The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that we don't perceive reality: spacetime, objects, colors, sounds, tastes, and so forth, are all merely an interface that we evolved to track evolutionary fitness rather than to perceive truths about external reality. In this paper, I expound on his argument, then I extend it, primarily, by looking at key ideas in physics that are quite germane to it. Among the topics in physics that I discuss are black holes, the holographic principle, string theory, (...) duality, quantum gravity, and special relativity. I discuss these ideas from physics with an eye to their relevance for Hoffman's view. (shrink)

The conceptual pair of own-world (ídios kósmos) and common world (koinós kósmos) constitutes an archaic pair, originally introduced by Heraclitus. More than two millennia after its introduction, Binswanger picked up this conceptual pair in the attempt to understand existence and mental disorder. Ever since, this conceptual pair has been part of the conceptualization of schizophrenia in phenomenological psychopathology. However, the concepts of ídios kósmos and koinós kósmos have seldomly been elaborated and expanded upon, and certain unclarities rest within the literature. (...) This paper resolves some of these unclarities and contributes to a theory of anthropological proportions, which furthers our understanding of ídios kósmos and koinós kósmos. The paper begins with an exploration of the theoretical underpinnings of this conceptual pair, i.e., it discusses the concept of world, what is understood by common world, and what it means to live in an own-world. This theoretical exploration segues into an in-depth analysis of the alterations of experiential life in schizophrenia, which can be illuminated via this conceptual pair. It is further argued that this conceptual pair contributes to an understanding of the puzzling phenomenon of double bookkeeping. Finally, the paper concludes in a discussion of clinical implications of this conceptual pair, stressing the importance of a mindfulness of the alterations to the ídios kósmos and koinós kósmos in schizophrenia. (shrink)

There is renewed interest in questions of ontology in various fields, as there has been in biosemiotics. But for umwelt theory, ontology needs to be approached in particular ways, in order to avoid it from being yet another “philosophy of access”, part and parcel of the epistemology-ontology dyad, where “ontology” is the leftover of epistemology, or any sort of subjective constitution of things. The article engages in philosophical considerations about what kinds of assumptions and preliminary considerations should be made for (...) a semiosic ontology that was multiple, relational, and irreducible, with the principle goal being to engage with some terminological issues at the meeting point of ontology and umwelt theory. Ontography is proposed as a name for a low-key descriptive engagement with non-human umwelts considered as “worldings”, and maieutics as a particular attitude, or ethos, for the practical situation of direct inaccessibility of nonhuman umwelts. Parallels are drawn with the ontological turn in anthropology, which has also successfully engaged with alterity. A comparative study of umwelts should consider the ontological self-determination of the nonhuman other. (shrink)

In this essay I analyze a passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. This excerpt contains the expression “O, rubbish!” (Ach Unsinn), which I consider to be closely related to the notions of “bullshit” developed by Harry Frankfurt and Gerald A. Cohen. The relevance of this essay is illustrated with lively examples, both related to contemporary society and identified by Wittgenstein about 70 years ago. The paper is organized in six sections containing 1) an introduction to the topic, 2) an explanation (...) of “bullshit” as found in the works of Frankfurt and Cohen, 3) an explanation of Wittgenstein’s work on certainty and propositions beyond doubt, 4) an identification of reasonable and unreasonable doubt and their connection to “bullshit”, 5) an explanation of the different kinds of “bullshit” with the intention of mapping them in relation to each other, and 6) a summarizing conclusion. The main purpose of this paper is to expound on Wittgenstein’s views on “bullshit” and relate them to contemporary philosophy of nonsense. (shrink)

Many people assume that serious reflection on animal ethics arose because of recent technological progress, the sharp rise in human population, and consequent pressure on global ecology. They consequently believe that this sub-discipline is relatively new and that traditional religions have little or nothing to offer. In spite of this however, we are currently seeing a heightened awareness of religion’s important role in all areas of individual and communal life, for better or for worse. As regards our relations with nature (...) in general and with animals in particular, and as regards the foundational idea of creaturehood, religious traditions have played, and are still playing, a central role in molding the subliminal conscience of billions of people, guiding their moral dispositions that often remain unarticulated. This paper therefore explores our relation to animals by referring not only to the binary conceptual structure animality-humanity, as philosophers often do, but by referring also to the triple conceptual structure animality-humanity-divinity. After critically evaluating some of the relevant attitudes that derive from the major world religions, the paper tries to determine the extent to which the doctrine of these religions converge on some useful central principles regarding animal ethics and animal production. The result of this research supplies added support to the claim that the study of religious outlooks in this area serves to rediscover neglected perspectives and thereby to enlarge the horizon of current philosophical work. (shrink)

