While the Hegelian struggle for recognition is often taken to be the systematic point at which rational humanity differentiates itself from mere animality, Hegel more thoroughly expounds on the relationship between rational and nonrational animals in his Encyclopedia: humans diverge from nonrational animals through a process of habituation. While one might assume that Hegel takes this power of habituation to be sufficient for rationality, this assumption is complicated by Hegel’s attribution of habituation to non-human animals as well. Against readings of (...) the Encyclopedia that separate human and non-human animal habituation, I argue that a coherent interpretation must treat habituation as the same power in human and non-human animal life. My interpretation demonstrates Hegel’s proximity to Matthew Boyle’s transformative conception of rationality, which portrays rationality as a unique realization of animality. Hegel takes the realization of rational animal life to be thoroughly habitual, contra the instinctual basis of nonrational animal life. (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)

The article presents the conceptual groundwork for an understanding of the essentially improvisational dimension of human rationality. It aims to clarify how we should think about important concepts pertinent to central aspects of human practices, namely, the concepts of improvisation, normativity, habit, and freedom. In order to understand the sense in which human practices are essentially improvisational, it is first necessary to criticize misconceptions about improvisation as lack of preparation and creatio ex nihilo. Second, it is necessary to solve the (...) theoretical problems that derive from misunderstandings concerning the notions of normativity, habit, and freedom – misunderstandings that revolve around the idea that rationality is a form that is developed out of itself and thus works in a way similar to algorithms. One can only make sense of normativity, habit, and freedom if one understands that they all involve conflictual relationships with the world and with others, which in turn enables one to adequately take into account their constitutive connection to improvisation, properly understood. In outlining these conceptual connections, we want to prepare the foundations for an explanation of rational practices as improvisational practices. The article concludes by stating that human rational life is improvisatory because the conditions of human practice arise out of practice itself. (shrink)

This article pursues the exploration of how contemporary works of deconstruction can challenge preconceptions of the body and embodiments and interrogate their limits, particularly in relation to intertwined foldings of desire, gender, race and sexuality. Through readings of Jacques Derrida and Sarah Kofman, the authors show that deconstruction allows for an understanding of the body or bodies that goes beyond the present body — indexed as human, male, white, able, living body — thus opening up towards the thinking of bodies (...) and corporealities exceeding the limitations of Christian transsubstantiation and of the Eucharist. The deconstructive body is not one of communion; it is one of (self-)interruption, différance and non-presence. It is the other's body — or the body as otherly. The authors then analyse the ethical-political implications of this thinking of another body, one inassimilable by Western metaphysics, and marked by incalculable sexual differences, animality, undecidable life-death, machinicity, monstrosity, and so on. (shrink)

Deleuze said that he detested Hegelianism and dialectics: this paper claims that Deleuze is contra Hegel because he has and proposes a different philosophical system. Thus, I suggest that if we want to understand the reason of such a “disgust,” we need to focus the philosophical question that moves the entire Deleuzian system (§ 1). Then, I explain that if the ground-question of Hegel’s philosophy is “how is it possible that things are surpassed, that they go on?”, the Deleuzian one (...) is “how is it that there is always something new, that things come out?” (§ 2). Finally, I discuss how desire can be considered as a key-example for seeing how the perspectives of the two thinkers diverge (§ 3). (shrink)

In this article the author traces the limits of the philosophy and politics of recognition as manifest in colonial settler contexts. Forms of property ownership and ways of being, sutured by the racial body, are contained by a restricted economy of owning, knowing and being. Bringing the concept of plasticity to bear on the relationship between the body, property and the colonial, the author illuminates the ways in which practices of ownership that exceed the restricted economy of recognition exhibit a (...) temporal and spatial plasticity in the context of the Palestinian struggles over land in the West Bank. (shrink)

Hyppolite stresses his proximity to Merleau-Ponty, but the received interpretation of his “anti-humanist” reading of Hegel suggests a greater distance between their projects. This paper focuses on an under-explored dimension of their philosophical relationship. I argue that Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite are both committed to formulating a mode of philosophical expression that can avoid the pitfalls of purely formal or literal and purely aesthetic or creative modes of expression. Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to navigate this dichotomy, I suggest, closely resembles Hyppolite’s interpretation of (...) Hegel’s “speculative” mode of expression. In particular, his emphasis on the “mediating” character of philosophical language, which moves between descriptive and creative expression, suggests a debt to Hyppolite. This reading provides more evidence to think that Hyppolite cannot be straightforwardly understood as an anti-humanist or post-phenomenological thinker, and paves the way for a _rapprochement_ between his work and the broader phenomenological tradition. (shrink)

