Since Plato, Western thought has framed knowing as a method within ‘some realm of what is’ and a predetermined ‘sphere of objects’. The roots and the consequences of this stance towards reason and truth were noted by Heidegger, who equates the history of Western thought with the history of metaphysics. Since Plato, truth has relied on definition, hierarchy and mastery. Discourse on the truth begins to be discourse on the limits of things and, thus, on who is able to set (...) these limits and discourse. This dominant position erases its own traces, presents itself as unique and unavoidable, and excludes all other ways of thinking. This exclusion includes violence, and this violence is not merely a philosophical matter. It is written in the history of the West, which is a history that includes conquest, genocide and war. However, we can also identify in Heidegger ways to transcend this inner violence by returning to the originating stance towards truth, namely, truth as aletheia, or world disclosure. This article provides the groundwork to argue that Heidegger's thought, based on a call for existential responsibility, requires education to remake our existence. (shrink)

In his 2012 article Philosophy of Education for the Public Good: Five Challenges and an Agenda, Gert Biesta identifies five substantial issues about the future of education and the work required to address these issues. This article employs a Heideggerian reading of education to evaluate ‘Biesta’s truth’. I argue that Biesta’s point of view underestimates knowledge’s predominance and relativism; frames intentionality in pre-Heideggerian terms, which—although not a problem in itself because an individual is free to choose a particular perspective on (...) the concept—raises the issue of consistency in Biesta’s theoretical framework; and a final criticism concerns Biesta’s choice of tools for engaging with the identified challenges: The primary tools Biesta uses are intrinsic to the perspective he challenges. The use of a ‘first person perspective’ to frame pedagogy that focuses on the subject and ‘subjectification’ reaffirms the fundamental Western gesture that makes human beings subjects who ‘stand-over-and-against’ the world. I argue that it is possible to penetrate Plato’s ‘theoretical gaze’ and find a ‘weak’ alternative to an all-encompassing point of view of education through a Heideggerian approach that regards intentionality and thinking as ‘hearing’. (shrink)

Research in business ethics has largely ignored questions of equality and dissensus, raised by theorists of radical democracy. Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work has been very influential in business ethics, has developed a novel approach to virtue ethics rooted in both Aristotelian practical philosophy and a Marxian appreciation of radical democracy. In this paper, we bring MacIntyre into conversation with Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe and argue the following: first, MacIntyre’s work has significant similarities with Rancière and Mouffe, thus suggesting that (...) MacIntyrean business ethics has the potential to address the concerns of radical democrats; second, the MacIntyrean business ethics literature has not adequately incorporated the aspects of Macntyre’s work addressing concerns regarding equality and dissensus and future work should pay more attention to these concerns. (shrink)

Despite being the work of one of the 20th-century’s most famous philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason has never been fully integrated into our collective philosophical consciousness. None of the book’s key concepts, from seriality to the group, have come to play an important role in other philosophers’, sociologists’, or political theorists’ work. Amongst Sartre scholars, while work on the Critique has increased steadily in recent years, in particular in France and Belgium, no critical consensus exists about the book’s (...) overall meaning or value. On the occasion of the Critique’s 60th birthday, in this article I provide a summary of its main aims and concepts with a view to establishing a new basis for reading and discussing the book. I will argue that the Critique is a coherent and unique work of social theory that speaks to a world suffering an overwhelming wave of what Sartre calls ‘counter-finality’ in the form of climate change. (shrink)

This article attempts to question modes of sharing and watching to rethink political subjectivity beyond that which is enabled and enforced by the current data regime. It identifies and examines a ‘shareveillant’ subjectivity: a form configured by the sharing and watching that subjects have to withstand and enact in the contemporary data assemblage. Looking at government open and closed data as case studies, this article demonstrates how ‘shareveillance’ produces an anti-political role for the public. In describing shareveillance as, after Jacques (...) Rancière, a distribution of the sensible, this article posits a politico-ethical injunction to cut into the share and flow of data in order to arrange a more enabling assemblage of data and its affects. In order to interrupt shareveillance, this article borrows a concept from Édouard Glissant and his concern with raced otherness to imagine what a ‘right to opacity’ might mean in the digital context. To assert this right is not to endorse the individual subject in her sovereignty and solitude, but rather to imagine a collective political subjectivity and relationality according to the important question of what it means to ‘share well’ beyond the veillant expectations of the state. (shrink)

