This article discusses Hermann Levin Goldschmidt’s philosophical work , first published in 1976 as within the context of the field of futurology. Whereas his historical work seeks to restore a legacy that the Holocaust destroyed, his philosophical argument against the futurologists reclaims the future from the realms of forecasting and planning. Goldschmidt gains this unique philosophical position on the future from the perspective of German Jewish philosophers and scholars who shaped his historical work. The intersection of different lines of inquiry and scholarship that informed Goldschmidt’s perspective took shape within the contexts of his experience of exile and as a witness of World War II and the Holocaust. For Goldschmidt, to take the future seriously was to remain open to its possibilities.

This paper argues for an interpretation of Chinese philosophy as the pursuit of the Dao rather than the popular reading of it as a kind of wisdom literature. I examine the shared pursuit of two major Chinese schools of thought: Daoism and Confucianism—Dao, and compare it to the task of philosophy represented in the works of two major western thinkers—Hegel and Heidegger. By investigating the Dao comparatively with Hegel’s Concept and Heidegger’s philosophia, I reveal the common quest of philosophical thinking in both traditions.

W. Norris Clarke described his personalism as “substance-in-relation,” which emphasizes the equality of primordial modes of substance and relation as a solution to the dichotomy between substance and relation created in the history of metaphysics of the human person. African personalism seems to conceive the human person as essentially relational, which is mostly expressed in the saying: “I am because we are.” Though some contemporary African scholars, like Molefe, try to indicate the priority of the individual, the relational concept remains dominant, which makes it inclined toward collectivism, that most often seems to repress the individual (substance). This article aims to attempt a proposal of a reconstruction of African personalism using the model of Clarke’s personalism by laying equal emphasis on the primordial modes of substance and relation in order to guard against individualism on the one hand and collectivism on the other hand.

In this article, I examine Reiner Schürmann’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s critique of subjectivity. By focusing on Nietzsche’s reflections on the difference between weight and lightness, I analyze Nietzsche’s critique of the appropriative nature of man and relate it to his understanding of the expropriative tendency in human existence. In the second part of the article, this Nietzschean understanding of subjectivity is de­veloped through Schürmann’s interpretation of Nietzsche. Here, the onus is placed on Schürmann’s understanding of “the will to power.” For Schürmann, the will to power is the completion of man’s appropriative nature at the same time as it is points beyond subjectivity and towards an understanding of man as an expropriative being. The aim of the article is to show up Nietzsche’s importance for Schürmann’s thought and to investigate how his interpretation can shed light on what existence would become if it transcended the limits of the appropriating subject.

This article reconstructs Slavoj Žižek’s theory of ideology as a form of fetishistic disavowal. By seeking out Žižek’s relevant influences and clarifying them, the article seeks to make the theory of fetishistic disavowal in politics intelligible to a wider audience. Moreover, the article argues that the theory of ideology advanced by Žižek in this period of his work can be understood as a theory of unconscious defense, a fact that raises important questions about the utility of psychoanalysis for political philosophy. The article also considers issues pertaining to political belief, practical irrationality, and real abstraction.

The text approaches the Hegelian dynamic between truth and certainty as it appear in the beginning of the Phenomenology as a question of truth and the sense of truth. Since this difference exceeds a merely epistemic stance and cannot be captured in terms of conceptual content, it leads to another mode of inquiry, namely, to that of a different relatedness to knowledge. Hegel’s emphasis, as I will attempt to show, on thinking the question of self-relatedness of thought in terms of experience (which is always negative) in the first place, may provide a means to identify such a mode of self-relatedness that precedes the “self” of consciousness. Such an approach would put the question of the self both against its rigid modern critiques on the one hand, and its contemporary dissolution into naturalistic objectified oblivion on the other. In this way, the essay also challenges Heidegger’s critical stance towards the Hegelian notion of “the experience of consciousness” by presenting it rather as a “consciousness of experience.” For here this double genitive expresses a repetition or return that appears as a kind of afterimage of a still-life.

The concepts of contradiction and dialogue are crucial to Hermann Goldschmidt’s Contradiction Set Free. In this paper, I place Goldschmidt into dialogue with two social thinkers for whom similar ideas were equally crucial: Georg Simmel and Donald Levine. In the case of Simmel, I highlight his theory of conflict specifically, but more generally his commitment to duality and ambiguity. In the case of Levine, I feature his attempt to articulate what he calls a “dialogic” narrative of the sociological tradition. I seek to evaluate Goldschmidt’s own thinking by his own criteria, by asking whether the sociological and the philosophical approaches to these questions are parallel, in opposition, or an instance of a contradiction in Goldschmidt’s sense.

This paper employs a psychoanalytic framework of the concept of contradiction to engage the methodological self-assuredness in which the philosophical concept of contradiction, as developed by Goldschmidt, is mapped onto a historical framework. Through readings of passages by both Freud and Goldschmidt it questions if, unlike the concept of contradiction found within Western metaphysics, “psychoanalytic contradiction” retains a capacity to call into account its own conceptual articulation.

“The human other, each singular and whole in its own right, is never the same but always a different person. Human beings don’t repeat each other; they contradict each other” (Goldschmidt, Contradiction Set Free). Originally published in German in 1976, in the long shadow of the Shoah, in response to the threat of atomic holocaust, and amidst growing recognition of ecological disaster, Goldschmidt’s Contradiction Set Free argues that emancipation lies in diversity rather than in unity, in the freeing up of contradiction rather than in uniformity. I offer a close reading of Goldschmidt’s plea for pluralism, the foundation for our inescapable moral and political responsibilities to others. Today, what insights—and what hope—does his dialogic offer for the “joyfully creative” realization of our responsibilities to the other, both human and in the natural world?

