(Deutsch:) Es werden zunächst drei Hinsichten unterschieden, nach denen die in einer Situation offenstehenden Möglichkeiten vorstrukturiert erscheinen: materiell, sozial und subjektiv. Während in materieller Hinsicht Möglichkeiten schlicht vorgegeben sind, werden Möglichkeiten gesellschaftlich als zulässig oder unzulässig skandiert, d.i. hervorgehoben, oder bleiben unskandiert. In subjektiver Hinsicht sind es vor allem die Fähigkeiten des Einzelnen, die diese Möglichkeiten er- oder verschließen. Technisierung erscheint in dieser Perspektive als sichernde Vorstrukturierung von Möglichkeitsräumen, die subjektiv stets mit der Abblendung oder Abschattung bestimmter Sachverhalte und Möglichkeiten, (...) der Erzeugung einer Zone der Latenz, einhergeht. Wie aus emanzipatorischer Perspektive mit dieser Dynamik umzugehen ist, ist Thema des letzten Abschnitts. -/- (English:) At the beginning of the text, I distinguish between three respects in which the options and possibilities within a given situation are prestructured: materially, socially, and subjectively. While certain options and possibilities are simply predetermined by the physical structure of a situation, many options are socially accentuated (skandiert) as admissible or inadmissible, while other options remain unaccented. With respect to the subject, options are primarily made accessible and disclosed through the particular capabilities of the agent. From such a point of view, mechanization (Technisierung) can be described as the safe-guarding prestructuring of spaces of possibility, which is always linked with the fading of certain circumstances and possibilities, the establishment of a domain of latency. How to cope with this dynamic from an emancipatory perspective is the subject of the last section of the paper. (shrink)

This paper proposes a metaphysical framework for distinguishing between human and machine intelligence. Specifically, it posits two identical deterministic worlds -- one comprising a human agent and the other comprising a machine agent. These agents exhibit different types of information processing mechanisms despite their apparent sameness in a causal sense. By postulating the distinctiveness of human over machine intelligence, this paper resolves what it refers to as “the vantage point problem” – namely, how to legitimize a determinist’s assertion of determinism (...) by placing the determinist within the universe. (shrink)

This paper proposes a metaphysical framework for distinguishing between human and machine intelligence. By drawing an analogy from Kant’s incongruent counterparts, it posits two identical deterministic worlds -- one comprising a human agent and the other comprising a machine agent. These agents exhibit different types of information processing mechanisms despite their apparent sameness in a causal sense. By postulating the distinctiveness of human over machine intelligence, this paper resolves what it refers to as “the vantage point problem” – namely, how (...) to legitimize a determinist’s assertion of determinism by placing the determinist within the universe. (shrink)

"Roger Garaudy was for many years at the centre of the French Communist Party but was eventually expelled for his liberal views. In the Seventies he developed a project to bring Marxism and Christianity together, to include all humanity in a project to set all people free. What emerges from Garaudy's project is a very modern Marxism, with its emphasis on the individual, its ecological politics, and in its insistence on religion as central to human emancipation. Although Garaudy himself became (...) frustrated by the West and converted to Islam in 1982, ending his life discredited in the West, it is certainly possible that Garaudy's project represents a good, perhaps even the best, starting point for Marxism in today's world"--. (shrink)

A strange dialectical reversal characterizes the oppositions which psychoanalysis posits against philosophy and neuroscience: what psychoanalysis intervenes with as a unique and missing quality of these subjects, reveals itself upon enquiry as already having been a feature of said subjects. This article first discusses the failed intervention of psychoanalysis within the perceived totalities and absolutes of German idealism. Psychoanalysis, founded on an ontological division and internal inconsistency with a retroactive logic, finds this internal contradiction already reflected within the supposed totalities (...) of Schelling and Hegel. Schelling’s “blind act,” a decision with no prior foundation that grounds an abstract identity-in-itself, appears as the counterpart to what Badiou calls the strictly “analytic act.” Hegel’s Science of Logic, in which the inconclusive interpenetration of being and nothing presupposes its own conclusion in the transitions to essence, and in which an internal incompleteness and contradiction are retroactively constitutive of the concept, similarly nullifies the intervention of psychoanalysis. Finally, precisely such a reversal is presented in neuroscience, where the constitutive contradiction of contingently functional neuronal formations in the adaptive “multiple demand” model of executive functioning repeats the contingent and self-contradicting psychoanalytic subject as being its own deference within linguistic, discursive formations. (shrink)

