In 1990, Gilles Deleuze publishedPostscript on the Societies of Control, an introduction to the potentially suffocating reality of the nascent control society. This thirty-year update details how Deleuze’s conception has developed from a broad speculative vision into specific economic mechanisms clustering around personal information, big data, predictive analytics, and marketing. The central claim is that today’s advancing control society coerces without prohibitions, and through incentives that are not grim but enjoyable, even euphoric because they compel individuals to obey their own (...) personal information. The article concludes by delineating two strategies for living that are as unexplored as control society itself because they are revealed and then enabled by the particular method of oppression that is control. (shrink)

This paper explores the thought of Hegel, Saussure and Derrida regarding the nature of the linguistic sign. It argues that Derrida is right to maintain that Hegel is an influence on Saussure. However, Derrida misrepresents both Hegel and Saussure by interpreting them as falling within the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian philosophical tradition.

In this paper I argue that Deleuze's ‘thinking with’ Whitehead gives access to a range of novel conceptual resources that offer a route out of phenomenology and back to life, a movement beyond intentionality and back to things ‘in their free and wild state’. I lay out four conceptual and methodological markers (there are many more) – creativity, event, prehension, empiricism – that characterise Deleuze's metaphysics and provide a guide for showing how these develop through a sustained becoming with Whitehead. (...) I conclude by looking at Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term most famously associated with Whitehead: the concept of ‘process’. (shrink)

A number of writers have tackled the task of characterizing the differences between analytic and Continental philosophy.I suggest that these attempts have indeed captured the most important divergences between the two styles but have left the explanation of the differences mysterious.I argue that analytic philosophy is usefully seen as philosophy conducted within a paradigm, in Kuhn’s sense of the word, whereas Continental philosophy assumes much less in the way of shared presuppositions, problems, methods and approaches.This important opposition accounts for all (...) those features that have rightly been held to constitute the difference between the two traditions.I finish with some reflections on the relative superiority of each tradition and by highlighting the characteristic deficiencies of each. (shrink)

Atheists are rarely associated with holiness, yet they can have deeply spiritual experiences. Once such experience of the author exemplified ‘the holy’ as defined by Otto. However, the subjectivism of Otto’s Kantianism undermines Otto’s otherwise fruitful approach. While the work of Hegel overcomes this, it is too rationalistic to account for mortal life. Seeking to avoid these shortcomings, this paper places ‘holiness’ within a self-differentiating ontological unity, the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’. This unity can only be experienced by confronting groundless finite mortality, (...) and the resulting existential disposition is characterized as ‘reverence’. Reverence is gratitude for mortal existence, and existence itself. Moreover, it is as much political as it is ontological, atheistic as it is theistic. (shrink)

The group of mathematicians known as Bourbaki persuasively proclaimed the isolation of its field of research – pure mathematics – from society and science. It may therefore seem paradoxical that links with larger French cultural movements, especially structuralism and potential literature, are easy to establish. Rather than arguing that the latter were a consequence of the former, which they were not, I show that all of these cultural movements, including the Bourbakist endeavor, emerged together, each strengthening the public appeal of (...) the others through constant, albeit often superficial, interaction. This codependency is partly responsible for their success and moreover accounts for their simultaneous fall from favor, which, however, can clearly be seen as also stemming from different internal problems. To understand this dynamics, I argue that Bourbaki’s role can best be captured by using the notion of cultural connector, which I introduce here. (shrink)

Sensory Qualities Austen Clark Oxford, Clarendon, 1993 pp. xii + 250Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics Mark Johnson University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1993 pp. xiv + 287Understanding Origins Francisco J. Varela & Jean‐Pierre Dupuy (Eds) Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1992.