Herman Levin Goldschmidt delineates and critiques four types of “dialogism,” four ways of derailing dialogical discourse and praxis. In the following, I examine two of them: “Pan-dialogism” is the glossing over the effect of power differentials such as gender, class, and race as relevant factors in the constitution of dialogue. “Pluralogic” is the evading of true dialogue, which is intense and exclusive, by conducting simultaneously multiple superficial conversations. Pluralogic enables to escape the internal turmoil and conscience’s call for critiquing that are part and parcel of true dialogue. To examine the two dialogisms, I use Martin Buber’s thought, which Goldschmidt sees himself as continuing, as a case in point as well as a resource to further unpack Goldschmidt’s thought. In the course of the paper, I criticize what I call “Human Resource Office Morality,” the celebration of mere diversity at the expense of true contradiction.

Goldschmidt’s evocation of Leviticus 19:18 in Contradiction Set Free accomplishes heavy lifting within the distinction of the dialogic from the dialectic. Analogized to a necessary recognition of each particular and unique fulfillment of the immediate command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” dialogue is temporalized within an already near, yet not ever complete, messianic infinite. As an ongoing, active and unfinished composition of unique “nows,” dialogue’s structure is likewise epistemically distinct from the structure of dialectical synthesis. How might this distinction’s lens of Leviticus 19:18 illumine opportunities—and obstacles—for “dialogue” between humans and artificial systems? Does examining the specific case of OpenAI’s ChatGPT under the lens of Goldschmidt’s text suggest that certain questions about generative AI learning capacity might actually be questions of time?

Goldschmidt’s Contradiction Set Free confronts us with a variety of topics, political and philosophical topoi, in which he traces contradictions of thought and action. This article focuses on Goldschmidt’s omission of the sphere of language as a site of contradiction in Contradiction Set Free. I argue that it is a deliberate choice on the part of Goldschmidt to not project a metalanguage of contradiction, but to probe philosophy’s involvement in the practice of language and thus present a critique of philosophy through the contradictory impulse of language. First, I discuss the status Goldschmidt ascribes to the work of language for philosophy. From here, I engage in a discussion of the meaning of Ergriffenheit (awe) in Contradiction Set Free. Finally, I analyze two of Goldschmidt’s uses of parables and conclude with a reference to a parable by Franz Kafka.

In After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux speculates from the principle of noncontradiction’s a priori enclosure toward a standpoint of absolute contingency. Based on his propositions, I argue that his thinking continues to reproduce a contradiction between the finitude of the subject and the infinitude of the noumenal world. Accordingly, I eschew the principle of noncontradiction in favor of a principle of contradiction derived from Hermann Levin Goldschmidt’s Contradiction Set Free. Goldschmidt formulates contradiction as an Either-And-Or whereby the two contradictory terms share a space between them in which there elapses a continuous process of negotiation. If the relation between finitude and infinitude is an Either-And-Or, then there is an interpenetration between the finite and the infinite, between bounded subject and noumenal world. Goldschmidt’s method reinvigorates the contradiction with which Meillassoux is grappling and introduces a more immanent mode of infinitude that echoes certain Spinozist and pre-Spinozist strains of Jewish thought.

This article contests in detail the use that Eric Santner makes of the writings of Claude Lefort, Merleau-Ponty and Ernest Kantorowicz. Santner conceives of modernity as being haunted by, or one might almost say, poisoned by the Royal Remnants, the body of the king circulating in society as “too muchness.” He uses Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh in order to orchestrate his profoundly anti-modern position. I contend that he has grossly misinterpreted the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, as well as the work of Claude Lefort, in order to elaborate a post-secular position which ends up being a form of an apology for the Trump administration. This is effected through his denegation of the categories of political philosophy and his substitution for them with concepts taken from marketing. My article ends by contesting the notion of messianism, with or without a messiah, which has become current in certain forms of contemporary philosophy and reflecting on the role of messianism in American political culture.

In this article, I argue that Rawls is not actually an ideal theorist (as it is commonly understood), that his political theory remains unconvincing nevertheless, and that we should understand justice as failure in order to unlearn our adherence to dysfunctional ideals. I demonstrate that Rawlsian ideals are not removed from actuality, as both ideal theorists and their critics seem to think. Instead, they are already actualized as something to aspire to in a given culture. They are actual ideals. Non-ideal theorists, such as Charles Mills, who claim that instead of starting from ideals we should start from actual conditions thus miss the target. I then present an argument against theories of actual ideals: the original position requires optimal epistemological conditions in order to source actual ideals from public discourse. I offer Aamer Rahman’s “Reverse Racism” joke as a test for whether these conditions apply. I argue that in our world, they do not. Finally, I suggest justice as failure as a critical practice that may help us to unlearn our inherited dysfunctional actual ideals.

This article arranges a dialogue between Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures and Agamben’s The Adventure, prompting a foray into Lacanian theory. Gide emerges as the bridge between Lacan and Agamben, enabling us to observe a transformation of what psychoanalysis deems pathology—perversion—into a political stance: perversion involves play with the law. Gide and Agamben promote a life of adventure composed of gestures that elude the law’s ability to stamp one’s behavior as crimen. For Gide and Agamben, life is not, or should not be, a law court pronouncing judgments or a psychoanalytic session intent upon detecting pathology—not a trial but a dance.

In dialogue with Kristin Ross and Fred Moten, as well as recent theorizations of destituent power, this article aims to trace the practical logic that governs place-based politics in our anarchic epoch, including the construction of collective formations that defend them.

