Étienne Balibar has provided a sustained commentary on the politics of Greece and its relation to the European Union. This writing is a practical mobiliza­tion of Balibar’s theoretical work on universalism and European identities. This essay questions some of the assumptions that provide a seeming confidence in Balibar’s decision-making with respect to Greece that are not found elsewhere in his work. It goes on to explore the questions of balance and calculation in Balibar and in writing on politics more generally.

Death is ironic; as the archi-semiotician and first historian, death fixes object and meaning in a semiotic complex, separates non-sensuous meaning from bare physical existence, but thereby exposes meaning to the capriciousness of interpretation and tradition. The pause, however, conserves that which does not happen in repose, yet does not interrupt history, and lets history emerge in a movement in which all determination of meaning is suspended. This essay is written in memory of Werner Hamacher, whose life in writing shaped language around its distance and delay from the fixity of sound and sense, which, as he argued, are the subliminal conditions to every communication, presentation, and form in general: formative limits that separate and conjoin that which is and the surplus of un-actuality and incompletion that accompanies each instant of our intentional lives.

This paper pursues the way the terms exhaustion and inexhaustibility play a central role in Werner Hamacher’s critical encounter with philosophy. The argument is developed via an engagement with aspects of Hamacher’s interpretation of Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments. The limitations of Hamacher’s own position become an opening. What is opened up is the possibility of philosophy having become exhausted as a result of its identification with calculation and instrumentality.

This tribute to Werner Hamacher highlights his ideas of understanding and philology, foregrounding his passion for words, his intimate close readings that reveal the hidden gems of a far-distant understanding, his radical version of philology as the love of language in its most literal sense, and his unconditional and incorruptible insistence on Eigenständigkeit: standing and understanding for oneself.

This article examines the violence inherent to fundamental operations of critical and theoretical thought: to read in order to gain insight into something, and to draw distinctions in spite of experiences contradicting clear dividing lines, notably between what is human and the rest of all beings as “nature,” and between terminological language and other forms of speech, such as lamenting and complaining. Walter Benjamin’s texts both present and reenact this violence. Reading Benjamin, Werner Hamacher expounds these moments of violence as structural necessities. The article focuses on the question of distance as the objective of reading, and of drawing terminological distinctions—an objective, it is argued, that is driven by counteracting dynamics in reading, which follows the dictate of a text, and in excessive modes of speech such as plaintive language, which keeps claiming attention while refusing symbolic substitution in order to insist that it cannot be answered, satisfied, or appeased.

This text pays tribute to Werner Hamacher’s work. It contemplates Hamacher’s thought about language, especially his criticism of views that measure language according to its propositional and referential functions. Instead, Hamacher foregrounds the importance of language’s interruptions, strikes and disorders, in which language operates independently of anything but itself, thus revealing its innermost core. The text examines Hamacher’s “The Second Inversion,” “Afformative, Strike,” and “Other Pains.”

A translation of Werner Hamacher’s essay “Andere Schmerzen,” which he was unable to complete before his death on July 7, 2017. The essay analyzes the connection between pain and language in the work of Pindar, Sophocles, Cicero, Seneca, Kant, Hegel, and Valéry.

Vardoulakis traces the function of violence in Balibar’s theory of the subject/citizen. Doing so, Vardoulakis brings together areas of Balibar’s philosophy that are usually discussed separately, such as his work on Spinoza, his anthropology and his lectures on violence. Finally, Vardoulakis uses the presentation of the way violence figures in all these fields to offer a critique of Balibar’s conceptions of democracy and power.

In this paper I adopt Étienne Balibar’s distinction between three forms of universality—“universality as reality,” “fictive universality,” and “ideal universality”—in order to retrieve universalism for feminist politics. The paper articulates a proposal for the feminist adoption of a specific notion of universality, which I call political insurgent universality. This notion is not based on a definition of human essence or of women's nature. It is rather rooted in the “real universality” historically created by capitalism, that is, in the fact that capitalism has generated a world in which people are interdependent and in which capitalist accumulation poses objective universal constraints on social reproduction.

Balibar presents Spinoza as a profound critic of “the anthropomorphic illusion.” Spinoza famously derides the tendency of humans to project their own imagined traits and tendencies onto the rest of nature. The anthropomorphic illusion yields a gross overestimation our own agency. I argue in this essay that the flip side of this illusion is our refusal to extend certain properties we reserve exclusively to ourselves. The result is that we disregard the power of social and political institutions because they do not resemble us. The anthropomorphic illusion therefore causes us both to overestimate our power as singular individuals and to underestimate the power of social and political institutions. If we understand ourselves and institutions as “transindividuals” rather than on the illusory model of substantial individuality, it is unproblematic to attribute individuality to collective powers, like the commonwealth.

The essay uses the second moment of Hegel’s “absolute method,” namely, the moment of the advancing action, in order to shed light on the constitution of the dynamic universal in society, politics, and history through the moment of stasis or crisis. In the action that advances or in the middle moment of the method lies the “crisis” of the unfolding process. Dialectically, action advances by stalling and imploding but also by emerging from this frozen state, moving on from it. I indicate the moment of crisis-stasis as the predicament of “living in the interregnum” and examine it by appealing to Thucydides, Gramsci, and Gordimer.

This article is a critique of Étienne Balibar's philosophical orientation towards Europe, construed as both an ideal and an institutional reality, in light of recent European crises. I argue that Balibar's commitment to Europe follows from his longstanding political-philosophical preference for a compromise position between political utopianism and political realism, but that this compromise is ultimately incoherent, combining the ungroundedness of utopianism with the undue self-limitation of realism.

This essay explores Étienne Balibar’s treatment of the conceptual development of a notion of the super-ego in Freud as crucial to Balibar’s own thinking of the connection between politics and psychoanalysis. Via Balibar’s writing, however, it traces the antinomic forces at work in the question of a psychoanalytic supplement of politics, in the process examining not only the psychic conditions of the "political" but also the "politics" of different forms of psychological discourse and debate.

We are witnessing and participating in a new “Querelle of Universals” which has indissoluble political and philosophical characters. It ranges from the incorporation of anthropological differences (of gender-sex, race-culture, normality and abnormality, etc.) into the very definition of the “human” to the contemporary attempts at rethinking the diversity of histories within mankind as a multiverse of translations rather than a failed unity. The essay discusses a series of typical aporias that are relevant to this querelle and proposes a concept of subjectivity which elaborates their productivity.

