Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy has been influenced by Michel Foucault’s thoughts in various aspects. This influence can be seen especially in methodology and political philosophy to a certain extent. Agamben’s political project, Homo Sacer, culminates in the publication of The Use of Bodies, where he proposes ‘form-of-life’ as a way to overcome the contemporary biopolitics. While the concept of form-of-life has often been considered in connection with the issue of sovereignty and law, this article argues that it (and Agamben’s coming politics) (...) can also be understood as a response to Foucault’s biopower. This is possible by considering several conceptual oppositions raised by Agamben against Foucault’s ideas, concepts such as “intimacy”, “community”, and “zoe/bios”. And this is, finally, an effort to re-appropriate human freedom. (shrink)

Social robotics designed to enhance anthropomorphism and zoomorphism seeks to evoke feelings of empathy and other positive emotions in humans. While it is difficult to treat these machines as mere artefacts, the simulated lifelike qualities of robots easily lead to misunderstandings that the machines could be intentional. In this post-anthropocentrically positioned article, we look for a solution to the dilemma by developing a novel concept, “abiozoomorphism.” Drawing on Donna Haraway’s conceptualization of companion species, we address critical aspects of why robots (...) should not be categorized with animals by showing that the distinction between nonliving beings and living beings is still valid. In our phenomenologically informed approach to social robotics, we propose that the concept of abiozoomorphism makes it possible to transcend the strong ethos of biotism that prevails in both robot design and academic research on social robots. (shrink)

In light of the Iranian uprising of 1978–79, Foucault preferred to use the term revolt instead of revolution. In the first part of the article, we attempt to go beyond the limits of the nonspecific distinction he made between revolt and revolution by drawing on Furio Jesi’s phenomenology of revolt and showing in what sense the Iranian uprising can be considered a revolt. In the second part, the article highlights the connection between the Iranian uprising and Foucault’s later works by (...) arguing that his adventure in Iran effectively shaped his final intellectual trajectory. By examining the tension between the transcendental and the historical in Foucault’s works, we propose to read his Iranian experience against the backdrop of such tension to better understand his different approach to the question of the transcendental in his final years. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito (1998; 2002; 2008) examines how immunological apparatuses originally designed to protect communities end up undermining communities. This paper explores comparatively his view on the interplay between community and immunity with Giorgio Agamben’s and Jacques Derrida’s, although in their works these notions appear under other labels. Beyond pointing out their similarities, the paper concludes by analyzing what, in our view, constitute the raison d’être of their ultimate and irreconcilable differences: Agamben’s approach is _antinomic_, while Derrida’s is _aporetic_ and Esposito’s (...) is rather _dialectical_. (shrink)

In his early works, Giorgio Agamben argues that some Auschwitz inmates practised a ‘silent form of resistance’ by shutting themselves off from the world until nothing could harm them. I argue that this conception of ‘bare life’ is both too abstract and too individualistic. Agamben’s idea of bare life’s resistance first neglects the socio-historical context that has produced particular instances of it, effectively barring the investigation into how to avoid future occurrences of sovereign violence. Agamben, second, emphasizes the potential for (...) resistance present in individual bodies shut off from the world without providing guidelines for how these bodies should form a substantive community. I consequently employ Vasily Grossman’s writings on the Shoah to provide an alternative conception of bare life’s resistance in the camps. According to Grossman, resistance lies not in closing oneself off from the world, but in cultivating ineradicable nodes of ‘senseless kindness’ in concrete human interactions. (shrink)

The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the (...) live event of the lecture. We adopt a phenomenological approach inspired by Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, which assumes that a gesture like note-taking is always an event of thinking with media in which a certain freedom is expressed. But Flusser’s description of note-taking focusses on the individual note-taker. What about students’ note-taking in a lecture hall as a collective gesture? Nietzsche considered note-taking ‘mechanical,’ as if students were automatons who mindlessly transcribed a verbal flow, while Benjamin considered it an inaesthetic gesture: at best, boring; at worst, ‘painful to watch.’ In contrast, we argue that the educational potentiality of note-taking—or better, note-making—can be grasped only if we account for its mediaticity (as writing that displaces the voice), together with but distinct from its political potentiality as a collective mediality (as a ‘means without end’). Note-taking enables us to see how collective thinking emerges in the lecture, a kind of thinking that belongs neither to the lecturer nor the student, but emerges in the relation of attention established between the lecturer, students and their object of thought. (shrink)