Can deconstruction be accomplished not through the close reading of just one discourse, but through its combination with another? This paper aims at exploring this second way of performing deconstruction through a particular case study: Marxism and psychoanalysis. In the body of the essay, the history of Freudo-Marxism is divided into two parts, depending on which psychoanalyst stands as point of reference: Freud or Lacan. We proceed by studying the four main strategies by virtue of which a genuine combination between (...) Marxism and psychoanalysis has been historically attempted: separation (Reich), domination (Marcuse), contradiction (Althusser) and, finally, deconstruction (Laclau). (shrink)

In this paper, my main aim is to analyse Mao’s conception of Marxist theory and his Marxist subjectivity in theory construction in his three articles. While doing so, I will use two main approaches, first is the idea that Karl Marx’s method in understanding social relations and his theory of knowledge is in many aspects compatible and in continuation with an epistemological reading of Hegel’s subjectivity, and the second is the general structure about the relationship between the object and subject’s (...) process of knowing is similar in all three thinkers. While doing so, I will advocate the position that Mao’s epistemology is compatible with the Marxist understanding of Hegelian epistemology, and that from such an epistemological understanding it is possible to investigate Mao’s three texts in a way that yields, not an orthodox or “end result” Marxism, but instead a more general, meta epistemological understanding of Marx, that is understood better structurally. Eventually, I will claim that while using “scientific” or “orthodox” Marxism as a method to understand society, Mao further uses the subjective element in the same way as Hegel and Marx used it, although eventually he diverts the Marxist subjective manoeuvre to another direction. (shrink)

Dass wir alle in einer gemeinsamen Wirklichkeit leben, setzen wir meist unhinterfragt voraus. Sehen Andere die Welt dann doch einmal anders, mag es uns scheinen, als sähen sie diese einfach nicht so, wie sie wirklich ist. Schwerer fällt uns anzuerkennen, dass andere zuweilen in ganz anderen Wirklichkeiten unterwegs sind als wir selbst. - Tom Poljansek zeigt, wie sich die Vorstellung einer Pluralität menschlicher Wirklichkeiten mit der Annahme einer wahrnehmungsunabhängigen Realität vereinbaren lässt, ohne sich in einen Relativismus der vielen Wirklichkeiten zu (...) verlaufen. In Auseinandersetzung mit »kontinentalen« und »analytischen« Ansätzen legt er eine elegante Theorie menschlicher Wirklichkeiten vor, die konstruktivistische und realistische, phänomenologische und naturalistische Motive unerwartet miteinander verbindet. (shrink)

This article begins with a treatment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense.” The essay is often read, in the deconstructive tradition, as a showcase example of the impossibility of making a literal philosophical claim: is Nietzsche’s claim that all truth is merely metaphorical itself a true statement, or merely a metaphorical one? The present article claims that this supposed paradox relies on the groundless assumption that all philosophy must ultimately be grounded in some (...) unshakeable literal truth. From here, we turn to Edmund Gettier’s famous critique of the widespread notion of knowledge as “justified true belief.” Expanding on Gettier’s point, it is argued that there can only be “justified untrue belief” or “unjustified true belief,” never a belief that is both justified and true at once. (shrink)

This article presents conceptual bridges that exist between the philosophy of G.W.F Hegel and a feminist ethics of care. To do so, it engages with Slavoj Žižek’s contemporary reading of Hegel in concert with existing feminist interpretations of Hegel’s thought. The goal of doing so is to demonstrate how both Žižek and a selection of critical feminist thinkers interpret Hegel’s perspective on the nature of subjectivity, intersubjective relations and the relationship between the subject and the world it inhabits, in a (...) way that can further our thinking on the feminist ethics of care as a relational and contextualist ethics that foregrounds vulnerability as a condition of existence. These readings of Hegel highlight the radical contingency of human subjectivity, as well as the relationship between human subjectivity and the external world, in a way that is compatible with the feminist ethics of care’s emphasis on the particularity, fluidity, and interdependency of human relationships. I argue that this confrontation between care ethics and mainstream philosophy is valuable because it offers mutual contributions to both care ethics as a moral and political theory and the philosophy of Hegel and Žižek. (shrink)

Much has been written about Žižek’s critique of ideology and its theoretical boundaries. Beyond the critical aspect of Žižekian philosophy, the desert of Žižekian politics lies in the way subjectivity persists even at the end of great revolutionary mobilizations. In this essay, I deal with the implications of a Žižekian politics based on the theory of subjectivity and the problem of the “morning after”. His rejection of the main currents of leftism opens up the discussion whether Žižekian politics is a (...) call for pragmatism or as a provocation to revolution. To address this issue, this essay proceeds in two ways. First, we study how Vladimir Lenin and Deng Xiaoping gives us two lessons in socialist pragmatism; the lessons we draw from Lenin and Deng allow us to study the problematic faced by the post-revolutionary politics: the need to arrive at a concrete plan to govern the nation and resuscitate the economy. Second, from what we learn as the audacity of Lenin’s strategic retreats and the missed political opportunities in Deng’s economic reforms, I argue that in a politics of militancy, collectivism is complemented by the rigorous study of our present situation. Militancy is an attitude of guarded optimism that complements communist optimism with a critical edge and a level-headed approach to dealing with political problems. (shrink)

