This article embodies the result of a collective work that seeks to understand the manner in which the notion of conflict is transformed by the attempt to apply it to reality, according to the doctrines hereby comprise as “ontologies of conflict”. It seems that there are three resulting “logics of conflict” which may receive the following qualifications: logic of contradiction, logic of contrariety and logic of difference.

In this paper, it is argued that even though the concept of community does not play a significant role in Marxist theory, Marxism needs a notion of community, and the paper sets out to theorize how to make sense of this concept in a Marxist theoretical setting. The paper claims that Althusser’s philosophy, especially his elaboration of the concept of practice, may assist us in this task, and it sets out to explore what can be gained by redefining community in (...) terms of practice. In Althusser’s theory, practice and ideology are very closely linked. While recognizing the importance of Althusser’s theory of ideology, the paper then subsequently explores an alternative configuration of the concepts community and ideology. Finally, it is claimed that this analysis may help us to better understand ideologies such as racism and nationalism. (shrink)

The Timaeus is a muthos that attempts to imagine a logos of the cosmos. Like the demiurge, readers are to be mimetic artists, poets, who move constantly between the intelligible essences and their likenesses in the world of appearance, experience, and becoming, occupying a third register that is neither and both. The cosmology of the Timaeus is both a likely story and an allegory of its own failure. It takes place within the nonspace of the khōra, a realm accessible only (...) through bastard reasoning that we can perceive only as if in a dream. The Timaeus is an unfinalizable logos in which each moment of positing is also a moment of irony and interrogation, of simultaneous acceptance and active separation, of choric space. (shrink)

Each thinker, according to Heidegger, essentially thinks one thought. Plato thinks the idea. Descartes thinks the cogito . Spinoza thinks substance. Nietzsche thinks the will to power. If a thinker does not think a thought, then he or she is not a thinker. He or she may be a scholar or a professor, a producer or a consumer, a fan or a fake, but he or she would not be a thinker. Thus, if Heidegger is a thinker, he essentially thinks (...) one thought. What is Heidegger’s one thought? It is neither life nor death, neither me nor you. It is neither technology nor art. It is neither spirit nor language. Heidegger’s one thought is being—or more precisely, the question of the meaning of being. And what is being? Neither presence nor absence--but rather, an ambiguous uncertainty. (shrink)

This essay examines the capacity of language (‘word’) to convey what there is (‘world’). It draws on philosophical thought, which it seeks to apply to law while making specific reference to comparative legal studies, that is, to the investigation of law that is foreign to its interpreter.