The article reflects on Heidegger’s admission in the 1966 Spiegel Interview that he was shocked by images of the Earth taken from space. It asks what these images were and shows that far from testifying to the encounter of planetary technics and the modern human they evince the meeting between an improvised automated technology of image capture and contingency.

This article discusses translation as a technique of doing philosophy and introduces the concept of idiodiversity as an alternative to the current model of automated translation machines. The dominant functionalist approach to technology has made these machines the agents of linguistic homogenisation, which constitutes a threat for the diversity of idiomatic open systems this article advocates for. However, as this article argues, the challenge is not merely to accuse automated translation technologies of impoverishing the knowledge of how to translate but, rather, to determine whether these technologies can be reappropriated for the purpose of preservation and revalorisation of translation and, more generally, as a conveyor of noodiversity. This challenge also involves the need to draw attention to the political significance of translation practices and to elaborate an alternative to the mechanistic approaches to translation, typical of computational linguistics and language engineering, through a heterodox approach to cybernetics.

In order to think of philosophy after automation, we have to ask if there is more in philosophy than the process of learning what philosophy is by inducing, from actual inferential practices, the future possible moves that are believed to produce philosophical truths. In the same way as the production of scientific hypothesis has been automated like a self-updating process which entails schemas of decisions and actions, philosophy itself, once conceived as a game where the truth of the statements is measured with respect to the social reproduction of inferential moves, could be automated as well.

To talk about automation and invisibility in our digitally projected world, I argue the case for the “cancelled” or lost voices of postphenomenology such as, most notably, Günther Anders. Reflecting on Nietzsche as on the role of GPS for location and for dating services like Grindr, I take up Nietzschean humanism (all-too humanism) including the fragility of his portable brass typing ball, latterly not unlike daisy wheel printer technologies and the programmed death of ink jet printers. With a casual reflection on pocket robots and screen-intentionality, GPS, triangulating perambulation, and programmed addiction, I raise the necropolitical question of climate change as of technology and its scotosis.

The scope of the paper is to present the concept of the radical dyad of the “non-human,” in an attempt to think radical humanity in terms of Marxian materialism, which is the product of approaching Marx’s writings on “the real” and “the physical” by way of François Laruelle’s non-philosophical method. Unlike posthumanism, inspired by critical theory and the method of poststructuralism, the theory of the non-human, as a radical dyad of technology in the generic sense of the word (ranging from the techné of speaking a natural language to AI technology) and the organic understood as physicality, does away with anthropocentrism. Moreover, it does away with any anthropomorphology of thought, that is, it does away with any theorizing or philosophy that is centered on the notion of (human) subjectivity or, to borrow a Laruellian term, any “posture of thought” that is molded according to the structure of subjectivity centered thinking,

Ours is an age of general automation. The factory that produced proletarians now extends to the biosphere; consequently, disautomatization is needed, which is the real meaning of autonomy. Autonomy and automatism must be reconceived as a composition rather than an opposition. Knowledge depends on hypomnesic automatisms that open up the possibility of what Socrates called “thinking for oneself”; digitalization thus requires a new epistemology that entails questions of political and libidinal economy. Today, automatization serves the autonomization of technics more than noetic autonomy, but reconceiving the latter necessarily involves reconsidering the meaning and character of desire. Greta Thunberg’s diagnosis of the irresponsibility of the generation before hers exposes the fact that the knowledge necessary to combat the consequences of contemporary technological development has been destroyed. The only possible counter to this irresponsibility lies in the reconstitution of knowledge, understood as the means by which humans struggle against entropy and anthropy.

Is “philosophy after automation” a theme or a question? One might hesitate about this, because we may wonder whether or not it implies that philosophy could disappear after automation, or at least be subject to serious revision. Philosophy could be read as a historical movement towards self-determination [autodétermination] as well as the exposition of the limit of such a program of archi-autonomy. The Cartesian event (a prominent moment of the automation mutation) is essentially ambivalent, and man alone in the world is undoubtedly also the one who can but alter, in the long run, the sufficiency of the auto. This is what we can now begin to understand.