A recent political critique of Speculative Realism by Catherine Malabou finds fault with this loosely arranged movement for its focus on reality in its own right, apart from the subject. Malabou responds with a radical ontological claim, holding effectively – if not always explicitly – that subject and object mutually generate one another amidst a primal void. After criticizing this idea, I point to some of the difficult political consequences of such a position, though Malabou defines it positively as an (...) anarchic awakening that generates new collectivities unconstrained by any thing-in-itself. By contrast, I contend that nonhuman constraints and collaborators are an intimate part of the human political sphere. More generally, it is shown that there are consequences for which sorts of relations are taken to be the primary political relations. (shrink)

This paper develops a dialectical methodology for assessing technoscience during the Anthropocene. How to practice Hegelian dialectics of technoscience today? First of all, dialectics is developed here in close interaction with contemporary technoscientific research endeavours, which are addressed from a position of proximity and from an ‘oblique’ perspective. Contrary to empirical research, the focus is on how basic concepts of life, nature and technology are acted out in practice. Notably, this paper zooms in on a synthetic cell project called BaSyC (...) as a concrete instantiation of converging views of life, nature and technology currently at work in technoscience. While dialectics is used to explore the significance of this project, the synthetic cell as a case study also allows us to demonstrate the remarkable relevance of dialectics for understanding contemporary research, notably because it incites us to see the synthetic cell project as a concrete exemplification of life under Anthropocenic conditions. Should we assess the synthetic cell as the ultimate realisation of the technoscientific will to control and optimise life, or rather as an effort to bridge the disruptive collision between technoscience and nature, or both? (shrink)

Starting with Popper, social theorists across the board have acknowledged that traditions serve socially valuable functions. However, while traditions are usually understood as ‘living’ entities that come in overlapping varieties and evolve over time, the socially valuable functions attributed to tradition tend to presuppose invariability in ways of thinking and acting. Addressing this tension, this article provides a detailed analysis of the concept of tradition, and directs special attention to conceivable criteria for the authentic continuation of a tradition. It is (...) argued that the ways of thinking and acting that constitute the material of a tradition must – among faithful members of that tradition – stand in a relation of equivalence – not identity or similarity. The implications of this account concern our ability to decide (normatively) conflicts over authenticity among rival tradition branches as well as the role that traditions play in policy-making. (shrink)

Friedrich Engels’ dialectical assessment of modern science resulted from his fascination with the natural sciences in combination with his resurging interest in the work of “old Hegel.” Engels became especially interested in what he saw as the molecular essence of life, namely proteins or, more specifically, albumin, seeing life as the mode of existence of these enigmatic substances. Hegelian dialectics is crucial for a dialectical materialist understanding of contemporary technoscience. The dialectical materialist understanding of technoscience as a research practice builds (...) on Engels, but also on later authors who were inspired by his writings, e.g., life scientists such as Haldane and Bernal. Considering the criticism raised against Engels’ dialectics by 20th-century Marxists, a dialectical diagnostic of contemporary technoscience can be achieved, which shifts the focus from artificial albumin as “living matter” to contemporary research on synthetic cells. (shrink)

This article affords particular attention to the relationship between memory, the narrativization of news and its linear construction, conceived as journalism’s ‘memory- work’. In elaborating upon this ‘work’, it is proposed that the Hegelian notion of retroactive causation (as used by Slavoj Žižek) can examine how analyses of news journalists ‘retroactively’ employ the past in the temporal construction of news. In fact, such retroactive (re)ordering directs attention to the ways in which journalists contingently select ‘a past’ to confer meaning on (...) the present. With regard to current literature, it is noted that a retroactive analysis can highlight two important dialectics within the practice of news journalism: 1) the relation between contingency and necessity; and, 2) the relation between content and form. Indeed, it is argued that this theoretical account offers a novel approach to examining the significance of memory in news journalism as well as the inconsistencies which underscore journalism’s memory-work. It is in accordance with such inconsistency that broader reflections on time, temporality and our relations to the past can be made. (shrink)

Although both Heidegger and Derrida criticize Hegel as the archetype and historical culmination of the metaphysics of presence, Hegel’s dialectics also serves as a model for their critical destruct...