Since René Descartes famously separated the concepts of body and mind in the seventeenth century, western philosophy and theory have struggled to conceptualize the interconnectedness of minds, bodies, environments and cultures. While environmental psychology and the cognitive sciences have shown that spatial perception is 'embodied' and depends on the aforementioned concepts' interconnectedness, architectural design practice, for example, has rarely incorporated these insights. The article presents research on the epistemological foundations that frame the communication between design theory and practice and juxtaposes (...) it with scientific research on embodied experience. It further suggests that Asian aesthetics, with its long history in conceiving relations and art as interactive, could create a bridge between recent scientific insights and design practice. The article outlines an approach to the interconnectedness of minds, bodies, environments, the sciences and cultures, in favour of a future that is governed by creative wisdom rather than 'smart' efficiency. (shrink)

Maria Kronfeldner’s Preface and Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization maps the landscape of dehumanization studies. She starts with a brief portrayal of the history of the field. The systematically minded sections that follow guide the reader through the resulting rugged landscape represented in the Handbook’s contributions. Different realizations, levels, forms, and ontological contrasts of dehumanization are distinguished, followed by remarks on the variety of targets of dehumanization. A discussion on valence and emotional aspects is added. Causes, functions, and (...) consequences of dehumanization, and the prospects for reducing or undoing it, are introduced. The systematic overview closes with a discussion of some important theoretical complexities that arise in studying dehumanization. After these systematic sections, the scholarly work on dehumanization gets situated in the broader intellectual landscape of debates about the ‘human’ in the humanities and social sciences. The Introduction ends with some notes on scope, limitations, and intended readership of the Handbook. (shrink)

The question of how the university can relate to the world is centuries old. The poles of the debate can be characterized by the plea for an increasing instrumentalization of the university as a producer and provider of useful knowledge on the one hand (cf. the knowledge factory), and the defense of the university as an autonomous space for free inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake on the other hand (cf. the ivory tower). Our current global predicament, (...) however, forces us to rethink the relation between university and world. Indeed, an easy nstrumentalization of the university for the purposes of society is no longer possible in troubled times when the future of society itself seems to be at stake. Nevertheless, urgent societal concerns do need to be addressed by the university. Hence, the disinterested position seems a highly irresponsible option. The aim of this dissertation is to reconsider the relation between the university and the world from an educational perspective by addressing the question “How to situate study in the relation between university and society?” The dissertation consists of three parts. In Part One, the existing literature on the relation between university and society will be discussed. The first chapter discerns two main approaches to this issue, namely the transcendental-philosophical approach (cf. the idea of the university) and the critical-sociological approach (cf. academic capitalism) that conceive of the university, respectively, as an idea and as an organization. By means of an excursus on the emergence of the university in the Middle Ages, the case is made for an ecological approach to the university. In the second chapter, the work of two authors who have recently adopted such an ecological approach is briefly presented. Whereas Ronald Barnett’s theory of the ecological university is situated more in the transcendental-philosophical tradition, Susan Wright’s investigations of the university in the knowledge ecology can be placed in the critical-sociological tradition. Both conceptions, however, are hinged on an institutional understanding of the university. In line with recent developments in social theory, namely the focus on practices, it is proposed to work towards an ecology of study practices. Part Two presents Isabelle Stengers’ idea of the ecology of practices. The third chapter elucidates Stengers’ work on scientific practices by first situating it within the so-called Science Wars, which provided the impetus to elaborate a theoretical framework for a civilized dialogue between scientists and the broader public. The basic tenets and concepts of her approach, such as the understanding of practice as a set of requirements and obligations, are presented, explained, and discussed. In the fourth chapter, the focus shifts from scientific practices to study practices. Assisted by Stengers’ writings on Whitehead’s speculative philosophy, this chapter aims to flesh out Whitehead’s description of the university as a ‘home of adventures’ in order to come to an educational understanding of the study practices of the university. A conceptual inquiry into how study practices activate certain worldly problems and turn them into matters of study is presented. Part Three develops the conceptual work on study practices further in relation to the activities of the Palestinian experimental university Campus in Camps. Chapter Five presents the work of Campus in Camps and explains how it relates to the theoretical discussion offered in the second part. On the basis of Stengers’ conception of practice, which discerns requirements and obligations as vital ingredients, this chapter argues that life in exile is what drives the study practices of Campus in Camps, and hence, that it is the issue of life in exile that participants are obligated to when they study. Whereas Chapter Five is focused on what is being studied in Campus in Camps, Chapter Six inquires in to the specific requirements its activities need to fulfill in order to be study practices; in other words, how the participants study. Four requirements are discerned that, taken together, seem indispensable to understand the study practices of Campus in Camps; namely, storytelling, comparing, mapmaking, and using. The concluding chapter returns to the research question and again takes up the main ideas developed in the dissertation, such as the adventure of study and the cohabitation of scientific and study practices in the university. The last two sections of the conclusion deal with two remaining issues of a more practical nature; namely, how to relate to institutionalization when working from a practice-theoretical point of view, and lastly the question of what can be done. In all, and returning to the initial problem, the dissertation asks what it means to conceive of the university as situated by and engaged with worldly questions. (shrink)