In this dialogue, Hiroki Azuma discusses with Yuk Hui about the perception of technology in Japan after the defeat in the Second World War, from the Kyoto School to the postmodern critics, and the ambivalent conflicts between the modern and the tradition. The postmodern culture has a different signification in Japan than in the West as well as in other parts of Asia. Azuma documents the rise of the Otaku culture in Japan, and calls them “database animals,” a thesis that he formulated through his reading of Alexandre Kojève’s end of man and the absorption of the human subject into the technological world.

In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro discusses his work on the Amerindian perspectivism, multinaturalism; the relation between nature, culture and technics in his ethnographic studies; as well as the necessity of a non-anthropocentric definition of technology. He also discusses a haunting futurism of ecological crisis and automation of the Anthropocene, and explores a “strategic primitivism” as survival tool.

In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens explains the discipline called philosophy of technology and gives a concise overview of the most important contemporary approaches within this field. He also offers a critical evaluation of what are probably the two most salient characteristics of contemporary philosophy of technology, the so-called “empirical turn” and the “ethical turn,” which are deeply related and partly reflect the discipline’s on-going alignment with the global neoliberal agenda of exclusively profit-driven technological innovation. He also critically reflects on recent developments in the molecular and informational life sciences such as genomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology.

This article asks how can we articulate the limit of artificial intelligence, which virtually has no limit? Or maybe the definition of AI already implies its limit, how Marvin Minsky once declared that there is no generally accepted theory of intelligence, and that AI is only one particular way of modelling it. This article revisits the debate between Minsky and Hubert Dreyfus and repositions them in terms of an opposition between mechanism and organism, in order to expose the limit of Dreyfus’s Heideggerian critique. It suggests reflecting on the relation between noodiversity and technodiversity to methodologically broaden the concept of intelligence, and on how different concepts of intelligence could be thought by introducing the Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan’s interpretation of Kant’s intellectual intuition.

In his book Foucault and Religion, Jeremy Carrette presents a compelling argument against Foucault’s genealogical method (what he terms “relations of force”). In brief, Carrette holds that while Foucault’s genealogical method effectively unmasked the origins of “rationality” and “madness,” it was less successful when explaining the materialization of “the spiritual.” Foucault’s analysis of spiritual practices is at best functional and, according to Carrette, fails to explain the psychophysical state of subjects engaged in religious customs. In the following paper, I argue that Carrette is correct; there are limitations to Foucault’s genealogical method, especially when explaining subjectivization processes, such as conversion experiences. However, I demonstrate that we can perform a successful genealogical investigation of the spiritual by adding an additional lens of analysis to “the relations of power” and “the relations of meaning” Foucault employs. I call this lens “the relations of affect.” I use this tool to explain Augustine’s transformative process, as observed in the saint’s Confessions.

In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari understand concepts in a very unconventional way. One of the central aspects of their theory is that concepts are self-referential and should not be understood in terms of any form of reference or representation. Instead, concepts are complex “assemblages” interacting on a “plane of immanence.” I argue that we can best understand this theory through the philosophy of Spinoza. The latter understands thought and ideas through the model of physical bodies. Spinoza’s theory of thought is, as François Zourabichvili says, a “physics of thought.” I do not only call upon Spinoza to elucidate the general approach of Deleuze and Guattari; I also use Spinoza’s notions of modal essence and existence, interpreted by Deleuze in terms of intensity and extensity, to expound the details of their distinction between concepts and propositions.

In this interview, Claude Romano discusses his phenomenological project of the event in relation to hermeneutics, reason, realism, and some other fundamental problems of phenomenology. He explains common themes in his phenomenological project and elucidates why he considers it important to leave behind the transcendental perspective in phenomenology. He distinguishes his descriptive realism from other realist movements in contemporary French philosophy. The interview also questions the Eurocentric orientation of many phenomenological authors and considers the possibility of going beyond such assumptions in phenomenology.

The distinct role of the concept metaphor of “translation” in psychoanalysis has been obscured. It has generally been considered in conjunction if not synonymy with metaphors of “writing/graphy,” leaving it theoretically underdetermined. Its distinct role went largely unnoticed, moreover, since Freud himself dropped the concept metaphor of translation from his work after 1900. However, this did not prevent it from re-surfacing in a pivotal role in Jean Laplanche’s structural-linguistic accounts of “the drive to translate” and of the translation model of repression. To provide a bridge between Freud’s remarks on the role of translation, and his own tenets on language in relation to the unconscious, Laplanche reads Walter Benjamin ([1923a] 1972) on translation—to incongruous effect, which this article proposes to address, in turn, by re-instating a distinct role for translation.