This paper attempts to critique the Indian ideology, its reproduction of caste identities, using the works of Slavoj Žižek. While Žižek’s direct engagement with anti-caste thinkers is minimal, Žižek’s works offers new dimensions of looking at social and political realities in India. This paper seeks to bring Žižek into a dialogue with the iconic Dalit leader BR Ambedkar and Periyar EV Ramasamy, the key leader of the non-Brahmin movement in South India, both of whom were trenchant critics of Indian nationalism. (...) Reading Žižek along with Periyar and Ambedkar, this paper looks at the Indian ideology as a manifestation of Brahminism. Periyar and Ambedkar, like Žižek much later, argued that prior to the British intervention, the lower castes had no rights, only duties – a permanent state of servility to the upper castes. Both saw the arrival of European modernity as an equalizer, much to the consternation of the Indian nationalists, and sought to promote egalitarianism and rationalism. Through a comparative theoretical engagement, this paper seeks to arrive at an understanding of Brahminism as an ideology, the Indian ideology at its purest, which prevents the emergence of any genuinely universalist politics. Further, this paper also seeks to address gaps in Perry Anderson’s controversial recent book The Indian Ideology through an engagement with the above thinkers. Finally, this paper concludes with a critical consideration of the importance of Žižek’s political thought for understanding Brahminism and challenges the accusation placed by 'postcolonial' scholars against Žižek, that of his irrelevance to the so-called Third World. (shrink)

Ernst Bloch’s recourse to speculative philosophy has guaranteed him the position of a perpetual outsider in the history of Western Marxism. When Jürgen Habermas described Bloch’s philosophy in 1960 as a ‘speculative materialism’, it was to denounce him for crossing the boundaries of critical thought set down as much by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as by Marx’s critique of political economy. This article argues that Bloch’s speculative materialism deserves to be re-assessed. Contrary to Habermas’s assertion that speculation is divorced (...) from critique, I argue with Bloch that the speculative hypotheses we unavoidably use to interpret the world around us inform our political beliefs and actions, and to stifle speculative thinking as that creative and inquisitive enterprise which questions and transgresses the given is not only a ‘crime against reason’, as Hilary Putnam once claimed, but also a crime against freedom. (shrink)

This essay considers the divergent efforts of Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek to arrive at a postmetaphysical conception of ethics that would sidestep the pitfalls of traditional Western humanism yet still possess universal applicability. Butler approaches this task through her ethics of precarity, which posits vulnerability as a foundation for a generalizable ethics of relationality in the Levinasian vein. Badiou and Žižek, in turn, work from a more Lacanian perspective, attempting to leap directly from the singular to the (...) universal by bypassing the particular. After considering the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, I propose that posthumanist theory needs to reconsider its resistance to a priori norms, for such norms do not need to be metaphysically grounded to be ethically compelling and politically useful. (shrink)

Our reception of Hegel’s theory of action faces a fundamental difficulty: on the one hand, that theory is quite clearly embedded in a social theory of modern life, but on the other hand most of the features of the society that gave that embedding its specific content have become almost inscrutably strange to us (e.g., the estates and the monarchy). Thus we find ourselves in the awkward position of stressing the theory’s sociality even as we scramble backwards to distance ourselves (...) from the particular social institutions that gave conceptualized form to such sociality in Hegel’s own opinion. My attempt in this article is to make our position less awkward by giving us at least one social-ontological leg to stand on. Specifically, I want to defend a principled and conceptual pluralism as forming the heart of Hegel’s theory of action. If this view can be made out, then we will have a social-ontological structure that might be filled out in different ways in Hegel’s time and our own while simultaneously giving real teeth to the notion that Hegel’s theory of action is essentially social. (shrink)

No special definite definition does exist for postmodernism however it has had an inordinate effect on art, architecture, music, film, literature, philosophy, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. The main body of this work can be seen as an admiration and reverence for the values and ideals associated with postmodern philosophy as well as postmodern literature., I have argued that postmodern has mainly influenced philosophy and literature and they are recognized and praised for their multiplicity. Postmodernism might seem exclusive in its (...) work, its emphasis on multiplicity and the decentered subject makes very uncomfortable reading for traditional theorists or philosophers. It rejects western values and beliefs as only small part of the human experience and it rejects such ideas, beliefs, culture and norms of the western. Integrity is fragmented apart into unharmonious narratives which lead to a shattering of identity and an overall breakdown of any idea of the self. Relativism and Self- reflexivity have replaced self-confidence due to the postmodern belief that all representation distorts reality. I have also referred that in a sense; postmodernism is a part of modernism we find the instantaneous coexistence of these two methods of expression and thinking, especially in visual arts and literature. (shrink)

Drawing on a close reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s works, I offer five lessons for a science of crime and punishment: always historicize; dissect symbolic categories; produce embodied accounts; avoid state thought; and embrace commitment. I offer illustrative examples and demonstrate the practical implications of Bourdieu’s ideas, and I apply the lessons to a critique of orthodox criminology.