This article addresses the chapter in A Thousand Plateaus, “Year Zero: Faciality,” by examining Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal to “dismantle” the abstract machine that is responsible for producing the subject’s collective or group face. After examining the components of the abstract machine, including its relationship to visual perception and emotion from the perspective of American Ego Psychology, a comparison is drawn between faciality and Walter Benjamin’s earlier thesis of the reproducibility of certain kinds of images in a technological or modern media society. The article concludes by outlining the three-step program of “schizoanalysis” that Deleuze and Guattari proposed as the political objective of “dismantling the face.”

This paper argues that the inclusion of “fields” in speculative realist ontologies better explains human experience, encourages the inclusion of systems thinking, and avoids some of the unusual conclusions speculative realists currently accept. The paper begins by summarizing the philosophies of Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, as well as major criticisms of each. Second, it explores the “math as structure” theories of Stewart Shapiro and Michael Resnik, and the ways relativity and quantum physics account for objects. Using these ideas, the paper argues that Meillassoux’s reference to math and Harman’s account of objects are insufficient without including a concept of “fields.” Third, the paper defines a concept of “field” and discusses how it can be applied to speculative realism. Finally, the paper shows how incorporating the concept of “fields” allows speculative realism to answer critics more effectively by showing how transcendental structures are embedded in reality.

John Dewey’s conception of democracy as the political form devoted to the maximum individual self-realization of the citizenry, in the broadest sense of that term, promises to lift democracy above angry populism while avoiding untenable and contentious metaphysical commitments. The idea of self-realization is traditionally tied to a hierarchical and therefore unacceptable model of society. Dewey breaks this tie by stripping the idea of its metaphysical commitments. But Dewey requires supplementation. I argue that Dewey’s own insights can be best kept alive by being read in light of Stanley Cavell’s understanding of Emersonian Perfectionism, in particular the latter’s focus on the failure of the self to realize itself and its ordinary resistance to doing so. Bringing this Romanticism to bear upon Dewey’s ideas would temper them in important ways, preserving and developing what is best in the rich conception of democratic citizenship he has left us.

Fantasies have the power in the very midst of political communities, consciously and unconsciously alike, to suppress internal antagonisms in times of crises. More specifically, they help to blur aporias of a community’s ideological structures by invoking a common sense that reconstitutes the community, similar to an act of religious conversion. Their impact on the “space of reasons” is analyzed in this article because fantasies, and specifically excessive and radical fantasies, suspend the game of giving and asking for reasons. They do so in order to ground premises of contestation in the background of communal reason via an emotional and secret “code” of what it means to be a “we.” Totalitarian, monarchical, and democratic societies need this “code” to purge society of the pure formalities of political reason, or, in other words: to get rid of fantasy fatigue.

This article offers a reading of the notion of “reading” that marks the pragmatic hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Simone Weil. Whereas existence, for both Weil and the early Heidegger, entails a pretheoretical understanding of everyday operations, the occasions for employing such understanding also allow for diverse “readings” which do not necessarily “work,” but which instead permit a radical suspension of the very foundations for use. Through careful readings of reading (and writing) in Being and Time and in Weil’s oeuvre, this article exposes traces of illegible intervals within the scheme of things, where the comprehension of worldly matters is no longer of any use, but instead opens out to alterity in ways which prepare for encounters that are not predicated upon the work of understanding.

The following piece reflects a bit on the role of anecdotes in philosophy, and compares the anecdote, which rcounts a heretofore “unpublished” story based on oral tradition, to the aphorism, the narrative, and the fable. It offers some anecdotes involving Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, and Derrida.

The paper examines the importance of monism in Heidegger’s thought. Monism is understood here as the supposition of one kind of existence, or a single mode of being. Monism matters for a better understanding of Heidegger’s approach to practical philosophy. The paper explains that monism always faced the question of how to account for action. If there is a single, unified being, then aren’t all actions merely modifications of that being? The paper traces Heidegger’s answer to this question to argue that it faces two problems: Heidegger’s solution is similar to the solution in onto-theo-logy; and, it appears to make action trivial or self-contradictory. Despite that, the paper highlights the importance of Heidegger’s answer for continental philosophy.

In light of the January 6, 2021, insurrection on the Capitol, this article considers the Second Amendment as an example of how Black women are quasi-citizens within the United States. I focus on the Second Amendment to not only give an account of the historical and contemporary ways guns are used to terrorize Black women but to also show the jeopardization possessing and carrying firearms pose to Black women in both individuated and systemic cases. By turning to the Second Amendment, Black women’s status as citizens illuminates a liminal space where they are simultaneously inside the category of citizens but functionally excluded. Given the unjust foundations of the Second Amendment, I view Black women brandishing firearms as possibly an act of civil disobedience.

The United States, alongside other Western democracies, is in search of a usable past. Collective memory in the United States has persistently distorted or whitewashed its past, resulting in a distinct kind of (socially sanctioned) ignorance of the present. Collective memory reconstruction can thus be understood as “epistemic activism,” targeting an “epistemology of ignorance,” borrowing and expanding key concepts from the work of Charles Mills and José Medina. In this article I begin to defend an ethical practice of collective memory reconstruction as epistemic activism. I first outline a qualified understanding of “collective memory” that survives philosophical skepticism. I then draw on Paul Ricœur’s critical phenomenology of abuses of memory and analyze collective memory distortions of the US Civil War and the US struggle for civil rights. I suggest that a reconstructed democratic collective memory will be a set of plural and dynamic collective memories, rather than a homogeneous and static memory. I end by outlining some consequences that follow from this conclusion.

