In Out of This World, Peter Hallward argues that Deleuze's philosophy is, in spite of its proclaimed Nietzscheanism, intrinsically nihilistic. This article defends Deleuze against this accusation by reassessing his relationship to Nietzsche. I argue that both thinkers pose a similar problem, that of agency, and that the modus operandi of both for solving it relies on viewing agency as experimentation. The paper highlights the strong pragmatic dimension at play in Deleuze's philosophy: Deleuze aims to penetrate increasingly deeply into this (...) very world and to provide us with tools for intensifying our sensitivity to and engagement with it. To bring this into view, I offer a parallel reading of Nietzsche's and Deleuze's account of the production of our empirical experience, their critical stance towards such experience, and their means of overcoming it by engaging fully with problematic aspects of reality. (shrink)

I offer an interpretation of the target of Søren Kierkegaard’s corrective to Luther as not merely cultural Lutheranism but Luther's very conception of what it means to be receptive to grace. On this interpretation, while Kierkegaard affirms that salvation is by grace alone, and through faith alone, he thinks that Luther errs when he conceives of salvation as a process in relation to which the believer is merely passive. Instead, in Kierkegaard’s view, receptivity to grace involves a distinctive, middle-voiced, form (...) of human agency in which the believer learns to acknowledge her need for grace. With reference to Kierkegaard’s discourses on patience, and their thematic proximity to the spirituality of the Philokalia, I illustrate this conception of active-passivity and show how it is compatible with an uncompromising Lutheran emphasis on human powerlessness. With reference also to his insistence of the irreducible importance of the participant’s perspective, I further draw out from Kierkegaard an account of why the temptation may arise to erroneously interpret the core tenets of Luther's teaching, in the mode of a theory of soteriological passivity. (shrink)

This essay argues that although political thinkers frequently draw on his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche has not been read as a ‘thinker of politics’ in his own regard because the Euro-American field of political thought owes its very notion of ‘politics’ to the conceptual heritage Nietzsche's project directly challenges. The first part of the essay traces the prevailing conception of politics to Aristotle, in whose view politics is the quintessentially human ( anthropos) activity of organising collective life through reason/speech ( logos). (...) The second part presents Nietzsche's project as a novel type of political naturalism, one which replaces the two Aristotelian axioms underpinning standard construals of politics, namely logocentrism and anthropocentrism. For Nietzsche, politics is not a unique, intra-species behaviour of certain bipedal primates, but the relational power dynamics present in all of nature, humans included. Nietzsche's political naturalism thereby gifts us an image of politics befitting the thoroughly entangled, volatile world we urgently have to come to terms with today. (shrink)

This paper deals with the issue of self-determination and agency in moral action. On the one hand, it seems that where possible, the moral agent should use their practical reason to identify what it is right for them to do, and act accordingly; on the other hand, this seems to leave little room for the agent to decide for themselves how to act, where this is often said to be a marker of freedom and how the will is exercised. In (...) response to this difficulty, Ruth Chang has argued recently that at least some reasons themselves need to be seen as being created through an act of will. Looking at the work of Iris Murdoch, it is argued that this response is problematic. At the same time, it is also argued that Murdoch can provide a fruitful way of dealing with this problem through her account of the imagination. This gives a role to the will of the agent, not in creating reasons, but in attuning us to those reasons, thereby locating the will within practical reasoning itself and showing how the authority of the good can be made compatible with human freedom. (shrink)