This essay offers an educational understanding of truth deriving from the work of Jacques Rancière. Unlike other educational accounts—the traditional, progressive, and critical accounts—of truth that take education as a way of approaching pre‐existing truths (or lack of pre‐existing truths), this essay establishes an account of truth that is intrinsic to education. It uses Rancière's language theory to do so, showing that Rancière's own perspective on truth is in fact opposed to the one so often promoted in and through education. (...) To conclude, the essay explores what Rancière's perspective on truth means to the educational researcher who would write on Rancière's work. (shrink)

In this essay, I investigate the human act of spectatorship as found in the work of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. I will show that each is thoroughly anti-watching when it comes to educational practices. I then problematize their positions by looking at their spectatorial commitments in the realm of aesthetics. Both Dewey and Freire have a different opinion about spectatorship when it is a matter of watching art. I claim that this different in opinion derives from the practice of (...) ‘educational humanism’. By educational humanism, I mean the tendency to posit stock human traits that derive from pedagogical practices. Ultimately, I will take a stand against educational humanism, against the process of back-forming, from educational circumstances, the desirability, or the undesirability, of human traits. (shrink)

Much work in the field of education for democratic citizenship is based on the idea that it is possible to know what a good citizen is, so that the task of citizenship education becomes that of the production of the good citizen. In this paper I ask whether and to what extent we can and should understand democratic citizenship as a positive identity. I approach this question by means of an exploration of four dimensions of democratic politics—the political community, the (...) borders of the political order, the dynamics of democratic processes and practices, and the status of the democratic subject—in order to explore whether and to what extent the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can and should be understood as a particular order. For this I engage with ideas from Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière who both have raised fundamental questions about the extent to which the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can be captured as a particular order. In the paper I introduce the figure of the ignorant citizen in order to hint at a conception of citizenship that is not based on particular knowledge about what the good citizen is. I introduce a distinction between a socialisation conception of citizenship education and civic learning and a subjectification conception of citizenship education and civic learning in order to articulate what the educational implications of such an ‘anarchic’ understanding of democratic politics are. While the socialisation conception focuses on the question how ‘newcomers’ can be inserted into an existing political order, the subjectification conception focuses on the question how democratic subjectivity is engendered through engagement in always undetermined political processes. This is no longer a process driven by knowledge about what the citizen is or should become but one that depends on a desire for a particular mode of human togetherness or, in short, a desire for democracy. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss three different ways in which we can refer to those we teach: as learner, as student or as speaker. My interest is not in any aspect of teaching but in the question whether there can be such a thing as emancipatory education. Working with ideas from Jacques Rancière I offer the suggestion that emancipatory education can be characterised as education which starts from the assumption that all students can speak. It starts from the assumption, in (...) other words, that students neither lack a capacity for speech, nor that they are producing noise. The idea of the student as a speaker is not offered as an empirical fact but as a different starting point for emancipatory education, one that positions equality at the beginning of education, not at its end. (shrink)

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well-known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the (...) potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics. (shrink)

Badiou's philosophy of the ‘event’ has itself become an event of sorts for contemporary social and political theory. It has broken radically with a set of propositions concerning the operation of power, the status of knowledge, and the possibility of action that were for some time considered nearly unquestionable, in many ways defining what Badiou might call ‘the state of the situation’. After briefly outlining the manner in which Badiou's reinvigoration of the concept of ‘truth’ constitutes a serious challenge for (...) the politics of difference and the ethics of alterity, this paper explores the significance for educational philosophy of what, borrowing from Jacques Rancière, Badiou calls the ‘axiom of equality’, or the notion that, in democratic politics, ‘equality must be postulated not willed’. I suggest that this axiom is best understood when read in relation to Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and thus explore an intrinsic link between Badiou's more obscure philosophical claims and political assertions on the one hand, and the question of education on the other. I further propose that the limitations of Badiou's criticism of Rancière's work, which suggests that he stops short of locating an effective political subject who might oppose the parliamentary state, are revealed most explicitly when we reassess Rancière's approach to education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and in his more recent work on political aesthetics. Ultimately, however, I conclude that a truly democratic approach to education will have to learn from both Badiou and Rancière, and take seriously the ‘axiom of equality’. (shrink)