This article argues for the importance of the work of Emmanuel Eze as a resource for confronting the relationship between philosophy and cultural difference. Eze is one of few philosophers to have contributed important research in the three main areas relevant to the relationship between philosophy and cultural difference: 1) analysis of the formation of philosophy as exclusively European, through his work on race and the Enlightenment; 2) engagement with the philosophies of other cultures, through his work in African philosophy; 3) direct discussion of the relationship between universality and diversity, prominent in his final book, On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism. This article follows the various lines of Eze’s work, concentrating on its relevance for the project of doing philosophy across cultural borders.

I claim that a genealogy of the philological racism known as ‘orientalism’ should include Leibniz as a founding figure. This argument is framed and motivated by recent publications that seek to exclude Leibniz from the history of race and racism by arguing that he insists on a linguistic, rather than ‘racial,’ schematic of human diversity. A survey of nineteenth-century race theory reveals that this distinction is not only specious, but these recent defenses only further implicate Leibniz in the linguistic tradition that is orientalist racism.

Working with Hannah Arendt’s implicit argument about place and visibility, this article develops an account of recognition in order to rethink the nature of community. I argue for an Arendtian recognitive politics, a two-tiered account of recognition, which takes into account social identities as the condition of possibility for the free political action that so animated Arendt. If we require a place to act freely, in other words, we are visible to another in that place. Claims such as Arendt’s “right to have rights” consequently understate the vital conditions of visibility and the role such visibility plays in the political sphere where agents are recognized as equals. The two-tiered account of recognition developed in this article allows me to argue that (1) the performance of visibility in relation to the recognition of one’s social identity is what in turn allows for (2) the possibility of recognizing one’s unique political identity in the political space.

Albert Camus can be meaningfully read as an agent-focussed virtue ethicist, as David Sherman has suggested. Yet moving far beyond Sherman’s version of this claim, we show here how Camus accepts what are four definitive parameters of the classical authors’ conception of the virtues—the last of which takes him beyond today’s recognised “virtue ethicists.” Firstly, he understands the virtues as lasting, beneficent dispositions to think, feel, and act in certain ways. Secondly, he conceives the virtues as mastering the untethered passions: the sources of epistemic partiality and behavioural excess (démesure). Thirdly Camus conceives of the virtues (led by his versions of the four cardinals: courage, mesure, justice and a directive “lucidity”) as necessary accomplishments if people are to live fulfilled lives. Finally—and here bidding farewell to a solely theoretical approach—Camus appreciates that such self-mastery can only be achieved through education and habituation (an “ascesis” or “a difficult science of living”), and through the imitation of the kind of exemplars he holds up before us in his literary fiction.

This article is a further philosophical engagement with the human-animal relation. The argument presented is that neither animals nor humans can be reduced to a biological essence characterised as ‘bare life,’ but live according to the call of a way of life. Heidegger’s thinking on the polis in terms of the animal-human relation is addressed in order to show how he reduces animality to a biological sub-stratum, while the human becomes the privileged bearer of the word. Heidegger’s deep-seated humanism is thus exposed, as is that of Bataille. The latter’s Hegelian stance on animality and humanity is revealed as the embodiment of the dialectic of necessity and freedom. The article is a critique of the view that freedom and transcendence can only be arrived after so-called basic biological needs (the needs of ‘bare life,’ or necessity) have been satisfied.

Descartes’s work as a philosopher was inspired by three dreams he had on November 10, 1619, and yet the philosophy that Descartes produced in response to this inspiration included an argument that all dreams are deceptive. This particular incongruity is indicative of a more general ambivalence and anxiety in Descartes’s thought concerning images, which creates a tension that is never fully resolved. In this essay I focus primarily on one side of that tension: the part of Descartes’s philosophy that is distrustful of images. To do this I first reconstruct Descartes’s theory of images, drawing from several of his lesser-known writings on optics, and then I consider how that theory of images leads Descartes to conceptualize true vision as a matter of “insight” rather than “eyesight” and to argue that the blind actually see better than those with working eyes. In the final part of the essay I briefly consider some of the consequences of Descartes’s theory of vision and the suspicion of images that animates it.

By closely reading Lacan’s references to the way philosophers (primarily Kant and Aristotle) use the notion of the “soul,” this paper suggests that the soul represents whatever in the body is unattainable to thought. The paper aims to reveal the philosophical moment in which a soul distinguishes itself from both mind and body and to show that this moment, in which a soul is summoned by philosophers, is needed in order to overcome the fundamental alienation of the body with regard to thought. Lacan’s way of addressing the soul along these lines suggests why having a soul carries ethical implications.

Badiou and Wittgenstein focus in their works on potentialities of innovation in the realm of thought as well as in the realm of politics. These innovations manifest themselves especially when two seemingly contrasting jurisdictions of thought—present in politics and logic—meet and merge. For Badiou a set-theoretical process of enforcement may change pre-established templates of a political doxa. For Wittgenstein it is the spontaneity of concept-formations that crisscross referential relations within the “space of reasons” and through performative enactments make visible unexpected places of unprompted innovation. For both Wittgenstein and Badiou, the subject is of vital importance in this union of politics and logic. It is both a “limit of the world” as well as a “supernumerary agency.” Characterized as such, it can provoke new worlds to appear with the aid of what I will call self-proclaimed logics of scission.

This article examines Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of analytical philosophy of language. I argue that Ricoeur’s idea of responsibility is exemplary for understanding this discussion and for understanding how Ricoeur conceives of the task of phenomenological hermeneutics in relation to analytical philosophy and cognitive science. According to Ricoeur, analytical philosophy of language explains how we use ordinary language for ascribing responsibility to the actions of agents (e.g., X is responsible for giving a speech). I argue that Ricoeur shows that the task of cognitive science is similar: explaining the causal relation between human action and the physical body (e.g., the debate on responsibility and neuroscience). Yet analytical philosophy of language insufficiently understands responsibility, for Ricoeur, in making an abstraction of the question of what it means to be responsible. Whereas analytical philosophy of language explains the causes of human action, so Ricoeur contends, it does not explain its motives, because these are not empirical relations that we can identify by means of common language. The task of phenomenological hermeneutics consists then, so I aim to demonstrate in line with Ricoeur, in understanding the motives of human action, which implies interpretation of text and of the self’s narrative identity: in narratives we learn the reasons for being responsible.