The large-scale, intensive production of meat and other animal products, also known as the animal-industrial complex, is our largest food system in terms of global land use and contribution to environmental degradation. Despite the environmental impact of the meat industry, in much of the policy literature on climate and environmental change, sustainability and food security, meat continues to be included as part of a sustainable food future. In this paper, I present outcomes of a discourse analysis undertaken on a selection (...) of key major international and Australian reports. After highlighting common themes in the ways that meat and animals are discussed, I draw on the animal studies literature to critically analyse the assumptions underpinning such policy documents. My analysis illustrates that animals are effectively de-animated and rendered invisible in these bodies of literature by being either aggregated—as livestock, units of production and resources, or materialised—as meat and protein. These discursive frames reflect implicit understandings of meat as necessary to human survival and animals as a natural human resource. A critical examination of these understandings illustrates their dual capacity to normalise and encourage the continuation of activities known to be seriously harming the environment, climate and human health, while at the same time obstructing and even denigrating alternative, less harmful approaches to food. In response, I offer some conceptual and analytical modifications that can be easily adopted by researchers on climate change, sustainability and food security with the aim of challenging dominant discourses on meat and animals. (shrink)

In their recent book Radicalizing Enactivism. Basic minds without content, Dan Hutto and Erik Myin make two important criticisms of what they call autopoietic enactivism. These two criticisms are that AE harbours tacit representationalists commitments and that it has too liberal a conception of cognition. Taking the latter claim as its main focus, this paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of AE in order to tease out how it might respond to H&M. In so doing it uncovers some reasons which not (...) only appear to warrant H&M’s initial claims but also seem to point to further uneasy tensions within the AE framework. The paper goes beyond H&M by tracing the roots of these criticisms and apparent tensions to phenomenology and the role it plays in AE’s distinctive conception of strong life-mind continuity. It is highlighted that this phenomenological dimension of AE contains certain unexamined anthropomorphic and anthropogenic leanings which do not sit comfortably within its wider commitment to life-mind continuity. In light of this analysis it is suggested that AE will do well to rethink this role or ultimately run the risk of remaining theoretically unstable. The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing theoretical development of AE by highlighting potential internal tensions within its framework which need to be addressed in order for it to continue to evolve as a coherent paradigm. (shrink)

To the three classic wounds to human narcissism – that of Copernicus , Darwin , and Freud – there must be appended a fourth wound: man is not the only subject in the universe. While most philoso- phers are unwilling to accept it, ethological research shows that animals are also subjects; indeed, in human/animal hybrid communities, certain animals can become individuals or even persons. Through animal biography, anec- dotes, and other often disqualified but nonethe- less empirical forms of knowledge, we (...) can come to know these singular animals. (shrink)

This article seeks to lay out an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s central claims with regard to the formation of a theory of citationality. By juxtaposing Walter Benjamin’s theory of citations alongside his more recent, critical engagements with the Western theological tradition, Agamben sets himself the goal of redefining ethics along Levinasian lines in order to arrive at a respect for the face of ‘whatever’ being before us, the true source towards which all citations point.

In Remnants of Auschwitz , Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification. Agamben’s ontological account of shame is problematic insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and Maurice Blanchot – (...) I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity , and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself. On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity. The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare ; even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting point for resistance. (shrink)

Ethics is ordinarily understood as being concerned with questions of responsibility for and in the face of an other. This other is more often than not conceived of as another human being and, as such, necessarily excludes others – most notably animals and machines. This essay examines the ethics of such exclusivity. It is divided into three parts. The first part investigates the exclusive anthropocentrism of traditional forms of moral␣thinking and, following the example of recent innovations in animal rights philosophy, (...) questions the mechanisms of such exclusion. Although recent work in animal- and bio-ethics has successfully implemented strategies for the inclusion of the animal as a legitimate subject of moral consideration, its other, the machine, has remained conspicuously excluded. The second part looks at recent attempts to include these machinic others in moral thinking and critiques the assumptions, values, and strategies that have been employed by these various innovations. And the third part proposes a means for thinking otherwise. That is, it introduces an alternative way to consider these other forms of otherness that is not simply reducible to the conceptual order that has structured and limited moral philosophy’s own concern with and for others. (shrink)

In recent years, questions regarding the ontological status of the human have been raised with renewed interest and imagination within various fields of critical thought. In the face of biotechnological findings and increasingly advanced technologies that connect as well as disturb settled boundaries, whether geographical or bodily, not to mention philosophical questionings of traditional western humanism, the boundaries of the human subject have been contested. The human body, traditionally imagined as closed and autonomous, has been opened up to a world (...) of forces and agencies that are strange, other and often deeply disturbing when viewed from an anthropocentric standpoint. Rather than close down anxieties concerning such boundary transgressions and ontological uncertainties, scholars – not least within areas such as feminist, posthumanist and queer theory – have argued that here lie possibilities as well as an ethical urgency to rethink the human subject, its world(s) and its others. Indeed, what might it mean to view the world from positions that do not take the pure and autonomous human form as its starting point? And what ethical considerations does such a viewpoint demand of us? (shrink)