The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the (...) live event of the lecture. We adopt a phenomenological approach inspired by Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, which assumes that a gesture like note-taking is always an event of thinking with media in which a certain freedom is expressed. But Flusser’s description of note-taking focusses on the individual note-taker. What about students’ note-taking in a lecture hall as a collective gesture? Nietzsche considered note-taking ‘mechanical,’ as if students were automatons who mindlessly transcribed a verbal flow, while Benjamin considered it an inaesthetic gesture: at best, boring; at worst, ‘painful to watch.’ In contrast, we argue that the educational potentiality of note-taking—or better, note-making—can be grasped only if we account for its mediaticity (as writing that displaces the voice), together with but distinct from its political potentiality as a collective mediality (as a ‘means without end’). Note-taking enables us to see how collective thinking emerges in the lecture, a kind of thinking that belongs neither to the lecturer nor the student, but emerges in the relation of attention established between the lecturer, students and their object of thought. (shrink)

This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that being is inescapably diverse in kind—is anchored in his argument for the existence of change. -/- Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When (...) he gave this definition, arguing that change is real was a losing proposition. To show that it exists, he had to rework the way philosophers understood reality. His groundbreaking analysis of change has long been interpreted through a Platonist lens, however, in which being is conceived as unchanging. Offering a comprehensive reexamination of the relationship between change and being in Aristotle, Sentesy makes an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle, ancient philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics. (shrink)

While the initial reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was unspectacular, it made its presence felt in a host of other films – from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, to Brian De Palma's Obsession, and David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.. What seemed to have eluded the critics at the time is that Vertigo is a film about being haunted: by illusive images, turbulent emotions, motion and memory, the sound and feeling of falling into the past, into a nightmare. But it is also a (...) shrewdly reflexive film that haunts filmmakers, critics, and artists alike, raising fundamental questions about the ontology of moving images and the regime of fascination that churns them out. Douglas Gordon's Feature Film, D.N. Rodowick's The Wanderers, and Lynn Hershman's VertiGhost are contemporary examples of how the appropriation and contemplation of some the film's most iconic motifs, themes and strategies ask us to rethink the relation of fetishism to fabulation, and supplementarity to dissimulation and social engineering. Feature Film, The Wanderers, and VertiGhost are supplementary works, but like the original film they are about duplicity, doppelgänger, and dissimulation. What interests us is how they challenge the authority over, or even proximity to, that which returns in the form of the supplement. And ultimately, attaching themselves to the chain of forgers and forgeries, these supplementary works take their place in the vertiginous sequence of substitutions the film established: a neat allegory for a reign of the digital ghosting that Hitchcock could never have anticipated. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory opens by intervening in a debate between the jurist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Erik Peterson. Peterson's “Monotheism as a Political Problem” undermined Schmitt's thesis that the modern concept of sovereignty derives from Christian theology by arguing that divine monarchy is a Judaic and Greek idea that was liquidated by the doctrine of the Trinity. Agamben, by contrast, argues that the Trinity preserves and transforms the model of divine monarchy by casting God as (...) singular in his being and multiple in his management of the world. I argue that this critique of Peterson in fact builds upon the “Monotheism” essay, which shows how political theologians inherited and rearticulated conceptual problems derived from Aristotle's Metaphysics, and is driven by Agamben's concern with the impact of Aristotle's thought on ontology and politics. (shrink)

There is congruence between Nietzsche’s philosophy of life and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. For both philosophers the human animal possesses a divided relationship to its being alive. For both philosophers this division is of a political nature, such that membership in political community as we know it is conditional on the human animal’s alienation from its biological being. Both philosophers are also concerned with the possibility of transformation and, because of the connection they establish between politics and animality, (...) link this possibility to a change in the relationship between humans and their being alive. Yet both philosophers end up with an entirely different understanding of the nature of this change, and of its potential scope. This paper is an attempt at clarifying this disagreement between Nietzsche and Agamben, and with using it to come to a better understanding of the latter’s political ontology. It presents a reading of Kafka’s “The Burrow” in an attempt to show how Agamben’s concept of the anthropological machine challenges the Nietzschean program of the affirmation of life as will to power. (shrink)

