ideal of “the other” is realized when the other’s voice is heard in the novel and not only the author's point of view is dominant. (shrink)

O presente trabalho pretende estabelecer algumas precisões históricas e conceituas em torno da formação da história arqueológica de Michel Foucault, tendo como foco um livro póstumo e recém lançado, intitulado La Question Anthropologique (2022). Esse livro trata de um curso sobre “antropologia” ministrado por Foucault entre 1952 (ou 1951) e 1955, em Lille e na ENS. As precisões históricas e conceituais tratadas aqui são em torno dos seguintes contextos: primeiramente, analisa-se a escassa literatura de comentário anterior ao lançamento do livro (...) em 2022; depois, parte-se ao horizonte de leituras de Foucault na época, especialmente ocorridos em torno da figura de Nietzsche. Essas leituras ocorrem em diversas frentes, tais como as figuras de Heidegger e Jaspers, a importância da história das ciências, a interlocução com Althusser e Jacques Martin em torno de Marx e a questão da loucura e da psicanálise. -/- The present work aims to establish some historical and conceptual clarifications surrounding the formation of Michel Foucault’s archaeological history, considering a recently published posthumous book entitled La Question Anthropologique (2022). This book thematizes a course on “anthropology” given by Foucault between 1952 (or 1951) and 1955, in Lille and at the École Normale Supérieure. The historical and conceptual analysis concerns the following subjects: firstly, the text analyzes the scarce secondary literature published before the book’s launch in 2022; secondly, the article focuses some readings made by Foucault in those years, especially surrounding the figure of Nietzsche. These readings occur on several fronts, such as: the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers, the role of the history of sciences, the dialogue with Althusser and Jacques Martin on Marx and the themes of madness and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

El presente estudio sirve de Prefacio a nuestra traducción del libro de Jean-Luc Marion: Cuestiones cartesianas. Método y Metafísica, Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2012, pp. 9-40 (ISBN 978-987-574-463-9). Presentamos aquí el primer volumen de las Cuestiones Cartesianas, publicado por primera vez en 1991, y dedicado, como lo indica su subtítulo, a la relación, o mejor, a las sucesivas relaciones, a lo largo del corpus cartesiano, entre método y metafísica. Aunque se presentan como una recopilación de estudios autónomos, y son tales, la (...) significación de estas cuestiones, y la radicalidad del cuestionamiento que ellas plantean, deben entenderse por el lugar que ellas ocupan en la totalidad de la obra que J.-L. Marion dedicara a la filosofía de Descartes, esto es, en una doble continuidad. En primer lugar, estas cuestiones no se acaban aquí y se continúan en otro volumen, publicado cinco años después, bajo el mismo título y dedicado a los dos entes, ego y Dios, que se erigen, alternativamente, en principios de la metafísica cartesiana. A su vez, el conjunto de las cuestiones cartesianas continúan, sin perder su autonomía, la densa trilogía que las antecede, en la cual sus dos pares de problemas, método y metafísica, ego y Dios, y sus distintas articulaciones, se plantean desde el primer momento de una larga investigación en la que las sucesivas interpretaciones aspiran a una interpretación global y nunca definitiva, dirigida a la ardua (re)constitución de la metafísica que Descartes lleva a cabo, o mejor, y en sentido más general, a la situación historial de la metafísica de Descartes. En lo que sigue, exponemos las tesis principales de esos tres libros, a saber: Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes. Science cartésienne et savoir aritotélicien dans les Regulae, Paris, Vrin, 1975, 1981, 1992, 2000; Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes. Analogie, création des vérités éternelles, fondement, Paris, PUF, 1981, 1991; Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes. Constitution et limites de l’onto-théo-logie cartésienne, Paris, PUF, 1986, 2000. (Hay traducciones al español y al inglés). Luego, exponemos crìticamente los estudios contendis en el libro que introducimos, Cuestiones Cartsianas. Mètodo y Metafìsica para finalmente discutir el lugar que la exègesis cartesiana ocupa en la obra filosófica general de Jean-Luc Marion. (shrink)