The past few years have seen a dramatic backlash against identity politics from academics such as Michael Sandel, Kwame Appiah, Mark Lilla, and Francis Fukuyama. In the vocabulary of identity conceptions, we can classify this as a reaction to a growing dissatisfaction with the perceived hollowness and ineffectiveness of “authenticity” that calls for a return to “sincerity”—or a “Political New Sincerity.” We argue that a third identity paradigm is in play as well, namely “profilicity.” This profile-based approach to understanding oneself, others, and the world has had a major impact on social and political life, and yet has gone largely unnoticed or otherwise been mis-diagnosed. Our analysis provides a critical reflection on the emergence of profilicity to pave the way for developing insights into our changing sociopolitical and inter-personal landscapes.

In this essay I examine the concept of the “event” in Heideggerian thought, with particular reference to the first volume of the Black Notebooks, which is contemporaneous with Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (1936–1938) and Notes III (dating from 1946–47) from the fourth volume. At issue are the concepts of “event” (Ereignis), “essential unfolding” (Wesung), and “expropriation” (Enteignis), which assume considerable importance in the mid-1930s. Through his treatment of the event, Heidegger reinterprets being as an alterity with respect to beings and to Dasein, in that being withdraws and conceals itself. Furthermore, I show a shift in Heidegger’s “disposition” (Stimmung) that occurs in Notes III, from an “attunement” that stresses decision to a way of thinking in terms of “releasing” and “thanking.” In these writings, Heidegger already makes use of the concept of “releasement” (Gelassenheit), which is usually associated with a later stage of his thought.

Despite a shared recognition of the significant contribution of corporeality to normative phenomena such as agency, it is rare for Nietzsche scholarship on naturalism and agency to include explicit employment of so-called “new materialist” approaches to agency. In an effort to show the fecundity of such an employment, I apply Diana Coole’s notion of a spectrum of distributed agentic capacities to a reading of passages within Nietzsche’s genealogy of the subject. I suggest that doing so helps to emphasize the significant role of pre-personal and nonconscious corporeal processes in the emergence of the subject in Nietzsche’s texts; the contribution of these processes to agentic capacities; and the possibility of conceiving the agentic spectrum, in Nietzsche’s corpus, as a spectrum of acts of incorporation.

I seek to understand the relationship between human vulnerability and human rights as something more than a problem that respect for human rights solves. After characterizing vulnerability and noting that human rights are generally regarded as entitlements that respect the dignity of persons by securing their autonomous agency, I draw out the implications of these premises. I argue that human vulnerabilities are constitutive of the capacity for autonomous agency and therefore that the circumstances of respect for persons must include persons’ vulnerability to many sorts of harms. Given that the opportunity to lead one’s life in one’s own way—that is, the opportunity to exercise autonomous agency—is indispensable to human dignity, respect for persons entails respect for the vulnerability that underwrites autonomous agency. If so, rights-bearers are necessarily vulnerable subjects. I further defend this conception of rights-bearers by arguing that it comports with three types of human rights theory: agency-centered, needs-centered, and practice-based accounts of human rights.

This African moral framework discusses distant poverty as human vulnerability. Contextually, if vulnerability means human frailty, relative to some opposing facts of life, and that poverty makes the human person frail, relative to some largely unrealized/unrealizable desirables without assistance, then distant poverty as human vulnerability invariably connects, significantly, with poor dependency: poor people are vulnerable as dependent on the assisting other. Some fundamental questions arise: 1) What is the ontology of distant poverty as human vulnerability? 2) In what ways does the idea of poverty as human vulnerability essentially and morally connect with the idea of dependency? 3) Is the issue of addressing the problem of distant poverty as human vulnerability a question of perfect or imperfect moral duty or both? 4) In what ways do the perfect or imperfect moral duty (or both) connect to positive and negative moral duties? 5) What moral framework best accommodates, all things considered, moral duties? Considering these questions, this work advances that African ethics (AE) as character ethics, fundamentally serves as a better moral framework, compared to the Western ethics (WE) that has dominated the debates on addressing the questions for years.