Recent scholarship on fascism has largely centered on identifying the defining features of fascism to determine whether political figures and parties are fascist. These debates take European fascism as paradigmatic, thereby obscuring alternative traditions of antifascist theorizing that can shed new light on the contemporary ascendancy of fascism in the United States and elsewhere. This paper examines one such alternative in the antifascist thought and praxis of the Black Panther Party. Against the widespread claim that fascism could not happen in the United States, the Black Panther Party insisted that the United States had its own forms of fascism. We reconstruct the Panther’s concept of fascism as the generalization of racialized exclusion constitutive of American democracy and explore the antifascist practices to which this definition gave rise.

The belief that White people are targeted victims of dispossession, displacement, and genocide has spread with shocking intensity since Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral college victory. Although this Great Replacement myth may seem absurd and irrational, its destructive real-world consequences force the question: what explains its efficacy and appeal? Drawing on White nationalists Greg Johnson and Tucker Carlson, I argue that the Great Replacement myth functions as an explanation for the real socioeconomic decline that has culminated in deaths of despair. I then explore this decline’s sociohistorical context to argue that deaths of despair are consequences of political-economic domination reinforced by White supremacy. Put otherwise, these deaths result from socioeconomic violence that White people have inflicted on each other. I conclude that the real problem “the White race” faces today is not a Great Replacement but a Slow White Suicide.

This essay examines the relationship between African American internal colonialism and democracy, highlighting the complexities of democracy that make it both susceptible to oppressive violence at home and abroad, as well as a potential resource for emancipation and equality. I understand “internal colonialism” here to encompass various terms used by African Americans beginning in the 1830s, including semi-colonialism, domestic colonialism, and a nation within a nation. Much political philosophy assumes that society is “nearly just” or “generally just,” or that oppression and injustice are found in societies that we nonetheless deem legitimate. Centering the complexities and possibilities of democracy instead shifts the focus to how democracy is compatible with violence and injustice, as well as their overcoming. Such a focus leads to a consideration of abolition democracy and the question of what the process of overcoming internal colonialism demands.

The January 2021 attacks on the US Capitol prompt a renewed look at the relationship between violence and Western liberal democracies. The attacks were viewed in a race-neutral frame of staging an insurrection against a procedurally elected government of a liberal democracy. Without considering the racial-political context, we are susceptible to recognizing only certain iterations of political violence while missing others altogether. In what follows, I argue that political violence against nonwhites is often not seen as violence or harm committed against the polity; instead, it is frequently treated as a form of “self-defense,” enacted by white members of the polity. To illustrate my argument, I contrast the political principles and conditions under which the January 6 attacks were recognized as political violence with similar attacks in the twentieth century as they had been launched against African Americans who were attempting to participate in elections and run for office.

In “Criminal Empire,” Ojibwe scholar Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark argues that the criminalization of Indigenous resistance to colonization “averts attention” from the criminality of democratic settler states, which fail or refuse to honor their own legal agreements with Indigenous peoples. This chapter reflects on the implications of Stark’s analysis for the relation between property, dispossession, and liberal democratic state violence. From this perspective, the prison appears not as a correctional institution for individual lawbreakers, but as a spatial strategy for the imposition and enforcement of a colonial legal order and a capitalist property regime. The challenge of decolonization, then, is not just to return stolen land to Indigenous peoples, but also to dismantle the structures of propertied personhood and dispossession that the settler democracy (re)produces through the prison system.

In Walter Benjamin’s pivotal essay “Toward the Critique of Violence,” the state emerges as an originary site of violence, and the police figure as a key institution that makes possible both law-preserving and law-founding violence. I argue that Benjamin offers a unique and clarifying understanding of violence that can help make sense of twenty-first century calls for police and prison abolition. At the same time, Benjamin critiques several leftist attempts to combat state violence—such as the workplace strike and leftist reformism—finding in them a reformulation of the very violence they seek to combat. I argue that many of these critiques could be equally levied at some manifestations of the contemporary abolitionist movement. This paper concludes by distilling some of Benjamin’s insights about the propensity to reflect the violence we attempt to contest into some lessons for contemporary activism and social movements.

In Singapore, the law holds that one person may constitute an illegal assembly. This makes each person, individually and at all times, latently assembled if not actually so. But where exactly does the permissible, non-assembled one end and the unlawful, gathered one begin? How and when does one become more than one, that is, some? For here an excess of one is not many, but rather an indeterminate some. Of what does this someness consist? This essay draws on Foucault and Lacan’s discussion of the liar paradox and set theory’s concept of the “not-all” via Bateson and Kordela to make a few observations about the political subject’s constitution under illiberal democracy.

In this article, I argue that in portending potentially fatal harm to immunocompromised others, certain vaccine-hesitant views create a paradox for democratic deliberation on public health matters. In this paradox, either vaccine-hesitant views entailing potential harm to others are entertained as legitimate public health policy, or these views are disallowed, excluding discussion of competing harms from the deliberative process. In either case, the result is a deliberative process in which some group is not treated with the consideration owed to free and equal persons as required by the terms of democratic membership. I argue for capitalizing on and refining certain epistemic traits exhibited by anti-vaxxers to address vaccine-hesitant views and minimize this paradox. However, I make the case that this paradox cannot be completely resolved, so we should focus on certain demands of justice to protect the most vulnerable.

