Philosophy Today

Some of the most powerful persons today are those most successful at convincing others they have the greatest claim to victimhood. This new, socio-political shift marks the rise of what recently has been called “victimhood culture.” This article addresses how certain Christian theological views on God’s wrath, along with differing appropriations of the church’s collective victimhood both have played significant roles in generating a “culture war of victimhood”—a mode of conflict in which individuals and parties fight for the status of being the most socially oppressed and marginalized, especially for the purpose of gaining power. To better understand this collective intentionality of victimhood, the article provides a multidisciplinary exploration into recent works in sociology of religion (Froese and Bader), anthropology (Campbell and Manning), and historical theology (Kreider and Moss).

Euzhan Palcy’s film A Dry White Season, set in apartheid South Africa, portrays a resistance not intended to lead to victimhood, yet leads to the death of the Afrikaans protagonist, Benjamin Du Toit. The narrative follows Ben as they are educated about Black South Africans’ suffering under apartheid, their growing activism and simultaneous increasing victimization beside that of their Black friends. I first examine how early political critics of the film thought it stressed the victimization of the white character at the expense of that of the Black characters. Next, I interpret the film by considering how Palcy’s aims, the influence of their compatriot Aimé Césaire’s anticolonial views, and the details of the film’s structure, illuminate the film’s philosophical insights into victimization and resistance. I show how the film’s representation of Ben’s secondary victimization and witnessing highlights the victimization of apartheid.

In this article I examine Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 film Ivan’s Childhood. The film tells a story about a twelve-year old Russian boy, whose family was killed by the Germans at the onset of WWII. Orphaned and dispossessed, Ivan began to scout for the Soviet troops. Eventually, he was captured, tortured and executed by the Gestapo. Using a wide gamut of mythopoetic “articulations,” in this film, Tarkovsky shows how Ivan’s victimization affected him beyond repair, leading to the erosion of his child identity and the emergence of a traumatic duality. The film therefore is not only a poignant condemnation of the war, but a disclosure of the victim phenomenon carried out by mythopoetic means. In my analysis of Ivan’s Childhood, I approach this phenomenon by focusing on the effects of trauma on the child, with a special emphasis on dreaming. For my theoretic, I employ the phenomenology of the child (E. Husserl and M. Merleau-Ponty).

It is commonly accepted that technology and society have always been intertwined. The question is rather how we should understand that relation. This introduction to the special issue ‘Technology and Society’ gives a brief overview of the history of the questions related to this intertwinement. The special issue consists of six essays, emanating from presentations at the 2019 conference on Technology and Society at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. It was organized by the Working Group on Philosophy of Technology (WGPT), whose aim is to promote philosophy of technology at the KU Leuven, but also more broadly in Belgium.

Much of modern technology critique inherits Heidegger’s ontico-ontological distinction. In this paper, following Stiegler’s linking of the ontic to the transgenerational, I argue that Heidegger leaves the materiality of technics as a potential site for difference in the wake. Put differently, Heidegger “declines the gift of the ontic,” instead constructing an order of an imagined Graeco-German inheritance—a culturally and linguistically specific “saving-power” against the ills of modern technology. Through Derrida’s inheritance of Heidegger’s work—marked by a different language and (postcolonial) positionality—I reconsider ontico-ontological difference as an opening to a co-constitutive productivity of world and thing, where the passing on of mnemonic inheritance features multiplicities of languages and cultural techniques that preempt Heidegger’s “Graeco-German monolingualism.” This calls for a central positioning of the politics of memory and inheritance within modern technology critique, thereby attending both to the material realities as well as the cultural differences of technics.

In this article I investigate online misinformation from a media philosophy perspective. I, thus move away from the debate focused on the semantic content, concerned with what is true or not about misinformation. I argue rather that online misinformation is the effect of an informational climate promoted by user micro-behaviours such as liking, sharing, and posting. Misinformation online is explained as the effect of an informational environment saturated with and shaped by techno-images in which most users act automatically under the constant assault of stirred emotions, a state resembling what media philosopher Vilém Flusser has called techno-magical consciousness. I describe three ways in which images function on social media to induce this distinctive, uncritical mode of consciousness, and complement Flusser’s explanation with insights from the phenomenology of emotions.

This paper criticises the ideological dimension of the AI narrative. It does so by questioning the implicit assumptions behind its vision, which promises a world that automatically adapts to our desires before we even know them. These assumptions hinge on a misconception of the value of desire as residing exclusively with its fulfilment, warranting human manipulation for increased predictability. This social trajectory towards algorithmic governance, rather than delivering on the promised fulfilment, undermines our capacity to sustain the same desire that it uses to justify its enterprise.