Bernard Lahire’s critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology aims to establish a ‘dispositionalist-contextualist’ vision of human agency capable of fully sociologising biography and individuality. While accepting the utility of the notion of field, Lahire emphasises the plurality of non-field entities – including games, worlds and figurations – shaping people’s dispositions and the contexts in which they come to act, leading him to downgrade the notion of habitus and cast fields as only a small part of the picture. While appreciating the motivation (...) underpinning Lahire’s project and the usefulness of some of his research-led insights, this article argues that his skewed and partial reading of Bourdieu blinds him to the fact that solutions to some of the problems he identifies are already there in Bourdieu’s framework and, indeed, that these are more coherent and comprehensive than some of the conceptual suggestions Lahire offers. (shrink)

La trayectoria intelectual de Marcuse está acompañada de un compromiso constante con las formas de la crítica filosófica heredadas de la tradición occidental, desde la forma en la cual aparece la negación de lo dado a través del diálogo socrático hasta la manera en que se configura la crítica del sistema capitalista en el siglo XX. Esto no quiere decir que Marcuse haya sido un erudito que absorbió y comprendió a cabalidad todos los sistemas e ideas filosóficas y que las (...) utilizó al servicio de su propia consideración crítica del mundo; más bien resalta que entre sus elaboraciones han estado presentes algunos de los contextos e ideas más potentes del pensamiento que ha entendido de manera crítica la estructura de las sociedades humanas. (shrink)

The book explores the themes of a) “radical concepts” in politics (inspired by François Laruelle’s “non-Marxism” and “non-philosophy,” developed in accordance with Badiouan and Žižekian “realism”); b) politically relevant and applicable epistemologies of “Thought’s Correlating with the Real” (Laruelle), inspired by Laruelle, Badiou and Žižek and c) the possibility of hybridization of the epistemic stance of “radical concept” with the politics of grief and “identification with the suffering itself” proposed by Judith Butler. Radical concepts, the political vision and the theory (...) based on them, are always already succumbing to the “Lived” (Laruelle), to the singularity of the Event (Badiou), to the encounter with the “kernel of the Real” (Žižek) conditioning a political horizon and the grand and small political narratives taking place within it. The thesis of the book is that the instances of the “lived,” the “event” or the “Real” can be inherently inter-connected by virtue of the category of the “experience” which is an instance of the sheer lived, the bare being subjected to an occurrence which is always already an instance of trauma. The mere subjection to certain” taking place,” the passion (in the etymological sense derived from the Latin verb pati or in the Spinozian sense) which is category beyond the psychological notions of feeling, rational (or irrational) thought, i.e., an ontological category referring to our relation with the “Out-There” which always already happens to us, is that to which the radical (political) concept succumbs to as the ultimate authority rather than to a doctrine, a system of thought, to the “philosophy’s auto-mirroring” (Laruelle). Political revolt or the revolutionary stance stems from precisely this bare experiential, the sheer lived and thus, from the Real of the conatus of staying-in-life. Paradoxically the survivalist stance, the principle of self-preservation is also the revolutionary stance which is by definition destabilizing and destructive. Bodily resistance to subjection (i.e., to discipline) and the continuity of the Self in-the-Real is the source of resistance. The Real of grief and mourning, the identification with the purely experiential stance of the suffering itself is the foundation of a “radical concept” of political solidarity, which by virtue of its being grounded in the Real, i.e., in the Lived, provides the possibility of acting in a revolutionary way. But it is also a form of human universality or political universality, which yet again is not historic universality but rather purely categorical. Other concepts that can be called radical, concepts which are minimally transcendental (Laruelle) and are, therefore, of revolutionary potential are also violence, mourning, labor (work) and gender (the trauma introduced by the linguistic determination as a “he” or a “she”), life, death, animal. Yet, the main focus of the book is the exploration of the lived of vulnerability, trauma and the conatus of life as the determination in the last instance of the revolutionary (political) stance. Clearly, the revolutions and the revolutionary stance this book advocates, or rather, whose potentiality it explores, are not necessarily historical revolutions produced by the intentionality to create politico-historic change. They are not this necessarily. Yet again they are such possibly. Still all purely (on the formal level) revolutionary stance tends to introduce universal change, radically change the political horizon and to reverse the politically unthinkable into a thinkable by elevating it to the level of a universal political truth. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCurrently, the repetition of a critical way of speaking results in a stagnating tendency in educational debates. This had led to the endeavour of developing a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. This paper employs Rortyan and Latourian language in order to tackle the question of how such a post-critical pedagogy should deal with critique. It argues that if one takes critique as what Latour calls a debunking activity, then post-critical pedagogy should leave critique behind. If however critique means simply to say how something (...) should not be, then post-critical pedagogy should remain critical. In addition, however, there is a need for enriching the critical vocabulary with more affirmative language. For accomplishing this need, in contrast to recent suggestions to go back to ontology, the paper suggests that new propositions developed by literary theorists like Sedgwick and Felski are more promising. All these arguments are framed by Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics. (shrink)