This article reconsiders Hannah Arendt’s account of “totalitarianism” in light of the climate catastrophe and the apparent inability of our political-economic system to respond to it adequately. In the last two chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt focuses on the “ideology” of totalitarian regimes: a pathological denial of reality, a privileging of the ideological system over empirical evidence, and a simultaneous feeling of total impotence and total omnipotence—an analysis that maps remarkably well onto the climate zeitgeist. Thus, while Arendt used the concept of “totalitarianism” to foreclose alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy, the climate impasse suggests that the totalitarian label more properly belongs to the prevailing system itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ernst Cassirer’s The Myth of the State is often read as being insufficiently attentive to the possibility of fascism. In this paper, I examine, and partially contest, this reading. In his usage of the figures of Spinoza and prophetic Judaism, Cassirer develops a conception of the political capacity of the philosopher as pedagogically attempting to replace mythical thought with rational thought. In the end, Cassirer was aware of the onset and dangers of fascism.

This article analyzes Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of cessation. First, the article argues that this concept plays a decisive role in Meillassouxian philosophy. Second, by taking into consideration medieval and early modern debates on annihilation, it critically examines the conclusions elaborated in After Finitude. After that, it conceptualizes the relation between absolute time and absolute contingency, keeping in mind the critical reception of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Finally, the article turns to his insights into death and resurrection, and it confronts them with phenomenological theories of mortality. The conclusion is that Meillassoux faces several essential difficulties with regard to the concept of cessation that seem to be unsalvageable.

This takes a little-known reading of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” by Lyotard as the starting point for an examination of the relation between body and law. Lyotard’s late notion of the intractable serves as a frame for this examination: explicitly claimed to be an absolute condition of morals, I argue it also has political implications, which are here drawn out through the link between the intractable and the body. In Lyotard’s later writings, the body is usually associated with an originary affectivity, which is sometimes equated with sexual difference but sometimes appears to come “before” and exceed this law of bodily differences. It is the latter case, I argue, that allows for a path to be opened beyond the bodily violence of the law to be found in Kafka, especially if this is framed in terms of a certain “politics of incommensurability.”

I propose a critique of Heidegger’s poetics, and show that poetic critique of Heidegger is also philosophical critique on Lévinasian lines. I identify an obsessional erasure of absence in Heidegger’s poetics, a neglect of the immemorial other. Lévinas frames this critique through Valéry’s Eupalinos, a dialogue of an immemorial Socrates, in Limbo after his own death, praising architecture over his own, lost, philosophy. Separating poetics from ontology, Lévinas’s immemorial acknowledges irrecuperable traces, murmurs, or echoes of alterity; poetry, as commemoration, marks the distance between loss and absence. This contrasts with Heidegger’s eulogy of Max Scheler and its echo in the Gedachtes, metaphysical (“metontological”) and poetic monuments that seek an incompletable divorce from sensation and persons. I present Mark Doty’s elegy Atlantis as an illustration of Lévinas’s central philosophical critique of Heidegger’s thinking of death and persons. Atlantis embodies the immemorial; architecture alive with sound, an impossible city populated by absence.

In reply to Hagi Kenaan’s recent book Photography and Its Shadow, this essay argues for a theory of photography informed by Nietzsche’s perspectivism. It argues that Nietzsche’s perspectivism offers tools for a theory of photography as a way of life and for a positive conception of the inherent nothingness and artificiality of the photographic image. The first part examines Kenaan’s criticism of photography as an agent of post-modern malaise and nihilism in line with Nietzsche’s theory of the death of God. In response, the second part explores perspectivism as a visual and literary mode of thought for creating new horizons for understanding self and world, new relationships between desire and images, and a new conception of truth and falsity. The third part examines the writings of American artist Andy Warhol, who I argue exemplifies a perspectivist approach to photography and cinema in dialogue with the groundlessness and artificiality of images.

This existential phenomenological exploration concerns how writing is not the mere tool for communication and commemoration, or the supplementary image of a memory, but is closely connected to the phenomenon of the grave. The exploration aims to show a transgenerational mode of human existence and moral life, by considering how the becoming of a historical, which is to say a transgenerational subject through the features that writing and the grave together lets us capture, is also importantly bound to the becoming of a moral subject, or an “I,” in relation to the passed away other.

This article positions relational social theories against theories of non-relation. Relational social theories consider relations to be primary as opposed to objects. In contrast, two theoretical positions—psychoanalysis and Marxism—hold non-relation (or void) as the origin of any social relations. Not coincidentally, psychoanalysis and Marxism also hold the position of the subject, which relational social theories abolish as yet another object. What makes the link between non-relation and subject possible for psychoanalysis and Marxism, is the affirmation of a constitutive negativity embodied in-and-through social antagonisms of sexuality and class-struggle. The article shows, therefore, that by precluding this constitutive negativity, relational social theories lose sight of these two critical sites.

Markus Gabriel’s metaphysical nihilism—elaborated and defended most completely in his book Fields of Sense—contends that there is no legitimate ontological sense or reference attached to the words “the world.” In this paper, I present a detailed case for concluding that this project, at least in its current form, is unsuccessful. I argue, in particular, that Gabriel has at best shown that an absolutely unrestricted extensional domain cannot exist, but that his attempt to parlay this into a general rejection of metaphysics is unsuccessful and indeed incoherent. Finally, I offer a speculative diagnosis of how Gabriel ended up in this predicament.

This article challenges the recurrent critique that Pierre Hadot’s identification of ancient philosophy with the practice of spiritual exercises introduces a non- or irrational dimension into metaphilosophy. The occasion to do this is provided by Kerem Eksen’s recent reading of Descartes’s Meditations as consisting of solely intellectual, rather than spiritual, exercises—since the latter, Eksen claims, involve extrarational means and ends. Part 2 presents an alternative account of the role of cognition in the ancient meditatio at issue in understanding Descartes’s antecedents. This account is indebted to Michel Foucault’s characterization of ancient meditation as involving two cognitive mechanisms: an appropriation of thought, and an experiment in identification. Part 3 argues that attempts such as Eksen’s to depict spiritual exercises as wholly noncognitive themselves are the product of an “unexamined Cartesianism” that is fundamentally at odds with the monistic psychology of ancient Stoics like Marcus Aurelius as discussed in Hadot’s studies.