This essay seeks to articulate the many implications which Giorgio Agamben's work holds for theology. It aims, therefore, to examine his conceptualizations of language in light of particular historical glosses on the “name of God” and the nature of the “mystical,” as well as to highlight the political task of profanation, one of his most central concepts, in relation to the logos said to embody humanity's “religious” quest to find its Voice. As such, we see how he challenges those standard (...) notions of transcendence which have been consistently aligned with various historical forms of sovereignty. In addition, I intend to present his redefinition of revelation as solely the unveiling of the “name of God” as the fact of our linguistic being, a movement from the transcendent divine realm to the merely human world before us. By proceeding in this manner, this essay tries to close in on one of the largest theological implications contained within Agamben's work: the establishment of an ontology that could only be described as a form of “absolute” immanence, an espousal of some form of pantheism yet to be more fully pronounced within his writings. (shrink)

The main concern of Agamben's work, prior to the Homo Sacer project, is how to understand the existence of or potentiality for language. Contemporary philosophy casts language as the unsayable presupposition of discourse. Agamben criticises this as an incomplete nihilism that remains within the horizon of metaphysics, and attempts to think the experience of language without an unsayable ground. I examine Agamben's critique of the role of the ineffable in the theory of the subject, and in the thought of Heidegger (...) and Derrida. I contrast this with his account of infancy as an experience that fully assumes the groundlessness of language. (shrink)

What is the relation between knowledge and orientation? How does being disoriented lead one to new knowledge or/and to being humbled about not knowing? How can not knowing aid in liberatory struggles, in alleviating oppression or even in being in community with like-minded people in an ethical manner? These are some of the questions that Ami Harbin’s work “Disorientation and Moral Life” brought up for me and which I would like to explore below, using prison abolition as one brief example.

This paper returns to the question of how to think of justice through Teubner’s recent definition of what he calls juridical justice. Juridical justice is defined as distinct from political, moral, social and theological conceptions of justice. Teubner attempts to think of an imaginary space for a juridical justice ‘beyond the sites of natural and positive law’ and searches for a conception of justice as the ‘law’s self-subversive principle’. This article reviews Teubner’s conception of juridical justice and further proposes a (...) distinction between juridical and non-juridical understandings of justice. (shrink)

The concept of division or caesura is central to the political and legal philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. This paper examines the different ways in which Agamben characterises the law in terms of caesura, and the manner in which this analysis of law is grounded in his analyses of language. I argue that there are two forms of legal division to be found in Agamben’s political analyses. The first is the division that occurs when the legal system produces determinate identities, such (...) as those of nation, and socio-economic status. However, this form of division is itself predicated upon the division that delimits the law as such, the caesura between political and bare life. The way that Agamben sets up both of these political problems is deeply indebted to his analyses of the ‘presuppositional structure’ of metaphysical language—the fracture between signification and its excess. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben suggests that Herman’s Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ offers the ‘strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty’. Bartleby, a legal scribe who does not write, is best known for the formula with which he responds to all his employer’s requests, ‘I would prefer not to.’ This paper examines this formula, asking what it would mean to ‘prefer not to’ when the law is in question. By reading Melville’s story alongside Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and Walter Benjamin’s (...) theses on history, it suggests that Bartleby’s interest, for Agamben, lies in his challenge to dominant conceptions of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which, he believes, are rendered indistinct in sovereignty. By reflecting critically on Agamben’s depiction of Bartleby as a ‘new Messiah’, this paper examines Agamben’s understanding of what it would mean to fulfil the law, and what form of political task this would entail. (shrink)

In this essay, I trace the motif of abandonment that runs through the ethics of Simone Weil. In doing so, as a conceptual lens, I make use of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of abandonment. Taking my cue from Weil’s hesitations concerning baptism, I examine her stance as a case of either sacrifice or exception, of ambiguity or indifference. Subsequently, I use Weil’s hesitations to examine an interconnected sequence of soteriology and metaphysics, following Church and potentiality, World and actuality, and The Kingdom (...) and contingency. This allows me to explore the themes of writing and life. A crucial role is reserved for the Parable of the Sower, and how it discriminates between the saved and the damned. (shrink)