Revolutionary violence stems from the conatus of survival, from the appetite for life and joy rather than from the desire to destroy and the hubristic pretension to punish. It is an incursion of one's desire to affirm life and annihilate pain. Following Laruelle's methodology of nonstandard philosophy, I conclude that revolutionary violence is the product of an intensive expansion of life. Pure violence, conceived in non-philosophical terms, is a pre-lingual, presubjective force affected by the “lived,; analogous to Badiou's void and (...) it is radically revolutionary. It is fundamentally different from Benjamin's lawmaking “divine violence; and its appropriations by Žižek. Revolutionary experience is inevitably translated into language. What preserves the revolutionary substance in a post-revolution political discourse is that it is constantly checked by the sense of fidelity to the experience of the revolutionary event. Agamben, Benjamin, Schmidt and Žižek are discussed from an essentially non-philosophical stance, informed by Laruelle's theory that has been supplemented in some aspects by Badiou's concept of the pre-lingual event. (shrink)

This is a theoretical and empirical investigation into the causal link between international criminal trials and preventing violence through exemplary prosecutions. Specifically how do representative trials of persons accused of having the greatest responsibility for the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole, supposedly bind recurrent violence? The argument pursued is that by using an accused as an example, a court engages in an indirect and uncertain substitution of personal rights for social harmony and order. (...) These prosecutions combine a peculiar rhetoric, logic and aesthetic, all which substitute the responsibilities for a society in general to a particular individual in order to redeem that society by transferring its communal responsibility onto the individual punished as a form of atonement or expiation. International and domestic trials, as well as truth and reconciliation commissions, are part of a suite of options addressing communal mass violence that can work in tandem. However, because those convicted do not have a monopoly on criminality, nor do those merely reconciled have a monopoly on virtue, exemplification through punishment only targets a few on behalf of the many. Indeed such a redemptively sacrificial economy distinguishes legal justice from mere vengeance. (shrink)

Este artigo argumenta, começando pela justaposição de Heidegger ao lado dos geógrafos Ratzel e Vidal de la Blanche, e do etologista von Uexküll, realizada por Giorgio Agamben, em seu ensaio The Open, que a estética da morada , que encontramos no último Heidegger, tem que ser entendida em termos da centralidade para o pensamento de Heidegger de um conceito que também é central para o pensamento geográfico-cultural , nomeadamente, o conceito de lugar ou ‘espaço geográfico’. A centralidade dada ao ‘geográfico’ (...) no pensamento de Heidegger é freqüentemente tomada como diretamente conectada, como ela é entendida por Agamben, com o problemático engajamento de Heidegger com os nazistas nos anos 1930; e Agamben apresenta a posição heideggeriana como paralela a de von Uexküll quanto a isso. Porém, não apenas a maneira pela qual Agamben faz essa conexão é altamente enganosa, mas ela também não atenta para qualquer real consideração para o que pode estar em questão na ênfase no ‘geográfico’ em Heidegger. Há, de fato, razão para pensar que o papel desempenhado pelos conceitos de lugar e espaço no pensamento de Heidegger vai de encontro às associações que Agamben e outros supõem. Este artigo é então uma exploração do ‘geográfico’ tal como ele aparece em Heidegger e das associações políticas que podem ser pensadas como acompanhando-o, bem como da relação de Heidegger com uma certa linha da tradição geográfica exemplificada por Ratzel e Vidal de la Blanche.Beginning with Giorgio Agamben’s juxtaposition, in his essay The Open, of Heidegger alongside the geographers Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche, and the ethologist, von Uexküll, this paper argues that the aesthetics of dwelling that we find in later Heidegger has to be understood in terms of the centrality to Heidegger’s thinking of a concept that is also central to cultural-geographic thought , namely, the concept of place or ‘geographic space’. The centrality given to the ‘geographic’ in Heidegger’s thinking is often taken to be directly connected, as it is taken to be by Agamben, with Heidegger’s problematic engagement with Nazi in the 1930s, and Agamben presents Heidegger’s position as parallelling that of von Uexküll in this regard. Yet not only is the manner in which Agamben makes this connection highly misleading, but it also neglects any real consideration of what might be at issue in the emphasis on the ‘geographical’ in Heidegger. There is, indeed, reason to think that the role played by the concepts of place and space in Heidegger’s thought actually runs counter to the associations that Agamben and others assume. This paper is thus an exploration of the ‘geographical’ as it appears in Heidegger, and of the political associations that might be thought to accompany it, as well as of Heidegger’s relation to a certain strand within the geographical tradition exemplified by Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche. (shrink)