Continental philosophy is witnessing a global renaissance of speculative philosophy. And while some corners of this movement are gaining traction in art- and architecture-theoretical circles, its application to philosophical aesthetics has been forestalled in favor of metaphysical and, secondarily, epistemological inquiry. This essay tracks some of the ways that speculative aesthetics is emerging, and opening new pathways, within the renaissance. It accomplishes three primary tasks. First, it enumerates several of the ways that the name “speculative aesthetics” has been mobilized in contemporary speculative philosophy. Second, it presents and develops one approach to speculative aesthetics, namely Graham Harman’s, and highlights its indebtedness to Levinas. Third, it briefly endorses a particular way forward for speculative aesthetics, one that is object-oriented (like Harman’s) and articulated in a recent essay by N. Katherine Hayles, the work of Steven Shaviro, and my book Plastic Bodies.

Scholars—philosophers and scientists alike—have recently reintroduced the New Realism movement, which has its roots in the soil of early twentieth-century philosophy, as a challenge to continental philosophy. This essay will propose a “BLT correction” (Bacon, lecture, theatre) in order to criticize, instead of support, the current tendency to underestimate the insightfulness of phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy. The paper will discuss a hermeneutic of Idols proposed by Francis Bacon, and will conclude by proposing Paul Ricoeur’s correlating inclusion of objectifying explanation (expliquer/comprendre) as a necessary phase in interpretative action.

By recognizing Immanuel Kant as the founder of the so-called being-knowing fallacy, the Italian new realism proposed and defended by Maurizio Ferraris argues for the autonomy of ontology from epistemology. The dependence of reality on our conceptual framework would in fact transform our world in a system of beliefs that loses its connection with the “hardness” of the given data. This paper discusses Ferraris’s claims by maintaining that they are based upon an insufficient reading of history of philosophy, particularly, upon a misinterpretation of Kant’s philosophy. Firstly, we shortly analyze the relationship between transcendental philosophy and post-modernism through a comparison with Friedrich Nietzsche: we criticize their conflation. Secondly, we take into consideration Kant’s arguments about science and answer a particular objection of Ferraris by investigating how we can legitimately acquire knowledge in the deep past without contradicting Kantianism. In this sense, we believe that the new realism presents inconsistent arguments.

This paper questions the widespread assumption that education can and should mold students to socially desirable ends. It proceeds by sketching an important part of the intellectual history informing Foucault’s genealogy of this assumption’s emergence in a disciplinary society. This history involves Georges Canguilhem, Foucault’s elective master. And in the relation between the writings of master and student, we find a different exemplification of education, namely, as a thoroughly dialogical and philosophical activity undertaken for the sake of freedom. Examining this historical relation also: 1) establishes Canguilhem’s international importance as a philosopher because of his role in the 1953 UNESCO report on The Teaching of Philosophy; 2) helps clarify Foucault’s understanding of philosophical activity as problematization and his understanding of normativity; 3) helps think about education and the history of philosophy without looking for master theorists, but rather philosophical schools.

For a long time, Gilbert Simondon’s work was known only as either a philosophy restricted to the problem of technology or as an inspirational source for Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. As Simondon’s thinking is now finally in the process of being recognized in its own right as one of the most original philosophies of the twentieth century, this also entails that some critical work needs to be done to disentangle it from an all too hasty identification with (or even subsumption under) Deleuzian categories. While both Simondon and Deleuze have made crucial contributions towards a theory of differential individuation that significantly diverges from other authors associated with French poststructuralism insofar as they insist on the dynamic and vital dimension of difference, they also differ on crucial points. Whereas Simondon sees the process of becoming as transductive amplification, Deleuze theorizes it as intensifying involution, leading to two notably distinct concepts of difference.

This essay examines Slavoj Žižek’s radical pedagogy by drawing on his concepts of parallax and his gloss on objet petit a.

In this interview, Judith Butler remembers her teacher, the phenomenologist Maurice Natanson. Natanson observed that learning how to see is central to both teaching and learning, and Professor Butler reflects on Natanson’s views of the relation between perception, pedagogy, and world-making. She discusses the possibilities and limits of phenomenology, and its engagements with intentionality, reason, and faith. Professor Butler also reflects on the influence of phenomenology on her theory of gender performativity as well as her recent work on bodies in alliance.

Simon Critchley discusses his views on education and philosophy, reflecting on his experiences as a student from childhood to the present, his anxieties about teaching, and what philosophical writing he wants from his students. By discussing his relationships with influential teachers in his life, Dr. Critchley explores the problem of teachers as masters; the need to develop philosophy’s approach to tradition while engaging problems posed to it by work on race and gender; his experience conducting online, public philosophy through The Stone; and the politics of student and adjunct labor in higher education.

In this essay I examine Derrida’s attempts to transform how philosophy is conceived, specifically as this occurs in his writings on education. In these writings Derrida challenges two understandings of philosophy—in his interventions into debates on lycée education he targets philosophy in France, while in texts related to the founding of the Collège International de Philosophie at stake is philosophy understood as a broader European institution. I argue that in each case key in Derrida’s challenge is his rethinking of philosophy’s relation to other disciplines, and I suggest that this rethinking can aid us in our own attempts to transform education in philosophy.

It is well known that the American director Terrence Malick studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell and translated the work of Martin Heidegger. He eventually traded Harvard and Oxford for Hollywood, though. This essay traces Malick's evolution from budding academic philosopher to cinematic innovator. It suggests that Malick's cinematic career should be viewed as both a rejection of academic philosophy and a celebration of the examined life.

This essay offers a discussion of how Arthur Danto educated me philosophically both through his personal example and through his work. Along the way, I detail what I take to be his most important lesson: to engage deeply and seriously with the subject of one’s philosophy, in his case predominantly art, and thus always to retain contact with the world outside of philosophy. Danto modeled a truly engaged philosopher of art, attending to history, actual practices and contemporary currents, without sacrificing philosophical clarity and depth.

