Researchers of different calibres from phenomenology to posthumanism and beyond have outlined the processuality of the body and the environment (Alaimo 2010; Gendlin 2017), stressing the importance of changing the ontological presuppositions of the body-environment bond (Schoeller and Duanetz 2018: 131), since the existing models facilitate the alienation and intangibility of the environment, thus, leading to reduced societal awareness of the importance of environmental issues (Neimanis, Åsberg, Hedrén 2015: 73–74). In this article, I argue that in questions relating to food, (...) product-oriented ideologies dominate over process-oriented ethicality, in part, due to an embodied and lived ideology that can be best described via the concept of reactive nihilism and substance ontology. The article aims to demonstrate a necessity to rethink and recontextualize situated practices as alternatives to the prevalent ontogenealogies of the Global North. By problematizing the complimentary axis of reactive nihilism in food contexts and the genealogy of contemporary pop food “ethics”, I argue for a shift away from product-oriented ideologies and supplementation of the ontologies-we-live-by with situated alternative models. In the first part of the article, I use a genealogical approach, tracing the predominant meaning cluster encapsulated in Feuerbach’s famous expression “Man is what he eats” (Feuerbach 1846-1866, X: 5) in today’s contexts. To illustrate the leading discourses, I follow a Deleuzian understanding of the concept of “reactive nihilism” and contextualize food choices with the dominant understanding of the body in the Global North. With this discussion, I hope to provide context for the need to reconsider local ontologies as knowledge resources for the future. In the second part of the article, the framework present in the Global North is then complemented by a discussion of some local factors, to suggest ways in which global food philosophy and, particularly, lifestyle choices of food consumption could benefit from acknowledging the knowledge embedded in food consumption trends in Latvia. (shrink)

The Psychosis of Race offers a unique and detailed account of the psychoanalytic significance of race, and the ongoing impact of racism in contemporary society. Moving beyond the well-trodden assertion that race is a social construction, and working against demands that simply call for more representational equality, The Psychosis of Race explores how the delusions, anxieties, and paranoia that frame our race relations can afford new insights into how we see, think, and understand race's pervasive appeal. With examples drawn from (...) politics and popular culture--such as Candyman, Get Out, and the music of Kendrick Lamar--critical attention is given to introducing as well as explicating on several key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the study of psychosis, including foreclosure, phallus, the Name-of-the-Father, sinthome, and the objet petit a. By elaborating a cultural mode to psychosis and its understanding, an original and critical exposition of the effects of racialization, as well as our ability to discern the very limits of our capacity to think through, or even beyond, the idea of race, is provided. The Psychosis of Race speaks to an emerging area in the study of psychoanalysis and race, and will appeal to scholars and academics across the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and humanities. (shrink)

Ralph Ellison’s _Invisible Man_ is a violent text. It is unflinching in its confrontation with the violence at the heart of the (African-)American experience. In exploring the central role of violence here – narratively, within the novel; politically, within the culture that the novel explores – the recent work of Slavo Zizek is useful. Zizek posits a critical language which makes an important distinction between systemic violence (of the order of economic and political systems), objective violence (of the order of (...) discriminatory patterns of behaviour), and subjective violence (of the order of individual, often spontaneous, sometimes self-directed acts – which have the effect of misdirecting and obscuring our awareness of these other two more insidious forms of violence). And, in a dialectical spirit of which both Zizek and Ellison might approve, _Invisible Man_ will here reciprocally suggest an interrogation of Zizek’s theories of revolutionary violence. (shrink)

RESUMEN El siglo XXI ha visto el auge de la "filosofia ambiental", preocupada por problematizar la crisis ecológica global. En esta bibliografia quedan relegados los aportes de Félix Guattari, uno de los primeros en desarrollar una filosofia ambiental en su obra Las tres ecologías. Este artículo propone analizar el centro problemático de esta obra pionera. Asi, se insiste en la importancia de volver al texto original; de revisar sus temas principales en cada dominio ecosófico ; y de sostener su vigencia (...) incluso a la luz de la actual filosofia ambiental. Además, en este análisis se consideran los aciertos y los desaciertos de sus apuestas y pronósticos: es notable que su incumplida esperanza práctica contrasta con su agudo diagnóstico teórico. Este texto arguye que esta obra no solo resiste bien el paso del tiempo, sino que además cumple con el propósito de clarificar la actual catástrofe planetaria. ABSTRACT The 21st century has seen the rise of "environmental philosophy", concerned with the problematization of the global ecological crisis. In this bibliography, the contributions of Felix Guattari remain relegated -even when he should be acknowledged as one of the first to develop an environmental philosophy in his work The Three Ecologies-. This article proposes an analysis of the problematic center of this pioneering work. Thus, it insists on the importance of returning to the original text; of revising its main topics in each ecosophical domain ; and of upholding its relevance even in the light of current environmental philosophy. Furthermore, in this analysis, the successes and flaws of its wagers and forecasts are considered: it is of note that its unfulfilled practical hope contrasts with its sharp theoretical diagnosis. The present text argues that this work not only passes the test of time, but also fulfills the purpose of clarifying the current planetary catastrophe. (shrink)

