In this article, I examine the possible link between Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power and the new movement in continental philosophy known as speculative realism. Nietzsche is never invoked as a possible (re)source in the war against anti-realism, nor is he identified as a leading officer behind enemy lines but remains in the neutral zone. Although Meillassoux does seem to place Nietzsche in the camp of anti-realists, he is not the main target but only mentioned in a passing remark. In this article, I interpret Nietzsche into the framework of speculative realism and argue that he can be said to occupy a position in-between Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and Meillassoux’s speculative materialism.

Much has been made of the so-called “empirical turn” of “speculative materialism” with thinkers like Quentin Meillassoux championing the material sciences as a new route to absolute reality. According to Meillassoux, the material sciences “provide philosophers access once again to the great outdoors, the absolute outside,” of reality in-itself. One might expect from such encomia the attempt to engage with the products of contemporary science in order to develop a new metaphysics; but, Meillassoux spends almost no time in this way, focusing instead on the form and methods of the material sciences over their actual accomplishments. As a result, his praise rings hollow and his metaphysics remains undeveloped. This paper examines what would happen if we were to take seriously his claims that a new metaphysics be developed from a scientific accounting of material reality by surveying the conclusions of contemporary physics. The paper ends by contrasting such a new speculative and materialistic metaphysics with the speculative nihilism of Ray Brassier.

The sense of interconnectedness is perhaps one of the most celebrated features of African thought. It has been theorized under different philosophical idioms among African philosophers. It has appeared variously as African metaphysics, ontology, socialism and even religion—all in a bid to underline the basic idea that aspects of reality are inextricably interconnected and mutually impact one another in a seemingly universal web of interaction. While each of the idioms used to express this idea has some merits, the article privileges the epistemic idiom. To support this move, I make two mutually reinforcing arguments. First, it is appropriate to describe the sense of interconnectedness in epistemic terms because it is primarily a mode of knowing/perceiving the world. Second, and more importantly, the epistemic idiom is useful for the formulation of emancipatory demands and formation of epistemic alliances against the subjugation of African and non-Western knowledges by mechanisms of coloniality.

Work defines the lives of most people. Many people work overtime, work second jobs, or bring work home with them. It is often difficult to know when work stops and the rest of life begins. In a culture where work is central to our identities, good work is increasingly difficult to find. This article argues that one of the impediments to imagining a future beyond work is the productivist logic that predominates today, which determines labor and production to be key activities and values. To sketch a path beyond work, the author turns to Marx, arguing that Marx provides an important critique of productivism and gestures toward a postwork future in his own writings. To do so, the author defends Marx against critiques of productivism.

Rosi Braidotti has recently argued that the emerging scholarship on posthumanism should employ what she calls nomadic thinking. Braidotti identifies Gilles Deleuze’s work on Spinoza as the genesis of posthumanist ontology, yet Deleuze’s claims about nomadic thinking or nomadology come from his work on Leibniz. I argue that for posthumanist thought to theorize subjectivity beyond the human, it must use nomadology to overcome ontology itself. To make my argument, I demonstrate that while Braidotti is correct about Spinoza’s influence on Deleuze, his work on Leibniz is necessary to adequately conceptualize nomadology. I employ Deleuze and Guattari’s figure of the Thought-brain as a model for conceptualizing posthumanist subjectivity that they claim goes beyond the subject itself.

In his 2018 essay Down to Earth, the French philosopher Bruno Latour proposes a hypothesis that connects a number of contemporary issues, ranging from climate denialism to deregulation and growing inequality. While his hypothesis, namely that the elites act as if they live in another world and are leaving the rest of the world behind, might seem like a conspiracy theory, I will argue that there is a way to make sense of it. To do so, I will turn to two other authors, Timothy Mitchell and Shoshana Zuboff, to highlight the kind of logic that Latour seems to have in mind. In the final section, I will propose to capture the commonalities of these authors through the concept of shifting reciprocities and will return to Latour’s political plea to define one’s territories, reinterpreted as reciprocities.

In our article, we argue, following Nelson Goodman and Arthur Danto, that in contrast to the essentialist conception of authenticity, it is more fertile to consider authentic patterns not as the inner core of the person, but as a case of metaphorical exemplification. According to our approach, if we accept that authentic style is a metaphorical exemplification, then, based on Richard Rorty’s concepts of language and metaphor, style can be seen as an exaptation or reuse of symbols previously adapted through cultural selection to other specific functions. To support this approach, we proceed as follows. First, using Goodman’s and Danto’s model, we argue that authentic style can best be grasped through metaphorical exemplification. We then show that the metaphorical use of linguistic, pictorial, and other symbols is the result of exaptation. According to our results, the authentic style is the exaptation of symbols previously adapted to culturally selected functions. We then separate authenticity from creativity through the concepts of style and manner—borrowed from Danto—and we point out that whether a particular symbol is authentic or not is not affected by whether creative or mechanical mental processes are responsible for its creation. Finally, we examine the relationship between authenticity and autonomy, and we show that in an environment that promotes autonomous decisions and authentic style, agents that originally generated inauthentic symbols may be able to produce authentic ones.

This article advances a close reading of Hannah Arendt’s use of the phrase amo: volo ut sis in her posthumously published lecture “Willing.” Through this close reading, the essay argues that this affirmation of love, which Arendt translates as “I love you, I want you to be,” describes an enduring activity by which we unite our minds to the world. This argument is analyzed formally and practically: the formal aspect addresses love as an activity which has its end in itself and the practical aspect enumerates the binding character of love. To clarify these aspects, the article will focus on the sections on Augustine and Duns Scotus, requiring, also, a closer look at Arendt’s theological methodology.

For many philosophers, there is a tension inherent to shame as an inward-looking, yet intersubjective, emotion: that between the role of the ashamed self and the part of the shaming Other in pronouncing the judgement of shame. Simply put, the issue is this: either the perspective of the ashamed self takes precedence in autonomously choosing to feel shame, and the necessary role of the audience is overlooked, or else the view of the shaming Other prevails in heteronomously casting the shame, and the ashamed individual’s agency becomes problematically understated. I argue that this debate is fundamentally misguided insofar as it assumes that shame must be exclusively contingent upon either the perspective of the self or that of the Other, when it is in fact dependent upon both at once. This is the “double movement” of shame: an appraisal of the self that is at once social and private.

Thomas Sheehan’s attack on my book Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, addressed neither the book’s topic nor its arguments. He instead highlighted a few isolated details in a sophistic and biased fashion. Moreover, his exposition was interspersed with ad personam insults not typically found in philosophical or scientific discussions. Although I had hitherto resolved not to respond to personal attacks, I owe it to the memory of Johannes Fritsche, who was also attacked by Sheehan, to take my turn to speak and to thereby pay intellectual tribute to Professor Fritsche. The article returns to the interpretation of Being and Time and analyzes the meaning and connotations of Heidegger’s use of the German term Bodenlosigkeit. The key methodological issue concerns the need to study the semantic, historical, and political context of concepts instead of hiding these issues by reducing everything to a battle between dogmatic positions.