This paper ties together several anthropological and naturphilosophische themes in Hegel in order to re-examine the place of the philosophy of nature in the Encyclopedia. By taking Hegel’s anthropology as a starting point, I argue that his philosophy of nature has for its subject not nature “as such,” but nature as cognized by Geist, so that the identity of these two natures is only constructed by spirit itself retroactively. I trace the origin of this difference to the revolutionary event that (...) institutes Hegel’s anthropology – which is not a transition from nature to spirit, but a pure break or new beginning, culminating in the creation of the conceptual world of nature as “we” know it. As a result, the philosophy of nature does not precede, but follows from, the anthropology and the philosophy of spirit; the natural foundation is retroactively replaced by the philosopher with the anthropological one. (shrink)

This article studies the phenomenology of chronic illness in light of phenomenology’s insights into ecstatic temporality and freedom. It shows how a chronic illness can, in lived experience, manifest itself as a disturbance of our usual relation to ecstatic temporality and thence as a disturbance of freedom. This suggests that ecstatic temporality is related to another sort of time—“provisional time”—that is in turn rooted in the body. The article draws on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Heidegger’s Being and Time , (...) shedding light on the latter’s concept of ecstatic temporality. It also discusses implications for self-management of chronic illness, especially in children. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in Hegel’s mature Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences contains the outlines of a philosophically rich notion of the constitutive temporality of subjectivity. The temporality of the being of Hegel’s concrete subject is intimately connected with embodiment and sociality, and is thus an essential element of its fully detranscendentalized inner-worldly nature.

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 article aims to locate the connections between Hegel’s philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, with a particular focus on the model of intersubjectivity, as drawn from his Phenomenology of Spirit. The roots of the encounter between the philosophy of Hegel and psychoanalytic theory can be traced back to Jacques Lacan and the less well‐considered figure of Jean Hyppolite. Lacan, as a psychoanalyst, used Hegel’s thought in his own theory, as is well known, while Hyppolite was arguably one of the first to (...) write from a philosophical angle about the links between the two seemingly opposed systems of thinking. I will give a broad overview of the use of Hegelian philosophy in psychoanalytic theory from the Hyppolite–Lacan relationship through to contemporary thinkers in the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Although recently the figure of Slavoj Žižek has popularised the Hegel‐psychoanalysis connection, there remains much more to be explored in this branch of Hegel studies that widens the scope beyond the Lacanian‐Marxist version he employs. This article will survey existing literature (in the English language) and thus illuminate the key texts in the history of Hegel’s impact on psychoanalytic theory and the concept of intersubjectivity and gesture towards the future potential of this line of inquiry. (shrink)

This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body – that is plasticity as a form of life – is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizing narratives, I draw on genealogical method to illuminate the unequal (...) distribution of plasticity across gender and ethnic groups. Finally, after analysing postgenomics as a different thought-style to genomics, I outline some of its implications for notions of plasticity. I argue that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental control of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead closer to an alter-modernistic view that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community. (shrink)

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)

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.

At first glance a Russian anarchist’s revolutionary address to the youth of his day made in the late 19th century and the address to youth made by a contemporary French philosopher may appear to have little in common as their context and era are ostensibly very different. How would Petr Kropotkin’s address be understood in our time? Are Kropotkin’s concerns the same as those raised by Bernard Stiegler? Could Kropotkin speak of universal concerns, a sense of elevation and sublimation not (...) governed, undermined or circumvented by digital relations, calculation or algorithmic determination? I find a mutual concern with the coming into maturity of youth, but, I am concerned that as we are passing through an epochal and revolutionary transformation driven by digital and cognitive capitalism and in our toxic and crisis-ridden milieu, Kropotkin’s rhetoric would inevitably fall on deaf ears? Is his rhetoric on revolution anachronistic? How would his rhetoric be crafted for a youth seemingly indifferent to the plight of fellow brethren? Is it conceivable that the humanist-inflected prospects of youth so vaunted by Kropotkin have now been devastated by the inhuman and nihilistic tendencies of the so-called miscreant, ‘blank generation’ as described by Stiegler? True, while it is difficult to calibrate the vision of youth affirmed in Kropotkin with the fear of youth in Stiegler, and, despite differences in episteme, tradition and political orientation, both thinkers I think are concerned with the trials and tribulations of youth and both hold out the prospect of the not-yet of youth, of the coming into being of the maturity of youth, of Aufklärung. It is this shared focus I wish to examine further. (shrink)