This paper seeks to highlight the French philosopher Michel Foucault's contributions regarding his analysis of power. In this sense, the text proposes a conceptual transition around the ideas that could have interested the author within a digital context, integrating some notes and examples from the 2019 Chilean mobilizations.The article has an initial section that exposes genealogy as a way of approaching social reality. Then, it shows the social behaviors anticipation possibilities and their relationship with the information available on the web. (...) Later, it renders an account of the algorithmic governmentality notion as a key to reading it in both normative structure and a political possibility to final state reflections. (shrink)

Theoretical applications of time and temporality remain a key consideration for both climate scientists and the humanities. By way of extending this importance, we critically examine Timothy Morton’s proposed “ecological awareness” alongside Slavoj Žižek’s “parallax view”. In doing so, the article introduces a “past-present parallax” in order to contest that, while conceptions of the past are marked by “lack”, equally, our conceptions of and relations to Nature remain grounded in an ontological incompleteness, marked by contingency. This novel approach presents an (...) ecological awareness that remains temporally attuned to the impasses and inconsistencies which frame our relations in/with Nature. (shrink)

Bioethical discourse on organ donation and transplantation medicine covers a wide range of topics, from informed consent procedures and scarcity issues up to transplant tourism and organ trade. Over the past decades, this discourse evolved into a stream of documents of bewildering proportions, encompassing thousands of books, papers, conferences, blogs, consensus meetings, policy reports, media debates and other outlets. Beneath the manifest level of discourse, however, a more latent dimension can be discerned, revolving around issues of embodiment, the moral status (...) of the human body and the concept of bodily integrity. This publication aims to bring these “deeper” questions to the fore. What is envisioned is a “depth” ethics (the moral equivalent of a depth psychology) focussing on the tensions, conflicts and ambiguities at work in bioethical deliberations on organ transplantation, fuelling the viewpoints articulated on the more manifest levels of discourse. Organ donation reopens the question of the status of the body as something which we have, but at the same time are, and as something which constitutes a whole, while at the same time being a set of replaceable elements or parts. (shrink)

This article explores the ‘lack of meaning’ in contemporary society as a consequence of Western dualist thought paradigms and ontologies, via Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘reactive nihilism’ following the colloquial murder of God. The article then explores processual and new materialist approaches in the understanding of the lived and carnal self, arguing for immanent and senseful materiality as an ethical platform for religious, environmental, and societal solidarity for tomorrow. For the theoretical justification of the processual approach in understanding the enfleshed (...) self, the article employs John Dupré’s processual approach in the philosophy of biology, as well as Astrida Neimani’s critical posthumanism, and contextualizes these considerations with Erich Fromm’s ethical distinction of being and having. (shrink)

This study reassesses the concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological age as it is influencing contemporary debates in social theory. As a unit of geological time whose changes are allegedly caused, directly and indirectly, by human beings, this scientific concept challenges the existing constructions of theoretical binaries, such as nature/culture, environment/society, objectivity/subjectivity or happenstance/design, in social theory. The analysis suggests many understandings of the Anthropocene in social theory are politicized over-interpretations of natural events, and these moves appear to (...) be developing moral rhetorics of, and operational plans for, managing the Anthropocene to create specific outcomes for those who are the managers as well as the managed. The fact that human beings do not, in fact, have this measure of technical control is ignored by advocates of Anthropocenarian politics to advance their policy agendas. (shrink)

The martyr is a potent symbol of sacrifice in Western cultural discourse. Understanding martyrdom as sacrifice, however, blunts the potency of the martyr's action. It obscures the violence by which the martyr's death becomes, paradoxically, a means to define institutional life. In this article, I propose an analogous relationship between the early Christian martyr and Giorgio Agamben's enigmatic homo sacer. Like homo sacer, the Christian martyr provides an “other” against which to organize institutional life. Read as a sacrifice, the martyr (...) also exemplifies the threat of biopolitics that Agamben describes, where mere existence can be isolated from political life and made subject to sovereign violence. Distinguishing the martyr from their institutional appropriation is a step toward exposing the modes of violence inherent in sovereign power. It provides the possibility of reconceptualizing the martyr as an autonomous figure of resistance, not as homo sacer but as homo profanus. (shrink)

In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), we watch the film’s protagonist, Theodore, as he struggles with the end of his marriage and a growing attachment to his artificially intelligent operating system, Samantha. While the film remains unique in its ability to cinematically portray the Lacanian contention that “there is no sexual relationship,” this article explores how our digital non-relationships can be re-approached through the medium of comedy. Specifically, when looked at through a comic lens, notable scenes from Her are examined for (...) the potential they provide in affording a self-decentrement which allows us to traverse the fantasies that structure our non-relations. (shrink)