I have been teaching an undergraduate course called “Ethics and Animals” for almost a decade now. It counts as a core course for the ethics certificate at my university, and is housed in my home department, Women’s Studies, so there is some presumption of feminist or progressive content. I have the syllabi from all these years laid out in front of me on my desk. What strikes me immediately is that the turnover of the reading list is at least 75 (...) percent, and sometimes even 100 percent, from year to year. Early on, I see Singer (1975) and Regan (1983), Adams (1990), DeGrazi (2002), Francione (1996), Singer and Regan again, Linzey (1987), Haraway (1989), Francione again, Wolfe (2003), Derrida (2008), Waldau (2006) .. (shrink)

This article argues that Agamben’s conception of fiction is crucial for understanding his recent works. I suggest that the key to understanding Agamben conception of fiction is to be found in a few curious remarks at the end of Language and Death. These remarks explain why the distinctions between life and death, animal life and human life, bare life and political forms of life, the outlaw and the sovereign, and the norm and the exception that continue to preoccupy Agamben are (...) all fictions. After considering Agamben’s account of these fictions and their relation to the relevant passage in Language and Death, the article explores the ways Agamben thinks the fictions that govern human action and social life might be unworked. (shrink)

Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened (...) scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining. (shrink)

In this paper, in the first place, I aim to enquire into Bernard Stiegler’s critical appropriation of his mentor Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance, emphasizing how Stiegler’s philosophy of technology stems from an original interpretation of the main tenets of deconstruction. From this perspective, I will investigate Stiegler’s definition of technology as tertiary retention, i.e., exosomatized, artificial memory interrelating with biological memory, testing its hermeneutic strengths as well as possible weaknesses. In the second place, I aim to contrast Stiegler’s understanding (...) of technology with the concept of multistability brought forward by postphenomenological philosophies of technology such as those elaborated by Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek. This investigation will enable me to submit that Stiegler’s approach represents a peculiar and innovative way to conceive of technology. On the one hand, indeed, it does not seem to fall prey to the criticisms raised by postphenomenology against traditional philosophies of technology such as Martin Heidegger’s or Jacques Ellul’s, deemed to be overly deterministic, abstract and pessimistic in their understanding of technology. On the other, it retains important methodological precautions from deconstruction, thereby pointing at some possible blind spots of postphenomenology, especially concerning the vexed question of the empirical-transcendental divide, which Stiegler aims to develop beyond both Derrida’s and postphenomenology’s stances. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, ethical challenges related to robotics technologies have gained increasing interest among different research and non-academic communities, in particular through the field of roboethics. While the reasons to address roboethics are clear, why not to engage with ethics needs to be better understood. This paper focuses on a limited or lacking engagement with ethics that takes place within some parts of the robotics community and its implications for the conceptualisation of the human being. The underlying assumption (...) is that the term ‘ethical’ essentially means ‘human’. Thus, this paper discusses a working hypothesis according to which by avoiding to engage with roboethics, roboticists contribute to the tacit dehumanisation process emerging in and outside of robotics. An alternative approach includes ‘lived ethics’ which involves not only incorporating formal ethical approaches into the roboticists’ work but also ‘being’ ethical and actually engaging with ethical reflection and practice. (shrink)

While interactions with other animate beings seem mostly to serve our own human interests, there are, at times, fugitive glimpses, passing contacts, momentary motions, and fleeting feelings of vital connection with other life forms. Life phenomenology attempts to realize these relational, interactive and intercorporeal possibilities. It challenges the language game of presuming the muteness and bruteness of non-human creatures and, at best, of speaking for them. It critiques the capture of non-human species within the inhibiting ring of human functions and (...) forms to reveal feelings and flows of interspecies commonality. It brings to expression the experiences of being moved to act and speak with others who do not share the human tongue. In part a critique of the logocentric, anthropocentric phenomenologies of intentionality, life phenomenology is more positively a means of coming to terms with the life-affirming kinetic, kinesthetic and affective dynamics of interspecies relationality. I take up the interrogation of this phenomenality, this humanimality, with the assistance of phenomenological scholarship that lends fuller credence to the experiences we have of moving in concert with other animate beings. In doing so, I aim to show the important insights that life phenomenology offers us in fostering not only greater appreciation of, responsivenss to and connection with other animals, but also in indicating the qualitative dynamics of relating with greater animate consciousness to one anotherof our own animal kind. (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)

Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agamben’s account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a (...) form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agamben’s account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agamben’s rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendt’s belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics. (shrink)