In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, the narrator finds himself involved in a moral relation with the title character whose sense he finds difficult to articulate. I argue that we can make sense of this relation, up to a certain point, in terms of the influential account of obligation that Stephen Darwall advances in The Second-Person Standpoint. But I also argue that there is a dimension of moral sense in the relation that is not captured by Darwall’s account, or indeed (...) by any of the accounts of obligation that have been most prominent in the history of western philosophy from the early modern period up to the present. More specifically, I argue that what is brought out in the relation between Bartleby and the narrator is the separation of the experience of moral necessitation from the rule that would give its content. I attempt to show that this obligation without rule is a genuine moral phenomenon and that we can begin to understand it in terms of the ideas of love, singularity, and potentiality as these are developed in the work of Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

In this article, I go deeper into the educational meaning of tiredness. Over and against the mainstream view that tiredness is an impediment for education, I show that this phenomenon is intrinsically meaningful. My arguments are based, first, on a detailed phenomenological analysis of tiredness, as proposed by Buytendijk. Tiredness can be defined as the point where lack of willpower and lack of ability become utterly indistinguishable. Second, I turn to Agamben’s genealogy of the will, which shows that willpower was (...) invented in order to control a more original, but also more arcane sense of what it means to be able to do something: potentiality. I argue that tiredness, as analysed by Buytendijk, is a state of potentiality. As such it has the power to interrupt the contemporary ordering of society and of the realm of education, which is fully predicated upon individual wilful self-commandment. More positively speaking, tiredness has an important educational value in that it grants the opportunity of beginning anew with the world. This article is also an attempt to show how phenomenological work and genealogical approaches can inform one another. (shrink)

The essay discusses the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel’s theorizing about the individual. Whereas it is typically within the context of the modern metropolis and the mature money economy that Simmel’s ideas have been discussed in the secondary literature, I render those ideas in another light by addressing the ontological and existential issues crucial to his conception of the individual. In Simmel, the individual is divided between the “what” and the “who,” between the qualities which make one something individual and (...) one’s non-repeatable and finite existence which makes one someone singular. I argue that whereas the first dimension can be understood sociologically, in terms of social relations, the latter is not accessible to sociology as such, but must be treated philosophically. Therefore, if we wish to address this duality that lies at the heart of individuality, a “philosophical turn” for sociology is called for. (shrink)

The essay sheds light on Aristotle's understanding of friendship and its relation to political life. The author challenges the usual view that Aristotle postulates three distinct kinds of friendship. Instead the author argues that Aristotle understood there to be only one kind of friendship, and that other "friendships" were to Aristotle "unfinished" and thus not friendship at all. Aristotle shows that the relation between friendship and politics is grounded in friendship's possibility for human beings, and not as something cherished for (...) its actuality. By looking at proper friendship as possibility and not actuality, we could only ever interpret the infamous statement attributed to Aristotle—"my friends, there are no friends"—not as illuminating of what friendship is but rather as a nostalgic diagnosis of the decay of the possibility of friendship, and hence of politics. By extension, and more poignantly, interpreting Aristotle's work on friendship in this light, we stand ready to reinterpret the mobilization of Aristotelian friendship for contemporary understandings of democratic practice. (shrink)

This study seeks to critically explore the link between sovereignty, violence and war in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. From a brief rereading of Leviathan’s main arguments that explicitly revolves around the Aristotelian distinction between actuality/ potentiality, it will conclude that Hobbesian pre-contractual violence is primarily based on what Hobbes terms “anticipatory reason” and the problem of future contingency. Relying on Foucauldian insights, it will be emphasized that the assumption of certain potentialities suffices in leading to (...) Hobbes’s well-known conclusion that the state of nature is a “condition of Warre.” In a second step, this study considers some of Agamben’s arguments to account for how pre-contractual violence as envisioned by Hobbes cannot be rendered impotent through the integration of a sovereign. In specific, Agamben’s claims shed light on an irreducible, inextricable entwining between the state of nature and the state of law as “Siamese twins” (Virno). On a meta-level, Agamben thus implicitly shows how the “Hobbesian problem” cannot be merely reduced to a “problem of order” (Parsons). With regard to the current functioning of the stratagems of financial markets and the mechanisms of future-colonization underpinning global politics, this study finally argues that Hobbes ought to be reevaluated in particular regarding the problem of the future in his account. Partly responding to Agamben’s critical investigations, I suggest that a careful exploration of what will be coined “the prospects of an actualization of the potentiality not-to-be” might serve as a first theoretical step towards a productive form of criticism. (shrink)