I present a general metaphysical framework for any formal system that works with truth-values. To establish such a framework, I start with the notion of absolute nothingness, from which I construct a nothingness which is akin to the notion of an empty set in mathematics. Then I provide a formal system that its ability to produce symbols is an integral property and an inseparable part of its metaphysics.

This paper calls into question the growing tendency of quasi-absolutism within postmodern mainstream media discourse under the guise of objectivity. The tendency’s major aim is to ascribe more believability to its discourse by re-presenting that which it covers as the vehicle of objective truth to the mainstream audience. Two interweaving discourses have marked such objectivity: one in the form of indoctrinating and omnipresent narratives, which via effective propaganda become tantamount to ritualism, the other epitomised in the nostalgia for rationalisation, already (...) inherent in western positivist thought through the exponential increase of quasi-empiricism. Accordingly, what the media cover exists. What they do not remains in the order of myth. The article starts by rethinking objectivity within modern western academia, a discourse whose objectivity is already flawed from within. Then, with respect to human experience and media coverage, the paper concludes by raising the question of postmodern mainstream media’s substitution of religious quasi-absolutist narratives, be they secular or non-secular. Subjectivity thus emerges as the ultimate ground upon which our being may be legitimate. (shrink)

What and how should individuals resist in political situations? While this question, or versions of it, recurs regularly within Western political philosophy, answers to it have often relied on dyads founded upon dogmatically held ideals. In particular, there is a strain of idealist political philosophy, inaugurated by Plato and finding contemporary expression in the work of Alain Badiou, that employs dyads (such as the distinction between truth and doxa or the privilege of thought over sense) that tend to reduce the (...) complexities of practices of resistance to concepts of commitment. Although these dyads have been challenged by, amongst others, poststructuralist theorists, this has often been at the cost of losing their structuralist heritage. This thesis develops an ontology proper to structuralism that engenders non-idealist and non-dogmatic, yet ethical, practices of resistance against commitment orientated accounts of resistance and the return of classical ontological dyads. The thesis begins with an examination of the extent to which a dogmatic use of idealism grounds the work of a prominent contemporary theorist, Alain Badiou. In developing his neo-Maoist metapolitics, Badiou follows both Platonic ontology and the Marxist tradition of dialectics by claiming that political practice can only be carried out in truth by paying fidelity to an event that ruptures the presented order of things. Chapter one opens with an exploration of Badiou's mathematic meta-ontology to draw out its three foundational dyads (truth/doxa; sense/intelligibility; is/is not). It is argued that although Badiou makes important criticisms of the preponderant trends of political philosophy, he is unable to support his own account of politics due to his dogmatic reliance on idealist principles. Chapter two begins by developing two accounts: first, of the relations between Badiou's work and that of his former teacher Louis Althusser and, secondly, the relations between Althusser's thought and that of Gilles Deleuze, in particular his reading of David Hume. Discussion centres around the importance of the role that time plays within the works of all three authors, particularly in regard to the idea of the void. The chapter concludes with the argument that Hume's temporal idea of human nature is the key to a symptomatic reading of Althusser that accounts for the persistence of ideas in the latter's social theory. In chapter three, Deleuze's reading of Hume's idea of relations is developed to take into account Bergson's theory of time. Read in contrast to Quentin Meillassoux's speculative realism, the chapter argues that Deleuze's account of temporal relations informs Althusser's social theory to create the ontological grounds for non-dogmatic and non-idealist practices of resistance. These practices are developed in chapter four with an unlikely turn to John Stuart Mill's idea of genius, the metaphysical property of the individual that signifies the discovery of new truth. The chapter begins with an argument that there is an under-developed account of ethics in Deleuze's work. Distinguishing the idea of genius from both Mill's moral philosophy, as well as from utilitarian thought more generally, the idea of genius is sutured onto Deleuze's ontological account of individuation. Read alongside Althusser's social theory, which accounts for the non-idealist conceptualisation of situations, this suture creates an ethically oriented structuralist ontology. The thesis concludes with the argument that the idea of genius is the ethical imperative that motivates practices of resistance. When individuals are understood as embodied within situations, practices of resistance are conceptualised not against other components of a situation, but contra them, taking them into account in order to amplify, multiply and transform the individual's potential within a situation. (shrink)

Transcendental materialism is a philosophical perspective that uses German Idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and natural science to offer a materialist account of subjectivity and culture. This essay compares this philosophical framework with recent work in the study of religion and philosophy of religion. While transcendental materialism has until now been unconcerned with religion, it offers parallels with this recent work. It differs, however, in its specific understanding of the material dimension of the dialectical relationship between abstraction/conceptuality and practice/embodiment.