This essay draws on Heidegger’s account of technology and boredom and argues that the smartphone reveals a new kind of loneliness – profound loneliness. I examine three features of modern life – authenticity, boredom, and loneliness – and ask if any of these modes of being are the poièsis of the smartphone. I introduce three historical types of loneliness – primordial loneliness, existential loneliness, and profound loneliness. Whereas modern, industrialized life makes existential loneliness possible, the smartphone reveals our capacity for (...) profound loneliness. Like profound boredom, profound loneliness is “inconspicuous and wide-ranging,” concealed from us, hidden from view. Profound loneliness isolates us from everything, including ourselves. I also introduce a new form of boredom, profound boredom with something, and argue that the smartphone also reveals this new form of boredom, a pervasive, wide-ranging boredom of which we are unaware. (shrink)

A comprehensive reading of Heidegger's work from the mid-1930s to the 1960s that seeks to develop an ecological thinking rooted in reflections on the Heraclitean 'hen', relationality, and the impossibility of totality. An elaboration of the structural homology between Heidegger's use of the terms 'Technik' and 'metaphysics' sets the stage for his later work or topology. The Spätwerk is presented as an irresolvable polarity between 'Technik' and 'Ereignis', between a totalizing movement and a movement of disruption. This serves as the (...) basis for reflections on human experience of and as the ecological. Nature as Limit serves as a contribution to both eco-philosophy and to philosophical methodology more broadly, with philological and hermeneutic excursions that engage the relationship between language and the ecological motifs being developed in the work. (shrink)

This article argues that historical epistemology offers the history of philosophy and science more than a mere tool to write the history of concepts. It does this, first of all, by rereading historical epistemology through Michel Foucault's “techniques of the self.” Second, it turns to the work of Léon Brunschvicg and Gaston Bachelard. In their work we see a proposal for what the subjectivity of scientists and philosophers should be. The article thus argues that their work is driven by a (...) normative psychology: a set of prescriptions for which mental constitution a scholarly self has to have. In the Conclusion, it returns to existing analyses of “open‐mindedness” as a virtue and explores in what way these cases challenge these analyses, as well as to what extent Foucault's “techniques of the self” can be applied to other cases in the history of French philosophy. (shrink)

> Tradução do Livro (colaboração com Maurício Pelegrini): Michel Foucault: Devir Do Pensamento E Multiplicação De Práticas (Editora Pontes, 2023) ||| o Capítulo (Inglês – Português): Foucault e a genealogia do saber moderno sobre a sexualidade: De São Paulo às Confissões da Carne | Autor: Daniele Lorenzini ||| Capítulo (Inglês – Português): Os Sujeitos do Capitalismo: De Marx a Foucault | Autor: Johana Oksala ||| o Capítulo (Inglês – Português): A práxis filosófica de Michel Foucault: Sobre o devir da crítica (...) e da prática | Autor: Bernard E. Harcourt ||| o Capítulo (Espanhol – Português): Da biopolítica às declinações do Bios: Deslocamentos e continuidades do projeto filosófico foucaultiano | Autor: Christina López ||| o Capítulo (Francês – Português): Foucault, o neoliberalismo e o desejo de revolução | Autor: Christian Laval ||| o Capítulo (Francês – Português): Foucault e a mitologia antineoliberal | Autor: Philippe Sabot . (shrink)