Can humanity abandon its meat-based diet, and is it willing to? This diet is unique in that it institutes an endlessly bloody relationship to animals. Highlighted time and again in analyses of the sacrificial system, the possibility of substituting a plant-based offering (or an object) for one that requires killing, replacing the latter with the former and eventually achieving equivalence between the two, could prove unexpectedly fruitful in contemporary discussions of substitutes for meat (both plant-based meats, which imitate animal meat but do not contain it, and cultured animal muscle tissue, commonly referred to as in-vitro meat). This is the guiding question and the answer, in the form of a structuralist hypothesis, that this article proposes to clarify and develop.

If Lyotard is correct to acknowledge the role of commentary in guarding the kernel of misunderstanding at the heart of the ethical phrase when he exclaims, “but isn’t this exactly what commentary does with ethics! It comments upon it as though it were a misunderstanding, and it thereby conserves in itself its own requirement that there be something ununderstood,” he does not account for that which a trans-generic or transmedial “commentary” might permit, what troubling, unanswerable questions it might raise, what ekphrastic or synesthetic call it might echo. This essay considers several artistic reworkings, interpretations, and distortions of the biblical scene of near sacrifice upon which Lyotard comments, arguing that the exposure of the ethical (phrase or genre) to the explicitly aesthetic (phrase or genre) would bring to the surface something that might be latent, that which is always already there, albeit spectrally.

The thesis of this essay is that Gertrude Stein plays an important role in The Differend, the brevity of her appearance in the book notwithstanding. Scarcely one and a half pages long, Lyotard’s discussion of a string of quotations from Stein is the most sustained consideration of a female author in his text. Lyotard is intrigued by Stein’s efforts to conceive of la phrase less as a form or building block than an event—or rupture—of language. Characterizing her work as écriture féminine, he cannot decide whether her “vagabond prose” is one genre among others or a uniquely disruptive verbal praxis that unsettles his most basic ideas about phrases and genres. In the final analysis, the precise status of Stein in Lyotard’s thought remains uncertain, as if her unruly presence might simply be a quirk of the signifier stein.

Regress threatens throughout Lyotard’s Differend, especially where the argument appears to make normative ethical or political claims. How a term, a case or an example “links onto” a phrase serves as a way of examining how instituting can be non-regressively grounded, and with what consequences for abstract political subjectivity. The essay offers an alternative to liberal philosophical (Arendt, Nussbaum) and jurisprudential (Marbury v. Madison) schemata of political institution.

Taking its departure from The Differend’s analysis of Auschwitz as a sign for the evental character of history, I argue that the looming ecological disaster we now face reveals both the continuing relevance and limits of Lyotard’s thought. While the form of political agency of the catastrophe to come involves a differend, this differend cannot be attached to a proper name, however problematic its mode of signification. This, however, suggests the even greater relevance of Lyotard’s treatment, in the conclusion of The Differend, of capitalism in terms of temporal contradiction, as well as his theorization of oikos and ecology in subsequent works, where he distinguishes between the economic and the ecological. This distinction, I conclude, is rendered problematic by the catastrophe to come, as indeed is any attempt to draw an absolute distinction between “philosophical politics” and mere technocratic management or even to exclude speculation from the heart of philosophy.

For Lyotard, “Auschwitz” is named only as the terrible sign of a differend. However, this paper argues that the dissymmetrical address alluded to in a 1993 lecture given by Lyotard for Amnesty, “The Other’s Rights,” makes possible an alternative legacy found in the very formation of civil politics which might itself “rephrase” this differend otherwise, transforming what may be termed “distress” into “rights” without recourse to the type of (post-war) contractuality that would risk both repressing and compounding a “wrong” by seeking to litigate it.

In Le différend Lyotard evocatively describes what remains to be heard as “the silence of feeling.” Setting Lyotard’s différend among a differentiated set of incommensurable family resemblances, including Rancière’s mésentente and Derrida’s différance, this paper argues that le différend même, far from coinciding with itself, points to the re-marks and differs from itself, silencing itself by putting itself under a conditional. This is what gives its particular affective quality that is bound up with address and listening. From this perspective, it also becomes possible to develop a new analysis of the silencing said to constitute “cancel culture,” demonstrating that the marketplace-of-ideas model falsely presupposes a fictional equality of audibility and originary purity of speech. What Lyotard teaches us is that free speech cannot but silence itself.

The present article examines the contemporary stakes and “application” of The Differend with particular attention to neo-fascist denialism, trolling, and alt-right “free speech” discourse. This entails investigating the text’s own rhetorical performance as well as the shifting attitudes towards the sophistic tradition in The Differend and its precursor text, “On the Force of the Weak.” The article thus also takes up in detail three examples of the characteristic sophistic form of the dilemma or double-bind, two of which are drawn from Lyotard: the Holocaust denialist Robert Faurisson’s infamous dilemma of “the witness to the gas-chambers”; the canonical ancient dilemma through which Protagoras wins his fee from his student Euathlus despite seemingly never having helped him win a dispute; and “if you can speak, you can breathe,” the contemporary denialist’s rejoinder to “I can’t breathe.” Lyotard’s arguments are briefly compared to those of other thinkers (Cassin, Rancière, Moten).