Bataille and Blanchot figure among the authors who influenced Foucault the most. In this article we show how close Foucault was to these authors and to what extent his proximity to them permitted him to deviate from the prevailing university culture, i.e from those great philosophical machines called Hegelianism and phenomenology. The questions we pose are the following: How important were these experiences for Foucault? How did he receive them? How did he transform their theoretical stakes? In the first part (...) of this article we argue that the encounter with Bataille’s work and Blanchot’s was for Foucault a kind of experience of the self. In Bataille and Blanchot, experience has the function of wrenching the subject from itself: it is a project of desubjectivation and of destruction of the notion of the foundational subject and system in philosophy. The second part focuses on the contemporary experience of the death of God. According to Foucault, such an experience discloses the limitless reign of the Limit. We show how the work of Bataille, his discovery of the categories of irreversible expenditure, death, sacrifice, excess, limit, negativity pushes the system beyond its limit. In the third part we take into account the literary experience of Blanchot. According to Foucault, Blanchot’s work focuses on the disappearance of the subject: the being of language emerges in the exclusion of the subject. How is it possible to have a language stripped of dialectics? (shrink)

Henri Bergson's philosophy, which Sartre studied as a student, had a profound but largely neglected influence on his thinking. In this paper I focus on the new light that recognition of this influence throws on Sartre's central argument about the relationship between negation and nothingness in his Being and Nothingness. Sartre's argument is in part a response to Bergson's dismissive, eliminativist account of nothingness in Creative Evolution (1907): the objections to the concept of nothingness with which Sartre engages are precisely (...) those raised by Bergson. Even if Sartre's account of nothingness in its entirety is found to be flawed, I argue that the points he makes specifically against Bergson are powerful. My discussion concludes with a brief examination of the wider philosophical background to Sartre's and Bergson's discussion of nothingness: here I point to some important aspects of Sartre's early philosophy, including some features of his conception of nothingness, that may testify to Bergson's positive influence on his thought. (shrink)

The dominant features of the post-war intellectual scene in France were existentialism, phenomenology, and Marxism, as well as efforts to synthesize them. In the 1960s, these theoretical currents had to cope with new perspectives and ideas brought to the world of theory by the linguistically-oriented discourse of Saussure’s structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Structuralists tried to apply structurally-linguistic model to the humanities and designed the new concept of the language, subjectivity, and society. Levi-Strauss applied the structural-linguistic analysis to the study of (...) myths and family relationships; Lacan developed psychoanalysis based on structuralism; Althusser comes with a structuralist interpretation of Marx. Structuralists attempted to analyse the unconscious codes, rules, and binary oppositions that create the meaning, thus organizing social systems, such as sexual behaviour, fashion, culinary arts, myths, etc. Structures are unconscious, because their product and effects always overlap them. Structuralism therefore does not study individual isolated phenomena, but it moves from the analysis of phenomena that are consciously understood or known to participants in the particular discourse to their “unconscious infrastructures.” Structuralists always emphasized rigorously scientific status of their theories; at the same time, applying structurally-linguistic concepts on humanities was supposed to help to make them scientific again. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty, in his well-known essay, "Eye and Mind," startlingly comments: "A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror; he sees a dummy, an 'outside,' which, he has every reason to believe, other people see in the very same way but which, no more for himself than for others, is not a body in the flesh." This essay opens up a discourse on this very problem: the question of what one sees when looks at oneself in the mirror. As well, (...) the now-common assumption that we have arrived at a postmodern condition of experience, knowledge, and interpretation comes into question when we consider the possibility that the human sciences have not sufficiently embraced a post-Cartesian perspective on mind, body, self, and vision. The essay closes with a reflection on the contact of the self and the other in vision. The self and the other are not "signs" that are "read" in the context of a perceptual field. Rather, the interpersonal world embodied through the vital flesh of self in communion with other is reflected to the eye only if the observer cares to take note, to imaginatively flesh-out the world embodied in the moment of a thoughtful glance. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to sketch the procedural nature of the modus in which Deleuze reads the other philosophers. The hermeneutical problem indicated by the indecision to consider his books on different authors as an authorized interpretation or as fantasist utilization may be scattered if we understand his hermeneutical attempts both as interpretation and construction. In addition, this indecision affects the guild of Deleuzian exegetes in respect to the directory idea which could point out the general strategy of (...) his philosophy. (shrink)