Within continental philosophy of biology the work of Michel Serres has not received a lot of attention. Nonetheless, this chapter wants to argue that Serres was part of a group of thinkers – together with Jacques Monod and Henri Atlan – that started to think about biology in terms of second-order cybernetics and information theory. Therefore, this chapter aims to do four things. First of all, it maps the relation between Serres and Canguilhem, one that was mediated by authors such (...) as Louis Althusser or Jacques Monod. Secondly, it fleshes out Serres’s own ‘biophilosophy’. I label this alternative tradition as a ‘biophilosophy without a subject’. Finally, this chapter explores the consequences of this alternative biophilosophy through a brief examination of two authors whose work lies in the line of this tradition: René Girard and Bruno Latour. Though at first sight different, they both draw inspiration from this biophilosophy to develop a framework that, paradoxically, ‘jumps over’ the subject. Hence, the reason why biology is neither a prominent theme in Girard’s nor in Latour’s work. This is not because of a lack of biophilosophy, but because of an implicit one: a biophilosophy without a subject. (shrink)

This paper argues that early phenomenologists used the concept of empathy not only to refer to the direct perception of the other’s experiences – as underscored by contemporary proponents of the Direct Perception Theory – but also to describe – in a sense close to Lipps’s theory and contemporary Simulation Theory – how, by virtue of imagining, we “feel into” animate and inanimate objects. Focusing on this second usage of the term, two kinds of imagination-based accounts of empathy in early (...) phenomenology are identified. According to “radical imaginationists”, empathy can be explained in terms of the series of imaginative processes entailed in the idea of “feeling into”, such as projecting oneself into the target, “imitating” its feelings, and resonating with it. Voigtländer’s account of empathizing with one’s own self in Vom Selbstgefühl (1910) and Geiger’s account of empathy with atmospheres in “Zum Problem der Stimmungseinfühlung” (1911) can in this sense be regarded as radical imaginationist theories. According to “moderate imaginationists”, empathy might (but need not) entail imagining. Stein’s account of empathy with others in On the Problem of Empathy (Zum Problem der Einfühlung) (1917/1989) as a three-step process which can involve imagination-like states is a good example of a moderate imaginationist account. (shrink)

Notes prises par Jacques Lagrange lors du cours d'anthropologie donné par Michel Foucault en 1954-1955 à l'École Normale Supérieure.

Das Verhältnis von Einheit und Vielheit als ein Grundproblem der Philosophiegeschichte erfährt in den Werken von zwei der gegenwärtig einflussreichsten französischen Denker, Gilles Deleuze und Jean-Luc Nancy, eine je spezifische Reformulierung mit weitreichenden ontologischen sowie politischen Konsequenzen. Durch einen innovativen, aber dennoch einführenden Vergleich kontrastiert und verschränkt Ralf Gisinger erstmalig Ansätze beider Philosophen, indem er sein originäres Konzept der „Pluralisierung“ entwickelt. In einem Feld zwischen Allgemeinheit und Partikularität lassen sich so insbesondere klassische Kategorien der politischen Philosophie wie Identität, Subjekt oder (...) Gesellschaft radikal neu begreifen. Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy, two of the most influential thinkers of our time, both engage with the classic philosophical problem of the one and the many. Ralf Gisinger develops his original concept of ‘pluralization’ by contrasting and intersecting these two philosophers, while shedding a light on the consequences of these pluralizations on an ontological as well as political level regarding notions like identity, subject or society. (shrink)

Between Timelessness and History: The Image of the Human Being in Hans Jonas’ Ethics. This essay offers a contribution to the inquiry into the notion of image of the human being in Hans Jonas’ ethics. More specifically, passages from Das Prinzip Verantwortung and Technik, Medezin und Ethik are discussed to shed light on the complex temporal character that the image exhibits, stretched between the atemporality of what is equal to itself and the vulnerability that is distinctive of historical time. Particular (...) attention is dedicated to the fact that Jonas depicts the image as cross-cutting usual dichotomies such as temporal and timeless, permanent and changing, historical and non-historical – perhaps even transcendent and immanent. Albeit within its limits, the present work identifies the paradoxical temporal character of the image and, in so doing, points to a middle way between essentialism and relativism that may help rethink the relation between ethical values and historical time. (shrink)