Finding truth is an art that was learned and unlearned. Truth can only be found by looking for independent confirmation of our beliefs, by reality. This methodology is difficult to apply in personal- and social settings, because power and politics turn 'seeking independent confirmation' into 'avoiding dependent rejection'. A completely different social order is implied and the one keeps running the other into the ground like a tectonic plate. Philosophical Modernism showed us how dualism works, before Post-Modernism challenged it, regressing (...) to monism. (shrink)

Either we are in an elevated extinction rate event or in a mass extinction. Scientists disagree, and the matter cannot be resolved empirically until it is too late. We are the cause of the elevated extinction rate. What does this say about us, we who are Homo sapiens—the wise hominid? Beginning with the Renaissance and spreading during the 18th century, the normative notion of humanity has arisen to stand for what expresses our dignity as humans—specifically our thoughtfulness, in the double (...) sense of our capacity for reasoned choice and our capacity to enter sympathetically into the lives of others considering their good outside of the egotistical orbit of our own. Concurrent with this tradition has been a counter-current of critical thought viewing humans as self-defeating or self-destructive beings. This view reached great heights in the 20th century. Our causing an elevated extinction rate is largely unintentional and goes against our humanity in form as well as in content. Accordingly, it shows us to .. (shrink)

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and (...) subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger. (shrink)

This essay investigates thought as an event of “multiplicity.” French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou pose this as a concept of change (political and otherwise). Both philosophers propose that multiplicity means thinking happens as an event by engaging a theoretical impasse, or “un-thought.” Un-thought opens up and changes ideas into complex varieties or multiplicities. This dynamic is examined through the example of May ‘68, an actual event that gives context to how multiplicity expresses “radical change.” The aim of this (...) article is to see how both thinkers’ theories overlap. For Badiou, multiplicities are “truths” that happen whilst making a decision, engaging a notion of “point.” For Deleuze, multiplicities are concepts that happen materially in life as metaphysical forces, or “lines.” Multiplicity is critically approached as a complex variety of ideas that change in the forms of art, politics, and science. (shrink)

This essay presents a general summary of post-modern philosophy’s conception of agency. It argues that while post-modern philosophers offer formidable intellectual tools for criticizing contemporary restrictions on agency, their conception falters for a variety of philosophical and political reasons. This implies we should develop a more robust conception of agency to provide a foundation for progressive politics. The essay concludes by analyzing several recent steps to develop such a conception.

This paper argues that the images evoked in the literature of the Spanish indignados, and other contemporary global justice movements, specifically those of disciplinary and social decadence, a space–time beyond the limits of the possible, obligations across generations, and, ultimately, of universal history as horizon and anticipation, reactivate the legal critique of absolute property that featured so prominently in nineteenth-century accounts of law, civil society, and revolutionary right, and then again in the context of twentieth-century decolonization and revolutionary movements. Insofar (...) as such images can be distinguished from concepts, following a certain reading of the critical tradition against the grain, they pave the way towards the formulation of a systemic critique or a ‘jurisprudence of indignation’, in the wake of the emergence, rise and current crisis of the global market. (shrink)

Starting with Popper, social theorists across the board have acknowledged that traditions serve socially valuable functions. However, while traditions are usually understood as ‘living’ entities that come in overlapping varieties and evolve over time, the socially valuable functions attributed to tradition tend to presuppose invariability in ways of thinking and acting. Addressing this tension, this article provides a detailed analysis of the concept of tradition, and directs special attention to conceivable criteria for the authentic continuation of a tradition. It is (...) argued that the ways of thinking and acting that constitute the material of a tradition must – among faithful members of that tradition – stand in a relation of equivalence – not identity or similarity. The implications of this account concern our ability to decide (normatively) conflicts over authenticity among rival tradition branches as well as the role that traditions play in policy-making. (shrink)

This essay examines the ways in which Schelling’s narration of the two wills in his Ages of the World addresses existential questions about our experience of time and our desires. Divided into four sections, it focuses primarily on Schelling’s philosophy of time, the problem of overcoming the past, and the role of narration in this process.

