Contemporary American social and political discourses have integrated concerns about family values into the realm of debates about the associational life of social capital. In these discussions, theoretical and historical confusions about the relations between family and civil society run rampant. In this article, I first bring theoretical clarity to these social structures and the type of relations upon which they are predicated and, second, briefly historicize the relationships between an American idea of family and civil society. By tracing changes (...) in popular understandings of family and civil society, I demonstrate that the modern family values movement spurns its Victorian roots by maintaining the nostalgic language for a life and family of old built around a Christian home, while embracing means and institutions, and even more importantly, a form of family, which belies the nostalgia. The family has now become an institution or association which can be sustained through instrumental interventions; it is no longer to do with the organic relations of sentiment remaining from some long-faded Gemeinschaft. The family and the Christian home ideal, which were at the center of American critiques of modernization, have ceased to be. (shrink)

Kracauer’s rehabilitation in the 1990s sidelined his Marxist framework of the middle-to-late Weimar era in favour of the then still dominant if decaying paradigms of poststructuralism and postmodernism. It was also silent on the relationship between Kant and Marxism in Kracauer’s work. This essay addresses these weaknesses by arguing that Kracauer transcoded the structure of Kant’s ‘problematic’ around reification into a Marxist framework in the middle-to-late Weimar period. The essay considers how Kracauer conceived the mass ornament as a site of (...) reification and critical pedagogy. It explores his strategies of de-reification and their overlap with Walter Benjamin and the ruptures and continuities between the radical Weimar work and his later Theory of Film. The essay argues that the Theory of Film can be better understood as a transcoding of Kant’s philosophy of the aesthetic in the third Critique into the film camera itself, although the Marxian framework of the Weimar period is now considerably attenuated. (shrink)

The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics interviewed Vogl about his intellectual career, his relationship to the history and philosophy of economics, and his perspective on the analysis of contemporary capitalism.

The performative representation of the Spanish Roma woman reveals a historical journey that brings her closer to many symbolic elaborations of the feminine, giving her a special affinity with the imaginary concerning the colonized woman, particularly with the Orientalist vision. Developed initially by the travelling intellectuals in Spain who sought a fusion of the topics of sexualized exoticism, the myth was reworked by local artists and thinkers without undermining their power to silence and make invisible the reality of the most (...) vulnerable and most represented members of the ethnic group, their women. Today, a growing awareness of the importance of collective action directs Roma women to initiatives such as the revision of their historical memory, at the intersection between the external gaze and self-perception. These searches lead to the pioneering creation of community museum institutions, which have arisen around feminine Roma associations and are a symptom of an emerging desire to be heard. Based on the terminological tools shared by women and memory studies, this article seeks the personal dimension of this invitation to listen. The authors analyse a series of interviews with Roma women that investigate the social agents of representation, self-representation and their conceptual and experiential foundations. (shrink)

This text was delivered as the laudatory speech on the occasion of Didi-Huberman’s receipt of the Adorno prize in 2015. The influence of Adorno’s work on Didi-Huberman’s methodology is clarified, especially Adorno’s reflections on montage, the essayistic style and the anachronism of time. Didi-Huberman thematizes and analyses anachronism as a specific time structure of images. His works stress the similarity of images with the literary montage technique to develop a comprehensive theory of the readability of images – a practice in (...) which we approach images, based on the combination of voir and savoir, of looking and knowing. Two books, dealing with images and the Holocaust, are specifically exemplary of this approach: Images in Spite of All and Bark. Images in Spite of All calls a halt to one of the crudest erroneous readings of Adorno’s work, since the theorem of the Unspeakable or Unrepresentable always referred to Theodor W. Adorno ; and it is remarkably resistant to nuanced philological–philosophical studies of Adorno’s writings. By attentively considering the conditions in which the four photographs taken in Auschwitz-Birkenau were produced, Didi-Huberman dares to imagine the unimaginable. In this and in his more personal work of Bark, he successfully avoids an impossible reconstruction but instead asks what happened in that other place, in the cultural and our personal and memory. This is the work of ‘readability’ in the Benjaminian sense. (shrink)