The Holocaust serves as a foundational critical resource in postwar philosophy. Interventions into the logic of its exemplarity tend to treat exemplarity as a matter of archival selection that ignores earlier histories of genocide and slavery. A recent example is Alexander Weheliye’s critique of Giorgio Agamben (Habeaus Viscus), which seeks to restitute racial slavery as a theoretically significant moment of biological precarity. In a continuation of this logic, this essay introduces the history of Indian Ocean slavery, which precedes transatlantic slavery but is comparatively lesser known. In doing so, I suggest that complaints against archival selection do not go far enough, for they do not address the problem of a kind of event whose very nature is to destroy its own archive. Reading Jean-François Lyotard’s differend as a critique of the modern genre-supremacy of historiography, I argue that the very ground of historical examples (namely, the demand that there be proof) demonstrates the regressive nature of exemplarity itself.

In this article, the French philosopher Jérôme de Gramont evaluates the modes in which twentieth century philosophy and literature—from Heidegger and Derrida to Blanchot and Beckett—aim to think our being-in-the-world beyond the concept of “man” and without the genus of the human.

In his seminars on the death penalty, Derrida argues that Kant’s defense of that punishment is the most rigorous and systematically philosophical. For that same reason, he says, the arguments are especially vulnerable to deconstruction. I argue, in detail, that Derrida’s deconstruction fails if Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal is respected, which Derrida’s arguments do not specifically challenge. I close with some considerations for philosophical opponents of the death penalty. Derrida seeks a condemnation of capital punishment that is, in its way, a priori, disassembling its justification at the conceptual level. I suggest that contingent and empirical condemnations of capital punishment may be sufficient.

John Cooper and Pierre Hadot suggest that contemporary philosophy can no longer be regarded as a way of life as it has become an academic discipline of study that is theoretical and abstract. According to them, for philosophy to be considered a way of life, it has to be able to shape one’s understanding of the world, guide how one should respond from moment to moment, and reach an existential level in defining one’s being. In this article, I discuss how Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy is a way of life that has been overlooked by Cooper and Hadot. I show that Sartre’s existentialism presents an interconnected perspective of human existence and human development in history, is able to guide our philosophical reasoning about our everyday decisions, and offers a practical guide to living an authentic life through assuming responsibility for our life choices and engaging with our situations.

Focusing on the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and particularly Werner Hamacher, this essay seeks to develop an understanding of “survival” as the medial condition of linguistic structures. In the course of the past century and beyond, the term “survival” has repeatedly been deployed in discussions around the ontological status of linguistic entities. Most prominently, Benjamin finds in “survival” the essence of what he calls “translatability.” He decidedly puts the term in quotations marks to signal its linguistic nature, which prompts Hamacher to speak of “survival in citation.” This article thus attempts to demonstrate that the term “survival” is not reducible to its biological or phenomenal implications, and reintroduces it as the fundamental concept of a renewed understanding of philology. In three sections, the essay discusses linguistic technification, translation, and irony as three modes that bring the survival of language to the fore.

This article discusses Reiner Schürmann’s notions of ontological anarché and anarchic praxis in his readings of Heidegger and Eckhart, while bringing his philosophy of anarchy into dialogue with Zen-inspired Japanese thought. I thereby hope to shed light on his thought of anarchy in terms of what I call “an-ontology.” The inspiration for this project is the fact that Schürmann himself had practiced Zen as a young adult in France and had engaged in comparative analyses of Zen and Eckhart in his earlier works. I take what Schürmann meant by the principle of anarchy as a form of praxis that precedes the theoretical bifurcation between being and non-being. A similar sort of “anarchic praxis” is recognizable in Zen and we can find comparable (an)ontological implications of such praxis in the Zen-inspired writings of the Japanese medieval thinker Dōgen and of the contemporary philosopher Nishida Kitarō.

Philosophers struggle to identify a conception of race in Descartes’s philosophy. Yet, Descartes was not wholly silent on matters of foreign ethnicity and identity. This paper compares Descartes’s various statements on savages and barbarians, which have never been methodically analyzed. A tensive view emerges across several texts wherein Descartes asserts that all persons are rational while simultaneously presuming the epistemic inferiority of the foreign other construed as “savage” or “barbarous.” Further examination indicates that prejudice against this foreign other is endemic to both Descartes’s epistemology and his conception of the mind-body union.

Having elsewhere connected Walter Otto’s interpretation of Dionysus as a politically progressive deity to Huey P. Newton’s vision for the Black Panthers, I here expand this inquiry to a line of Otto-inspired scholarship. First, Alain Daniélou identifies Dionysus and Shiva as the dancing god of a democratic/decolonizing cult oppressed by tyrannical patriarchies. Arthur Evans sharpens this critique of sexism and heteronormativity, concluding that, as Dionysus’s chorus is to Greek tragedy, so Socrates’s circle is to Western philosophy. I thus call for the creation of a hybrid Dionysian-Socratic revolutionary philosophical chorus, modeled on Dionysus Lyseus (from -lysis), wielding philosophical analysis to loosen injustice’s bonds, as a vanguard of social justice. I find a handbook for this chorus’s creation in Euripides’s Bacchae, whose Dionysus is an ally of immigrant women, overthrower of Theban patriarchy, and international revolutionary. Finally, I offer a contemporary example of such a chorus that is based in my hometown in Alabama, namely, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild.

