This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka's posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.'s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.'s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related to the (...) modern desire for order: Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.'s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the article explores K.'s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice–law–power. K.'s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law–power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.'s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached. (shrink)

This essay argues for a formative, and not simply abstract, aspect to the philosophy of religion by attending to the practices of writing employed in Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work Repetition . By locating this text within an ethical tradition that focuses upon the practices that form subjects, rather than simply the formulation of a theory, its seemingly literary performances can be viewed as exercises. In particular, this text deploys and transforms the Stoic practices of self writing, in the form of (...) keeping notebooks and letter writing, so as to cultivate capabilities. This indirect ethical instruction does not, however, lead to the formation of autonomous ethical subjects, but to the cultivation of capabilities that are only possible in the relational space of vulnerability, service and dependence. (shrink)

In the present age AI emerges as both a medium to andmessage about the future, eclipsing all other possible prospects.Discussing how AI succeeds in presenting itself as an arrival on the humanhorizon at the end times, this theoretical essay scrutinizes the ‘inevitability’ ofAI-driven abstract futures and probes how such imaginaries become livingmyths, by attending how the technology is embedded in broaderappropriations of the future tense. Reclaiming anticipation existentially, bydrawing and expanding on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers–and his conceptof thelimitsituation–I offer (...) an invitation beyond the prospects and limits of‘the new AI Era’ of predictive modelling, exploitation and dataism. I submitthat the present moment of technological transformation and of escalatingmulti-faceted and interrelated global crises, is adigital limit situationin whichthere are entrenched existential and politico-ethical stakes of anticipatorymedia. Attending to them as a‘future present’,taking responsible action, constitutes our utmost capability and task. Theessay concludes thatprecisely here lies the assignment ahead for pursuing apost-disciplinary, integrative and generative form of Humanities and SocialSciences as a method of hope, that engages AI designers in the pursuit of aninclusive and open future of existential and ecological sustainability. (shrink)