Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

This paper works on the relation between spectacles and death. I present a decolonial genealogy, of the relation between sovereignty and spectacle, and specifically what coloniality does to this relation, how it shifts the very core of sovereign punishment. I demonstrate the formation of what I call “colonial sovereignty” as the emergence of a new relation between sovereignty and terror: in colonial sovereignty, terror is an inseparable element of sovereignty, formed through not the uniqueness but rather the repetition and proliferation of spectacles of death. The colonial/modern nation-state functions as a government by terror, where death becomes meaningless, and the spectacles of dead bodies outlive death.

In the Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1670, Spinoza asked why people “fight for their servitude as if for salvation.” In doing so, he foregrounded the affective dimension of despotism, putting forward the idea that servitude is not just passively endured but passionately strived for—something people want and will. Three hundred years later, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari repeated this formula in Anti-Oedipus, arguing that it was the central question of political philosophy. They read Spinoza through Wilhelm Reich, stating that the astonishing thing is that “those who are exploited are not continually out on strike.” In doing so they shifted the political question from domination to exploitation. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I argue for an updated version of the question, asking why people fight for exploitation as if it were rebellion. Asking this question involves reexamining the way in which the critique of religion is the antechamber of the critique of political economy in Marx, and is the thread connecting Spinoza to Marx. Finally, I argue that reframing the question in terms of rebellion and exploitation is useful in making sense of contemporary forms of right populism that present themselves as rebellion, but actually deepen the domination of capitalism over our lives.

This paper grapples with two objections against Max Weber’s methodology that arise because Weber borrows some ideas from Heinrich Rickert’s neo-Kantian philosophical system. The first objection (“the contradiction argument”) is raised by Julius J. Schaaf who disagrees with Weber’s claim that historical objects are constituted through retrospectively and hypothetically applied selections of value relations and that we can understand these objects. Weber’s idea that the relating ideal type constructions are also non-arbitrary—i.e., not merely subjective—and can be rectified, Schaaf maintains, contradicts his own characterization of historical objects and reality. The second objection (“the incom¬patibility argument”) was made by Gerhard Wagner and Heinz Zipprian. It focuses on the conception of objective possibility. According to this, counter¬factual chains of historical events are contrived to figure out the relevant set of causes by which a certain event can be said to necessarily occur. The critics claim that it is only based on the ontological assumption of a preexisting real object that this thought-experiment can operate. That is, the pre-emptive assumption of realism is indis¬pensable for explaining the historical individual. To refute these two objections, I clarify some foundational notions and ideas of Weber’s methodology.

In this article, I show that Hegel’s philosophical articulation of the family is inextricably bound to his engagement with political economy by focusing on three central aspects of his theory of the family. Firstly, I analyze how Hegel construes the family as a historically distinct social dispositif and constitutive element of the modern order of property. I argue that Hegel’s construction of the family and its place in the modern order of property is not only gendered but also racialized. Secondly, I focus on Hegel’s articulation of the nexus between the family and civil society and his critical diagnosis of the structural problems that result from it. Thirdly, I discuss Hegel’s concept of labor and the political-epistemic limitations of his problematization of civil society, which are bound to it. I draw attention to three aspects, namely the confinement of the concept of labor to civil society, Hegel’s rearticulation of the gendered matter/form distinction, and the relation between Hegel’s economic notion and speculative usage of “labor.” Finally, I consider briefly how a critical reading of Hegel’s articulation of the political economy of the family can provide productive insights for a multidimensional theory of the family today.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant provides two different propositions of freedom. According to the first, in the “Analytic of Pure Practical Reason,” freedom establishes the possibility of moral agency—i.e., it is the ratio essendi of the moral law. According to the second, in the “Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason,” freedom is the object of one of the practical postulates (CPrR 246–54; AA 5:132–41). Why should Kant postulate something that has been allegedly established as the ground of moral agency? Does Kant appeal to two different conceptions of freedom? In this paper, I argue that Kant (1) in both cases conceives of freedom as an unconditioned form of causality, and (2) pursues two different aims according to two different but complementary arguments. On the one hand (the practical standpoint), he wants to argue that the causality of freedom is actual, through moral agency, in the domain where the laws of nature also apply. On the other hand (the theoretical standpoint), he is aware that the possibility of achieving the highest good would be compromised if we did not assume, along with the other two postulates, a world in which only the causality of freedom applies. While freedom as the ratio essendi of the moral law is actual, freedom as a postulate is a mere object of belief.

One of Martin Heidegger’s enduring philosophical legacies is his overall vision of what it is to be us. We—whoever that turns out to include—are cases of Dasein, and as such we are distinctively open to entities, including others and ourselves. In this essay, I paint a picture of that openness that aims to capture why Heidegger’s vision has so powerfully gripped so many. Drawing on Heidegger’s thought both early and late, I present a synoptic view of us as open to the encounter with entities' bursting forth into presencing. We can be more or less closed off to this upsurge, but we can also allow it in its full power: in philosophical and poetic openness. I draw on Borgmann, Buber, Plato’s Socrates, Rilke, and others to capture our openness at its Heideggerian best—and we ourselves at our best, showing up radiantly for encounter.

The emergence of Memory studies as a growing trans-disciplinary field within the human and social sciences is part of a larger orientation in the last four decades toward the exploration of how the past is experienced and enacted by individuals and groups. However, approaching this general theme through the specific term of “memory” is not obvious. In order to bring out the often neglected philosophical dimension of contemporary memory studies, the article seeks to situate the phenomenon of memory within a larger theoretical context. Through the lens of Husserlian phenomenology and its hermeneutic and deconstructive legacy, and also of Bergson’s life-philosophy, it focuses on three fundamental aspects of memory: as the privileged sense of time, as the site of the experience of embodied selfhood, and as a locus for the interior/exterior distinction. Warning against the reification of memory in the service of disciplinary consistency, it argues for its place at the heart of a hermeneutic-deconstructive philosophy of temporality and historicity.