The notion of modernism, originally a classificatory term in art and literary criticism, now a common term of art in many philosophic (and anti?philosophic) programs, has remained an elusive, often vague point of view. For a discussion of the notion's historical accuracy and philosophic legitimacy this article selects an author greatly responsible for setting out the problem (called by him ?nihilism') and philosophically sensitive to the issues involved in claiming that something essential to a tradition has ?ended? and something new (...) ?begun?: Nietzsche. Such issues are: what needs to be shown in order to demonstrate that indeed a complete ?break? in a tradition has occurred, especially if part of that claim is that this break ought to have occurred? And: what consequences follow, particularly with respect to the possibility of ?post?modern? ?justification'? Nietzsche's answers to these questions are more subtle than has been appreciated, and can, when pursued properly, help reveal the strengths and weaknesses of such post?Nietzscheans as Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida. (shrink)

: Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at Paris-Nanterre. A collaborator and student of Jacques Derrida, her work shares some of his interest in rigorous protocols of reading, and a willingness to attend to the undercurrents of over-read and "too familiar" texts. But, as she points out, this orientation was shared by Hegel himself. Arguing against Heidegger, Kojève, and other critics of Hegel, the book in which this Introduction appears puts Hegel back on the map of the present.

The fact that humans are responsible for climate change is certain. But the meaning of the fact of human responsibility is not disclosed by stating the fact: there is a distinction between the two principles, de facto and de jure, the right to state a fact and the right to assert the meaning of the fact. This distinction must be preserved in order that humans may interpret the nature of our responsibility, as a form of justice. In fact, the nature (...) of human responsibility can never be exhaustively determined. To recognise the fact of human responsibility for climate change may only lead us to acknowledge that climate change coincides with the plundering and exploitation of the earth as a natural resource, together with the industrial pollution which fouls our atmosphere. It is something else again to know precisely what must be done, how to think and write and interpret the science, or even what can be achieved before it is too late to prevent the worst effects of global warming. In this essay I analyse the central claims of proponents of the idea of the Anthropocene, arguing that they are arrogant and perhaps even naïve: in particular, the suggestion that humanity and nature have now fused to become a geological force is shown to be theological in its orientation. The essay also exposes Anthropocenology as a form of pedagogy, meaning that rather than opposing the neoliberalism that it attacks, Anthropocenology joins itself to the biopolitical institutions of education, seizing power in order to govern a totalized human population all the more effectively. (shrink)

This paper offers an intellectual portrait of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, by considering his incorporation of perspectives associated with “modernism,” the artistic and intellectual avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century. These perspectives are largely absent in other alternatives in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Emphasis is placed on Lacan’s affinities with phenomenology, a tradition he criticized and to which he is often seen as opposed. Two general issues are discussed. The first is Lacan’s unparalleled appreciation of the (...) paradoxical nature of human experience, together with his treatment of paradox as almost a criterion of truth. These points are illustrated by considering Lacan’s conceptions of the self and of erotic desire. The second issue is Lacan’s focus on the “ontological dimension,” on overall styles or modalities of what might be termed “transcendental subjectivity”: namely, what he calls the registers of the “Imaginary,” the “Symbolic,” and the “Real.” By emphasizing the incommensurable yet interdependent nature of these modalities, Lacan offers a synthesis of dynamic/conflictual and formal/ontological dimensions of the human condition. This paper offers an encompassing portrait of Lacan’s major ideas that is at odds with the widespread assumption that Lacan is somehow a deeply anti-humanist thinker who derides the subjective dimension. Lacan’s most distinctive contributions are fundamentally concerned with the nature of human experience. They show strong affinities with hermeneutic forms of phenomenology inspired by Heidegger, a philosopher who focused on ontological modes of Being and considered paradox as a mark of truth. (shrink)

This article compares and contrasts the work of Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on power and the State. It argues that despite Skinner's explicit repudiation of Derrida's method of philosophising, he has come to advocate an approach to the history of ideas that bears important and striking similarities to Derrida's thought. I attribute this intellectual gravitation toward Derrida as the logical outcome of a shared understanding on the nature of the cosmos and man's place within it-an understanding profoundly indebted to (...) the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the genealogical history of Michel Foucault. As a means to illustrate the narrowing intellectual gulf between Skinner and Derrida, I compare their respective thoughts on the nature of the modern and contemporary State, a State that both intellectuals see as emerging from a dominant western philosophical tradition that, at its core, is marked by the idea of fear. For both Skinner and Derrida this has profound consequences for the possibilities open to individuals and societies for free thought and political action. (shrink)