The notion of “weak action” is developed in this paper in an attempt to overcome the schism between the action of a free political subject on the one hand, and their dependency on the support of others and the environment on the other. This paper focuses foremost on Judith Butler’s later work raising two different questions. First, following Butler and her critical reading of Levinas, the problem is raised how and at what price the ethics of vulnerability would be able to become not only the source of a critique of politics, but also the source of a concrete political action. Second, through Butler’s reinterpretation of Arendt’s political thinking, the notion of “action” is enriched by the dimension of vulnerability.

Philosophical interest in vulnerability focusses mainly on normative questions concerning its relevance for moral, political and legal theory. However, beneath these questions there lies another one which is epistemological: How do we gain clear knowledge about another person’s pain and suffering? How do we recognize a wounded life? Drawing primarily on the account of Elaine Scarry (1984), the article aims at showing that the difficulties to apprehend and recognize a life as injured are not only grounded in political and cultural frames, as Judith Butler contends, but also in the phenomenological and epistemic features of pain itself. Pain is epistemically fragile. Whereas it is almost impossible to ignore one’s own pain, it is very easy to overlook the pain of others. This epistemic slope has concrete effects on the social and political life. Regarding vulnerability, the normative question of recognition and the epistemic question of recognizability, thus, are closely intertwined.

Though fatigue appears a constant of this pandemic year, I argue that we may not all be living the same pandemic. I highlight the non-belonging of most racialized and colonized peoples to a world where flourishing is taken for granted as norm. To think this, I use the term “weariness.” I want to evoke, wearing out, wearing down, as well as the medical concept of weathering. Drawing on Césaire, Fanon, Hartman, Scott, and Spillers, my concept of weariness articulates an exhausting and enduring experience—the eroding, grating, and crumbling of racialized flesh—through repetitive colonial duration, not simply for a year, but over a longue durée. I read this as a wounding that needs to be thought not simply in terms of health outcomes and disease, but in terms of affective experience and dismembered possibility.

Viruses and pandemics are part of an overarching ecological theme that encompasses not only climate and plants, but all forms and conditions of life. This requires a far-reaching change in perspective. Not only does biodiversity, following Alexander von Humboldt, form a common “cosmos” across the globe, but we humans are also part of it. This natural sphere corresponds to Arendt’s concept of the “world” on the social and political sphere. Cosmos and world take the place of the old irreconcilable separation of nature/barbarism and culture/civilization. Consequently, the threat to cosmos and world does not come from nature but from man-made devastation. Biodiversity and human plurality can only thrive with the principles of environmental/political sustainability.

This essay diagnoses systemic interconnections between COVID-19 pandemics, anti-Black racism, and the intensification of digital capitalism. By drawing on Charles Mills’ rectificatory justice and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on understanding and action, it argues that the role of philosophy lies in safeguarding racial justice and understanding against the hegemony algorithmic governmentality.

Philosophy in a time of a pandemic should insist that it is critically important to get to the root causes of the pandemic, and not merely react to its symptoms. The ultimate reason for this pandemic is our relentless destruction of nature and the merciless exploitation of animals.

In order to understand the essence of COVID-19 pandemic, it is necessary to take a step back and question the hierarchy of emergency in relation to other emergencies that are not addressed. This will also allow us to imagine a “philosophy of warnings” capable to interpret absent emergencies.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11, agonistic democracy promised to navigate away from both liberalism and dialectical materialism. How can we renew that discourse to highlight its significance in the times of COVID-19? I answer this question by looking at three articulations of the apple metaphor.

Belying the rhetoric of “We’re all in this together,” and “COVID as the great equalizer,” the pandemic has brought into focus the “pre-existing conditions” of inequality—poverty, racism, lack of health care, lack of child care, women’s double burden, and the vulnerability of the elderly, among others. The coronavirus reveals gaping inequities in the length and quality of life caused by social and economic “pre-existing conditions.” It is the great unequalizer, the promise and ruse of “We’re all in this together.” The new normal for some, is the old normal for many others.