This article explores the viability of life after ‘the end of nature’ – as Žižek reports – in the Anthropocene. Humans can no longer consistently rely on their persistent interventions to nature as its source. The end of nature, however, does not only mean that the problem is solely ecological. Instead, it points to the original chaos of catastrophes that disturb the link of man’s relationship to nature. In short, the current predicament of the times not only exposes problems of (...) ecology per se but also of economy, biology, and society. So, what comes next? Taking off from Heidegger and Leibniz, ethical prospects after this four-fold end should reopen the task of thinking the Anthropocene in various independent but coalescing fronts. (shrink)

COVID-19 has crowned1 a number of other disasters (wildfires in Australia, Desert Locusts in Kenya, an imminent WWIII merging Iran and the US), causing panic to click into place and horror to become our global predicament, making us realize that we live in the illusion of the permanence of things, of mastery, and of immortality. People’s turning to social media for trans-local news on COVID-19 has stirred great ire in the world. This led to the proliferation of dark images that (...) associate the viral catastrophe with the end as we know it. To problematize the idea of the apocalypse (or the end) this paper speaks of three moments of survival in human existence: the beneath, the behind and the beyond. We argue that the apocalyptic nature of the pandemic and its global horrorism are part of a congeries of apocalyptic simulations that have always been part of the narrative with which we try to define ourexistence on earth. This paper masks itself against perfunctory examinations of the term apocalypse, and offers instead an understanding that runs along the lines of its Greek etymological sense as apokalyptein (revelation). It offers what Foucault calls an ontology of the present, that interrogates the history of COVID -19 with an emphasis neither on its origin nor on its telos. As beyondists, the COVID-19 catastrophe has revealed to us that 1) we have ‘access to knowledge beyond knowledge’ (see Gumpert Citation2012), and therefore that 2) our modern predicament is not very modern. The end, (not) to be sure, has been lived and relived in the boundary between reality and simulation. After all, the end of something comprises the beginning (in reverse) of that which “endeth”, throwing the beyond, behind and beneath in the Ferris wheel of epistemological and existential entanglement. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the impacts of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy. The conclusion is reached that violence may be being promoted rather than prevented by government attempts to counter ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’. The motivation for this paper is the author's experience of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy in a school in east London; and its main recommendation is that counter-extremism strategies can and should be contested. This conclusion, and the explanation for it, is reached by using a critical realist approach to Critical (...) Discourse Analysis, supported by the framework of the semiotic triangle in the context of Bhaskar's transformational model of social activity. This brings in a time dimension that, it is argued, has previously been neglected in critical realist versions of Critical Discourse Analysis. (shrink)

This article focuses on applying some of Žižek’s theoretical work to a specific space within the capitalist conjuncture, the pub. Jürgen Habermas’ influential conception of the public sphere has shown the important role of the caffeine-centric cafés of the past in producing a lively democratic movement. As most any trip to a post-modern coffeehouse will attest, however, such locations have become little more than outlets for free and always individualized Wi-Fi. But the local pub, in the current political climate, has (...) attained something more. The central argument here is that pub culture, built on neither action nor reaction, is the last bastion of anti-capitalism. Indeed, if Bartleby’s “I’d prefer not to,” was an effective response to the demands of capitalism in the work place, then “I’d prefer another” does such duty with even more resistance and relevance for the present. To make this case, and explore its implications, I will turn to key insights from theorists such as Žižek, Lawrence Grossberg, and Deleuze and Guattari, while also comparing and contrasting today’s global pub culture to that of the historical role of the café. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most influential philosophers of our current age. His work as a whole largely draws from Platonic, Cartesian, Hegelian and Lacanian thought, and has been applied to the analysis of empirical sciences, political-economic theory, as well as contemporary spirituality and theology. Jordan Peterson is a well respected clinical psychologist and has recently become one of the most influential public intellectuals of our current age. His work as a whole largely draws from Christian, Nietzschean, Jungian and (...) Piagettian thought, and has been antagonistically situated in contemporary debates on the nature of gender identity, sexual expression, communist ideology, and the importance of responsibility for a meaningful life. During Peterson’s rise to global fame these two thinkers have often been symbolically positioned by those familiar with their work as figures in an oppositional determination : Žižek standing for the future of the progressive left and revolutionary communist values, and Peterson standing for the future of the conservative right and traditional patriarchal values. In this work it is argued that the difference internal to this antagonistic positioning can be put to a productive utility. Towards this end I first attempt to use Christianity, Postmodernism and Psychoanalysis as thematic structures to focus on their core differences. Secondly, I attempt to summarize the major points of agreement that emerged from their public debate/dialogue/discussion. These two goals are established to demonstrate the importance of higher order dialogue capable of reconciling opposed figures of consciousness. Such reconciliation would not represent a synthesis to erase all differences, but rather a reconciliation that would open new spaces of productive discourse capable of approaching the nature of psychology and society. (shrink)