The aim of this interview has been to rekindle the debate surrounding the meaning and purpose of education in today’s society. Is a humanistic education still relevant in a world obsessed with scientific proof and driven by a problem-solving mentality, or is it becoming obsolete, as some experts in education seem to suggest? (http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2016/07/26/actualidad/1469530199_692638.html). While recalling, often humorously, his own experience as both a student and an educator, Vattimo stresses the importance of freedom for the emergence of critical thinking—or, better, actual thinking; and since freedom has mainly been the prerogative of humanistic disciplines he warns against the ongoing tendency to subject all spheres of knowledge (including philosophy and literature) to the rigours of a scientific approach.

The memories of the teaching we had during the seventies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona show, forty years later, that this teaching was not a matter of a premeditated learning program. However, the diversity of the teachers we knew, their characters and examples, project a certain shadow of a philosophical experience that has been shared by several generations of contemporary Catalan philosophers.

A memoir of Richard Rorty as a teacher, a philosopher, an intellectual, and a man of letters, by a former student.

Levinas rarely speaks about non-human animals directly, but his texts and his interviews are saturated with animal rhetoric. Levinas’s most ubiquitous gesture is to cast non-human animals as beings whose striving to live is a form of violence. These images constitute violence as endemic to nature, and provide the essential contrast to what Levinas regards as the strictly human event of ethics. In order to sufficiently interrogate the fate of non-human animals in Levinas’s philosophy, we must address the manner in which this animal imagery functions in Levinas’s rhetoric. What conceptions of the human are sustained, and what possibilities for an ethical comportment toward non-human animals are foreclosed, as a result of this oppositional imagery? How do essential vulnerabilities appear only as violence, and what forms of violence remain unacknowledged through their veiling by related vulnerabilities? What philosophical consequences result from Levinas’s relegation of violence, including human violence, to the figure of the animal or to animality? How might Levinas’s philosophy be transformed if we were to address ourselves to his imaginative acts of segregation and complementarity vis-à-vis human beings and non-human animals?

The concept of intellectual equality dominates Jacques Rancière’s prolific (and ever increasing) bibliography and remains fundamental to his aesthetic philosophy. Whereas equality’s relationship to Rancièrean pedagogy, politics, and literature has been discussed at length in recent years, however, I argue that translation represents a sustained and specific focus in Rancière’s political-aesthetic framework, one that scholarship has so far overlooked. This article considers the important but rarely-cited essay “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization” alongside several of Rancière’s more canonical works in order to trace the role of translation as a metonymy, a scholarly style, and a political activity in his philosophical thought. The intersection of translation with ways of “doing, being, and saying” clarifies Rancière’s elegant elision of poetics and politics and ultimately sheds new light on his specific contribution to literary studies.

This paper critiques Adorno’s interpretation of Paul Celan’s poetry, as well as some of the philosophical ideas that motivate it. For Adorno, Celan’s poetry is “hermetic”—it refuses aesthetic representation; and, by virtue of this hermeticism, it expresses the horror of the Holocaust—a horror whose content is that it refuses aesthetic representation. I give a reading of Celan’s “Tenebrae,” from his 1959 collection Sprachgitter, and show that it uses aesthetic representation; that this use expresses the horror of the Holocaust; and that, in comparison to this, Adorno’s concept of hermeticism is a way of concealing this horror.

This paper has three interwoven aims: (1) to demonstrate the constitutive role of style in deconstruction, which, when not entirely misconstrued, has yet to be rigorously appreciated; (2) to develop the notion of ‘de-distancing’ (Ent-fernung, é-loignement) as a necessary but overlooked notion for understanding not only the ontological stakes of Dasein in Being in Time but also Derrida’s intervention in the relation between Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the limits of metaphysics; (3) to demonstrate that Derrida’s recourse to de-distancing as the spatiality of woman in Spurs punctures the horizon within which Heidegger attempts to situate the notion for essential reasons and, in the same stroke, instances the constitutive role of style in deconstruction.

This article argues that the works of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman are complementary, specifically in their analyses of disciplinary power. This analysis would be what Foucault calls a ‘micro-physics’ of power. Micro-physics is an important concept even in Foucault’s later lectures, but it remains a sub-discipline of genealogy Foucault himself never pursues. Goffman’s works, which rely upon notions of social performance, personal spaces, and the construction of the self through these, fulfill the conditions of micro-physical analysis well. Using Goffman’s works, I argue that his style of ethnographic analysis helps clarify certain fundamental questions about disciplinary power left unquestioned in Foucault’s works—namely, the ‘internalization of the gaze’ and its ‘spontaneous’ efficiency. I conclude that disciplinary power is not actually a process of internalization at all, but a systematic divestment of the subject’s access to the external processes and spaces on which the production and performance of his ‘self’ depends.

This essay conceives ecological life as radically dependent, vulnerable, and horrific. Epistemologically speaking, we are quite ignorant of the web of dependency that sustains our lives. Our ecological condition often prevents us from locating and identifying our dependencies and the many ways our actions impact the environment. This is the terror and danger that plagues the Anthropocene. Our ignorance bears an ontological weight that can be drawn out with the concept of trust. Trust, I argue, is not a choice. Trust is a necessity to which we are riveted, and one that is always conditioned by our vulnerability and ignorance. The picture of ecological trust that I paint is not a hopeful one: it is dark, pessimistic, and urgent. It opposes visions of our future that are superstitious and optimistic about our ability to respond effectively to climate change.

Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology has received much attention recently, both critical and constructive, but much less work has been done looking at the relationship between Marion’s work on Descartes and his phenomenological project. The present article begins by making a point of clarifying Marion’s understanding of the meaning of Descartes’s cogito, and contrasting it with the standard understanding as found in Leibniz, Kant, and Heidegger. Following the discussion of these various interpretations of the cogito, we examine some of the similarities between Marion’s particular interpretation of Descartes’s cogito as a performative exercise and Marion’s particular phenomenological analyses of givenness and the saturated phenomenon. Notably, in Marion’s view both the cogito and givenness overcome incorrect conceptions of objectness and being, both of them exceed the limits of syllogistic logical formulations, and both are irreducible to their apparent constituting parts.

My aim in this essay is to show that Edith Stein’s influence on Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception is predominantly through her early work On the Problem of Empathy. Though he does not give Stein due acknowledgement, Merleau-Ponty is closer to her philosophically than to her near contemporary Max Scheler, who receives much more attention. Whilst Stein’s influence is in the main difficult to disentangle from that of Husserl, some of her reformulations of and additions to the latter’s ideas are taken up recognisably in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. I focus on her accounts of bodily ownership and embodied willing and acting, and on her view of how the ownness of conscious human life is a condition of explicit self-awareness and empathic experience. I conclude by showing how her contributions are developed further by Merleau-Ponty, most notably in his reworking of the representation, decision and implementation model of human action.