In this essay I attempt to answer a fundamental question about Žižek’s heterodox reading of Hegel’s dialectic: What project sustains this reading in the first place? That is, what is at stake for Žižek himself? The purpose of this essay is to develop in this fashion a reading of Žižek, although not one that is necessarily meant to compete against other alternatives. My argument, then, is that Žižek’s ontological and hermeneutical project is ultimately political, that when Žižek says we need (...) Hegel “now more than ever,” he has a political situation in mind. By finding an element of Hegel’s thought, the political subjectivity of the “rabble,” that resists the traditional picture of dialectical system, Žižek can overturn the distinction between Hegelian method and system by suggesting that there’s no comprehensible distinction at all. And by politicizing Hegel and drawing out the seeds of Lacanian thought that were nonetheless incomplete until Lacan, Žižek’s historiographical project takes on the character of ideological critique. As such, Hegel and Lacan reach us anew, as theoretical players in an anti-postmodern political gambit. (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)

Big historians are attempting to construct a general holistic narrative of human origins enabling an approach to studying the emergence of complexity, the relation between evolutionary processes, and the modern context of human experience and actions. In this paper I attempt to explore the past and future of cosmic evolution within a big historical foundation characterized by physical, biological, and cultural eras of change. From this analysis I offer a model of the human future that includes an addition and/or reinterpretation (...) of technological singularity theory with a new theory of biocultural evolution focused on the potential birth of technological life: the theory of atechnogenesis. Furthermore, I explore the potential deep futures of technological life and extrapolate towards two hypothetical versions of an ‘Omega Civilization’: expansion and compression. (shrink)

This article reconstructs and evaluates a debate between Pippin and Žižek over the proper interpretation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in relation to Hegel’s concept of reconciliation. Both Pippin and Žižek agree that Vertigo exemplifies Hegelian reconciliation: Scottie exhibits Hegel’s reconciliatory “negation of negation” when he realizes that his lost love Madeleine had really been Judy all along, thereby losing his original loss. Yet Pippin and Žižek disagree on the precise significance of the concept of reconciliation both for the film and for (...) the contemporary world. Žižek argues for a revolutionary reading of reconciliation in Vertigo: we learn from reconciliation that we must make a revolutionary break from the present world, in order to bring about a wholly new world. Pippin argues for a reformist reading of reconciliation in Vertigo: we learn from reconciliation that we must find the “traces of reason” latent in the present world, in order to gradually reform it for the better. Ultimately, I argue that Žižek’s reading offers the more authentically Hegelian approach to interpreting Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But if nothing else, the Pippin-Žižek debate demonstrates the profound intellectual fecundity of the intersections between film and philosophy for understanding our current historical moment. (shrink)

This paper develops a dialectical methodology for assessing technoscience during the Anthropocene. How to practice Hegelian dialectics of technoscience today? First of all, dialectics is developed here in close interaction with contemporary technoscientific research endeavours, which are addressed from a position of proximity and from an ‘oblique’ perspective. Contrary to empirical research, the focus is on how basic concepts of life, nature and technology are acted out in practice. Notably, this paper zooms in on a synthetic cell project called BaSyC (...) as a concrete instantiation of converging views of life, nature and technology currently at work in technoscience. While dialectics is used to explore the significance of this project, the synthetic cell as a case study also allows us to demonstrate the remarkable relevance of dialectics for understanding contemporary research, notably because it incites us to see the synthetic cell project as a concrete exemplification of life under Anthropocenic conditions. Should we assess the synthetic cell as the ultimate realisation of the technoscientific will to control and optimise life, or rather as an effort to bridge the disruptive collision between technoscience and nature, or both? (shrink)

This essay is an exegetical work, the primary intention of which is to present and interpret Hegel’s notion of the “understanding” in the first chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit. The presentation and interpretation at hand takes as its starting point the work of Slavoj Žižek, who the author feels has begun a new and exciting era of scholarship on Hegel. The overall aim of the essay is modest: to develop the Žižekian reading of Hegel at the micro level. My (...) thesis is that Hegel’s initial development of the “understanding” demonstrates how, from the very first, subjectivity grabs a hold on the incompleteness of reality—a notion that is essential to Žižek’s work. Specifically, I show that the understanding realizes itself, against its will, as an accident of the world, upon which it previously depended for its illusory neutrality. The first chapter of the Phenomenology culminates in the problem of consciousness confronting itself as an accident. Ultimately, I show how Hegel’s accidentality of consciousness, since it is determined by the world, coincides with Žižek’s teaching about the identity of the subject precariously established on the incompleteness of reality. (shrink)