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)

Despite intensive work by human rights organizations to garner global condemnation of torture, in the years since the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were exposed, support in the United States for the use of torture has increased, and torture also attracts significant support in many other countries. This paper seeks to understand the affective work that the ‘ticking time bomb scenario’ and its imagined dramatization does in shaping how torture is understood. The literature is replete with debates over (...) whether the scenario distorts or accurately describes the actual circumstances in which decisions about torture occur, and the moral criteria that ought to be brought to the decision-making process. In describing the scenario as a “thought experiment,” however, these analyses obscure the work that this imagined scene does in shaping how people evaluate the use of torture – work that takes place at the affective and somatic levels. Induced into a process of racially inflected and affectively laden identifications and aversions, the paper suggests that the “subjects” of this thought experiment do very little thinking and thus fact-based or logical counter-arguments are of little use in shifting evaluations of torture. Rather, we need to understand the affective work that somatically grounded stories do in normalizing and inducing subjects to embrace torture. The paper is particularly interested in how imagined scenarios can be used to institute affects that freeze and immobilize, and how we might construct other narratives to encourage more dynamic and fluid forms of affective experience and identification. Exploring the link between narratives and more dynamic affects may offer more productive strategies for encouraging people to shift positions as they confront new evidence and encounter other experiences and bodies. (shrink)

This article is an argument for furthering the understanding, role and scope of critical theology in reflection on the act, content and implications of theological thought through appropriation of...

The term “Anthropocene” is deployed to designate a period during which human activity has significantly altered global eco-systems and climate. But the term presents geological change as if it were something humanity controls, rather than a state of affairs out of our control. In his reading of the Anthropocene as a fetishization of the relationship between nature and humanity, Daniel Cunha calls for a radical break with a capitalist logic that has made catastrophic climate change an inevitable outcome.

Over the course of three decades, vocabularies of radical democracy have pressed their stamp on democratic thought. Trading on the intuition that there is more to democracy than elections, they have generated critical insights into the important role that practices of pluralisation and critique play in bettering institutional politics. As a result, few would today deny the radical democratic contribution to democratic thought. What many might question, however, is its continuing traction. The article probes this question, focusing on the nuanced (...) place of democracy in contemporary radical work. It grapples with the difficulties that this poses for radical democrats, and it suggests that a way of overcoming these difficulties – that threaten to undermine the coherence of radical democracy – is to rethink and reconstruct the distinctiveness of its vocabulary. The article attempts such a reconstruction. It develops the idea of the promissory rule of the many, and it discusses the ways that this idea rejuvenates broader democratic thought. (shrink)

This article aims to present a Žižekian reading of the British author David Herbert Lawrence. The contemporary continental philosopher has tackled each of the British author’s reoccurring themes individually and thus may be used as a keystone for a valid literary interpretatio n. The paper begins by shedding light on the representation of Western ideology, moves further into the comprehension of the impacts of modern cultural capital and the limitations of industrialization. While at the same time the dissertation targets another (...) component of the romantic poet’s many writings which are characterized by the regeneration of the subject’s carnal presence as a defense mechanism against the prevalent culture of de-humanization. The argument at hand is that the reconstruction of the bodily image rendered through Lawrence’s erotic literature is not one that portrays promiscuity, but rather demonstrates a transgression of the Lacanian symbolic and the attainment of a partial rendition of a Hegelian totality. Lawrence’s six novels and set of poems are thoroughly analyzed from a strictly Žižekian p erspective to demonstrate that th e two authors share thematic representations, a common worldview and propose a manifestation of how literary analyses may be conveyed using Žižek as a philosophical lens for literary interpretation. (shrink)

It was Marx who first formulated what later became known as the idea of the working class as an ‘emancipatory subject’. In his view, the workers alone were able to orchestrate a revolution that would put an end to capitalism. The purpose of this paper is to show that this line of thought is ideological by Marx’s own standards, and that while the working class never constituted the coherent political subject that Marx wanted it to become, its non-existence produced distinct (...) theoretical effects not just in his work, but also in the Marxist tradition. After a brief discussion of the different criticisms of the idea of the working class as emancipatory subject put forward by Hardt, Negri, Laclau, and Mouffe, an attempt is made to demonstrate how Althusser’s structural approach is better suited to formulate an alternative to the traditional view. Finally it is argued that this alternative stays within a general Marxist framework. (shrink)