The article ventures a reading of Russian postcommunist politics from the perspective of the messianic turn in continental political philosophy, specifically Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the ‘end of history’. Taking its point of departure from a retrospective construction in the Russian political discourse of the 1990s as a period of ‘timelessness’, the paper argues that postcommunism may indeed be viewed as a paradoxical ‘time out of time’, a rupture in the ordinary temporality that entirely dispenses with the teleological horizon of (...) politics. While the problematic of the ‘end of history’ has been popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s liberal recasting of Kojève’s reading of Hegel, the Russian experience is entirely contrary to this complacent and self-gratifying account of the triumph of liberalism and accords, instead, with Agamben’s understanding of the end of history as the deactivation of the teleological dimension of politics as such. The effect of this deactivation is not a catastrophic disintegration of the social order but rather the opening of the possibility of an inoperative political praxis that is oriented towards the affirmation of existence in the pure present. The article proceeds with outlining the implications of this reading of Russian postcommunism for understanding the present conjuncture of Russian politics. (shrink)

This paper explores how Pope Francis’ critique of “the technocratic paradigm” in Laudato Si’ can contribute to an environmental ethics governed by asymmetries of power and agency. The technocratic paradigm is here theorized as linked to forms of anthropocentrism that together engender a dangerous alliance between the powers of technology and technologies of power. The meaning and import of this view become clearer when the background of these ideas gets excavated in the works of Romano Guardini. The contemporary manifestation of (...) Guardini’s warnings appears in the form of myriad environmental injustices wrought by structures of power linked to technology. To counter such injustices, we must discern which types of technologies to develop and how to limit technocratic approaches for the sake of other values. The integral ecological outlook favored by Francis may be interpreted as a kind of eco-politics, or even, controversially, an eco-technology, with the cultivation of technologies of contemplation. Applying Peter Sloterdijk’s conceptions of anthropotechnics and monogeism to the Ignatian Exercises animating the Jesuit Francis’ work, we can see how such technologies hold potential for Catholicism to collaborate better with secular strategies in relating to Earth’s agency in a new eco-politics. Such an eco-politics could furnish an alternative to bio-politics, especially if governed by aspects of the Franciscan form-of-life identified by Giorgio Agamben. Such a project ultimately moves us beyond Laudato Si’ and the work of Romano Guardini, pointing up the limitations of Laudato Si’ in engaging the agency of the Earth. (shrink)

This essay explores the use of the concept of the messianic by Giorgio Agamben and Theodor Adorno. Throughout his work, Agamben consistently presents his reading of the messianic as an alternative to what he considers to be the ‘pessimistic’ negative dialectics of Adorno, which he argues ‘is an absolutely non-messianic form of thought’. For Agamben, the messianic brings dialectics to a ‘standstill’. This essay analyzes this deployment of the ‘messianic’ in his thought, and contrasts it with the perspective of Adorno. (...) Agamben’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin is challenged with reference to a debate between Adorno and Benjamin over theology, dialectics, and politics. (shrink)

This article focuses on the cultural implications of biosemiotics, considering the extent to which biosemiotics constitutes an “epistemological break” with modern modes of conceptualizing the world. To some extent, the article offers a series of footnotes to points made in the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer. However, it is argued that the move towards ‘agency’ represented in biosemiotics needs to be approached with caution in light of problems of translation between the humanities and the sciences. Notwithstanding these problems, biosemiotics is found (...) to represent the potential for one of the most thoroughgoing shifts that cultural analysis has yet seen. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger was convinced that we can learn something about the way we inhabit the world by turning attention to our fundamental moods. It was one important theme of his fundamental ontology in the 1920s. There is, according to Heidegger, an intricate connection between awakening our moods and developing a reflexive stance. He provides us with a rich phenomenological description of different forms of boredom. In this article I approach Heidegger’s conception of boredom from an educational point of view. I (...) am suggesting a reading where the experience of boredom has transformative potentialities that also can illuminate our cultural situation as a whole. By turning away from boredom there is always a possibility of turning away from ourselves. (shrink)

This article puts Arendt’s conception of non-human animal appearance into a productive dialogue with recent developments in critical animal studies and animal rights theory within which notions such as agency, zoopolis, and animal agora play an important role. By reinterpreting the animal condition in Arendt’s account of the human condition, it demonstrates her potential contribution to political theory in a world where non-human-animals and nature are seen as making claims of entry into the political community. By emphasizing Arendt’s later work, (...) in which she expresses an openness towards the possibility that non-human animals are drawn to appear, the article indicates how Arendt might help us, both to rethink the boundaries of the political community beyond the human species, and to recognize the political agency of non-human animals. (shrink)

This paper situates Günther Anders’s diagnosis of a shift in the modes of human self-production from hermeneutic and educational practices to techno-scientific interventions in the broader context of observations concerning posthumanism and biopolitics (e.g. Peter Sloterdijk, Giorgio Agamben). It proposes to reframe the problem of human self-production within the philosophy of media and traces a common anti-hermeneutic trajectory to which both technoscientific transhumanism and certain strands of posthumanism belong, insofar as they are based on an ontology that exclusively considers causally (...) effective agency. With Anders and Martin Heidegger it is argued that such a focus on agency neglects the dimension of meaning that irreducibly guides technoscientific interventions. The paper claims that, with regard to the escalating dynamics both of human enhancement and of the Anthropocene, neither a truly critical theoretical stance nor a practical subversion is possible without taking the horizons of meaning into account that drive these dynamics. The last section sketches an outline of the complex interrelations of humans, technologies and meaning that cannot be mapped in terms of causally effective agency. (shrink)