Some of Catherine Malabou’s recent work has developed her conception of plasticity (originally deployed in a reading of Hegelian Aufhebung ) in relation to neuroscience. This development clarifies and advances her attempt to bring contemporary theory into dialogue with the natural sciences, while indirectly indicating her engagement with the French tradition in philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, especially the work of Georges Canguilhem. I argue that we can see her development of plasticity as an answer to some specific (...) shortcomings in Canguilhem’s conception of organic or biological normativity as advanced in The Normal and the Pathological . Such a view of plasticity shows its potential to provide the basis for a powerful critical engagement with contemporary conceptions of selfhood, self-transformation, subjectivation, and the general theory of norms. (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 dissertation engages the question of the relation between nature and rationality, and the conditions of our freedom, through the lens of the concept of Life. It begins by analyzing biological life in Kants Critique of Judgment as a form of judgment bridging theoretical and practical reason. Kants argument is limited, however, because it returns us to ourselves with new insight only about our judgment, but not about natural life. Hegel, by contrast, begins his treatment of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology (...) of Spirit in Life, showing how rationality develops out of a mutually constitutive relation with objects in their independence. Hegels dialectical relation of subject and object develops into a world increasingly worked over as social structures, norms and institutions that provide the conditions for our situated freedom. Contra the reading that positive liberty entails that we are fully determined by our social conditions, my contention is that Hegel provides a robust theory of our freedom as socially and historically situated. Through a dialectical process of alienation from and interaction with norms and institutions, both we and these external conditions are changed, giving meaning to our agency as the ability to interact with, rather than merely react to, our lifeworld. In the Phenomenology, this interaction first appears as work, through which we create the social structures that come to stand against us in culture. By recognizing the role that work plays in the creation and reinforcement of these institutions, we also realize our own activity as a tool for reforming these social conditions towards an increasingly free and just society. (shrink)

Resumo: Este artigo parte da análise da influência de Hegel na construção do conceito de capital e de ideologia, na obra de Marx. Para tal, buscou-se analisar a passagem dos primeiros escritos humanistas de Marx à sua teoria tardia. Da ruptura realizada por Marx em relação a suas obras de juventude, surge o problema de como determinar o sujeito, uma vez que a perspectiva humanista inicial é abandonada. A ideia é a de que, paradoxalmente, quando critica a dialética hegeliana, Marx (...) termina por encontrar problemas que poderiam ser resolvidos através de conceitos hegelianos, como a questão do sujeito de classe. É o que procuraremos argumentar por meio de uma análise sobre o papel da negatividade em Hegel.: This article starts with an analysis of the influence of Hegel on the construction of the concepts of capital and ideology in Marx's work. To this end, we analyze the transition from Marx's first humanist writings to his later theory. Due to the break achieved by Marx in relation to his early works, a problem arises: the determination of the revolutionary subject once the initial humanist perspective has been abandoned. Our thesis is that when Marx leaves Hegel, he paradoxically ends up encountering problems that can only be resolved by Hegelian dialectics,. We argue this by means of an analysis of the role of negativity in Hegel. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Education appears to bear responsibility on the one hand to do justice to society’s need for reproduction and continuation, and on the other to do justice to the individual’s capacity for and need to express resistance, critique and political action. How we navigate this problem is tied to how we understand justice. ‘Plastic justice’ is the suggestion that questions concerning justice and education might find a materialist expression instead of the usual transcendental ideals of justice. In this perspective, ‘justice’ (...) appears not as an achievable ideal but as a philosophical void that allows us to identify and react to injustice. An example of this is the void that allows for social selection – in the form of admissions or exams – that must be kept open if we wish to avoid encouraging social conformism and reproduction. (shrink)

El presente trabajo analiza la interpretación de la noción hegeliana de “proposición especulativa” que Judith Butler presenta en Sujetos del deseo. Reflexiones hegelianas en la Francia del siglo XX. Sostenemos que la filósofa norteamericana sostiene una interpretación retórica de la proposición especulativa porque comprende en términos retóricos el carácter especulativo de la proposición filosófica. Para ello, en primer lugar, presentamos la concepción hegeliana de la proposición especulativa, tal como ésta se desarrolla en el Prólogo a la Fenomenología del espíritu. En (...) segundo lugar, abordamos la interpretación de Butler.Por una parte, desarrollamos el carácter retórico de la proposición filosófica. Por otra parte, nos ocupamos de la idea de la apertura lógico-semántica de las determinaciones conceptuales que se deriva de la interpretación butleriana de la proposición en cuestión. Finalmente, en la conclusión, señalamos algunas limitaciones de la propuesta hermenéutica de Butler. (shrink)

In Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (Malabou 2010), Catherine Malabou looks back over her earlier intellectual trajectory and attempts to clarify the precise relationship between her own philosophical investigations and the crucial sources on which she has principally drawn, namely Hegelian dialectic, Heidegger’s ‘destruction’ of the history of ontology, and Derrida’s project of deconstruction. In this process, she also undertakes to take a step beyond the complex constellation of these three sources, arguing for a philosophy of plasticity which can (...) at once take up and transform the practices of dialectic, destruction, and deconstruction in what she describes as a ‘plastic reading’. (shrink)