Contemporary theorizations of neoliberalism are framed by a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, studies influenced by Foucault in emphasizing neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, and on the other hand, inquiries influenced by Marx in foregrounding neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology. This article seeks to shine some light on this division in an effort to open up new debates and recast existing ones in such a way that might lead to more flexible understandings of neoliberalism as a discourse. (...) A discourse approach moves theorizations forward by recognizing neoliberalism is neither a ‘top-down’ nor ‘bottom-up’ phenomena, but rather a circuitous process of socio-spatial transformation. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of “eco‐anxiety” by integrating results from numerous fields of inquiry. Although climate change may cause direct psychological and existential impacts, vast numbers of people already experience indirect impacts in the form of depression, socio‐ethical paralysis, and loss of well‐being. This is not always evident, because people have developed psychological and social defenses in response, including “socially constructed silence.” I argue that this situation causes the need to frame climate change narratives as emphasizing hope in the (...) midst of tragedy. Framing the situation simply as a threat or a possibility does not work. Religious communities and the use of methods which include spirituality have an important role in enabling people to process their deep emotions and existential questions. I draw also from my experiences from Finland in enabling cooperation between natural scientists and theologians in order to address climate issues. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

This contribution addresses the anthropocenic challenge from a dialectical perspective, combining a diagnostics of the present with a prognostic of the emerging future. It builds on the oeuvres of two prominent dialectical thinkers, namely Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Hegel himself was a pre-anthropocenic thinker who did not yet thematise the anthropocenic challenge as such, but whose work allows us to emphasise the unprecedented newness of the current crisis. I will especially focus on his views on (...) Earth as a planetary process, emphasising that the “spirit” of technoscience is basically monitoring the impacts of its own activities on geochemistry and evolution. Subsequently, I will turn attention to Teilhard de Chardin, a palaeontologist and philosopher rightfully acknowledged as one of the first thinkers of the Anthropocene whose oeuvre provides a mediating middle term between Hegel’s conceptual groundwork and the anthropocenic present. Notably, I will discuss his views on self-directed evolution, on the on-going absorption of the biosphere by the noosphere, and on emerging options for “sublating” the current crisis into a synthetic convergence towards the Omega point. I will conclude that, after disclosing the biomolecular essence of life, biotechnology must now take a radical biomimetic turn ; that reflection itself must become distributed and collective; and, that the anthropocenic crisis must be sublated into the noocene. (shrink)

According to a chorus of authors, the human life-world is currently invaded by an avalanche of high-tech devices referred to as “emerging,” ”intimate,” or ”NBIC” technologies: a new type of contrivances or gadgets designed to optimize cognitive or sensory performance and / or to enable mood management. Rather than manipulating objects in the outside world, they are designed to influence human bodies and brains more directly, and on a molecular scale. In this paper, these devices will be framed as ‘extimate’ (...) technologies (both intimate and external; both embedded and foreign; both life-enhancing and intrusive), a concept borrowed from Jacques Lacan. Although Lacan is not commonly regarded as a philosopher of technology, the dialectical relationship between human desire and technological artefacts runs as an important thread through his work. Moreover, he was remarkably prescient concerning the blending of life science and computer science, which is such a distinctive feature of the current techno-scientific turn. Building on a series of Lacanian concepts, my aim is to develop a psychoanalytical diagnostic of the technological present. Finally, I will indicate how such an analysis may inform our understanding of human life and embodiment as such. (shrink)

Since the 1990’s, the debate concerning the ethical, legal and societal aspects of ‘neuro-enhancement’ has evolved into a massive discourse, both in the public realm and in the academic arena. This ethical debate, however, tends to repeat the same sets of arguments over and over again. Normative disagreements between transhumanists and bioconservatives on invasive or radical brain stimulators, and uncertainties regarding the use and effectivity of nootropic pharmaceuticals dominate the field. Building on the results of an extensive European project on (...) responsible research and innovation in neuro-enhancement, we observe and encourage that the debate is now entering a new and, as we will argue, more realistic and societally relevant stage. This new stage concerns those technologies that enter the market as ostensibly harmless contrivances that consumers may use for self-care or entertainment. We use the examples and arguments of participants in NERRI debates to describe three case studies of such purportedly innocent ‘toys’. Based upon this empirical material, we argue that these ‘soft’ enhancement gadgets are situated somewhere in the boundary zone between the internal and the external, between the intimate and the intrusive, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between the friendly and the scary and, in Foucauldian terms, between technologies of the self and technologies of control. Therefore, we describe their physiognomy with the help of a term borrowed from Jacques Lacan, namely as “extimate” technologies. (shrink)