This article sets out to compare reconstructivism and critical theory as two possible avenues for a normative science and technology studies discipline “after constructivism”. This investigation is pursued through a case study of a wireless network community in the Czech Republic. The case study focuses on a schism that erupted after some users attempted to commercialise an invention for sending data with visible light. Their enterprise was partly motivated by a larger, political aspiration of creating a decentralised communication infrastructure. Other (...) members in the Czech wireless network community opposed this attempt as they perceived commercialisation as more of a threat than an aid for their politics. I will argue that these conflicting viewpoints over the role of markets can also clarify the different, theoretical assumptions behind reconstructivism and critical theory, and give some direction for a future, normative STS discipline. (shrink)

In many of his writings, Castoriadis argues that ‘the discovery of the imagination’ occurs in the works of Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Freud, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Although he has systematically encountered and interrogated the works of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Merleau-Ponty, the work of Fichte remains an enigmatic absence within the orbit of Castoriadis' work. This study is an attempt to address this enigma through a close reading of Fichte’s The Science of Knowledge.

In the twentieth century, philosophy came to be dominated by the English-speaking world, first Britain and then the United States. Accompanying this development was an unprecedented professionalization and specialization of the discipline, the consequences of which are surveyed and evaluated in this article. The most general result has been a decline in philosophy's normative mission, which roughly corresponds to the increasing pursuit of philosophy in isolation from public life and especially other forms of inquiry, including ultimately its own history. This (...) is how the author explains the increasing tendency, over the past quarter-century, for philosophy to embrace the role of "underlaborer" for the special sciences. Indicative of this attitude is the long-term popularity of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that fields reach maturity when they forget their past and focus on highly specialized problems. In conclusion, the author recalls the history of philosophy that, following Kuhn's advice, has caused us to forget, namely, the fate of Neo-Kantianism in the early twentieth century. Key Words: analytic philosophy • normative • positivism • pragmatism • professionalism • underlaborer. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida is known for his attempt at including the perspective of woman in his philosophical work. His efforts received the acclaim of women philosophers, despite the fact that his philosophy remains marked by the omission of any mention to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. The topic of this paper shall not be woman, as in Derrida’s 1972 conference Spurs, but phallogocentrism. That is, the economy, dynamic and limits of this concept as a critique of history, or rather, as (...) the history of the lie, the term by which Derrida seems to conceive of the possibility of any history whatsoever. We agree that phallogocentrism in Derrida’s hands enabled anti-philosophical forays by which to include woman as singularity in the male-dominated French philosophy of the 1970s. However, we also argue that the specter of man was maintained untouched throughout Derrida’s work, thereby suggestion that deconstruction overlooked what may very well be the primary prohibition in Western thought. (shrink)

The principal concern of this paper is to track the first wave of criticism directed against Deleuze's relation to Hegelianism as it has appeared in the English-speaking world. To this end, we assess the criticisms offered by Stephen Houlgate, Judith Butler, and Catherine Malabou, each of whom, in their respective ways, accuse Deleuze of misreading Hegel, claiming that his rejection of Hegelianism merely reinforces a secret or unacknowledged Hegelianism inherent in his own critique. Despite the brisk treatment Houlgate grants Deleuze, (...) his charges are by far the most serious, and hence it is to these that much of the discussion is dedicated; but the aim is to show how each of these claims concerning Deleuze's misreading of Hegel themselves involve a misreading of Deleuze. (shrink)