This article argues that the concept and practice of ‘self-organized learning’, as pioneered by Sugata Mitra (and his team) in the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ experiments (1999–2005) that inspired the novel Q & A (2006) and the resulting movie, Slumdog millionaire (2008) bear direct, but not uncritical comparison with Jacques Rancière’s account of ‘universal teaching’ discovered by maverick nineteenth century French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot. In both cases, it is argued, there is a deliberate dissociation of two functions of ‘teaching’ that are often conflated: (...) knowledge and mastery. Mitra’s development of computer-mediated learning among the supposedly ‘ignorant’ of India’s slums, and Rancière’s insistence on equality as a presupposition rather than a goal, both emphasize the agency of the student at the centre of learning, but in ways that displace both established pedagogical methods of ‘explication’ and the neoliberal ideology of ‘schooling’ as the harmonizing of individual and social functions of education. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Of Masters, Intellectuals and Inequality On Lessons, Equality, Democracy Focus and Contributions to the book Notes Acknowledgement References Bibliography Jacques Rancière.

ABSTRACTThe paper is a response to the articles published in the current issue analysing Rorty’s philosophy of hope. In these articles, Bianca Thoilliez, Stefano Oliverio and Kai Wortmann highlight the pragmatist characteristics of post-critical pedagogy. Taking a poststructuralist perspective, I propose to examine some limits of the association between Rorty’s philosophy of hope and post-critical pedagogy. I will discuss, in turn, their take on the definition of hope, on the place of critique in post-critical pedagogy and on the affirmative ethos (...) of post-critical pedagogy. (shrink)

We draw on ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary psychosocial theorists to analyse the ethical implications of social policies implemented through the welfare state with the espoused objective of achieving social inclusion. We argue that many such policies establish a boundary between domains of inclusion and exclusion that perversely maintains the very problem such policies are designed to solve. They then also provide ?rationalisations? for social exclusion which imply that such states can be explained?that they are ethical, and so legitimate. We (...) illustrate our argument with reference to a specific area of social policy?Improving Access to Psychological Therapies?and discuss how it impacts on our own area of practice as state employed psychotherapists. We analyse how this policy frames aspects of social exclusion (un(der)employment?) as a ?psychological? problem: a move that grants the excluded a specific kind of identity and then locates the problem of exclusion in this identity. We invoke Plato's Republic to show how this offer of psychological ?help? subliminally suggests that these mental disorders result from individuals' failures to ?know their place? and to ?mind their own business?, rather than as a consequence of complex networks of social (dis)orders, exclusions and injustices within which we are all embedded. (shrink)

In this article I posit translation as philosophical operation that disrupts commonsense meaning and understanding. By defamiliarising language, translation can arrest thinking about a text in a way that assumes the language is understood. In recent work I have grappled with the phrase 'ways of knowing', which, for linguistic and conceptual reasons, confuses discussions about epistemological diversity. I here expand this inquiry by considering languages in which more than one equivalent exists for the English verb 'to know'. French, for example, (...) has both savoir and connaître , and German has wissen and kennen . This interlinguistic translation thus allows for a reconsideration of the inquiry into the phrase 'ways of knowing': do problems arise with 'ways of knowing-in-the sense-of connaître ', or with 'ways of knowing-in-the-sense-of savoir ', or both? Displacement is, more generally speaking, a method used by philosophers. Shifting the concept or phenomenon under consideration into a different context or discursive register allows one to defamiliarise it and see it in terms of something else. Through translation, whether interlinguistic or interdiscursive, philosophers ask what questions and understandings become possible when we see A in terms of B. (shrink)