Channeling affinities with certain motifs of Daoism, Walter Benjamin renews a form of dialectical thought that diffuses ideological notions of progress and grants minimal weight to the ontological distinction of the Subject. In fleeting yet pivotal moments of contact with Chinese aesthetics, Benjamin moves attention toward the practice of ‘thinking by way of resemblance’ – a phenomenon he variously enacts. Calling forth resonances within late-capitalist modernity, he retrieves from Daoist literature a notion of dialectical reversal freed from progressive synthesis, as (...) well as image-repertoires of self-forgetting, which he understands to be irreducible to reification. The Daoist imaginary offers Benjamin resources for breaking open the anthropocentric closure of Hellenic accounts of mimesis. He theorizes similitude more capaciously as something that can flash up across temporally discontinuous phenomena – without deferring to predetermined categories of Being. Benjamin thus recasts resemblance – regarded by Enlightenment rationality as an impoverished mode of cognition – as a medium of historical apprehension that resists the occlusion of transience by the ontology of the victors. (shrink)

Daniel Bensaïd was a leading figure of May ’68, a Marxist thinker and an influential French public intellectual. His theoretical and political trajectory is divided into two distinct periods separated by the historical turn of 1989: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of theussr. This also coincided with an existential turn due to his contractingaids, which brought him close to death. After this turn, he played the role of a ‘border-crosser’ between generations, intellectual currents and geopolitical areas (...) within the radical left. In the 1990s, he began a critical rereading of Marx and tried to transcend Trotskyism, confronting its legacy with other currents of critical thought, notably the Frankfurt School. Since this pivotal moment, his writings reveal a permanent and intense dialogue with the work of Walter Benjamin, which he reinterpreted in a contemporary, political perspective, rethinking the political dilemmas of the twenty-first century through a Messianic vision of history. This article emphasises the affinities between two historical constellations – 1939 and 1989 – which, in spite of their obvious differences, were equally shaped by a feeling of defeat, and allowed a fruitful ‘encounter’ between French and German philosophers. (shrink)

In this article I reply to three critics. Responding to Cinzia Arruzza, I argue that capital encounters a large spectrum of differences of gender, religion and ethnicity, as well as differences generated by racism. Capital is able to use these differences to its own profit in order to differentiate wages and intensities of exploitation and thereby divide the working class. Responding to Peter Osborne, I contend that my temporal-layered framework elucidates how capital organises and synchronises different temporalities according to the (...) dominant temporality of socially-necessary labour time. I combine Bloch’s idea of ‘multiversum’ and Benjamin’s idea of history in order to show how conflicting temporalities can disclose new political possibilities of liberation. Responding to Harry Harootunian, I articulate the relationship between my reading of Marx and the Postcolonial critique. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to provide an in-depth review of Andrew Feenberg’s Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason. To this end, the anal...

This essay looks at the image of the ship in Péter Forgács’s documentary The Danube Exodus (1999) as a site that enables the viewer to meditate the encounter of the historical Self and the Other. Forgács, who works with the found footage material of an amateur filmmaker, teases out the paradoxical double movement of the historical event, in which both Jewish and German refugees use the river Danube as an escape route in the early phase of World War II, traveling (...) on the same paddle steamer in opposite directions. The documentary about two river-stories directed by an Eastern European filmmaker becomes a contemplation on interconnectedness, national cross-pollination and the inscription of the viewer in these processes. I argue that the film offers its audiences a way to visually and conceptually consider the unfeasibility of historiographic authority. (shrink)

Germany was famously a latecomer to colonialism, but it was a hybrid empire, centrally involved in all forms of imperial activity. Germans dominated the early Holy Roman Empire; Germany after 1870 was a Reich, or empire, not a state in the conventional sense; and Germany had a colonial empire between 1884 and 1918. Prussia played the role of continental imperialist in its geopolitics vis-à-vis Poland and the other states to its east. Finally, in its Weltpolitik – its global policies centered (...) on the navy – Germany was an informal global imperialist. Although these diverse scales and practices of empire usually occupied distinct regions in the imaginations of contemporaries, there was one representational space in which the nation-state was woven together with empire in all its different registers: the Berlin trade exhibition of 1896. Because this exhibition started as a local event focused on German industry, it has not attracted much attention among historians of colonial and world fairs. Over the course of its planning, however, the 1896 exhibition emerged as an encompassing display of the multifarious German empire in all its geopolitical aspects. The exhibition attracted the attention of contemporaries as diverse as Georg Simmel and Kaiser Wilhelm. In contrast to Simmel and later theorists, I argue that it represented the empire and the nation-state, and not simply the fragmenting and commodifying force of capitalism. In contrast to Timothy Mitchell, I argue that the exhibit did not communicate a generic imperial modernity, but made visible the unique multi-scaled political formation that was the German empire-state. (shrink)