How is anxiety the source of knowledge? How can Heidegger identify death as nothingness? How does anxiety engender resoluteness?

This article is a translation of the third chapter of Part Four of Günter Seubold’s Kunst als Enteignis, 2nd ed. (Bonn: DenkMal Verlag, 2005). It discusses Martin Heidegger’s notes on Paul Klee.

On May 19th, 1958, the day after Martin Heidegger and Shin’ichi Hisamatsu led a one-day colloquium in Freiburg on the topic of “Art and Thinking,” the two men came together to discuss the success of the colloquium. The conversation soon turned to the work of Paul Klee, the Swiss artist, and from there to the newest developments in Heidegger’s thinking about language. Heidegger had just presented some of this new thinking during his lecture on Stefan George’s poem “Das Wort” in Vienna a week earlier. Having attended the lecture in Vienna, Hisamatsu used the opportunity of the conversation to ask Heidegger for elaboration on this new thinking and to clarify connections between it and language in the Zen tradition. The conversation was transcribed and later published in volume 16 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe.

On May 18, 1958, Martin Heidegger led a one-day colloquium in Freiburg on the topic of “Art and Thinking” together with Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, the Japanese philosopher and Buddhist scholar. The protocol of the colloquium, published in volume 16 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, presents a conversation among the colloquium participants about art in the East Asian world. In this conversation, Heidegger is particularly interested in hearing from Hisamatsu about the conception of art present in the East Asian world prior to the introduction of Western aesthetic concepts and about the relationship between form and formlessness in East Asian aesthetics. The conversation allows Hisamatsu to clarify for the participants what he takes to be the most essential features of Zen art and how these features compare with those found in modern Western abstract art.

This article gives an account of the material on the art of Paul Klee found in the Nachlass of Martin Heidegger and indicates ideas central to Heidegger’s encounter with Klee.

This document gathers together and translates Heidegger’s notes on Paul Klee that have been published up to now.

The objective of this paper is to critically revise the anthropocentric perspective that conditions the Heideggerian philosophy of animality. I shall criticize this theoretical assumption as shared by Heidegger in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1929–1930) and in some of Heidegger’s later reflections on animality following the Kehre, such as the Letter on Humanism (1946) and the Zollikon Seminars (1959–1969). Hence, the main issue I am raising here is that Heidegger’s reflection on animality is revealed as a theoretical strategy aimed at exorcising the presence of the animal in the human and the presence of the natural-biological in the linguistic-spiritual. In my opinion, rather than outlining a withdrawal from the humanist perspective pertaining to metaphysics, Heidegger’s philosophy marks its radicalisation in a hyper-humanist sense. Indeed, Heidegger reveals himself as being incapable of understanding the deep ontological nexus that unites animality and humanity.

A homage in the guise of an essay, this is the story of the last course Reiner Schürmann taught. As a text, it attempts to describe, situate, and come to terms with the power of Schürmann’s teaching in the context of his last lectures on Heidegger’s Being and Time. But if it is to be true to the deepest lessons of Schürmann’s thinking, it will also need to be heard as an invitation to interpret together the significance of his reading so that it may be permitted to shape the course of the lives of those who encounter it.

According to Heidegger’s philosophy, the essence of time is not chronological; for this reason, history is not a linear succession of facts but is opened up by an event: that is what Heidegger’s philosophy reveals at first glance and it’s also what we can’t consider suspect today. But it is less obvious that the ‘base’ from which time and history will disclose themselves is the phenomenon of love: love stands out in the letters of Heidegger to Hannah Arendt as a most excellent way of temporalizing time, and it allows the philosophy of finitude to be reconciled with the eternity.

The thoughts of apocalypse can either be intense and demanding, or lead to the risk of abandoning the present to a state of inertia and impotence. The apocalypse can be, in fact, the moment of the Last Judgment. In this case, justice is related to the revelation of truth. But the apocalypse can also be the revelation of the end of any truth, i.e. the revelation that the history doesn’t have any meaning, that the end is as endless as it is hopeless. This article takes up “the apocalypse of Blanchot.” It shows that by thinking that the apocalypse has always already occurred, history is not what leads to an end, but is rather the responsibility to an endless end. In that sense, for Blanchot, history is not the redemption of contingency as eternity; rather, what must be historicized is the eternity of the end.

This article analyzes Heidegger’s Paris lecture, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in an attempt to understand the historical “task” that Heidegger seeks to examine when confronted with the agony of philosophy today. I attempt to valorize the understanding of time and history that Heidegger stages in his reading by demonstrating its entrance to be radical and novel with respect to other moments in Heidegger’s production: history here is not of “destiny” (Schicksal), that is, it does not coincide with the appropriating orientation of man in time already presented in Heidegger’s other texts; rather, it is understood on the basis of the opening to the future that fragilizes and suspends all hope and all historical resolution. History is thought here as the desertification of present times, the completion of metaphysical nihilism, in which there opens at the same time a “perhaps” that, repeated many times throughout the lecture, takes up in all its complexity the problem of the future’s coming, of the extraordinary, of the opening, that is, of what, from the future, exceeds destiny.

The text tries to make plausible the necessity in every thought of time to think an un-time—a 'field' without the form of time that only allows for conceiving of time as a form.

This essay is a broad overview of philosophy’s capacity of facing the historicity of nature. It shows why classical philosophy of history, especially Hegel, left nature outside of history, and also in what sense this kind of philosophy is outdated. Then it shows how natural sciences discovered historical phenomena since the invention of biology at the very end of the eighteenth century and especially since Darwinism, although these did not examine the philosophical presuppositions of their theories. Assuming that the challenge of contemporary philosophy of history is to learn to include nature in history, the essay finally examines climatic change as a test case that allows us to see the problematics of nature’s historicity today. Climatic change cannot be explained if one holds onto the classical division into natural sciences and humanities, and this is because it is neither a natural nor a cultural phenomenon but manifests reality as a techno-nature, that has a singular, non-teleological and eventful historicity, the understanding of which is crucial today.