The COVID world is just like it was before, only more so. Every problem that already existed is worse. What can philosophy do in such a world? I think there are at least two opportunities for philosophy today. The first is that philosophers can seize this historical moment to intervene in almost every sector of social, political, and ethical life. The second unique opportunity I think philosophers have is to create new concepts in response to new phenomena. New events call for new ways of thinking and being that change our world-view. COVID is not just an amplification of existing power structures. It has also changed our relationship to and awareness of the importance of social and viral mobilities. Might the concept of “motion” offer us a new perspective on the world?

The essay considers three classic definitions of philosophy, namely those offered by Socrates, Boethius, as semantically enriched by Montaigne, and Kant, in order to reflected on individual and collective death. Kant’s philosophical tool of the antinomies of reason is deployed to think through the antinomies of our pandemic in order to make clear that in a pandemic there is only collective, and not individual or even national, inoculation. The false dichotomies of physical versus social, embodiment versus virtuality, nationalism versus planetarization, and propaganda versus science, are discussed. Lady philosophy appears wearing blue plastic gloves.

Many philosophers and lay people believe that philosophy has an important role to play in times of societal crisis. In this contribution reasons are given to doubt the supposed societal relevance of philosophy.

I look at what Walter Benjamin calls the “magic of matter,” a silent form of communication between material objects, including our bodies. This communion exists even when bodies are separated as they are during the pandemic and becomes especially sensible to us when the physical presence of others is removed.

This essay considers the pandemic as a consequence of the planetary condition. It goes on to ask: Can philosophy contribute to the elucidation of the planetary, or is philosophy, in the words of Heidegger, already completed in and as the planetary? What kind of relation to the planetary will it desire to have?

Drawing on Françoise Dastur’s suggestion that the event is a permanent possibility that shapes lived experience, but also, when it occurs, a distinctive temporal rupture, I argue that the initial weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic constitute an event, in her sense. Connecting this phenomenological point to literatures on the politics of temporality, I suggest that the distinction between event and normal experience maps to that between epidemic and endemic. Understanding some of the political and ethical erasures of death and debility in COVID times can thus be mutually informed by phenomenological analysis.

This article focuses on Alain Badiou’s surprisingly moderate response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is shown that his dismissal of the virus as a familiar problem best dealt with by bureaucratic managers stems from an overly idealist approach to one of his key philosophical topics: the event.

Philosophy cannot alone change the present state of the world, the role of the philosopher being only to question and help to arouse a true awareness of what is happening in the world. The current pandemic should therefore incite the philosophers to make the Europeanization of the planet their main question.

The -19 pandemic highlights the following problems: the balance between the private and the public within a liberal framework; the merits and the limits of a liberal democracy in governance; and the inadequacy of a nation-states-led global order. In light of these problems, I will offer some Confucian alternatives.

This essay speculates on how variations in political attitudes—and in particular differences in perceptions of, and reactions to, the COVID-19 pandemic—might in fact be rooted in variations in our a priori conceptions of the thing and our understandings of the place of the human in the world.

The article aims to reflect on the pandemic from the situatedness of being in the eye of the storm. It discusses the contagion between biological and digital viralization, and the politics and existential effects of the pandemic non-touching.

The presence of COVID-19 has elicited a range of philosophical responses. The aim of this paper is to engage with the position advanced by Giorgio Agamben. Part of the critique of Agamben involves critique of populism. In response to populism the paper advances a different philosophical position this time ground in the concept of solidarity. The work of Hannah Arendt provides the basis for this response.

In this article, I demonstrate that Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy represents a first major step toward a rejection of the humanist subject and therefore was influential for the development of contemporary posthumanist material feminism. Specifically, her unprecedented attention to embodiment and biology, in The Second Sex and other works, as well as her notion of ambiguity, serve to challenge the humanist subject. While I am not claiming that Beauvoir was a posthumanist or material feminist thinker avant la lettre, I show that she is an important precursor to some of their key ideas. Indeed, her thinking about the body, sex, gender, and the importance of embodiment and situation constitutes a challenge to the subject of humanism, thereby opening up a path for thinkers that follow to push Beauvoir’s critique and articulate a posthumanism that does away with the subject of humanism.