This is a comment to Graham Harman’s 2019 response to an article by Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen (2018) in which they propose that a materially grounded, archaeological perspective might complement Harman’s historical approach in Immaterialism (2016). Harman responds that his book is indeed already more archaeological than historical, stipulating that history is the study of media with a high density of information, whereas archaeology studies media with a low density of information. History, Harman holds, ends up in too much (...) detail, while archaeology has the advantage of lending itself to the imagination. Hence, his reading of history had the aim of tempering the historical information overload, in effect making the book a work of archaeology. In this comment, I want to do three things: (1) critique the idea that archaeological and historical media are inherently different with regard to their densities of information, (2) discuss how archaeology and history approach their media, and (3) reflect on conceptualisations of “archaeology” outside the discipline itself. (shrink)

Now that the usage and meaning of urban spaces have been dramatically challenged by the global pandemic, several debates and reflections are going on around the manner in which cities – both as concerns the public and the private spaces – have been designed. The article observes how “urban-human face” representations have served different models of urbanity across times and cultures. Using a framework deriving from semiotics of culture, according to which the city represents a model of the world, the (...) article attempts to interpret how portraits of faces have been modelling the city through different urban faciality mechanisms. The focus is on a sample of what we call ‘urban-human faces’, ranging from Soviet propaganda posters to the digital #selfiecity project. The expression refers to series of representations that bring together the city and the face. It can be argued that both the city and the face, produced at a specific historical and cultural moment, with their figurative and plastic elements, deploy the struggle for the city ownership and authorship. Nonetheless, the commensurability of the city and the face can be just based on the fact that both semiotic configurations represent an excess with the help of cartographic reproduction (the city) and the portrait (the face), respectively. A city can be represented by a face to the extent to which it is also multifaceted as a polylogue. On the basis of such instable commensurability, the article will ultimately attempt to bring together the semiotics of the face and the semiotics of the city. (shrink)

If, as Lefebvre argues, every society produces its own social space, then modernity might be characterized by that (anti-)social and instrumental space epitomized and idealized in Le Corbusier's writings. This repetitively patterned space consumes and regulates the differences between places and people; it encapsulates a normalizing morality that seeks to reduce all differences to an economic order of the Same. Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of 'difference' can both help explain the operation of this (im)moral landscape and offer the possibility of alternative (...) post-modern social spaces that might produce and respect Otherness. In this sense Lefebvre's work is an incipient 'difference ethics'. (shrink)

Societies evolve practices that reflect social norms of appropriateness in social interaction, for example when and to what extent one should respect the boundaries of another person’s private sphere. One such practice is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called civil inattention—the social norm of showing a proper amount of indifference to others—which functions as an almost unnoticed yet highly potent privacy-preserving mechanism. These practices can be disrupted by technologies that afford new forms of intrusions. In this paper, we show how (...) new networked technologies, such as facial recognition, challenge our ability to practice civil inattention. We argue for the need to revitalise, in academic and policy debates, the role of civil inattention and related practices in regulating behaviour in public space. Our analysis highlights the relational nature of privacy and the importance of social norms in accomplishing and preserving it. While our analysis goes some way in supporting current calls to ban FR technology, we also suggest that, pending a ban and in light of the power of norms to limit what is otherwise technically possible, cultivating new practices of civil inattention may help address the challenges raised by FR and other forms of digital surveillance in public. (shrink)

Digital communication now pervades all spheres of life, creating new possibilities for commodification: personal data and communication are the new resources of surplus value. This in turn brings about a totally new category of threats to privacy. With recourse to the culture industry critique of early critical theory, this article seeks to challenge basic theoretical assumptions held within a liberal account of privacy. It draws the attention to the entanglement of technical and socio-economic transformations and aims at elaborating an alternative (...) framing which takes into account that privacy is not in the first place a pre-political space for individual freedom but a constituted sphere in which social power relations are reproduced in a particularly deceitful way. With recourse to positions of critical theory, this article revisits the conceptual ambiguity of liberation and oppression and looks to draft prospects for a socio-theoretical justification and critique of privacy, updated for the digital age. Following the tradition of critical theory, the argument focuses on (new) forms of domination in and by privacy. It aims to prepare the ground for a critique of the social’s increasing commodification as well as an idea of privacy understood as reflexive participation in social practices. (shrink)