Modern Japanese thinkers tried to understand “history” as processes of translation through which the Japanese culture/society/nation integrated itself into world history. This paper analyzes Miki Kiyoshi’s (1897-1945) Philosophy of History [1932], a prominent example of such an approach to history. His understanding of history is deeply influenced by Martin Heidegger’s thoughts about facticity. The most essential part of Miki’s notion of “history” lies in his practico-poietic conception of history, which is elaborated through his own interpretation of Heidegger (via Marx). This paper attempts to investigate how Miki developed such a practico-poietic theory as well as how he was faced with its limit, not only on a theoretical level, but also in the specific historical contexts in the 1930s and 1940s. To seek answers to these questions enables us to understand why Miki came to re-create philosophical discourse to describe the space of history in approaching the question of translation, that is, the question concerning the transformation by and through language.

The problem of the origin of geometry is crucial for understanding the formation and development of Derrida’s early conception of historicity. Mathematical idealities offer the most powerful example of meanings that are fully transmissible through history. Against Husserl’s explanation of the particular, Derrida considers that the logic and progression of mathematical idealities can only be explained if they are referred to non-intentional and pre-subjective movements of production and development of significations: language itself, which is structured as non-phonetic writing. Historicity is, to Derrida’s eyes, the non-intentional and non-present structure at work in the formation and transmission of meaning. Therefore, pure transmissibility of meaning is an essentially equivocal and creative process. However, Derrida’s analyses fail at understanding the logic of mathematical progression. He explains it by generalizing consciousness’ inner temporality to what he describes as being the “dialecticity” of non-present temporal modes (retention - protention). But the dialecticity of mathematical concepts is not reducible to the dialecticity of temporal modes of experience. We cannot characterize the pre-intentional conditions of historicity if we put into brackets the concrete field in which history becomes factual, i.e. in which meaning and appearing actually historialize: the effective progression of objects.

This paper discusses hope and hopelessness in relation to history. It does so by turning to Benjamin’s famous statement that hope exists only for the hopeless, and to Derrida’s late thoughts on solitude and the world.

There is no heritage.

Vattimo’s thought, activity and engagement concentrate nowadays primarily on politics—in theory as well as inpraxis. The aim of this essay is to reconstruct how Vattimo developed his political ideas starting from an aesthetical inquiry—and in particular from Luigi Pareyson’s theory of Formativity. This contribution will focus on Vattimo›s “weak, effective fight” against what he describes as the “monopoly of the truth” in order to analyze how a hermeneutical conception of a work of art has been the model for his “Hermeneutic Communism,” based on a renewed, subversive idea of dialogue and weakening democracy.

With Gianni Vattimo’s late collaborative works with Santiago Zabala, Vattimo is proving to be not only a philosopher of emancipatory hermeneutics but also one who is making his own distinct contribution to liberation philosophy. This article critically explores Vattimo’s liberationist weak thought in the context of the New Materialisms. Though Vattimo’s post-metaphysical hermeneutics lacks the linkage with the natural sciences and eschews the development of a political ontology, which are both characteristic of the New Materialisms, his deliberate reactivation and rehabilitation of Marx by way of Heidegger eventuates in an expressed preferential option for the poor. This animating concern with what Vattimo and Zabala term “the discharge of capitalism” restores the original animating spirit of Marx’s dialectical materialism and thus makes the political dimension latent in materialist thought explicit and provides a new species of the New Materialisms.

This is the first English translation of the majority of Fichte’s 1807 essay on Machiavelli, which has been hailed as a masterpiece and was important for the development of German idealist political thought, as well as for its reception by figures such as Carl von Clausewitz, Max Weber, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt. Fichte’s essay attempts to resuscitate Machiavelli as a legitimate political thinker and an “honest, reasonable, and meritorious man.” It tacitly critiques Napoleon, who was occupying Prussia when Fichte composed the piece, and calls on the Germans to resist the French. And some have argued that it marks a shift in Fichte’s political thought toward a more realist position.

I propose a reading of Vattimo which focuses attention on and develops his suggestions regarding the Heideggerian meditation on technology in relation to the history of Being. In a number of texts, Vattimo takes up Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of modern technology as Ge-Stell, paying particular attention to those moments where he suggests that in the enframing we can catch a first glimpse of a turning in Being. In Bestand, beings begin to loose the characteristics of subject and object, preparing for the Kehre to a new epoch in the history of Being. Vattimo contends that this turn is further developed in the new information and communication technologies of which Heidegger was only dimly aware. I argue then that one of Vattimo’s key contributions to post-Heideggerian hermeneutic ontology is to suggest that we may locate the turn to a new epoch in the history of Being in information, understood as a newly emergent paradigm for the way in which beings appear. However, in order for this to be further developed, Vattimo’s work must be uncoupled from the focus on natural language he inherits from Heidegger and Gadamer.

In La società trasparente (1989), Vattimo places the “relative chaos” of the mass media at the heart of his understanding of postmodernity as an epoch of the weakening of being. The consequent decline of strong foundations for political authority was part of Vattimo’s emancipatory reading of the media. In the second edition of the book (2000) he claims that such postmodern emancipation is limited by a lack of conflictuality in the aesthetic ideals promoted by the free market. In this article, I ask howVattimo’s media philosophy anticipates elements of his more recent political philosophy. Reading Vattimo against Heidegger and Byung-Chul Han, I conclude that his insistence on the nihilistic origins of hermeneutics may offer a way of criticizing the lacking conflictuality in current digital media in a fashion that does not desire a return to ultimate truth claims.

Since the 1980s, Vattimo’s “Weak Thought” has been an emendation of his previous revolutionary and dialectical reading of Nietzsche. Marxist terrorism in Europe exposed the indissoluble link between dialectics and violence, and consequently Vattimo’s revision was a rejection of any reconstructive effort for a new political and social order. But in the age of Silvio Berlusconi, Vattimo rediscovered the joy of political commitment. Ecce Comu was a call to pursue “a project of human emancipation” founded “on the search for equality.” More recently, Of Reality and Hermeneutic Communism are a rejection of neoliberal philosophies and constitute a jump back to the Seventies. Vattimo aims once again to change the world and reality, a reality that other philosophies (Ferraris’ New Realism) simply contemplate as a pure fact. Vattimo defends the “revolutionary” meaning of hermeneutics against realism’s conservative tendencies and develops a project close to Gramsci’s “philosophy of praxis.”