This essay returns to Of Grammatology, Derrida’s seminal work of 1967, in order to demonstrate the key role played by the category of interiority in that work and in deconstruction more generally. The essay show how Derrida traces the values associated with interiority in his readings of Plato, Rousseau, and Levi-Strauss in order to argue that the opposition between interiority and exteriority is not one philosophical opposition among others but the single most powerful and persistent opposition in Western philosophy, organizing everything from the relationship between speech and writing to that between presence and absence, essence and accident, even life and death. We thus come to see through a reading of this early work of Derrida’s that deconstruction will have been from its very inception a deconstruction of any claims to an inside that would come before or exclude its outside, that is, a deconstruction of every phantasm of interiority.

In this article I take up the image of inclination developed by Adriana Cavarero in her book, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude as a mode of developing an account of history informed by an ontology of heterogeneous ethics. Clarifying the potential of inclination contra the Kantian figure of “uprightness,” the principle task of this article is to reimagine the implications of inclination with regard to Walter Benjamin’s theses on history. Ultimately, I show that by pushing at the relationality inherent to an inclined ontology of the self a meaningful exchange can be generated between plural historical temporalities, a move that reveals the inclined figure’s potential to redeem narratives of the historically dispossessed.

In 1955, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna was returned to Germany following its removal from Dresden in anticipation of the city being bombed. That same year Heidegger wrote a short paper titled “Über die Sixtina,” likely to commemorate the painting’s return. The goal of this article is to bring the largely overlooked “Über die Sixtina” into discussions about Heidegger’s philosophy of art. While brief, Heidegger’s paper makes clear that the Sistine Madonna is an important work to consider when deliberating about his philosophy of art in general. This article elaborates on the topics Heidegger discusses in “Über die Sixtina,” particularly the image-being of the Sistine Madonna, the image as a window painting, and the place of the painting.

This essay contends that Stanley Cavell’s criterion of “good enough justice,” which designates the minimal condition of social justice necessary for his perfectionist understanding of ethical selfhood, constitutes an avoidance—rather than an acknowledgment—of the problem of injustice. Taking Cavell’s misreading of Walter Benjamin as exemplary of this tendency, the essay shows how Cavell’s moral perfectionism consistently converts questions about the suffering of others into a problem of the self and its conscience, thereby avoiding the ethical claim at the heart of Benjamin’s project.

I argue in this paper that Rawls is unable to offer a ground for the normativity of his freestanding politics, where his account is susceptible to a number of criticisms he raises against Hobbes. Rawls identifies three problems in Hobbes’s political view: the absence of reasonableness, the lack of a social role for morality, and finally resorting to an absolute sovereign to maintain stability. I maintain that Rawls’s Kantian account circumvents these problems. However, I argue that his move to a freestanding politics that disposes of the Kantian moral basis is unable to justify normative commitments and ultimately resorts to contingent justifications resulting from uncritically accepting norms institutions inculcate.

Vulnerability is often conceived of as a valuable category countering the ratiocentric and ableist bias in traditional ethical and political theories. Frequently, social formations are ascribed primary responsibility to respond to vulnerability since relevant theories go against normative individualism. However, generalizing norms and hegemonic structures tend to determine the notion, and thus the administration, of vulnerability. The paper argues that the tacit hypostatization and conceptual fixation of vulnerability can generate dialectical shifts that increase vulnerability precisely by emphasizing it. This is illustrated with examples such as exclusive recognition, stereotyping, social control, a disempowering ethics, and the problematic opposition of vulnerability and resilience. While an awareness for the inherent vulnerability of embodied beings is a crucial prerequisite for preventing us from establishing discriminating (though well-intentioned) notions of “special“ vulnerability, the inner dialectic of the concept cannot be remedied by a simple recipe such as the assertion that we are all vulnerable.