This paper reassesses a perennial concern of philosophy of education: the nature of the educational community and the role of the teacher in relation to such a community. As an entry point into this broader question, we turn to Philosophy for children, which has consistently emphasized the importance of community. Yet, not unlike pragmatist notions of community more broadly, the P4C community has largely focused on the goal-directed, purposive, aspect of the process of inquiry. The purpose of our paper is (...) to move beyond P4C in order to theorize a non-instrumental, in-tentional, educational community without pre-conceived goals or intentions. Drawing largely from the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, we describe the P4C-classroom as one that refuses to be operative and thus undermines the taken-for-granted logic of means and ends that underlies how educational communities are typically depicted and justified. Again drawing from Agamben, we identify the specific ways in which the experience of love and friendship constitute the in-tentional community. The silence of the voice of the teacher enables the experience of love and friendship to come about. Being included as an exclusion via his/her silence, the teacher is neither immanent nor transcendent but alongside the community as a paradigm of friendship. (shrink)

The paper’s purpose consists in pointing out the importance of the notion of “territory”, in its different accepted meanings, for the development of a theory and a practice of subjectivity both in deleuzean and canettian thought. Even though they start from very different perspectives and epistemic levels, they indeed produce similar philosophical effects, which strengthen their “common” view and the model of subjectivity they try to shape. More precisely, the paper focuses on the deleuzean triad of territorialisation, deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation, with (...) regard to the role it plays in the forming of the subject and in connection with the fundamental deleuzean notion of difference; it furthermore concentrates on the characterization of the notion of territory in Canetti’s work, also in the light of the mentioned deleuzean categories and with reference to the crucial canettian concept of transformation. Finally, the paper analyses both the political consequences of the “nomadic subjectivity” Deleuze and Canetti deal with and the critical and problematic aspects it involves. (shrink)

(2009). Fantasies and Fetishes: The Erotic Imagination and the Problem of Embodiment. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 40, Tradition, Art & Sexuality, pp. 66-82.

Today it would seem that being fatigued is a fairly common physical and psychological effect of educational systems based on an increasing demand for high-yield performance quotas. In higher education, ‘publish or perish’ is a kind of imperative to perform, perform better, and perform optimally leading to an overall economy of fatigue. In this paper we provide a critical theory of what we are calling the ‘fatigue university.’ While highlighting the negative costs of fatigue, we also provide a philosophical distinction (...) between tiredness and exhaustion that disrupts the biopolitics of fatigue from the inside. To do so, we turn to Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben whose writings on exhaustion point to its educational importance. Indeed, it is through the very ‘illnesses’ of exhaustion that the biopolitics of research can be problematized and opened up for new configurations. (shrink)

This article explores the uses of Agamben’s philosophy for understanding the educational meaning of practices that typically take/took place at school, such as the collective rehearsal of the alphabet or the multiplication tables. More precisely, I propose that these forms of ‘practising’ show what schooling, as a particular and historically contingent institution, is all about. Instead of immediately assessing the ‘practice of practising’ in terms of learning outcomes, I turn to Bollnow’s attempt to analyze this phenomenon in a substantially educational (...) way, which for him essentially consists in opposing practising and learning. I show that his analysis is superficial and that we need Agamben’s notion of ‘potentiality’ in order to come to grips with the sense of this phenomenon. This will allow to see that practising concerns an uncommon way to relate to a subject matter that makes possible a transformation of individual and collective existence. The main objective of this investigation is not to hold a plea for reintroducing obsolete pedagogical methods, but to rethink the very meaning of education. (shrink)

This article utilizes the work of Judith Butler in order to chart a queer and feminist animal studies, an animal studies that celebrates our shared embodied finitude. Butler's commentary on other animals remains dispersed and fragmented throughout books, lectures, and interviews over the course of the last several years. This work is critically synthesized in conjunction with her work on mourning and precarious lives. By developing an anti-anthropocentric understanding of mourning and precarious lives, this article hopes to create ontological, ethical, (...) and political concepts that resist the violence of the present. In so doing, the article contrasts Butler's understanding of precarious life with Giorgio Agamben's understanding of bare life in order to conceive of precariousness as constitutive of social reality. This intellectual labor lays the groundwork for understanding mourning the lives of other animals as a political act that produces new communities, rather than as an individuating and isolating emotion. (shrink)