This article contends that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic understanding of corporeality is central to his interpretation of intellectual emancipation. Concretely, I will argue that Rancière’s aesthetic understanding can be viewed as a torsion of a body that affects its vital arrangements, which thereby open paths for political emancipation. I will support my claim with Rancière’s reading of the plebeian philosopher Gauny, as well as works that have not been sufficiently considered in secondary literature, such as The Nights of Labor and The (...) Ignorant Schoolmaster. My reading will, I maintain, help to question common interpretations of emancipation in Rancière that tend to read this notion either in dichotomous terms or as a merely ephemeral, evental practice with no concrete conditions of possibility and without long-lasting or verifiable effects in the world. (shrink)

Theorists, who broadly subscribe to Claude Lefort’s characterization of democracy as the dissolution of the markers of certainty, disagree over the proper enactment of democracy. In this article, I consider the possibility of narrowing the gap by attending to the ignorance advocated by each of the two approaches – the disruptive radical route Jacques Rancière describes and the reformist approach of Richard Rorty. I highlight the attributes and shortcomings of the positive link between practices of ignorance and democracy in the (...) work of the two theorists, and explore how the practices they describe can complement each other in the enactment of democracy. (shrink)

The article presents an introduction to the Special Issue on the French philosopher Jacques Rancière who raises a provocative voice in the current public debate on democracy, equality and education. Instead of merely criticizing current practices and discourses, the attractiveness of Rancière's work is that he does try to formulate in a positive way what democracy is about, how equality can be a pedagogic or educational (instead of policy) concern, and what the public and democratic role of education is. His (...) work opens up a space to rethink and to study, as well as to ‘re-practice’, what democracy and equality in education are about. He questions the current neutralisation of politics that is motivated by a hatred of democracy. This questioning is for Rancière also a struggle over words. Against the old philosophical dream of defining the meaning of words, Rancière underlines the need for the struggle over their meaning. The aim of the article is to clarify how and why education, equality, and democracy are a major concern throughout his work and to offer an introduction to the articles collected in the Special Issue. (shrink)

This article discusses the right to be forgotten. The landmark Google ruling of the European Court of Justice gave this ambiguous right new weight and raised several urgent questions. This article considers what kind of person is presupposed and constructed when somebody invokes their right to be forgotten. The aim is to engage in an experimental reading of the ruling in the framework of contemporary political theory, namely, the philosophy of Jacques Rancière. The analysis shows that even though the right (...) to be forgotten is a new legal and rhetorical instrument, there are good grounds for being critical of its underlying logic and sceptical of the novelty thereof. The judgment can be understood as a reiteration and consolidation of the same impotent human rights thinking that law often seems forced to contend itself with, no matter how radical our intentions may be. (shrink)

Although there is ample interrogation of advertising/commercial/media culture in critical pedagogy, there is little attention paid to the fine arts and to aesthetic experience. This lacuna is all the more perplexing given Paulo Freire’s use of artist Francisco Brenand’s illustrations for his culture circles. In this essay I will return to Freire’s original description of the relationship between fine art images and conscientizacao in order to map out the future of the image in critical pedagogy. This return to the origin (...) of the use of images in literacy programs will highlight the interdependent nature of word and image but also will demonstrate some of the long standing misconceptions of the way fine art images function in relation to education and politics. In conclusion I will suggest that if images have a future in critical pedagogy, then this future must ultimately move beyond Freire. As an alternative genealogical anchoring point for the development of the aesthetics of critical literacy, I suggest a turn to the work of Jacques Rancière. Through his conceptualization of the “pensive image” as well as the “emancipated spectator” we can begin to understand how the fine art image can work to realize Freire’s democratic ideals without relying on Freire’s problematic formulation of the image-pedagogy relationship. In conclusion, I suggest that the philosophical model necessary to support critical literacy is not Freire’s culture circle so much as Kant’s aesthetic community now revitalized via Rancière’s own aesthetics of dissensus. (shrink)

Gert Biesta criticises deliberative models of democracy and education for being based on an understanding of democracy as a ‘normal’ order, which involves certain ‘entry conditions’ for democratic participation. As an alternative, Biesta introduces the idea of democracy as ‘disruption’ and the associated subjectification conception of education both of which he draws from the work of Jacques Rancière. This paper challenges Biesta’s critique of deliberative democracy by demonstrating that the ‘entry conditions’ for deliberation serve an important normative function. It is (...) also suggested that Biesta’s critique dismisses some important dimensions of the deliberative model. The paper further contests Biesta’s conceptions of democracy and education by arguing, first, that his position involves certain contradictions that are problematic especially from a normative perspective. Second, the paper argues that Biesta’s conceptions of democracy and education might result in dismissing crucially important questions concerning the long-term evaluation and improvement of democratic and educational institutions. (shrink)

This paper starts with an apparently provocative question – can we call the 2019 Water Revolution in Hong Kong a lesson of emancipatory education which awakens students’ critical consciousn...