It is the aim of this contribution to question the two conceptions of violence in the later Levinas. One of the face, the other the violence that must be overcome by the face. The article argues that this cannot be understood fully without taking into account Levinas’ Talmudic philosophy. By focusing on the notion of trauma in the later work of Levinas, it is argued that Levinas’ idea of the human subject is understood as radical vulnerability. This idea is evaluated (...) on the basis of short comparisons with the thinking of Lacan, Žižek and Camus. The claim is made that to Levinas, violence is not a phenomenon to be eliminated by rational ethics, but one that forms the very notion of humanity itself. This is elaborated by showing how the Bible takes on a central role in Levinas’ thought. (shrink)

Beginning with his engagement with Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s seminal treatment of ‘real abstraction’, Intellectual and Manual Labour, Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly thematised and excavated the proposition that capitalism is innervated by a kind of actually-existing metaphysics, the scandal of an abstract form external to human cognition. This essay investigates Žižek’s use and criticism of Sohn-Rethel and outlines some of the developments and contradictions in his effort to confront capital’s challenge to philosophy’s self-sufficiency. It problematizes Žižek’s tendency to elide a model of (...) abstraction as a hollowing-out or evacuation of social content with a much more promising conception of real abstraction as its re-articulation or re-functioning, while querying Žižek’s recent efforts to transcend the purported limitations of Marx’s conceptualisation of capital in the direction of a Hegel. (shrink)

The paper examines connections between ontology and finance. The ontological debates concerning the role of finance are examined between two opposing schools of thought that can be labelled, very broadly, ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘realist’. These two schools of thought have had momentous repercussions in understanding what is a good society. Each school defines Nature in particular ways which can be explored using ontology and philosophical insight. Our theoretical investigation aims to accommodate Nature in community financial deliberations. A positive role for government (...) is advocated to finance environmental infrastructure initiatives. For example, precautionary strategies to address climate change must be funded. New roles for finance and government are proposed to align human relationships with Nature. Environmental precautionary principles must be developed in conjunction with finance theory to maintain decent standards of living for all. Reliance on impersonal market forces will not be enough to save the planet given the power of some over the many in the neoliberal arena. (shrink)

The dominant forms of thought today exist as either deconstructive or metalinguistic structures. Here we attempt to situate dialectical thinking as a constructive meta-mediation of this opposition between deconstruction and metalanguage. Dialectical thinking offers us a way to think about the processual nature of reason itself as a force of thought mediating being. In this mode of understanding we attempt to think the possibility of articulating the meaning and importance of ‘metaontology’ defined as the ontology of epistemology. In a metaontology (...) we treat the structure of concepts not as reflecting external territory, nor as existing at a distance from external territory, but as having their own territory. We attempt to approach metaontology by reflectively observing the singularity of the author’s own internal territorial map, revealing a ‘quadratic twisted circularity’; and also the movement of the symbolic order itself, revealing a possible invariant unsymbolizable real. From these reflections we dive into the foundations of dialectical thinking, starting with Plato, and then exploring modifications introduced by Hegel and Lacan. Finally, we offer a dialectical structure of knowledge for the 21st century. This offering is meant only as an offer, a consideration, for how dialectics can be deployed at the location of key antagonisms in the contemporary field. The hope is that future dialecticians. (shrink)

This article mounts a defense of my and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, against the two main criticisms of it made throughout Graham Harman’s article “The Battle of Objects and Subjects”: (1) that we and our fellow contributors are guilty of gross overgeneralization when we classify thinkers from various schools of thought – among them New Materialism, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and actor–network theory – under the broad rubric of the “new materialisms”; (...) and (2) that despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a full-blown idealism. In responding to and attempting to refute these criticisms, I make the case that our Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism is an “extimate materialism.”. (shrink)

Since its inception in the late 2000s, supporters of Quentin Meillassoux tended to oppose the movement he founded, speculative materialism, to Derrida and the Derridean community. The arc of Meillassoux's later publications, however, did not support that opposition, especially when it became clear that he neither dismissed correlationism nor set aside literary concerns. These approaches might not be as incompatible as has been supposed. Still, if any affinity is to be established, a first need is to reassess the core of (...) Meillassoux's argument in After Finitude, which has continued to influence his publications. In this article, I attempt not merely to comment upon Meillassoux's argument, but to justify it from within, and so to demonstrate its logic. Then, using a method of re-reading that will be familiar to many, I will attempt to show how that logic reveals speculative materialism and Derridean concerns to be better treated as logical affiliates. Doing so will not presuppose agreement, but will set the stage for more thorough comparisons in future. (shrink)