The ontology developed by Merleau-Ponty in the final stage of his work is centered on the concept of flesh, giving this notion its most general scope by complementing the idea of “flesh of the body” with that of a “flesh of the world.” This paper seeks to evaluate the possibility of reading this philosophy of the flesh as a materialist ontology. For this purpose, the possibility is considered of interpreting the concept of flesh as a new figure of matter, despite (...) Merleau-Ponty’s claims that seem to preclude this interpretation. In concluding, the paper briefly discusses the potential contribution of this interpretation to approaching certain conceptual problems in contemporary science. It is argued that this approach can help to promote a more productive interchange between Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental thought and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This article addresses the question as to whether it is logically possible to fashion a discourse exclusively for the natural environment. Could such a discourse emerge without colonization by other social spheres acting as proxy? The prospects appear to be rather bleak, for even in the case of two apparently non-human-directed or non-committal discourses, that of extensionist ethics and new sophisticated management (of environmental crises), the latent social-constructionism built into both renders them monistic discourses hegemonically mapping the territories of what (...) they refer to. It becomes increasingly difficult to escape the human epistemic locatedness anti-anthropocentric critics demand. Despite this, such an exercise offers us the benefit of being mindful of what the crisis of social-scientific discourses amounts to as well as what to expect of discourse analysis as such. Furthermore, the prospects of the two discourses examined are being mapped onto two modified models drawing on Foucault and Deleuze thus helping us understand the pattern of our diverse environmental responses. Ecological thinking is perhaps the first subject-matter that transcends or shatters discourse boundaries and strains both imagination and human powers when selecting between conceptual frameworks, making us aware of the ineluctable feature of social-constructionism present in our social thought. (shrink)

A critical review of Bourdieu’s theory of the state is developed here against the backdrop of both his wider theoretical project and empirical studies. Elaborating the concepts of symbolic capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination, the centrality that Bourdieu accords to symbolic forms is compared to benchmark Weberian accounts that start with the state monopoly of violence. Reviewing also some of the burgeoning secondary literature discussing his theory of the state, Bourdieu’s writings, which encompass various antinomies, are shown to vacillate (...) between two distinct perspectives—a strong and a weak theory of the state. His rejection of the “physicalist” approaches of Marx, Elias, and Tilly is elaborated and subject to a counter-critique, particularly in relation to the notion of symbolic “violence.” Bourdieu’s account of the state is shown to be as much a political as theoretical intervention. His antagonism towards Marxist accounts in particular is shown to be rooted in a pragmatic interest in the role of the “left hand of the state” in progressive reform; and this perspective is traced back to the twin influences of Durkheim and Hegel, French republicanism, and in particular the potential of the state to express a universal interest. At the same time, compared with sophisticated Marxist and Weberian accounts and the work of Norbert Elias and Gramsci, Bourdieu’s theory is shown to be severely lacking in the way that he deals with violence and coercion. His “expanded materialism,” particularly with the “strong theory,” bends the stick too far and overplays the symbolic basis of consent. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s insights with regard to the pervasive influences of state practices of classification, taxonomy, delegation, and naming are shown to have real utility with regard to focused empirical investigations of the state in modern societies. (shrink)

Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at Paris-Nanterre. A collaborator and student of Jacques Derrida, her work shares some of his interest in rigorous protocols of reading, and a willingness to attend to the undercurrents of over-read and “too familiar” texts. But, as she points out, this orientation was shared by Hegel himself. Arguing against Heidegger, Kojève, and other critics of Hegel, the book in which this Introduction appears puts Hegel back on the map of the present.

In this study I compare the work of two scholars who are important for contemporary research into the history of semiotics. The main goal of the study is to describe specific rhetorical/figurative forms and structures of persuasion between two epistemological positions that determine various possibilities in the historiography of semiotics. The main question is this: how do we understand two important metatheoretical forms of descriptions in the historiography of semiotics or the history of sign relations? The first perspective is semiology (...) and its corollary, “structuralism,” as presented in Michel Foucault’sThe Order of Things. This perspective prefers to consider history as a set of ruptures (i). The second position explores the possibility of the historical development of semiotic consciousness as presented in the works of John N. Deely (ii). The main aim of this study lies in the exploration of these two different epistemological bases – divergent bases for developing specific understandings of interconnections that hold between between semiotics, semiosis and historical processes. A goal of this paper is to demonstrate the limits and advantages of these two paradigmatic positions. The positions in question are “meta-theoretical” in the following senses such that: (i) the historical episteme is taken to be ana priorideterminant of all sign-operations in a given era and is also the semiologic grid through which Foucault approaches every mode of scientific knowledge (from “science” to “economy” and beyond); (ii) the quasi-Hegelian development of semiotic consciousness based on a conception of the sign considered as a triadic ontological relation. The latter is Deely’s guiding meta-principle, through which the history of semiotics can be articulated, examined and evaluated. (shrink)