In the first part of this series it was argued that there is an inextricable bond between economic and cultural liberalism such that when Catholics identify the faith with the defence of neoliberal economics, even though they may oppose abortion, they end up promoting exactly that which they oppose. In this the second part this point is expanded upon and the argument made more explicit and that by reference to Pope Francis’ recent Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudium Evangelii. The Exhortation evidences a (...) view of matters economic that sits ill with capitalism, a point understood by Catholic commentators who champion Neoliberalism. This essay argues that Francis’ comments are nothing new, especially when compared to what John Paul II and Benedict XVI have written on the subject; indeed, that Francis’ Exhortation can be seen as a tempering of their critique of economic liberalism. The essay attempts to tease out what it is that informs the critique of the popes and shows that it has to do with what flows out from the rejection of metaphysics proper, a rejection that defines Modernity, and which ends in the deracination of all things such that even the very concept of ‘substance’ is dissolved and, thereby, all is made plastic and malleable, including human life. The important point the essay wishes to make is this: the popes are quite clear that the form a culture’s economy takes can both ground and exacerbate this anti-essentialist logic, what’s more the economy above all others that does this is the one they identify with neoliberal capitalism. As a consequence, Catholics who champion this form of economic theory must think seriously as to whether or not they or the popes are wrong on this matter. (shrink)

This essay is a response to Askegaard and Linnet’s : 381–404) call for a greater epistemological plurality within consumer culture theory. The article begins with a brief review of what these authors refer to as the dominant existential–phenomenological perspective and their Morinian alternative and then presents contemporary political philosophy as another alternative. Political philosophy has experienced quite a renaissance in recent years, and the school of thought has inspired major epistemological and ontological interventions throughout the academy. Here, I provide a (...) general introduction to this field of social inquiry and then focus specifically on the contributions of French philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou’s work is particularly valuable for fields such as CCT, as it presents a unified epistemological framework for developing knowledge of social structures, cultural forms and subjectivities. The utility of political philosophy in general as well as the Badiouian framework is then demonstrated with recourse to the extant CCT literature. Ultimately, a Badiouian perspective has the potential to fulfil Askegaard and Linnet’s call for epistemologies that can attend to everyday experience while also considering the operation of cultural, political and sociological forces. (shrink)

This article argues that an engagement with the powerful critical insights of Žižek’s theory of ideology and practice of cultural critique is a necessary step for any art historical methodology which aims to fully account for a work of art’s function within the society of its creation and reception, and to explain how it came to play such a role. However, any attempt to situate cultural artefacts within historically contingent networks of social relations requires an account of historical change incompatible (...) with any formalist or transcendentalist methodology. Moreover, if it is to be of any use as an academic discourse, art history must be able to account for the specifities of ‘art’ as a distinct—but not autonomous—sphere of human activity. It is precisely these two issues that a wholesale importation of Žižek’s writing into the domain of art history encounters. A solution must be found whereby the critical lessons of Žižek are not ‘lost in translation’. In this vein, the present article begins by outlining Žižek’s conception of ideology and elucidating the problematic consequences of any straightforward application of its parameters as an art historical methodology. It then reads the interventions of Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler as providing the necessary theoretical tools by which one can construct the possibility of a powerful Žižekian art historical methodology. (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)

We revisit the Marxist debate on the commodity form. By following the thought of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Slavoj Žižek, we attempt to understand the commodity form through the Kantian categories a priori. Sohn-Rethel explores the proposition that there can be no cognition independent of its historical and social conditions and puts forward the daring conclusion of an ontological unity between knowledge and commodity exchange. We suggest that Sohn-Rethel’s thought finds new relevance nowadays, under the prevalence of a cognitive capitalism. We (...) discuss the reformulation of relations of production and consumption under cognitive capitalism and show how knowledge-led immaterial and affective labour adds a higher value to the commodities into which it is embodied. Above all, the commodity form in cognitive capitalism becomes biopolitical. (shrink)

The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can only be (...) resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘ Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness. (shrink)

In the philosophy of Alain Badiou, ethics can only arise in relation to an evental truth procedure that breaks from the economic logic of a situation. Further, because for Badiou there cannot be economic truths per se – rather, economic matters must be understood in their relation to one or more truths in the domain of love, art, science or politics – a Badiouian business ethics would look entirely distinct from any ethics that simply places limits on certain kinds of (...) economic activity. Although Slavoj Žižek, among others, has suggested that this marks an essential weakness in Badiou's economic/political theory, it may actually be the greatest strength of his position. Within a capitalist system, a Badiouian business ethics would then be a question of mobilizing economic resources in order to serve the ongoing construction of a truth procedure. For a business to be considered ethical on Badiou's terms, it must break – and continue to break – from the dominant logic of capitalism and its merely economic pursuit of profit maximization. (shrink)

UK higher education reform (BIS, ) has been presented as a common-sense movement towards efficiency. This article will argue that, in reality, the marketisation of higher education is a movement towards negative freedom, defined after Berlin () as unrestricted choice. Using Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra as a means to explore the relationship between rationality and sensibility, it considers how negative freedom may undermine human connectivity and debase our relationships. In so doing, this article challenges the idea that importing the market (...) system into education will enhance the ‘student experience’. (shrink)