Reflections on mimesis have tended to be restricted to aesthetic fictions in the past century; yet the proliferation of new digital technologies in the present century is currently generating virtual simulations that increasingly blur the line between aesthetic representations and embodied realities. Building on a recent mimetic turn, or re-turn of mimesis in critical theory, this paper focuses on the British science fiction television series, Black Mirror (2011–2018) to reflect critically on the hypermimetic impact of new digital technologies on the formation and transformation of subjectivity.

Across the world, militaries are racing to acquire and develop new capabilities based on the latest in machine learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, I argue that the shift into military AI is shaping human behaviour in heretofore unacknowledged and morally significant ways. Following Anders, I argue that as the human becomes digitally co-machinistic (mitmaschinell), they are compelled to adopt a logic of speed and optimisation in their ethical reasoning. The consequence of this is a form a moral de-skilling, whereby military personnel working with digital infrastructures and interfaces become less able to act and decide as moral agents. This is an especially concerning development when it comes to the conduct of war, where the moral stakes could not be higher.

This paper examines the development and technological mediation of the concept of solidarity. We focus on the workplace as a focal point of solidarity relations, and utilise a phenomenological approach to describe and analyse those relations. Workplace solidarity, which has been historically concretised through social objects such as labor unions, is of particular political relevance since it has played an outsize role in the broader struggle for social, economic, and political rights, recognition, and equality. We argue that the use of automated decision support systems (ADS) in labor process management may negatively affect the formation of these relations. As solidarity motivates collective political action and risk-taking, the mediation and potential obstruction of solidarity relations by ADS is politically significant. We contribute to the growing literature on the “future of work” problem in elucidating the technological mediation of workplace solidarity.

Ever since Facebook appeared circa 2004, social network sites (SNS) have gained more and more presence and importance in our daily lives. At the very core of SNS lies the necessity to create a profile; this profile becomes our digital persona or our digital avatar. Since what we do online matters and ever increasingly affects the offline world, our online identity becomes in turn increasingly important. But how does our personal identity—how do we—relate to our digital avatars? This paper explores the possible form and extent of the connection in between both identities. For this purpose, I propose to think about personal identity in terms of a narrative theory of the self, as well as in a relational manner through the concept of recognition. Employing this framework I intend to pinpoint the elements of our digital avatars, and the SNS dynamics as a whole, that can be related to the process of becoming who we are.

This essay explores Giorgio Agamben’s engagement with Reiner Schürmann, focusing in particular on their ontological understanding of anarchy. Setting out from the lacuna in the literature on this issue, it gives a close reading of the passages where Agamben addresses Schürmann, interrogates the role of of arche in Agamben’s works and links his interest in Schürmann to his long-standing critique of Derrida. Tracing these issues through Agamben’s and Schürmann’s texts, it becomes apparent that both authors operate with a strikingly similar approach, while adumbrating different understandings of the rapport between arche, anarchy and difference. Specifically, the essay argues that Schürmann’s work can be seen as an incisive reference point in Agamben’s recent theory of “destituent potential” by focusing on the epilogue of The Use of Bodies. Here, arche and anarchy are positioned as the basic operative categories of the entire Homo Sacer project, while the concept of “true anarchy,” developed in critical dialogue with Schürmann, turns into its philosophical vanishing point. With and against Schürmann’s attempt to think anarchy as an interruption of identity through difference, Agamben develops his notion of anarchy as as a suspension of difference, that is, as in-difference.

The aim of this article is to show how, through Derrida, the concept of unconditional hospitality can be understood through a logic of the parasite. In a supplementary chain that leads to the figure of the parasite, I first knot two main concepts: hospitality and unconditionality. Then I explore the knotting itself through two theoretical articulations discussed by Derrida in many of his text on the work of mourning and the altered constitution of ipseity. Finally, I will arrive at the unpublished seminar Manger l’autre (1989-1990) to focus on the “eating trope” of hospitality. Since para-sitos only means eating-with, the parasite is not a priori a negative notion, but rather suggests a trespassing of frontiers. All the above articulations finally lead me to propose a reading of these topics through a notion of incorporation.

This article defends Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler against the long-standing but recently reiterated charge that they affirm a linguistic idealism or foundationalism. First outlining the parameters of Lacan’s thinking on this topic through his comments on the materiality inherent in the imaginary, symbolic, real schema to show that he offers an account built around the tension between the real and symbolic, I then move to Butler to argue that she more coherently identifies the parameters of the problem before offering an explanation based on paradox. With this, both offer (1) a forceful rebuttal of linguistic idealism, (2) a far more complex analysis of the materialism–signification relation than their new materialist critics tend to appreciate, and (3) innovative but often-ignored “new” materialisms of their own.