This paper explores the emergency-motif as it is received in Vattimo’s weak communism through his reading of Heidegger’s concept of the “lack of emergency” and Benjamin’s weak messianism. The “event” of weakening the metaphysical grounds of framed democracy and the overcoming of the lack emergency is discussed by taking into consideration the difference between the political and politics. Against the background of this discussion, Vattimo’s interpretations of kenôsis and caritas are conceived of as paving the way to an existential analytic of the kind of being-with which the political project of post-metaphysical hermeneutics tacitly refers to.

This manifesto demonstrates the relevance of weak thought to ecological thinking. In eleven theses, I argue that the background meaning of Gianni Vattimo’s philosophy rotates on the invisible orbit of such thinking; that the weakening of metaphysics implies a transformation of the economic into the ecological framing of the world, and that the ensuing ecology is utterly rid of naturalism.

Vattimo’s political liberalism often sits uncomfortably with his non-foundational commitments. The attempt to disentangle postmodern thought from moral relativism is seen as a disingenuous strategy: one either arbitrarily adopts liberal values or does so because it is part of our tradition, thus depending on the very metaphysical foundations which Vattimo denies to other thinkers. One answer may well be to distinguish metaphysics from ontology and show that Vattimo’s justification of liberalism arises from an oscillation between Heidegger and Nietzsche. However, the following article maintains that Vattimo’s justification is often not properly understood because it is peculiarly Italian, seeking a plural account of truth derived from the human being’s peculiar position as the imaginative creature.

Philosophy of History is in crisis. This crisis has a structural origin in separating a finitude of the one (fate, destiny, nation, people, identity) from an infinitude of the many (individuals, biographies, contingencies, banalities). This difference seems to produce an aporia. Where could history be that would talk of both?

L’affaire Faye: Johannes Fritsche’s bizarre Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1999) mistranslates every key term in Sein und Zeit §74 and distorts the entire book. Gaëtan Pégny’s justification of Emmanuel Faye’s mistranslations of Heidegger is beyond irresponsible. François Rastier’s “Open Letter to Philosophy Today” lends uncritical support to Faye’s sketchy scholarship.

The aim of the paper is to examine the limits of Aristotle’s and Arendt’s contributions to a philosophical anthropology. By focusing on the concept of ‘potentiality’—and thus the ‘good life’ as a potentiality awaiting actualization—the limit emerges from the way Aristotle understands ‘life.’ His discussion of slavery is pivotal in this regard.

In this article, I address (1) the anti-academic procedures by which Professor Thomas Sheehan affirms that I “continue” a “scam,” before (2) presenting in a greater detail my work on the notion of being as a code name (Deckname) in Heidegger. In sections 3, 4, and 5, I analyze the way in which Sheehan authoritatively hollows out the state of the debate around the interpretation of Heidegger and the weakness of his philological interpretation. Finally, in the last section, I return to the necessity of the research that Sheehan’s “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud Into Philosophy?” attempts to discredit.

In addressing the fundamental issues of Merleau-Ponty’s last ontology, for which Being is an expressive movement, this paper focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on painting, sculpture and, mainly, cinema. Two reasons justify such a choice. The first one is that Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on films as artistic objects are starting to become better known, while an exclusive privilege has been too long given to his texts on painting, sculpture and literature. An enrichment of our reading of his aesthetics and ontology is thus made possible. The second reason is that, although it is true that Merleau-Ponty’s general aesthetic doctrine introduces us to the question of movement, of its meaning and its ontological status as “expression,” it is even more true that, in the framework of this general aesthetic doctrine, his analyses of the mode of expression of cinematographic images become especially significant.

Merleau-Ponty’s abiding interest in the art and the enigmatic person of Paul Cézanne focuses importantly on both the pictorial expression of space, and on the freedom of artistic creation in the face of adversity. Examining these issues in relation to the art of Claude Monet (whom Merleau-Ponty neglected), together with Monet’s status as a precursor of painterly abstraction, one can follow the Merleau-Pontyan “indirect logic of institution” to confront the work of Joan Mitchell, within the parameters of gestural abstraction, so as to consider both her perspective on spatiality and horizon and her artistic trans-substantiation of adversity, focusing on the almost ecstatic intensity of her 1983-1985 series, La grande vallée.

This article engages Agamben’s view that philosophy and poetry need to remarry, to heal a fracture that springs from the origin of Western culture between knowing and having the (inaccessible) object. While Agamben would like philosophy to wax more poetic (to have the object) and poetry to show more awareness of its philosophical implications (to know the object), he also encourages direct interventions between these two arenas. This essay thus stages an interpenetration of poetic writing and philosophy (Agamben with a little Derrida). James’s embodiment of Agamben’s theory of melancholia in The Aspern Papers set alongside Brodsky’s reflection of Agamben’s notions of nudity, the specter, and the messianic in Watermark—in relation to depictions of Venice—leads to the realization that Agamben’s messianic renders melancholia inoperative. Agamben’s messianic vision that finds salvation in loss cancels the desirability of clinging to the lost object by showing the redemption of its passage.

In a short paper bearing the title “The Deleuzian Fold of Thought” (1996), Jean-Luc Nancy engages a concept that has a prominent place in contemporary continental philosophy, the fold, so as to accentuate a shared tendency that nevertheless estranges his own thought from Gilles Deleuze’s. This shared tendency deals with the shifting conception of thinking through the fold itself, the unfolding and refolding of the fold, which in its discontinuity has transformed the image of what it means to think. I do not seek to reconcile the two thinkers through the fold, but to demonstrate the way in which their estrangement through the fold is what it means to think and defines the exigency of thought.

This paper is about the Bergsonian synchronization of the perpetual present or memory with the passing present or the body. It shows how forgetting narrows and focuses consciousness on the needs of action and how motor memory allows the imagining of the useful side of memory. The paper highlights the strength of Bergson’s analysis by respectively confronting classical theories of memory, the highly regarded perspective of the phenomenological school, Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergsonism, and Sartre’s theory of mental imagery.