The article seeks to develop a new conceptual framework suitable for analysing the ageing processes of objects in modern culture. The basic intuition is that object experience cannot be analysed separately from collective participation. The article focuses on the question of the ‘timeless’ nature of modernist design and seeks to understand why modernist objects age more slowly than other objects. First, inspired by the late Durkheim’s account of symbolism, I turn to the experiential effects of collective embeddedness. Second, I enter (...) the field of architectural practices and architectural theory. Visiting early modernist ideologue Adolf Loos, I seek to understand the modernist attitude as a direct response to experiences of the acceleration of ageing processes characteristic of modern culture. I then try to show how Loos’s explicit awareness of the collective dimension is ignored by the subsequent modernist movement and by architectural theory. Finally, I try to assess the consequences of this neglect. (shrink)

This article traces the radical devaluation of the phantasm throughout Western civilization. With the help of Nietzsche’s critical perspective, I develop a notion of hystery as the series of collective traumas repeated in each individual’s growth, whereby the phantasm changes value from psychosomatic interface, to evil incarnate, to disease of learning. Beginning with the Classical episteme represented by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, then moving up through the Christian era, I focus primarily on Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Bacon, (...) who represent the last nail in the imagination’s coffin. The next section examines Nietzsche’s rediscovery of the phantasm and the theoretical contributions of post-structuralism that follow in Nietzsche’s wake. Juxtaposing Bataille and Deleuze, I look at Deleuze’s early enthusiasm and ultimate betrayal of the phantasm, and I posit Bataille’s emphasis on the affective force of the mythological phantasm as an insurrection to reclaim our experience and life along with it. The article ends with speculation, offering Bruno’s art of memory as an ontic and epistemic alternative to dominant Western hystery, other pasts opening to other possible futures, an ungrounding that paradoxically leads to a restoration of the human house in a re-enchanted cosmos. (shrink)

Steering a middle course between the strong neoliberalization thesis and arguments that deny that neoliberalization has occurred, this article accounts for the complex and hybridic shift in Sweden from pension reform through share ownership as a socialist strategy to an as-of-yet incomplete and contradictory neoliberal process. Noting the broader significance of Sweden for the international debate over pension reform, the article unpacks the concept of “mass investment culture” to discern the significant headway toward neoliberalization in Swedish pension savings and provision (...) while still noting profound sources of crisis tendencies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a reflection on his Marxist past, J. F. Lyotard described a différend between himself and the revolutionary discourse. This might also represent the relations between the latter and the contemporary discourse of resistance, with its characteristic fascination with non-teleological political action. The disdain for teleology apparently justifies the incommensurability of these discourses, thus disabling any inheritance of elements of the revolutionary tradition. This essay challenges the unbridgeable nature of this gap and explores alternative relations between the two discourses, (...) such as mimetic ones, by reading Walter Benjamin's somewhat neglected fragments on barricades in his Arcades Project. Benjamin's concept of interruption – celebrated by contemporary theorists of resistance – alongside his non-teleological concept of revolution, provides the theoretical armature for this task. Thus, I use barricades, commonly conceived as the emblem of the revolutionary tradition, in order to reconsider the possibility of inheriting aspects of this tradition in times in which the predominant discourse is that of resistance. (shrink)

This essay argues for the philosophical standing of Walter Benjamin’s early work and posits a deeper continuity between this early work as a philosopher and the subsequent development of his work as a writer. When these fragments are read in proper relation to each other, they reveal for the first time many of the key innovations of Benjamin as a philosopher, as well as his points of influence on Horkheimer and Adorno. His early ‘Program’ critiques the Enlightenment conception of experience (...) as a means for gaining empirical knowledge, and announces the need for a new concept of experience. Benjamin follows through on this program with a method of philosophical enquiry that is by turns fragmentary and constellational, developing a series of provisional notions of experience, which form a constellation with one another: perception, mimesis, language as a medium of experience, observation and memory. (shrink)

