Many theorists have defended the claim that collective entities can attain genuine agential status. If collectives can be agents, this opens up a further question: can they be conscious? That is, is there something that it is like to be them? Eric Schwitzgebel argues that yes, collective entities, may well be significantly conscious. Others, including Kammerer, Tononi and Koch, and List reject the claim. List does so on the basis of Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. I argue here that (...) List’s rejection is too quick, and that groups can, at least in principle, display the kind of informational integration we might think is necessary for consciousness. However, group consciousness will likely differ substantially from the individual experiences that give rise to it. This requires the defender of group consciousness to face up to a similar combination problem as the panpsychist. (shrink)

An original reading of Blanchot's thought with far-reaching philosophical and literary implications.

The study of the processes and methods through which elements of Hegelian philosophy and aesthetics have been appropriated and adjusted to the needs of Marxist–Leninist criticism is essential for understanding Bolshevik–Marxist aesthetics in the process of its consolidation into an official doctrine in Soviet Russia. By looking at the career of the Bolshevik Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunačarskij, it is possible to discern the extent to which the process was forged by the unsanctioned presence of Goethe and Hegel. The article (...) traces their important contributions in the causes of sustaining revolutionary romanticism and its eventual overcoming in favor of the rationality and solemnity of socialist realism. (shrink)

The article presents a conception of the end of history, developed on the basis of Giorgio Agamben’s critical engagement with Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel. Departing from Agamben’s concept of inoperosity as an originary feature of the human condition, we argue that the proper or ‘second’ end of history consists not in the fulfilment of its dialectical process but rather in the radical interruption of the dialectic that terminates the teleological dimension of social praxis. Introducing the figure of the ‘workless (...) slave’ into the scenario of the Master—Slave dialectic, the article demonstrates how the dialectic of history may be ended in a non-dialectical fashion through inoperative praxis that subtracts itself from the struggle for recognition. In the conclusion, the implication of this reading of the end of history for the understanding of Agamben’s ‘coming politics’ is addressed. (shrink)