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Displaying: 1-19 of 19 documents


1. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Kimberly Ann Harris What Does It Mean to Move for Black Lives?
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I argue that the key ideas of the movement for Black lives have resonances with Frantz Fanon’s ideas particularly in Black Skin, White Masks. I first demonstrate how the mission to repudiate Black demise and affirm Black humanity captures Fanon’s critique of universal humanism. The fear of the Black body was central to the testimonies of Darren Wilson, Jeronimo Yanez, and George Zimmerman (the individuals that shot and killed Mike Brown, Philando Castile, and Trayvon Martin respectively). Fanon prioritized the role of the body in his account of racism. It is difficult to not see the relevance of Fanon’s analysis when one considers these testimonies. Lastly, I demonstrate how the chants “Black lives matter,” “Hands up, don’t shoot,” and “I can’t breathe” are acknowledgments of the significance of Black lives and serve as contemporary instances of Fanon’s sociodiagnostic approach.
2. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Sabeen Ahmed From Death Penalty to Thanatopolitics: Notes Towards a Trinitarian Theory of Governmentality
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Drawing from the works of Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, this article offers a theory of political theology for the contemporary Western liberal nation-state. Taking as its starting point the death penalty, it presents a triune theory of governance—what I call Trinitarian Governmentality—which exposes the thanatopolitical dimension fundamental to the very articulation of sovereign power and, as such, the theologico-political. It is thus only by conceptualizing sovereignty as Trinitarian Governmentality—composed of biopower/oikonomia, disciplinary power/theologia, and pastoral power/eschatologia—that we can begin to address Derrida’s central question: how might we theorize a properly philosophical abolitionism for the present?
3. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Ellen T. Armour Justice for Alan Kurdi?: Philosophy, Photography, and the (Cosmo)Politics of Life and Death
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Photographs of the body of a drowned three-year-old Kurdish boy from Syria washed up on a Turkish beach encapsulated the plight of refugees fleeing the (so-called) civil war in Syria with particular pathos and power. Through what these photographs index, this essay considers what they open up and open on to: the philosophical problematics embedded in the political issues the refugee crisis raises. These issues and problematics are rendered legible in Jacques Derrida’s recently published seminar on the death penalty and in his reflections on cosmopolitanism. Together, they prompt further reflections on what I call spectatorial responsibility as a potential cosmopolitical site.
4. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Patrick Bourgeois, Robert Greenleaf Brice Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on the Pre-Reflective Level
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The philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty may seem at first glance to be mutually exclusive. On further examination, however, they can be seen to share some fundamental points of view. For instance, they both share a common rejection of a modern mechanistic explanation of nature, and both endorse what we might call a pre-linguistic (pre-ratiocinative) level of meaning. In this paper, we show that these thinkers not only share some fundamental philosophical views, but also had, for many years, contemplated what cognitive scientists today call “embodied cognition.”
5. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Rona Cohen Jean-Luc Nancy and the Extension of the Mind
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This essay explores Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical return to Cartesian philosophy, specifically to Descartes’s preoccupation with the relation of mind and body, as a fertile ground from which to develop an ontology of the body in (1992). It explores Nancy’s reasons for revisiting the Cartesian thinking framework, which on the face of it, is of little value to an ontology of the body. I argue that Descartes’s impasse in accounting for both mind/body dualism and their union constitutes Nancy’s point of departure in constructing an ontology of the body in , thereby transforming Descartes’s impasse into a productive aporia, in the Derridean sense of the term. To fully understand the significance of the notion of “relation” in Nancy’s’ philosophy, I turn to his reading of Lacan’s famous aphorism “there is no sexual relation” and explore its ontological implications.
6. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Xunwu Chen Beyond Kant’s Political Cosmopolitanism: Thinking a World Constitution without a World State
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Kant bequeaths to the present discourse of cosmopolitanism the question of how a constitutionalized global order without a world state is possible. At the core of the matter is what a legitimate public authority as the necessary enactor of the cosmopolitan sovereignty is. Habermas’s answer that this is a three-tiered, networked realm of public authority is a plausible one. The key to Habermas’s answer is the concept of a political constitution for a pluralist world. If such a constitution is possible, I believe that we need a new concept of constitution as a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties; on this point, we should take the UK constitution as the paradigm and recognize that since the end of World War II, such a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties of the global human community has been emerging.
7. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Andrew Jampol-Petzinger Faith and Repetition in Kierkegaard and Deleuze
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In this paper, I compare Gilles Deleuze’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s concepts of “repetition.” Although Deleuze (and interpreters after him) have argued that Kierkegaard’s use of this concept valorizes the role of unity in selfhood, I claim that, in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, repetition in fact serves as a practical task linked to self-overcoming and rebirth. From this perspective, I argue that Kierkegaard’s conception of repetition as a function of “faith” can helpfully inform an understanding of Deleuze: self-overcoming in Deleuze will have many features in common with a Kierkegaardian conception of acting out of faith.
8. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Joanna Hodge Adorno and Phenomenology: Between Hegel and Husserl
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Adorno develops critiques in parallel of the phenomenologies of G. W. F. Hegel and of Edmund Husserl. While respecting their differences, he rehearses conjoined objections to their accounts of philosophy, and of progress, of history, and of nature. Critical of Hegel’s idealist dialectics, and of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, Adorno also in his readings of their texts reveals a textual materiality of their philosophical enquiries, which provides material evidence in support of his critique. This essay seeks to reveal the dynamic of this process, and show certain parallels with results supplied in the phenomenological enquiries of Michel Henry, and in the deconstructions of Jacques Derrida. If an epoch may still be captured in the concept, then the negative dialectical conceptuality developed by Adorno must capture a condition common to that epoch, and, in part, shared by other such thinkers.
9. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Elizabeth Portella Mediation and Its Shadow: Ethics and Politics in Selected Works of Levinas and Adorno
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Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno never spoke to one another. Both thinkers were of Jewish ancestry, though their lives would be impacted in distinct ways by the rise of Nazism. With these historical parallels in mind, this paper seeks to place these thinkers in a productive juxtaposition with regard to the status of ethics and politics in either’s work. In particular, I examine the ramifications of philosophical reflection on Auschwitz as a mediating event in post-war European philosophy, reading Levinas’s and Adorno’s theoretical differences as alternate philosophical responses to this momentous event. I argue that Levinas’s thought is ailed by the problem of immediacy, exemplified by his positing ethics as first philosophy and his rejection of the category of totality which, as Adorno highlights, is an important critical tool for an analysis of the form of society which produces Nazism.
10. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Ioana Vartolomei Pribiag Politics and Its Others: Jacques Rancière’s Figures of Alterity
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This essay examines Jacques Rancière’s concept of subjectivation, the coming into being of a political subject as the substance of radical democratic politics. In particular, it provides a detailed reading of disidentification and impossible identification as they relate to figures of the Other. I present some possible points of intersection between subjectivation and hybridity, and explain why these concepts may ultimately be incompatible in their most common formulations. Examining closely a few recurring figures of alterity (“the Algerian” and “the immigrant”), I show that, in each case, the Other is used principally as an abstract figure, a procedure which risks effacing historically situated political voices in the name of universalism. Moreover, I argue that decisions regarding which subjects authentically enact politics and which remain in the realm of the police can themselves turn out to be politically neutralizing.
11. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Liesbeth Schoonheim The Productive Body: Rereading Hannah Arendt’s Critique of Corporeality and Introspection
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This essay aims to correct the widely-held view that Arendt is hostile to the body due to its physical needs. By focusing on two modes of corporeality that are distinguished by the production of bodily substances—the digestive body and the crying body—I argue that Arendt (1) deployed various notions of corporeality that thematize, in different ways, the uncontrollability our bodies; and (2) argues for the affirmation of this unmasterablity because it corresponds to the conditioned nature of human existence. Firstly, Arendt criticized the Greek, narcissistic aspiration toward physical beauty, exemplified in the figure of Achilles, for its attempt to subjugate the digestive body to a preconceived end—a criticism that equally applies to Connolly’s plea for strategically altering our affects. Secondly, Arendt’s appreciation of Homer’s description of a crying Odysseus shows that the acknowledgment of events constitutive of one’s life consists in a publicly visible somatic reaction.
12. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Rodrigo Therezo From Neutral Dasein to a Gentle Twofold: Sexual Difference in Heidegger and Derrida
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This paper attempts to situate Derrida’s newly discovered Geschlecht III in the four-part series Derrida dedicated to the question of sexual difference in Heidegger. Taking its point of departure from an interview conducted two years prior to Geschlecht I, the paper retraces Derrida’s itinerary toward the culminating point of the Geschlecht series, Geschlecht III, the “magnet” that orients and attracts the other three. I argue that Derrida’s initial enthusiasm for a Heideggerian “pre-dual sexuality” in Geschlecht I is significantly tempered by Derrida’s meticulous reading of Heidegger in Geschlecht III, where his reservations vis-à-vis Heidegger’s neutralization of sexual difference become all the more serious and explicit. As I show, Derrida’s “dream” of a “doubly asymmetrical” sexual relation to the other remains incompatible with the sexual gentleness Heidegger imagines between brother and sister, an ultimately Christian incest that will yet again threaten to neutralize and erase the more radical sexual difference Derrida is trying to think.
13. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Chris Watkin Not More of the Same: Michel Serres’s Challenge to the Ethics of Alterity
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Much French philosophy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been marked by the positive valorization of alterity, an ethical position that has recently received a vigorous assault from Alain Badiou’s privilege of sameness. This article argues that Badiou shares a great deal in common with the philosophies of alterity from which he seeks to distance himself, and that Michel Serres’s little-known account of alterity offers a much more radical alternative to the ethics of difference. Drawing on both translated and as yet untranslated works, I argue that the Serresian ontology of inclination, along with his conceptual personae of the hermaphrodite and the parasite, informs ethical and political positions that offer a distinctive ethics and politics that present fresh insights about the relation between the singular and the universal, the contingency of market exchange, and the nature of violence.
book reviews
14. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Shannon Sullivan Jeremy David Engels, The Art of Gratitude
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15. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Khafiz Kerimov Andrew Cooper, The Tragedy of Philosophy: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Project of Aesthetics
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book discussion: paolo diego bubbio, god and the self in hegel: beyond subjectivism
16. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Simon Lumsden Hegel's God, Normativity, and Self-Knowledge
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17. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Jean-Philippe Deranty With or Without God?: A Critical Reading of Bubbio’s God and the Self in Hegel
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18. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Stephen Houlgate God and Metaphysics in Hegel: A Response to Paolo Diego Bubbio
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19. Philosophy Today: Volume > 63 > Issue: 2
Paolo Diego Bubbio Not Just a Metaphor: Hegel’s God and the Normativity of Metaphysics
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