From the comparative framework of writing on the meaning of ritual in the field of the history of religions, this essay argues that one of the major problems in Benjamin’s thinking is how to make certain forms of materiality stand out against other forms. In his early work, the way that Benjamin deals with this problem is to call degraded forms “symbolic”, and those forms of materiality with positive value, “allegorical”. The article shows how there is more than an incidental (...) connection with the recent approach to ritual in the field of history of religions, seeing that Benjamin too wants to set out the significance of certain material forms against those that are “ritualistic” and hence false. It is argued that he treats the latter in his essay on Elective Affinities and the former in his Trauerspiel. The key claim is that the way material forms stand out as meaningful is akin to the Kantian description of the aesthetic attitude, which identifies how certain formations warrant and attract reflective attention and underpin moral orientation. The point is significant since Kantian aesthetics is an object of polemical attention across Benjamin’s heterogeneous corpus. Moreover, the approach shows the main difficulty in Benjamin’s treatment of sensible forms: what are the criteria he uses to distinguish the “bad” way a sensible form has of being meaningful from the “good”? (shrink)

This paper focuses on the documentary photography of Eugène Atget in late 19th and early 20th-century Paris. I will begin by exploring Atget’s position as a pioneering documentary photographer in the field, followed by an engagement with the urban environment of Paris, in which Atget worked almost exclusively. Finally, I will analyse a single photograph in depth while discussing it in relation to the work of Charles Baudelaire and Jacques Rancière. This text is a contribution to a literature of critical (...) engagement with documentary photography, urban history and the politics of class visibility. I will do so by arguing for the political significance of reading Atget’s images in a critical, political manner that engages with Rancière’s concept of the ‘anonymous multiple’. Atget is considered a key documentary photographer, and, as such, he is exemplary of the history of documentary photography and its treatment of its subjects. (shrink)

Tilda Swinton’s status as a fashion icon exemplifies the contradictory functions that Walter Benjamin attributes to fashion as both exemplifying commodity fetishism and expressing a utopian ‘image wish’. This vexed relationship with fashion inflects Swinton’s cinematic performances, enhanced by her emphasis on disguise and transformation that calls into question the nature of identity and its authenticity. Her persona speaks to the fluid and fragmented dimensions of contemporary European identities, which are rooted, but also cross borders, national and otherwise; similarly, her (...) public presence testifies to the way that contemporary culture has generated new forms of celebrity as a means of representing identities in which the negotiation of gender is a significant component. (shrink)

This essay investigates the differences and points of contact between Walter Benjamin's concept of ‘constellation’ and the notion of ‘assemblage’ as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Both concepts address the entanglement of discourse and matter, bodies and devices, and raise questions regarding the historicity and temporality of different kinds of multiplicity. Presently, the term ‘assemblage’ figures prominently in the context of the new materialism, a theoretical movement which calls for a renewal of materialist ideas, proposing a break with (...) the historical materialism of the past. Against this backdrop, the essay has a twofold purpose: first, by focusing on the notions of constellation and assemblage, it seeks to highlight the differences and analogies between the materialisms of Benjamin, on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other. Second, by examining the new materialism's appropriation of Deleuzian ‘assemblage theory’, it will not only analyse what is ‘new’ about the new materialism, but also underline its conceptual errors and political problems. Eventually, what the essay argues is that our contemporary understanding of assemblages might indeed benefit from a more thorough engagement with the historical materialism of an author like Benjamin. (shrink)

Using the notion of a transfiguration of sexed bodies, this text deals with the stratifications of the gender-specific imaginary. Starting from the figurative—thus creative—force of the psyche-soma, its interaction with the configurations of a collective body will be developed from the perspectives of social philosophy and philosophy of history. At the center of my discussion is the interdependence between the individual psyche-soma, the socialized individual, and a collective bodily imaginary, on the one hand, and the strata of a gender imaginary (...) on the other. The ontological metaphor as well as the dimension of political action will be highlighted as playing a crucial role for these processes. (shrink)

I seek to interpret the work of Walter Benjamin in light of the "system programme" of German Idealism, in order to confront an antinomy of contemporary radical thought. Benjamin has been regarded as an anti-Hegelian thinker of the exception. Reading him against the grain, I draw out a concept of counter-tradition that eschews the opposition of intra-historical progress and extra-historical exception. The philological inspiration is a book by Franz Joseph Molitor, student of Schelling and "teacher" of Benjamin: The Philosophy of (...) History, or, On Tradition. (shrink)