The difficulty to pin down the philosophical content of structuralism depends on the fact that it operates on an implicit metaphysics; such a metaphysics can be best unfolded by examining Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist critique of it. The essay argues that both structuralism and Derrida’s critique rely on holistic premises. From an initial externalist definition of structure, structuralism’s metaphysics emerges as a kind of ‘immanent’ holism, similar to the one pursued, in the contemporary analytic panorama, by Donald Davidson. By contrast, Derrida’s (...) deconstructionist critique appears engaged in a ‘quasi-transcendental’ version of holism, which the author analyzes in connection with Martin Heidegger’s notion of Verwindung, or twisted overcoming. (shrink)

. Angels in the archive: Lines into the future in the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 206-222.

This article discusses two well‐known texts that respectively describe learning and teaching, drawn from the work of Freud and Plato. These texts are considered in psychoanalytic terms using a methodology drawn from the philosophy of Luce Irigaray. In particular the article addresses Irigaray's approach to the analysis of speech and utterance as a ‘cohesion between the source of the utterance and the utterance itself’ (Hass, 2000). I apply this approach to ask whether educational tradition has fractured the relationship between pedagogy (...) and the body of the teacher/pupil. Teaching and learning are re‐addressed in ways that challenge the gender‐neutral representation of pedagogy as a systematic technique. (shrink)

Grounded in newer French socio-political philosophy, this text deals with the paradoxical situation in which the interpretation of society as well as the relation between the individual and the social remains ambiguous even though autonomy and interrogation of the social emerges: Autonomy remains trapped between transcendence and immanence. Modernity is when society claims to know that it has to produce its own myths. Traditional societies did not relate to their myths as if they were their own products. Nevertheless, as soon (...) as the traditional religious points of reference are disclosed and disappear, the community gives itself new points of reference in order to put the social at a distance. Thus the social creates a distance to itself and a mirror for itself in order to perceive itself and work upon itself. The article explores the questions of why this is so and the difference between heteronomous and autonomous autotranscendence. (shrink)

The spirit of the laws is a symbol reflecting the ontological status and transcendental ideals of the system of positive law. The article analyses historical links between the romantic philosophy of the spirit of the nation (Volksgeist), which subsumed Montesquieu’s general spirit of the laws under the concept of ethnic culture, and recent politics of cultural and ethnic identity. Although criticising attempts at legalising ethnic collective identities, the article does not simply highlight the virtues of demos and the superiority of (...) civic culture against the vices of ethnos and the regressive nature of ethnic politics of identity. Instead, the author argues that the civil democratic concept of political identity is part of the more general process of social differentiation: unlike the pre-political ethnic concept of identity, it can be converted to generalised democratic procedures and thus dismantle the totalitarian claims of cultural identity politics. (shrink)

The following article is intended as a contribution to a reorientation of approaches to the treatment of the historical development of the concept of subjectivity. It argues for a fundamental continuity between German Idealist philosophy and Jungian psychoanalysis on certain fundamental aspects of selfhood. These continuities might seriously question certain key assumptions about the nature of 'modernity', notably as a period marked by exaggerated claims on self-identity and reflexivity. It is suggested that such claims are largely the result of the (...) Hegelian interpretation of the early Fichtean system, an interpretation that utilizes only one aspect of the intellectual resources made available by the early system of J. G. Fichte. Such an appropriation might be sub sumed under the rubric of 'Geist'. This article attempts to retrieve the other aspects of Fichte's system - the concepts of drive and primordial images; the emphasis on the 'subject' as a self-diremptive energy-flow; the aspect that points to Schopenhauer and beyond. (shrink)