This paper highlights the shortcomings of Georges Bataille’s writings in terms of his failure to address white supremacy and blackness by critically engaging and expanding his cosmological metaphor through the figure of the black hole. The sun is a timeless figure in the history of western thought as an epistemological and ontological metaphor. Bataille offers alternative cosmological interpretations whereby luxurious excess and waste aim to transfigure the traditions of metaphysics, ethics, and political economy. This paper confronts Bataille’s cosmologies and heliotropes through an afropessimistic lens whereby blackness proves to be an ontological positionality that is not simply marginal to whiteness, but antagonistic, thus allowing for an expanded critical cosmology that incorporates the figure of the black hole.

How should African philosophy be done in African Language? In response to this question, I engage Ngugi and Wiredu in their response to this language question in African philosophy. My aim is to appraise and extend their arguments by answering the question of “how” doing African philosophy in African language can be practically achieved. In this regard, I make a case for the creation of an indigenous cultural language that serves as a means of articulating, communicating and disseminating African philosophical ideas. I suggest the need for African scholars to develop a language culture under the auspices of African Language Network (A.L.N.) that will enable them to do philosophy and present it in an African language. I show that African philosophy done in a foreign or colonial language is like dressing Africa in a borrowed rope, and that as long as African scholars continue to overlook this, the lofty goal of restoring the lost glory of Africa, the gains and further progress in African philosophy, rather than being consolidated, may become greatly hampered. Recognizing the diversity of languages in African culture, I present Afrolingualism as the key to achieving this end. Afrolingualism is a conscientious effort by African scholars to contrive a unanimously accepted indigenous language of discourse in philosophy.

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).

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.

Victims of abuse and violence are often pressured to forgive their perpetrators. The idea of unconditional forgiveness—forgiveness granted regardless of apology, remorse, or change of behavior—has become a norm for many in the west and those who refuse to forgive are often seen as resentful and bitter. Yet those imploring forgiveness are often the powerful and those asked to forgive are often minorities who have comparatively little power. Since forgiveness in western culture derives from Jesus’s teachings, I return to those teachings. While the verse “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing,” is often cited as what Jesus taught, the reality is that his teaching about forgiveness is strongly connected to repentance or remorse. I show how those teachings have been significantly distorted to create the norm of unconditional forgiveness. Finally, I consider the value and place of resentment.

This article reflects on the borders between sense and non-sense in order to think about the meaning of a particular kind of non-sense: traumatic violence. What does it mean for a victim of traumatic violence to make sense of it? Bringing together the discourses of phenomenology and trauma theory this article demonstrates the way in which traumatic violence, as a limit case of the phenomenal, can be brought into meaning without being reduced to an object of knowledge.

This article is concerned with how we meet the victim of genocide in the middle of experience. François Laruelle, in Théorie générale des victimes (2012), suggests that to think the victim is a work of resurrection rather than remembrance. To think the victim should allow us to recognize that the victim, especially the victim for who they are as such, is always human in the last instance—a repeatable victim. With this thesis, the article begins with the definition of the crime of genocide adopted by the United Nations to examine how knowledge production is involved in cyclical violence. The second part of the essay thinks the victim of genocide through a subversion of Jean-Luc Marion’s limit concept of the saturated phenomenon, sans transcendence. The essay concludes that in this lived realization, weakness and compassion seize to return the victim to their suffering and instead, hope to change the world.

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).

Following Nietzsche, we can discern two types of therapeutical voice on ressentiment, which find themselves in a polemical relation to one another: The philosopher and the priest. In this paper, I turn to a third polemical voice, embodied by Jean Améry, namely that of the victim who bears witness to his own ressentiment. A dialectical reconstruction of this standpoint within the polemical triangle contributes to the Améry reception in three ways: (1) It is no longer necessary to justify his tactlessness through the exceptional context of the objectively recognized lived experience of victimhood. (2) It shows that Améry’s assumption of his “authentic ressentiment” is not just “anti-Nietzschean” (Jameson, Žižek) but first of all anti-pastoral. (3) Beyond the question of (in)authenticity, this also implies that the political significance of Améry’s testimony lies in its literary and conceptual systematicity no less than as a description of lived experience.

This article reveals three aspects of victimhood in Bataille’s reading of Sade (of the other, of the self, and Sade’s language) and relates them to some of Bataille’s metaphysical and political notions: the impossible, the general and the restricted economy, sovereignty, and transgression. Doing so shows a progressive simplification of possibilities for transgression from the pre-Christian world to that of popular sovereignty, i.e., the sovereignty of the crowd, the latter leaving open one avenue for transgression: Sadean victimhood. The article then applies these aspects to the pamphlet in Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir, “Frenchmen, Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Republicans,” in relation to a contemporaneous document of popular sovereignty, the preamble to the Constitution of the Year III, titled “Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and Citizen.” Attending to the aspects of Sadean victimhood in “Effort” shows that its system’s very impossibility makes it the Declaration’s logical completion. Finally, that impossibility is revealed as the sovereignty of the masses, distinct from that of the crowd.

In this contribution, a poetical transformation of victimhood is explored as described by Jean-Paul Sartre in his Saint Genet, a study of the writer Jean Genet (1910–1986). First, the question is answered what Sartre, who famously wrote “There are no innocent victims,” has to say about victimhood. Second, an outline is given of the context of Jean Genet’s work and the role he plays in Sartre’s thinking. There is a clear line from Sartre’s earlier study of Baudelaire to Saint Genet. Both authors try not to reject the judgement that has been passed on them but to affirm it, to turn this affirmation into an art. Third, already in his Baudelaire, but even more in Saint Genet, Sartre describes the merge of the victim and executioner as a mystical enterprise. Moreover, like Baudelaire, Genet transforms the idea of the convict and evil into a language dedicated to flowers. This leads to a transformation from victimhood to poetry.