Agamben’s philosophy of education can be arrived at by focusing on the nexus of philology, philosophy and poetry that is prominent in his work. By exploring the functional and semantic reciprocity between these fields, one can identify diverse pedagogies: of language and the poetic voice, of infancy and history, of history redeemed (in the Benjaminian sense), of the cultural image, and of potentiality. These overlapping areas of research share the common trait of Agamben’s personalism, which embraces the view that education (...) expands the affective and spiritual wholeness of the person. (shrink)

The modern outlook on emancipation has made its quest inseparable from a quest for endless enhancement, based on an ever-more intensive exploitation of the biophysical world. This accounts for how unsustainable ways of living are reiterated worldwide, in spite of evidence of their deleterious effects. The underpinnings of unsustainability, and a major impediment to conceiving alternatives, come from an account of the human as ontologically indeterminate, crushed on doing, both vulnerable and powerful towards the world. The impasse of such ambivalence (...) hampers social theory critique, from post-humanist ontologies to the case for degrowth and lifestyle politics. The article outlines a different take on emancipation. An account is provided of form-of-life as a doing tailored to being – not as a self-enclosed monad but as a result of the encounter between own ‘inclination’ and the world. This theoretical perspective discloses a research program on emergent mobilisations. (shrink)

This paper considers a key text in the field of Cultural Studies for its relevance to questions about the identity of knowledge in education. The concept of ‘aura’ arises as being of special significance in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ as a way of understanding the change that occurs to art when mass reproduction becomes both technologically possible and industrially realised. Aura seems to signify something of the symbolic halo generated by objects of special significance (...) that is both powerful and indefinite. This paper argues that aura is in fact the necessary property of symbolic representation—and that it attaches as much to the figure of Walter Benjamin as it does to any canonical work of art. But the paper also claims that Benjamin’s argument about the significance of popular forms of art—particularly photography and film—can be updated and applied to critical questions about the established order of knowledge in education. This is particularly relevant to those curriculum domains where specific objects—texts, for example—are invested with powerful auras. It may also be applicable to all forms of established knowledge and curricula. (shrink)

This paper considers a key text in the field of Cultural Studies for its relevance to questions about the identity of knowledge in education. The concept of ‘aura’ arises as being of special significance in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ as a way of understanding the change that occurs to art when mass reproduction becomes both technologically possible and industrially realised. Aura seems to signify something of the symbolic halo generated by objects of special significance (...) that is both powerful and indefinite. This paper argues that aura is in fact the necessary property of symbolic representation—and that it attaches as much to the figure of Walter Benjamin as it does to any canonical work of art. But the paper also claims that Benjamin’s argument about the significance of popular forms of art—particularly photography and film—can be updated and applied to critical questions about the established order of knowledge in education. This is particularly relevant to those curriculum domains where specific objects—texts, for example—are invested with powerful auras. It may also be applicable to all forms of established knowledge and curricula. (shrink)

: Using the notion of a transfiguration of sexed bodies, this text deals with the stratifications of the gender-specific imaginary. Starting from the figurative—thus creative—force of the psyche-soma, its interaction with the configurations of a collective body will be developed from the perspectives of social philosophy and philosophy of history. At the center of my discussion is the interdependence between the individual psyche-soma, the socialized individual, and a collective bodily imaginary, on the one hand, and the strata of a gender (...) imaginary on the other. The ontological metaphor (meaning the metaphor that brings about social modes of being) as well as the dimension of political action will be highlighted as playing a crucial role for these processes. (shrink)

Using the notion of a transfiguration of sexed bodies, this text deals with the stratifications of the gender-specific imaginary. Starting from the figurative-thus creative-force of the psyche-soma, its interaction with the configurations of a collective body will be developed from the perspectives of social philosophy and philosophy of history. At the center of my discussion is the interdependence between the individual psyche-soma, the socialized individual, and a collective bodily imaginary, on the one hand, and the strata of a gender imaginary (...) on the other. The ontological metaphor (meaning the metaphor that brings about social modes of being) as well as the dimension of political action will be highlighted as playing a crucial role for these processes. (shrink)