‘The Western tradition’, as passe-partout, includes fringe figures, émigrés and migrants. Rather than looking to resources at the core of the Western tradition to overcome its own blindnesses, I am more interested in its gaps and peripheries, where other thoughts and renegade knowledges take hold. It is in the contact zones with strangers that glimpses of any culture’s philosophical blindness become possible and changes towards a different understanding of knowledge can begin. In the context of education, I am above all (...) interested in PhD candidates who wish to draw on the bodies and modes of knowledge they bring with them to the university. Some are not well represented: Indigenous and other non-Western traditions, non-English languages, and the renegade knowledges of marginalised groups. My context is that of creative practice-led PhD theses at AUT University, Auckland which have made me aware of the importance of cosmopolitics to understand education in the context of entangled histories of colonisation and domination; border-crossing interdependencies; new types of conflict and new ways of building communities. My study thus explores aspects of transculturation—involving not only ethnic cultures but also different disciplinary knowledge cultures. The place that no-one owns in Western tradition, the place of fringe figures, émigrés and migrants, may offer a point from which non-traditional candidates’ thoughts can lever off to build connections with their own stores of knowledge. This usually means for Western supervisors that they need to recognise their ignorance towards parts of their own traditions, as well as those of their candidates. The proposition I will explore is that the emergent research of non-traditional candidates can thrive on gaps and on the fringes—provided that both candidates and supervisors are able to be porous to the unknown and ‘troubled by the presumption of equality’. The potential of the gap, the unknown, which simultaneously separates and connects candidates and supervisors, can be the beginning of generating a thing in common. This is a rich and creative place for new thought, which may open the academy to transcultural knowledge. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to understand the nature of and relation between science and philosophy articulated in the early work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It seeks to challenge the view that Deleuze’s metaphysical and metaphilosophical position is in important part an attempt to respond to twentieth century developments in the natural sciences, claiming that this is not a plausible interpretation of Deleuze’s early thought. The central problem identified with such readings is that they provide an insufficient explanation of the (...) nature of philosophy’s contribution to the encounter between philosophy and science that they discern in Deleuze’s work. The philosophical, as opposed to scientific, dimension of the position attributed to Deleuze remains obscure. In chapter 1, it is demonstrated that this question of philosophy’s contribution to intellectual life and of how to differentiate philosophy from the sciences is a live one in Deleuze’s early thought. An alternative, less anachronistic interpretation of the parameters of Deleuze’s early project is offered. The remaining chapters of the thesis examine the early Deleuze’s understanding of the divergence between philosophy and science. Chapter 2 gives an account of Deleuze’s metaphilosophy, alongside a reconstruction of his largely implicit early understanding of science. The divergent intellectual processes and motivating concerns that account for Deleuze’s understanding of the differentiation of science and philosophy are thus clarified. In chapter 3, Deleuze’s use of mathematical and physical concepts is examined. It is argued that these concepts are used metaphorically. In chapter 4, the association between modern science and the Deleuzian concept of immanence that has been proposed by some Deleuze scholars is examined and ultimately challenged. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the significance of Deleuze’s early work for contemporary debates concerning the future of continental philosophy and the nature of philosophy more generally. (shrink)

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s conception and critique of sovereignty has won him wide and well-deserved acclamation. In this article, however, it is argued that Agamben’s conception of sovereignty is somewhat misplaced, and, as a consequence, his positive political project of developing a ‘destituent power’ is highly deficient in terms of construing a popular and viable political alternative. The critique of Agamben is developed through a close reading of Aristotle’s Politics and his notion of kurion. It is argued that Agamben’s (...) flawed conception of sovereignty reemerges symptomatically in his extremely problematic reading of Aristotle’s Politics, and that a viable political alternative to both Agamben’s own project and the conception of politics that he criticizes can be developed through an alternative and closer reading of Aristotle. (shrink)