This article suggests that humanism is a decisionism in contemporary critical political theory. Despite obvious and multiple differences, leading critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Jürgen Habermas, among others, share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a ground of the political. This stabilization of the human should concern political theorists, as this article argues, because it uncritically reproduces conceptual affinities between the notion of the human being and sovereign authority. By investing in the stability (...) and centrality of the human being, these theorists perform what will be called, paraphrasing an often neglected argument by Carl Schmitt, a decision to be human. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that Schmitt’s decisionism is not merely circumscribed to sovereignty’s juridico-political dimension, but that it also includes a peculiar commitment to God’s decision to become human in Christ. Against this decisionism as humanism, the article draws on Walter Benjamin, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida to propose an alternative politics that destabilizes humanity and sovereignty through the emergence of the animal, or what will be called melancholic lycanthropy. (shrink)

Ten years after the publication of the special issue of Social Epistemology on feminist epistemology, this paper explores recent feminist interest in the inhuman. Feminist science studies, cultural studies, philosophy and environmental studies all build on the important work feminist epistemology has done to bring to the fore questions of feminist empiricism, situated knowledges and knowing as an intersubjective activity. Current research in feminist theory is expanding this epistemological horizon to consider the possibility of an inhuman epistemology. This paper explores (...) these developments through the subject of waste. Waste, as both an epistemological and material phenomenon, invites timely questions about possibilities for acknowledging an inhuman epistemology. These questions appear to be particularly urgent from an environmental perspective. (shrink)

In a tribute to the intellectual legacy of Peter Fitzpatrick, this article explores the poiesis of modern law, as a constitutive ambivalence distilled in the affinity between law and literature. Reading with Fitzpatrick, the resolution of the contradictions of this law in myth depends, paradoxically, upon its fundamental irresolution. Reflecting upon the profound significance of his revelation of the mythology of modern law and its scholarly reverberations, I consider the constitutive tensions of this law as exemplified in the relation between (...) praxis and poiesis, the operative function of the former dependent upon the creative unfolding of the latter. The alchemy of autopoiesis, by which law boldly proclaims itself law, is made explicit in the eschatology of its archive and the formation of its sovereign subject in negation. Revealing the literary dimensions of this law, the conceit of autonomy is nonetheless subject to the subversive substitutions of the supplement. Pressing yet further, the autopoiesis of law is found to be enfolded within a generative sympoiesis, constituted by the movement between its apposite dimensions. Ultimately, extending Fitzpatrick’s rendering of the irresolution of modern law as decolonial, I explore the possibilities afforded by a reading of the fundamental mutuality of myths, and the decolonial conviviality of poiesis. (shrink)

The following paper argues that J.G. Fichte, despite his apparent philosophical neglect of art and aesthetics, does develop a strong, original, and coherent account of art, which not only allows the theorization of modern, non-representative art forms, but indeed anticipates Nietzsche and Heidegger in conceiving of truth in terms of art rather than scientific rationality. While the basis of Fichte’s philosophy of art is presented in the essay “On Spirit and Letter in Philosophy,” it is not developed systematically either in (...) this text or anywhere else in his writings, but must be reconstructed through a broad consideration of all his works, including, above all, his political and economic writings. For Fichte, the art-work does not exist as an object possessing “aesthetic value” and which can, in turn, be possessed, consumed, and enjoyed through the subjective act of aesthetic experience. Rather, it involves a mode of praxis which, grounded in a radical and original power of imagination, creatively discloses possibilities for future forms of existence, experience, and political community that cannot be theoretically anticipated. While Fichte cannot himself theorize specific forms of art, since the art that concerns him belongs to the future, we can, however, retrospectively try to understand non-representational painting and non-mimetic dance as concrete realizations of Fichte’s art-work of the future. In this way, Fichte’s philosophy of art ultimately suggests an alternative to Heidegger’s understanding of the work of art as a projective institution of truth. Fichte suggests that the human body, rather than human language, is the fundamental medium of art. (shrink)

This article argues that Frank B. Wilderson's political ontology can be read as both a critique and a radicalization of Giorgio Agamben's formal political-ontological framework constructed around the two extreme poles of sovereignty and bare life. Wilderson critiques and expands Agamben's framework by locating the zero point of political abjection not within bare life, which is still implicated within the ontological zone of Human being by way of an included exclusion, but within Black social death, which is cut off absolutely (...) from Human being. While such a political ontological framework provides an extremely powerful optic for the absolute ontological abjection of Black existence in relation to all other racial positions in the modern West, its absolute prioritization limits the scope of an analysis of power relations that might offer an account of racial positioning that is both broader than and resistant to the political ontology of Western race relations. In conclusion, turning to Fred Moten's Black optimism and Deleuze's and Guattari's account of micropolitics and lines of flight, the article argues for a pragmatics of resistance that finds its practical condition of possibility within the micropolitical field of power relations that marks an excess to the anti-Black macropolitics of political ontology. (shrink)