Using the notion of a transfiguration of sexed bodies, this text deals with the stratifications of the gender-specific imaginary. Starting from the figurative-thus creative-force of the psyche-soma, its interaction with the configurations of a collective body will be developed from the perspectives of social philosophy and philosophy of history. At the center of my discussion is the interdependence between the individual psyche-soma, the socialized individual, and a collective bodily imaginary, on the one hand, and the strata of a gender imaginary (...) on the other. The ontological metaphor as well as the dimension of political action will be highlighted as playing a crucial role for these processes. (shrink)

This short essay provides an overview of the Visual Studies section of the special issue “Queer in the Clinic.” Addressing the impact of visual culture on queer experiences in the clinic, the author offers thoughts on the graphic artwork of Edie Fake and Brain Cremins’s essay included in this issue. Arguing that contemporary and historical visual assessments of the LGBTQ clinical subject are vital contributors to queer bioethical debates, she explains relevant concepts such as “radical somatic transformation,” “the nature of (...) bodily possibility,” and Walter Benjamin’s “world of secret affinities.”. (shrink)

Beginning with the theme of the location of haunting in Gothic interiors and the confusion of life and death and the “sub-central” positioning of the feminine as the hidden source of fearfulness, the paper analyzes Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” as an example of a narrative written from the position of the haunting in which the figure of fearful feminine is transformed into a “hauntess” participating in the public world on equal rights with others. Woolf’s text, though seemingly (...) positing the protagonist in the position of flâneuse, in fact implicitly criticizes flâneuring as a masculine kind of looking and participating in the public space. Taking place away from home, Woolf’s strolling in the streets of London carnivalizes (in the Bakhtinian sense) the activity by way of a joyful blurring of the split between the home and the market. Transgressing what Kathryn Simpson calls “the male privilege of the flâneur” (2010, p. 47) and rendering the transgression as haunting, Woolf evades participation in the masculine world of traffic and exchange by way of bringing the space of the Gothic confinement, and also of entombment, to the public. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno has been quoted as responding to the Humanist Union stating ‘I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls itself “humanist”’. Adorno’s opposition to forms of humanism (both liberal and Marxist) which posit the existence of our humanity is reflected in readings of The Frankfurt Institute’s history such as that produced by Martin Jay. While this is the case, one of Adorno’s highly admired (...) students, Alfred Schmidt, commemorated his teacher by proclaiming him a ‘philosopher of Real Humanism’. In categorising Adorno’s work as embodying a ‘Real Humanism’, Schmidt points towards an understanding and orientation towards the human (and our understanding of it) which cannot be accurately characterised through the philosophies of Humanism and Anti-Humanism as oppositional viewpoints. Rather, the Real Humanism of Adorno (as well as some of his fellow travellers) understands the human as the negative image of our currently existing society’s inhumanity, and urges us to take an ethical orientation towards the constitution of the human through the abolition of our inhumanity. If we, like Adorno, are to believe in the new categorical imperative that we must make sure ‘that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen[s] again’, then we must fundamentally orient ourselves towards the goal of ‘real humanism’ – a society free from the domination of ourselves and the other. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Harold Bloom, and Theodor Adorno this article proposes the re-imageination of international law as a ‘pure means’ of representation rather than a means of exercising control over the world.

This paper argues for the contemporary significance of the ‘Critique of Violence’ by proposing a Benjaminian reading of two important analyses of the relationship between history, politics and the Rights of Man: Hegel’s account of the French Revolution and the concept of dissensus proposed by Jacques Rancière. For both Hegel and Rancière, the gap between right and reality – between the ideal of equality, for example, and the existence of concrete inequality – does not warrant a rejection of the Rights (...) of Man. Rather, the gap is a constitutive condition of law and political rights. From the perspective of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, however, these analyses serve to perpetuate a bourgeois legality, one that both Hegel and Rancière acknowledge can never be realized due to the constitutive discrepancy between right and reality. In preserving the promise of legal equality, these analyses preclude the possibility of a suspension or ‘absolution’ from law. This suspension of law is a task that Benjamin identified with the proletarian general strike, a strategy whose pure violence is supposed to secure what Benjamin described, enigmatically, as a ‘wholly transformed work’. Remarkably, however, the relationship between the suspension of law in a general strike and a total transformation of labour is never clearly defined in the ‘Critique’. This paper will develop an account of this relationship by pursuing the references to Marx’s critical theory of capitalism in Benjamin’s writings. (shrink)