Much of leftist political philosophy has uncritically accepted the logic of capitalism, which is a logic of conservation that presents itself as a logic of “production.” Many leftist political philosophers subscribe to capitalism’s fundamental myth—that capitalism produces the new. This appearance of proliferation, however, masks an underlying stasis. This article interrogates this trend in the apparently disparate projects of contemporary accelerationism and Jacques Rancière. The accelerationist project of immanence allows for newness only in quantity and not in quality, while Rancière, coming closer to thinking radical newness in his account of politics, forecloses the possibility of a radically emancipatory society. I suggest an open ontology, which Marx offers, provides a better framework for thinking revolutionary newness.

This article examines the notion of vulnerable political subjectivity in Judith Butler’s theory of vulnerability. The paper aims to contribute to critical discussions of Butler’s political theory by offering an account of how the ontological, ethical, and political aspects of vulnerability shape political subjectivity in her work. The first part of the paper analyzes the features of vulnerable political subjects. The second part critically assesses to what extent Butler offers an alternative to the association of vulnerability with a damaged capability to act politically. The third part argues that Butler offers only a partial account of vulnerability as a transformative desire, which is crucial to explaining how and under what conditions vulnerability inspires subjects to engage politically with the conditions that shape their precarity or the precarity of others.

For the abstract, use this text instead: "Using the case of the Bosnian War during the 1990s, and drawing on Iris Murdoch’s philosophy, this paper develops an understanding of moral vulnerability, where one’s ability to imagine certain ways of being ethical can be transformed through the extreme violence of war and genocide. There is a vulnerability to moral injury through violence that is grounded in the way persons imagine themselves and the world. Beginning with the wartime diaries of Zlatko Dizdarević, a survivor of the Bosnian wars of the 1990s, the paper turns to different understandings of moral injury, as well as Margaret Urban Walker’s understanding of “moral vulnerability.” I argue these approaches do not capture an important dimension in Dizdarević’s witness. The paper then turns to Iris Murdoch’s philosophy to begin to articulate and account for this dimension and sketch an understanding of moral vulnerability distinct from current moral injury discourses.

Care (work) is in crisis. In fact, within our current system, social vulnerabilities of differential kinds are pushed to the fringes of society, while self-responsibility prevails. Yet recently, vulnerability has become a fashionable concept in (feminist) theory. It owes this popularity not least to Judith Butler’s work. This paper analyses the political potential of her conceptualization. More precisely, it argues for the need to assume political responsibility for vulnerability. This is not a connection that Butler makes explicitly. Instead, and contrary to her previous ambivalence to ethics more broadly, she tries to formulate a critical ethics based on vulnerability. Against the abstract nature of ethics, this paper turns to activist voices and Iris Marion Young’s theorisations on responsibility to develop a structural, historically contextualised and collective account of political responsibility. The example of care work and the crisis of care elucidates both theoretical and practical insights throughout the paper.

Hobbes and Butler both conjure images of an abandoned infant in their respective discussions of vulnerability. Leviathan uses this image to discuss original dominion, or natural maternal right over the child, while for Butler rights discourse produces fantasies of invulnerability that derealize other lives. However, Hobbes’s infant in nature has no rights and can only consent to being nourished. Only when able to nourish itself can it claim rights to transfer through the covenant producing a fantasy of individual invulnerability. Vulnerability in the state of nature and the commonwealth’s fantasy of invulnerability are together a counter-fantasy to the fantasies of invulnerability of Hobbes’s time, through heaven or eternal glory. In question is whether Butler, in her reimagining of community, is, like Hobbes, producing a fantasy, but a meta-fantasy that community can be taken as fantasy without derealizing the fantastic or that fantasizes an honesty about its being fantasy.

“La Poésie Comme Exercice Spirituel” first appeared in a 1942 issue of Revue Fontaine edited by Jacques and Raissa Maritain and was subsequently republished in Wah’s 1948 text Poésie, Pensée, Perception, published by Calmann-Lévy. The following is a translation of the Fontaine version. I have noted all of the variations from the latter version in the notes. As I emphasize in my commentary, the piece is a notable display of Wahl’s eclectic range of influences. Most importantly, it shows the extent to which his interest in radical empiricism and process metaphysics informs his creative approach to the intersection of poetics and metaphysics. These interests are not explicitly named in the essay, and yet their influence is pervasive. The essay also includes several moments of substantial resonance with the work of Gilles Deleuze, as noted in the commentary.