This paper revisits Giorgio Agamben’s text The Time That Remains and through a comparative analysis contrasts the author’s reading of St Paul’s Romans to relevant Derridean thematics prevalent in the text. Specific themes include language, the law, and the subject. I illustrate how Agamben attempts to revitalise the idea of philosophical anthropology by breaking away from the deconstructive approach. Agamben argues that language is an experience but is currently in a state of nihilism. Consequently, the subject has become lost; or, (...) more specifically, the subject and its object have not disappeared in language but through language. The resuscitation of experience is thus required to defeat this condition: only in language does the subject have its site and origin. Unlike deconstruction, which highlights an inherent paradox within a situation unearthing a questionable foundation, Agamben argues that, by investigating the “exception,” one finds neither a norm nor an inherent truth of the situation, but the confusion which surrounds them both. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical insights provided by Anne Truitt's minimalist sculptures, as viewed through the phenomenological lenses of Hannah Arendt's investigations into the co-constitution of reality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's investigations into perception. Artworks in their material presence can lay out new ways of relating and perceiving. Truitt's works accomplish this task by revealing the interactive motion of our embodied relations and how material objects can actually help to ground our reality and hence human potentiality. Merleau-Ponty shows how our prereflective (...) bodies allow incompossible perceptions to coexist. Yet this same capacity of bodies to gather multiple perceptions together also lends itself to the illusion that we see from only one perspective. If an ethical perspective becomes reified into one position, it then becomes detached from reality, and the ethical potential is actually lost. At the same time, phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations and meanings. An ethics that does not take embodied relations into account—that allows for only one perspective—ultimately loses its capacity for flexibility, and for being part of a common and shared reality. (shrink)

Three clinical cases of very ill neonates exemplifying extreme ethical situations for nurses are interpreted through Arendt's concepts of life and natality, and Agamben's critique of bare life. Agamben's notions of form-of-life, as the inseparability of zoe/bios, and testimony are offered as the potential foundation of nursing ethics.

In this paper, I hope to i. briefly explain Nyaya dualist ontology and identify the implications involved in accepting this view, ii. provide a comparison of Nyaya dualism to Cartesian dualism, and iii. provide an analysis of Nyaya dualism vis-à-vis some contemporary non-dualist theories of mind, in an attempt to gauge the viability of Nyaya Dualism as a theory of mind. I will briefly identify the context and history of this school in Indian Philosophy and will attempt to describe how (...) this paper approaches and interprets Nyaya thinking. (shrink)

Nietzsche's model of eternal return triggers a drama of affirmation, the overcoming of a simple miming of our ancestors in favour of an active participation in the counter-actualisation of hidden potentials in recurrent events. Based on a close study of Zarathustra's struggle to free himself from a suffocating nihilism, the paper focuses on the revelatory caesura that ushers in what Deleuze calls the third synthesis of time, a time of ‘doing’ rather than reflection.

What has not yet been imagined in thought is: how to remain together while still being two, how to be and become subjectively two, how to discover a way of coexisting as two beings … a way of living and thinking and loving as two beings without one being reduced to the other? … [t]hanks to the respect that I feel for the other as other, to articulate both attraction and restraint with respect to him. I go out from and (...) return to myself in order to respect his alterity, and this respect for the other becomes respect for myself, my life and my growth. So there is no longer fusion or submission, but the existence of a two which is irreducible to one or to the simple opposition between one (male) and the other (female), a reduction which makes them simply two poles of the one. Luce Irigaray , Democracy Begins Between Two 112-13. (shrink)