The promotion of ‘Global Citizenship’ (GC) has emerged as a goal of schooling in many countries, symbolising a shift away from national towards more global conceptions of citizenship. It currently incorporates a proliferation of approaches and terminologies, mirroring both the diverse conceptions of its nature and the socio-politico contexts within which it is appropriated. This paper seeks to clarify this ambiguity by constructing a typology to identify and distinguish the diverse conceptions of GC. The typology is based on two general (...) forms of GC: cosmopolitan based and advocacy based. The former incorporates four distinct conceptions of GC – namely, the political, moral, economic and cultural; the latter incorporates four other conceptions – namely, the social, critical, environmental and spiritual. Subsequently, we briefly illustrate how the typology can be used to evaluate the critical features of a curriculum plan designed to promote GC in England. The typology provides a novel and powerful means to analyse the key features of the very diverse range of educational policies and programmes that promote GC. (shrink)

This article allies the 1997 PlayStation video game Final Fantasy VII with Slavoj Žižek’s writings on ecology to critique the area of legal philosophy known as ‘earth jurisprudence’. Earth jurisprudents argue that law bears a large part of the responsibility for humanity’s exploitation of the environment, as law helps to bar nature from subjectivity. However, as Žižek warns—and as FFVII illustrates—the desire for meaning incites people to manufacture a harmonious vision of nature that obscures the chaotic forces at work in (...) the environment and ultimately absolves humanity of responsibility towards the world. Therefore, earth jurisprudence’s program of using legal rights to limit human intervention should be rejected in favour of an approach that enables people to take an active role in addressing the ecological crisis. (shrink)

:This article analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, focusing in particular on the film's remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique of rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-italictic allegory of world-destruction. At the same time, I suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds – cinematic but also cultural and natural – that characterises our historical mood, one that might be described as a deflationary apocalypticism (...) or melancholy modernity. From this perspective, Melancholia belongs to a genealogical lineage that links it with two earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar Bergman's Shame [Skammen] and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice . All three films share a concern with apocalypticism, world-sacrifice, and historical melancholia; but they also explore different responses to the imagined experience of a catastrophic loss of world. By examining these films in relation t.. (shrink)

The topic of eschatology is generally confined to the field of theology. However, the subject has influenced many other fields, such as politics and history. This dissertation examines the question why eschatology remained a topic of discussion within twentieth century philosophy. Concepts associated with eschatology, such as the end of time and the hope of a utopian age to come, remained largely background assumptions among intellectuals in the modern age. Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Berdyaev, and Hans Blumenberg, however, explicitly addressed the (...) subject in their philosophies. The impetus of this study is Heidegger's statement, "Being itself is inherently eschatological," which indicates the centrality of the subject in his understanding of Being. This statement led to the question whether eschatology played a larger role in Western thought. It also raised the question concerning the relationship between eschatology and other philosophical subjects such as teleology. Because of the multitude of assumptions concerning the meaning of eschatology, Chapter One provides essential working definitions. In order to obtain a sufficient understanding of the topic and address the use of the term among the three philosophers, it was necessary to see how eschatology was understood and acted upon in Western thought. Chapter Two addresses the history of eschatology in the West and concludes that there are two general streams of eschatological thought that explains why it continued to remain a subject for contemporary philosophers. Chapters Three through Five address how eschatology was used by Heidegger, Berdyaev, and Blumenberg respectively. Each utilized the subject in different ways: for Heidegger eschatology constitutes Dasein's existence. Futurity ("forward-directedness") is a condition Dasein as a totality. Dasein is "being-toward-the-end" or "toward-death." Berdyaev combines the eschatological tradition with philosophical achievements and offers an "eschatological metaphysics." He distinguishes eschatology from teleology arguing against teleology, noting that only a "personalist" eschatology can solve the problems of dualism and objectification. Blumenberg differs from Heidegger and Berdyaev by offering a negative evaluation of eschatological belief in the West contending that the modern secular age is the result of a failed eschatology. The conclusion of this work follows Charles Taylor's contention in A Secular Age that "our sense of where we are is crucially defined in part by a story of how we got there." The conclusion is that eschatology, throughout most of Western thought, functioned largely as a background assumption for understanding time and history. The transition from the linear concept of time to a cyclical concept defines in part the modern secular age. The notion of future time is an important and often neglected dimension of hermeneutic understanding. The continued influence of eschatological thought in Western history explains why the philosophers under consideration in this work address eschatology and signals that its influence upon philosophical thought is not likely to diminish in the future. (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)

In the 1972 science-fiction novel, Roadside Picnic, by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, aliens have used Earth as a rest stop on the way to another, presumably grander, destination...