This article considers Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hope in terms of its significance for debates in contemporary humanist thought. It is argued that Bloch achieves a commendable balance between, on the one hand, the maintenance of Utopian ideals, and, on the other hand, ethical vigilance towards the vulnerable position of the human individual. Bloch’s Utopian hermeneutics offers a corrective to the limitations and shortcomings of anti-totalitarian humanism. The potential for a constructive dialogue between an interpretation of Bloch’s work and anti-totalitarian authors (such as Emmanuel Levinas and Tzvetan Todorov) is explored. Bloch’s phenomenology of death indicates the extent to which his philosophy remains attentive to the existential experiences of the individual human being. The emotion which characterises the individual subject’s realisation of his / her mortality is characteristically one of melancholy over the incomplete work of life.

This article discusses the relation between Judaism and political theology in the work of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig. Both Cohen and Rosenzweig give an interpretation of Judaism that prioritizes the messianic ideal while maintaining the priority of philosophy over religion. With respect to political theology, this article argues that Cohen and Rosenzweig criticize the priority assigned to the national state in modern politics in favour of a politics that is both cosmopolitan and republican, in so far as it makes the internal relation between peoplehood and rule of law central, and detaches the rule of law from sovereignty. In this sense, the messianism of Cohen and Rosenzweig is opposed to Christian conceptions of the messianic recovered in recent contemporary political theory. The article concludes with a discussion of Rosenzweig’s hypothesis concerning how the antagonism between these two forms of messianism are to be reconciled in a new understanding of natural right.

In this article, I address (1) the anti-academic procedures by which Professor Sheehan affirms that I “continue” a “scam,” before (2) presenting in a greater detail my work on the notion of being as a Deckname in Heidegger. In sections 3, 4, and 5, I analyze the way in which Professor Sheehan authoritatively hollows out the state of the debate around the interpretation of Heidegger and the weakness of his philological interpretation. Finally, in the last section, I return to the necessity of the research that Sheehan’s “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud into Philosophy?” attempts to discredit.

In a paper entitled “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud into Philosophy?” (Philosophy Today 59[3] [2015]), Thomas Sheehan accuses Faye of committing many blunders in Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. In this paper, I address what is according to Sheehan himself the most important part of his paper, namely his charges against Faye’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Being and Time. I show that they are all wholly unfounded. All the aspects of Being and Time that Sheehan addresses speak not only not against Faye but rather even for Faye.

Steven Crowell’s new book is a wake-up call for phenomenology in general and for Heidegger studies in particular. This article focuses on Crowell’s robust reinstatement of the phenomenological reduction and the transcendental reduction in Heidegger’s work.

The monstrous power of the blind in Diderot’s 1949 Letter is not due to its ability to make people laugh or afraid, as its most common etymology would indicate: monstrum, monstrare, to point to an abnormal fact. The monstrous power of Diderot’s monster is that of one who shows: monere, monitor, in the manner of a guide or pathfinder. It shows us that everything that lives, and especially the human being, is a hybrid. It takes the idea of a possible mixture of animals and humans into account, thus the boldness of an ‘anti-speciesism’ as presented in the fantastical bestiary of Alembert’s Dream. It brings the humanism of essence to an end and invites us to redefine a new social bond.

In this paper I explore this question of the ways we might form enabling assemblages with non-human others, by returning to Spinoza’s theory of the composite individual. The challenge, as I see it, is less that of a need to move beyond a romanticized view of Nature as a harmonious whole, Nature as a perpetual threat, or Nature as motivated by a final cause (whether good or evil). The problem that confronts us, rather, is a problem of composition—which Nature do we ally with, what components? How do we understand or define, much less defend, localized ecosystems which are supported (and threatened) by a dizzying and infinite array of intensive and extensive properties? This is a problem of the monstrous infinite.

This paper responds to comments by Maxime Doyon and Thomas Sheehan on aspects of my book, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Among the topics discussed are the relations between phenomenology and analytic philosophy, the difference between a Brentanian and an Husserlian approach to intentional content, the normative structure of the intentional content of noetic states such as thinking and imagining, the implications of taking a phenomenological approach to Heidegger’s concept of “being,” Heidegger’s “correlationism,” and the normative character of Heidegger’s analysis of Angst, death, and conscience.

Foucault characterizes the defining feature of modern politics in terms of a new form of power concerned with maximizing life, biopolitics, as opposed to the sovereign right to kill. This characterization becomes problematic, especially when the overwhelming frequency of death and massacres in the twentieth century is considered. The question of how so much death is produced in an economy of power concerned with the maximization of life has stirred considerable debate. This paper argues that there is a death-function internal to biopolitics that should be considered in terms of biopolitical social defense. In making the life of a population its object, biopolitics makes death into an immanent condition of the population. The history of the emergence of this death-function internal to biopolitics is traced out in terms of different figurations of the monstrous: the shift from a juridical conception of monstrosity to a criminal and then medico-normative monstrosity shows that the steeping of death in the life of the population is done by normalizing judgment, through which death becomes an immanent condition of society. Thus, I show that the defense of society against its own monstrosity is done on both the disciplinary and the biopolitical levels.

In this paper, I analyse the problem of monstrosity as a key point of Lucretius’s theory through the opposite interpretations of Bergson and Canguilhem. According to Canguilhem, Lucretius’s philosophy can be described as follows: before the constitution of the ‘pacts of the nature,’ forms proliferate in the kingdom of Chaos. Following the pacts, the Kingdom of the form and of the Cosmos is established. Following Bergson, on the contrary, Lucretius’s pacts of nature represent the ‘kingdom of necessity’ and the ‘eternal law of nature.’ Not in the sense that the persistence of forms is ensured, but rather in the sense of the necessity of the combinations of atoms. Hence, the form’s constitution is not secured by the pacts of nature, and a monster is not an exception to them. Both interpretations paradigmatically illustrate what is at stake in the concept of monstrosity, namely the meaning of Lucretian determinism and its relation with chance.

In Leopardi’s writings the idea of the monster/monstrous means a deviation from nature or a consequence of something that is considered monstrous because it belongs to, or reflects a taste or a set of criteria of evaluation belonging to another time or place. There is therefore both an absolute and a relative meaning of monster/monstrous, according to whether it refers to the real history of mankind, which progressively diverged from nature, or to the imaginary foundation of taste and judgement. Nonetheless, these two moments are intertwined and refer one to the other reciprocally. In fact, the real difference between humanity and nature is the source of every imagination about monstrosity. One might even say that the notion of the monster/monstrous is the chain that links the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ because it is the result of a miscalculation that makes a mere partial viewpoint absolute.