Both ‘philosophy’ and ‘the child’ are notions that seem to have an everlasting presence in our daily vocabulary. What is less common and perhaps lacking is any reflection on the relation between them, which is rarely a focus of the researcher’s attention. We believe that it is precisely this relation that is at stake in increasingly popular notions such as ‘philosophy for/with children’, or even in philosophy of education as such. In this article we will expand upon this claim by (...) exploring the meeting place(s) of both notions. An extensive elaboration of this relation would need not only more space than the average journal article offers, but also much more extensive research. Both ‘philosophy’ and ‘the child’—if we were to do justice to the wealth these terms offer—should each form separately the object of further research, in order to be able to pick the fruits of their shared household. We will bypass a labyrinthine study of this sort, however, and instead offer some thoughts on the cross-section of both these terms, seeking as it were what could be philosophical about the child, and where philosophy becomes childish. We hope that the reader would be so kind as to step into this brief, and somewhat associative, reasoning and find something of value in this wordplay, knowing that the more extensive treatise that the interconnection of these two realities demands is to be found elsewhere. The authors, for their part, are writing in the conviction that less can sometimes be more. (shrink)

Modern continental thought is skeptical toward happiness and no longer easily reconciles its pursuit with a desire for justice, the good, and truth. Critical theory has unmasked happiness as a commodity within an industry, an ideological tool for control, and a sedative to, justification of, and distraction from social injustice. This article argues that these diagnoses make it all the more important that philosophy, rather than taking leave of happiness, once again turns it into a serious object of thought. Employing (...) the work of Badiou and Agamben as case studies, it asks what a critically informed yet affirmative philosophy of happiness should entail at a structural level. Assessing their philosophical models of happiness, this article 1) recognizes in their work a revival of the ancient ideal of a true, just, and happy life, 2) opens up a new way of evaluating their work, and 3) articulates basic requirements of a contemporary, affirmative philosophy of happiness beyond the happiness industry and its critics. (shrink)

-/- In the prime years of Hegel’s philosophical career, Prussia made progressive reforms to childhood education. Hegel had long supported reform. In his early Stuttgart Gymnasium Valedictory Address (1788), he had advocated for a public interest in widespread public education as a means for developing the children’s potential. Like Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hegel believed in education’s power to promote individual development (Bildung) as a path of freedom, which is achieved largely by expanding the student’s linguistic capacity since language, as Humboldt (...) understands it, is “the formative organ of thought [das bildende Organ des Gedanken]”. By combining Humboldt’s insights on language (especially his discussion of the power of Sanskrit) with themes in Hegel’s Science of Logic, I will demonstrate that the mind’s power to make judgments is a forward movement that can be arrested by epistemic injustice. Humboldt’s reflections on linguistic flowering and the factors that might impede it can help us understand epistemic injustice as an interference in linguistic cognitive mediation. -/- . (shrink)

This article is mainly about two things: first, exploring the gatherings of studying in the university. And second, it is about describing new relations to understand studying practices beyond the normative interventions carried out inside learning environments and the clearly demarcated functions imposed to their practice. In a certain sense, common assumptions about study recognize its importance for achieving learning goals and its capacity to be designed according to pre-conceived intentions. However, in an attempt to reconsider our understanding about studying, (...) the basic arguments here is that studying practices are constituted by open-ended activities that are guided by present interests to things that matter. Based on Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, activities of studying were observed through scenes, where students and study-materiality join together in the event of studying at the Agora Learning Centre of KU Leuven in Belgium. Adopting a particular sensibility and narrative to describe and attend to actions and material entities entangled on studying activities, the article attempts to take a look at these activities beyond their functionality. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to take a look at ‘what is going on’ in studying practices. (shrink)

The paper attempts to demonstrate; drawing on the recent experience of Philippine Catholic faith; that the relevance of the Church in the postmodern age is as much a political choice as it is a tolerance of the nihilistic mood of the times. It is a political choice insofar as the Church has nowhere to go in the postmodern except through asserting its relevance; which necessarily means homing in on the growing irrelevance of the organized faith; amidst the secular and liberal (...) currents of the present; in order to thresh out strategic directions for its continued survival; which is recently challenged by stories of sex scandals involving its clergy. The postmodern age also compels the Church to come to terms with the nihilism that accompanies what Nietzsche saw in his own time; and still true today; namely; the ‘death of God’. The ‘death of God’ continues to be a pervasive force behind the historical reaction of the faith toward the secularisation of the modern world; in terms; for instance; of the rise of today’s conservative attitude of Roman Catholicism; which can be considered a throwback of the earlier papal orthodoxy that looked down on temporal powers as a disguised evil. This conservatism entails a certain practice and belief in the purity of the faith and the sacred over and against the secular and the profane. It ignores the actual and objective distinctions between the temporal and the sacred; which betrays a form of nihilism; that is; the forced oblivion of the real ambiguity and the paradox that inform the distinction between the secular and the sacred. This kind of nihilism connotes that no distinction can be tolerated at the expense of the sacred; while certain strategic compromise with the secular in the guise of advancing the aims of faith are tolerated if only to allow for the full maturity of the regime of the sacred. (shrink)