This paper argues for the contemporary significance of the ‘Critique of Violence’ by proposing a Benjaminian reading of two important analyses of the relationship between history, politics and the Rights of Man: Hegel’s account of the French Revolution and the concept of dissensus proposed by Jacques Rancière. For both Hegel and Rancière, the gap between right and reality – between the ideal of equality, for example, and the existence of concrete inequality – does not warrant a rejection of the Rights (...) of Man. Rather, the gap is a constitutive condition of law and political rights. From the perspective of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, however, these analyses serve to perpetuate a bourgeois legality, one that both Hegel and Rancière acknowledge can never be realized due to the constitutive discrepancy between right and reality. In preserving the promise of legal equality, these analyses preclude the possibility of a suspension or ‘absolution’ from law. This suspension of law is a task that Benjamin identified with the proletarian general strike, a strategy whose pure violence is supposed to secure what Benjamin described, enigmatically, as a ‘wholly transformed work’. Remarkably, however, the relationship between the suspension of law in a general strike and a total transformation of labour is never clearly defined in the ‘Critique’. This paper will develop an account of this relationship by pursuing the references to Marx’s critical theory of capitalism in Benjamin’s writings. (shrink)

Against the usual interpretation, which states that Afrofuturism is unreservedly technophilic, I argue that Afrofuturism is a radical critique of white technology. White technology (be it imperial,...

Against the usual interpretation, which states that Afrofuturism is unreservedly technophilic, I argue that Afrofuturism is a radical critique of white technology. White technology (be it imperial, colonial or capitalist) is an acosmic technology that rejects its belonging to the cosmos. The Space Age and what is now called New Space (both of which have neo-colonial aims) are perfect illustrations of white technology and its anthropocentric enthusiasm. Rejecting this colonial and exploitative technology, Afrofuturism – from the music and poems of (...) Sun Ra to the paintings of Wangechi Mutu to the poems and activism of Alexis Pauline Gumbs – is first and foremost an attempt to use outer space not as a space open to conquest, but as a mediation, a stellar detour thanks to which our terrestrial condition could be politically and anthropologically rethought. At odds with any geoengineering project, Afrofuturism conjures up an “epoch of being” (Heidegger) in which technology would be constantly inhabited by a form of uncanny that would definitively prevent human beings from considering technology as a way of mastering the Earth. (shrink)

In his attempt at a renewal of the concept of reification, Axel Honneth has referred to reification as a kind of forgetting. He uses an epigraph from Adorno and Horkheimer’s work to introduce this theme. This article considers the different accounts that are given by Honneth, on the one hand, and Adorno and Horkheimer, on the other, as to the way that reification is a forgetting of core experiential capacities of intersubjective human relations. It argues that Honneth’s account relies too (...) much on a foundational and undifferentiated notion of ‘empathetic engagement’, and that in order to articulate the damage done by reification, we need to contend with the more radical notion of forgetting that is outlined in Adorno and Horkheimer’s work. (shrink)

This paper discusses corporate entanglement, impactfulness and responsibility in the Anthropocene, amidst events and conditions that ‘uncontain’ time. It takes its direction of travel from artist Brian Jungen’s ‘Cetology’ (2002), a whalebone sculpture made out of cut-up plastic garden chairs, which conjoins the times of earth and world history, as it hangs in the air of the art gallery, ‘as if’ exhibited in the natural history museum. The paper relates ‘Cetology’s’ engagement with natural history, time, and commodification to matters of (...) corporate entanglement and responsibility within company law and governance. Problems with understanding the comparable imprint of large and multinational companies on matters, places, and communities are identified, after the domination of corporate legal frameworks over nature and the stability and perfection of economic incentives at law. The reading of this (critical-legal) situation is developed through theory and engagement with materialist and critical thinkers, who unite in their concern with distributed human–nature relations and the ‘concreteness’ that attends collisions in time, ruin and affect. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s writings are central to this analysis, and strengthen the commentary on ‘natural history’ themes curated by Jungen. The paper contemplates how times’ uncontainment might invoke a change in expectation and method for the company law field, assigning contingency to the corporation and provoking a new mode of reflection about corporate entanglement and responsibility at law. (shrink)