The political activism of Christians in Malaysia is in an emergent phase. Despite significant advances, especially after the milestone general elections of March 2008, many Christians hesitate to engage politically and when they do, their engagement is incoherent. Based upon a survey and critical analysis of media statements by leading Christian organizations, this article argues that Christian activism remains anemic in part due to political theologizing which suffers from incoherency, inconsistency, a diminished view of the political, and an over-reliance on (...) the rational. The article intimates that the kind of political discourse and theologizing adopted by the church would benefit from an application of psychoanalytical categories. It concludes by suggesting that psychoanalysis cannot only provide new categories with which to re-imagine political issues in Malaysia but also reinvigorate the Christian political imagination itself. (shrink)

This monograph sets out from the idea of an obscure and perverted relationship between environmentalism, understood as a 21 st century green and popular movement, and pornography, understood as a traditionalist and conservative art form. Both sides seem to come together in the interest of what has been called the Anthropocene. Somehow the same groups that rely on a fierce defense of the planet and demand a collective awareness of the risk the entire humanity faces do not do it any (...) longer on behalf of an unknown future or revolutionary goal, but for the conservation of a still image of Earth: a positive conviction on how the future is going to look like. This aporia is dissolved into an oxymoron when environmentalist practices are put at work. (shrink)

The defetishization thesis claims alternative markets can lead to a more honest, less mystified relationship with food production and, in turn, strengthen civil society. Drawing from Marxian political economic and environmental sociological theory, I make three general claims: capitalism is inherently ecologically and socially harmful; “ethical” commodities derived from alternative markets cannot fundamentally counteract the pervasiveness and scale of ; and, because of and, ethical consumerism does not defetishize the commodity form, but acts as a new layer of commodity fetishism (...) that masks the harms of capitalism by convincing society that the harms of capitalism can be rehabilitated with the commodity form itself. Prescriptively, I argue traditional, large-scale political tactics would be needed for “defetishization” to take place. (shrink)

While the ‘mechanosphere’ is a concept mentioned only six times in A Thousand Plateaus, it is fundamental to the way Deleuze and Guattari construct their geophilosophy. In this article, I argue that the mechanosphere solves what Louis Althusser calls the idealist coupling of mechanism and spiritualism implicit in Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere and in Jacques Monod's appropriation of the term. My contention is that the mechanosphere must be contextualised within Althusser's critique of Monod, delivered during the ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’ (...) at the École normale supérieure rue d'Ulm in 1967. Reading A Thousand Plateaus against Monod's Chance and Necessity and Althusser's Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists, I argue that the mechanosphere evacuates the spectre of an ‘idealist tendency’ latent in Monod's molecular science. By refashioning Teilhard's Omega point, Deleuze and Guattari create a sphere that serves as an asymptote on the horizon of ecological history – a projected point of complete destratification between the production of human subjects and planetary ecology. Ultimately, the mechanosphere nuances contemporary treatments of the Anthropocene, asking us to consider not only how humanity is overwhelming natural forces, but also how the former category is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the latter. (shrink)

The global pandemic has pushed many of us to online streaming services. A particular genre in these services is the ‘end of the world’ science fiction film, in and through which the speculated results of processes such as climate change are depicted. CGI technology is frequently deployed to create images of the end of the world, which is a backdrop to the narrative of, ‘saving ourselves amidst the ruins’. This philosophy of education essay will critically examine ten films in order (...) to:Explain how ‘the end of the world’ images connected to processes such as climate change, obscures and displaces attention from the real, scientifically proven processes that are not so entertaining, but are still deadly. The images are created by capital and its machines for audience attention and have little to do with real social change. Science sits in an ambiguous position in this paper in that the real processes of climate change proven by science may be funded by capitalist mechanisms that can also be their cause.Introduce a reformulated notion of ecosophy from the work of Félix Guattari, Murray Bookchin, Arne Næss and Andre Gorz. This essay will suggest that ecosophy has the potential to teach the underlying split between depictions of the end of the world through the capitalist machine and the real social change necessary under climate change. Ecosophy is in the context of this essay a specific conceptual construction designed for teaching about climate change through cinema. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a critical reading of some aspects of Heidegger’s late philosophy and evaluate how these relate to his nationalist claim that we need to stay rooted in the soil of our homeland. In response to this claim, Žižek suggests thet being-rootless is the primordial state of being-human and that what we represent as our roots are secondary attempts to obfuscate this dimension. First, I will present Heidegger’s philosophy of technology to elucidate his thesis that the essence (...) of modern technology determinates the way we come to experience the totality of beings in our times as “standing reserve”. In the second section, I expound his aesthetics where art is seen as a mode of approaching entities that follows a different logic to that of the Gestell. However, this analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art will reveal a political dimension to the concept of earth which I take to be a reactionary attempt to neutralize the eventual dimension of the Gestell. In the third section, I offer a critical re-interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy following Žižek’s clue. I argue that modern art is characterized by its self-reflexive character which can be deemed transcendental once we accept the ontological dimension of art following Heidegger. These works offer a rooting in our own rootless condition analogous to the grounding in the Abgrund of Hegel’s absolute knowledge. Finally, I offer an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorius Basterds from the perspective of the conceptual framework developed in the previous pages. (shrink)