Emergent forms of political protest and constitution often provide limit cases for their contemporary theoretical models, and transnational protest movements from Occupy to Democracy in Europe 2025...

Bu çalışmanın amacı Heidegger'in varlık kavramını ve bu kavramın çok anlamlılığını, pratik problemler açısından ele almaktır. Heidegger'in erken dönem çalışmalarında üzerinde yoğunlaşmış olduğu Aristoteles'in ontolojisi, onun varlık kavrayışını belirlemek açısından önemli bir yere sahiptir. Diğer yandan, varlığın çok anlamlılığı kavrayışı, -diğer varlıklarla birlikte-dünya içinde olmak için bir olanak sunabilir.

This paper suggests that a grammar of the secret forms a concept in Agamben’s work, a gap that grounds the enigma of sovereignty. Between the Indo-European *krei, *se, and *per themes, the secret is etymologically linked to the logics of separation and potentiality that together enable the pliant and emergent structure of sovereignty. Sovereignty’s logic of separation meets the logic of relation in the form of abandonment: the point at which division has exhausted itself and reaches an indivisible element, bare (...) life, the exception separated from the form of life and captured in a separate sphere. The arcanum imperii of sovereignty and the cipher of bare life are held together in the relation of the ban as the twin secrets of biopower, maintained by the potentiality of law that works itself as a concealed, inscrutable force. But the ‘real’ secret of sovereignty, I suggest, is its dialectical reversibility, the point at which the concept of the secret is met by its own immanent unworking by the critic and scribe under the *krei theme, and subject to abandonment through the work of profanation; here, different species of the secret are thrown against one another, one order undoing the other. The secret founded upon the sacred is displaced by Agamben’s critical orientation toward the immanent: what is immanent is both potential and hiddenness. (shrink)

This text is based on a staged dialogue conceived by Alice Lagaay and Juliane Schiffers, which closed the conference ‘How not to speak’ at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin on 22 April. Critical comments and questions emerging from the discussion that took place on that day are reflected in ‘Voice Off’.

Within educational philosophy and theory there has recently been a re-turn to the concept and practices of studying as an alternative or oppositional educational logic to push back against learning as the predominant mode of educational engagement. While promising, we believe that this research on studying has been limited in a few ways. First, while the ontological aspects of studying have been examined in a thorough manner, the affective dimension of studying has not yet been investigated. Second, while a diverse (...) range of theorists have been called upon to articulate studying, the philosophical resources out of which studying has been shaped have remained trapped within the western canon. We seek to address these limitations in this article by turning to some literature on affect theory, Daoist wind-stories, as well as the Yijing–Daoist Yin–Yang movement. In doing so, not only do we make contributions to research on studying, but we also contribute an educational understanding to affect theory and draw out important affinities between affective study and Daoist windstories. In other words, this paper moves to both articulate the affective dimensions of studying and illuminate a particular pedagogy of affect. More important, we move one step further to re-conceptualize learning and study, figuring them not merely as alternative or oppositional orderings, but as a Daoist Yin–Yang movement wherewith learning and studying, analogous to the Yin–Yang elements, always happen together, mutually informing, confronting, and transforming each other. (shrink)

The concept of the gesture is explored in relationship with its moral significance rather than, for example, its aesthetic significance. It is argued that the concept can be used in order to make clear how morality relates to the body. This is not to suggest that gestures can be neatly defined. On the contrary, they always seem to be ambivalent and somewhat nebular. However, it will be shown that some of their significance might well be related to popular concepts such (...) as ‘transparency’, ‘authenticity’, ‘integrity’ and ‘responsibility’. In order to make this clear, the role of some particular gestures in politics and organizational life, most notably ‘apology’ and ‘trust’, will be discussed throughout the paper. (shrink)