Das Verhältnis von Einheit und Vielheit als ein Grundproblem der Philosophiegeschichte erfährt in den Werken von zwei der gegenwärtig einflussreichsten französischen Denker, Gilles Deleuze und Jean-Luc Nancy, eine je spezifische Reformulierung mit weitreichenden ontologischen sowie politischen Konsequenzen. Durch einen innovativen, aber dennoch einführenden Vergleich kontrastiert und verschränkt Ralf Gisinger erstmalig Ansätze beider Philosophen, indem er sein originäres Konzept der „Pluralisierung“ entwickelt. In einem Feld zwischen Allgemeinheit und Partikularität lassen sich so insbesondere klassische Kategorien der politischen Philosophie wie Identität, Subjekt oder (...) Gesellschaft radikal neu begreifen. -/- Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy, two of the most influential thinkers of our time, both engage with the classic philosophical problem of the one and the many. Ralf Gisinger develops his original concept of ‘pluralization’ by contrasting and intersecting these two philosophers, while shedding a light on the consequences of these pluralizations on an ontological as well as political level regarding notions like identity, subject or society. (shrink)

El artículo se propone poner en relación las concepciones sobre lo viviente en las obras de Hans Jonas y Gilbert Simondon. Como principales puntos de convergencia entre los dos autores se destacan la intención por superar los dualismos que han marcado las discusiones sobre este tema y la consideración del carácter problemático de la existencia del ser vivo. En ambos casos, la tensión que surge de este ser problemático de lo viviente se revela como el resultado de su propio devenir. (...) Esta caracterización de lo viviente se da en el caso de Jonas mediante su concepción de libertad y, en el caso de Simondon, en su consideración de la vida como conservación de un estado metaestable. La comparación de estos dos autores se concentrará en tres aspectos: (1) la distinción entre lo viviente y lo no-vivo; (2) el rol de la afectividad en los seres vivos; y (3) la forma en la que es entendida la muerte. Finalmente se pondrá en relación estas concepciones sobre el fenómeno de la vida con sus implicancias ético-políticas. (shrink)

The article deals with the relationship between art and religion in the philosophy of the French phenomenologist, Michel Henry. Henry develops a phi- losophy of art by interpreting Kandinsky’s theory of art on the basis of his own phenomenology of life. Art is an expression of life or subjectivity. By life or subjec- tivity, Henry means a passive self-affection of the subject on this side of intentional self-reference. According to Henry, self-affection is only possible if, in relating to himself, the (...) individual relates at the same time to absolute life. Religion is for Henry this link of the individual to absolute life. By being an expression of life, art is therefore at the same time an expression of religion. (shrink)

The essay discusses the interpretation of Aristotle's natural right teaching by Leo Strauss. This interpretation ought to be seen as the result of an investigation into the history of philosophy and of an attempt to philosophically address political problems. By virtue of this twofold origin, the Straussian commentary is unorthodox: it deviates from traditional Aristotelianism (Aquinas and Averroes) and it seems alien to the text of the Nicomachean Ethics. Strauss's criticism of medieval variants results from their incapacity—shared by contemporary political (...) thought—to address a perplexing issue: political exception. He sees in Aristotle's political teaching a way to escape from this failure: the unification, in natural right, of the requirements of statesmanship and ethics. The discovery of this way allowed Strauss to produce an interpretation of natural right that articulates important points pertaining to Aristotelian political science. (shrink)

While the traditional understanding of the look views it in terms of shame and oppression, I read Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics with Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity to argue that the look always gives me the world and inaugurates my freedom. Even the oppressor’s look reveals that I am free and that my existence is conditioned by the existence of other free beings. Because the look gives me the world as the arena within which I act freely, it is a (...) means of grace, and receiving it only in shame is bad faith. Although my existence remains unjustifiable and this grace cannot promise salvation, the look calls me out of shame to the pursuit of my and others’ freedom, and this call is a gift. (shrink)