Political theorists continue to be provoked by Giorgio Agamben’s disturbing diagnosis that ‘bare life’ – human life that is excluded from politics yet exposed to sovereign violence – is not a sign of the malfunction of modern politics but rather a revelation of how it actually functions. However, despite the enormous amount of attention this diagnosis has received, there has been relatively little discussion of Agamben’s proposed ‘cure’ for the problem that he diagnoses. In this article, I analyze the three (...) main concepts of Agamben’s positive philosophical program – ‘infancy,’ ‘potentiality,’ and ‘form-of-life’ – in order to show how he attempts to subvert the sovereignty of law over life with his idea of a life of habit in which life is sovereign over law. In addition to analyzing these concepts, I engage in an immanent critique of Agamben’s philosophy and contrast his vision of politics with those of other influential contemporary political theorists. I find that while Agamben’s philosophical program is almost undone by internal difficulties, it still radically challenges current theories of subjectivity, humanity, and community. (shrink)

Philosophical ethology draws heavily upon the methods and findings of ethological traditions but must be a properly philosophical undertaking that reframes them in terms of critical and speculative questions about animal mind and animal subjectivity. Both traditional ethology and later cognitive ethology failed to call into question the dualistic Cartesian ontological paradigm that introduced and justified an unbridgeable divide between human and nonhuman animals. Following the implications of Darwinian evolution and immanentist ontological philosophy, philosophical ethology presents a model of animal (...) subjectivity and desire that encompasses nonhuman and human animals. Martin Heidegger was correct in his phenomenological description of being-in-the-world, but he erred badly in failing to extend this model to other animals. Relationships to temporality and desire indicate that subjectivity is widespread among animals. (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 essay explores the significance of Agamben’s sparse references to medieval Jewish thinkers (that is, the Rishonim) and raises the question as to whether the modern interpretive horizon of “history” is adequate for providing an understanding of these thinkers.

This article proposes that the propagation of vibrations could serve as a better model for understanding the transmission of affect than the flow, circulation or movement of bodies by which it is most often theorized. The vibrations (or idiomatically ‘vibes’) among the sound system audience (or ‘crowd’) on a night out on the dancehall scene in Kingston, Jamaica, provide an example. Counting the repeating frequencies of these vibrations in a methodology inspired by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis results in a Frequency Spectrogram. This (...) ranges from the sociocultural frequencies of nightly, weekly and seasonal cycles and circulations of musical style and fashion, to the material frequencies of the amplitudes and timbres of sound itself, with reggae’s signature low-pitched bass-line, to the corporeal frequencies of the flesh and blood of the dancehall ‘crowd’, pulsating with heartbeats and kinetic dance rhythms. The vibration model then addresses the intensities of affect in terms of auditory amplitudes, as with sonic dominance; feelings as frequencies; and the distinctive meaning of affect as timbre. This aims to encourage the radical impulse of the idea of affect to abandon the traditional envelope of the autonomous, self-consistent, rational individual. The meaning of affect is thus located in the ratio, proportions and patterning of vibrations, that is, outside the discourse of emotions or representation of feelings. (shrink)

This paper discusses variegated scholarly approaches to what is here typified as a political economy of meat. Identified as a multifaceted, transdisciplinary and most dynamic field of research, inquiries into the political economy of meat imbricate key issues of social and economic development, across the human–animal divide. While some scholars interpret livestock production as “a pathway from poverty”, others observe deepened marginalization and exploitation. The argument raised in this paper is that concise engagement with multiple critical perspectives may facilitate further (...) explorations into the social dynamics that characterize the political economy of meat. (shrink)

This article catalogues and interprets an underexplored body of Greek and Roman narratives of animals who fall in love with humans. These narratives, unlike myths and fables, purport to tell of events which occur in the real world of their day; they are stories of desire (eros), but not of copulation; and their configurations of desire are characteristically Greco-Roman (the desiring animal is almost always male, and the human object of his desire is a woman or a young man explicitly (...) or implicitly described as beautiful). With their anthropocentric and hierarchically configured models of desire, and their emphasis on the impossibility of fulfillment, these narratives illustrate some lasting Western perspectives on the relationship between animals and humans and on desire itself. Some Native American narratives of animal-human love, emphasizing relationship and kinship, stand in suggestive contrast. (shrink)

This paper investigates forms of metaphysical vertigo that can appear when contrasts between humans and animals are challenged. Distinguishing three forms of vertigo and four ways of differentiating humans and animals, the paper attempts to achieve a perspicuous representation of what could be termed “the difficulty of being humans when we are animals”; or alternatively, “the difficulty of being animals when we are humans”.