This commentary considers Wahl’s 1942 “Poetry as Spiritual Exercise” in the context of his interests in radical empiricism and process metaphysics. In doing so, it raises appreciation for the complexity of his thought, identifies specific notes of influence on Gilles Deleuze, and responds to worries that Wahl’s notion of spiritual exercise is predominantly a form of withdrawal, quietism, or retreat from the horrors of World War Two. For Wahl, rather than passive contemplation of a determinate artifact, poetry is a mode of experience that, to speak with Whitehead and James, is a making. This experience of poetry develops affordances of thought that strengthen existential capacity for remaining open to uncertainty, fragility, and vulnerability.

This essay considers together two recent posthumous publications by Derrida: Geschlecht III, and La vie la mort, both of which raise questions concerning translation. In Geschlecht III that is first of all the problem of how to translate the German word, how Heidegger’s reading of Trakl profits from, or loses in its translation, and how Derrida’s reading of Heidegger either does or does not translate Heidegger’s own interpretive practice. Reference to La vie la mort enables analysis of Benjamin’s concept of translation as a form of life that is “not limited to organic corporeality,” and consequently allows me to understand how Derrida’s thinking, very different from that of either Benjamin or Heidegger, takes us way back to something like originary inorganic lifedeath.

At an important moment in his reading of Heidegger in Geschlecht III, Derrida wields a pair of semi-technical terms (“polysemia” and “dissemination”) from his own earlier work, and uses them to identify a classical, indeed Aristotelian, vein in Heidegger’s reading of Trakl. This gesture is complex, both in that, in spite of appearances, the Mehrdeutigkeit Heidegger identifies in Trakl is not essentially to do with the term Geschlecht, and in that Derrida’s presentation of Aristotle’s views about polysemia is perhaps over-simplified, or at least leaves open the possibility of a more generous reading. Derrida’s notion of dissemination is shown not to entail a mere exacerbation of polysemia, but a quasi-semantic re-marking of the “syntax” that allows for any semantic effects at all. It is suggested that the fact that this marking can be described by Derrida as “monotonous” might open onto a slightly different reading both of Aristotle’s understanding of pollachos legomenon and pros hen, and Heidegger’s understanding of the Einklang of Trakl’s poetry.

This essay traces the pivotal—although largely unspoken—relation between the mother and language in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III. Derrida’s gloss of the “idiom” in Heidegger’s text leads to a reflection on the language of gestation through the family of words linking “tragen” (carrying) to “austragen” (carrying to term). Following Derrida, the essay proposes that Heidegger’s conception of the time of the “unborn” in his essay “Language in the Poem” is the time of the promise and the promise of a future that would not be conceived according to a vulgar conception of time. Heidegger’s idiomatic use of the prefix “un-” in the terms “unspoken” and “unborn” can be read as a temporal inflection that opens up another kind of thinking about birth. The essay concludes by asking how the place of the mother is inscribed otherwise in this unthinking of birth.

This article suggests that the deconstruction of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin in the Letter on Humanism is a precondition for what Derrida attempts to do in his commentary of Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III. This preliminary deconstruction, through a constellation of Hölderlinian motifs (“homeland”, “return home”, “Occident”, “Greece”, “Germany”), controls the topology of Geschlecht III and determines Derrida’s approach to the themes of “nationality” and “philosophical nationalism”.

In this paper I demonstrate that the analysis supporting Derrida’s identification of the desire for a pure, originary idiom in Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III provides a framework with which we can understand the call for a new language in Monolingualism of the Other. While acknowledging how his interpretation of Heidegger provides important insights that guide Derrida’s later negotiation with the dual dangers of nationalism and colonialism, I argue that the proximity to Heidegger, manifest in Derrida’s articulation of a desire for language in the singular, threatens to close down possibilities latent in the promising definition of deconstruction as plus d’une langue—both more than a language and no more of a language.

This is a translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s recently discovered 1952 Berlin speech. The speech includes several themes that reappear in Truth and Method, as well as in Gadamer’s later writings such as Reason in the Age of Science. For example, Gadamer criticizes positivism, modern philosophy’s orientation toward positivism, and Enlightenment narratives of progress, while presenting his view of philosophy’s tasks in an age of crisis. In addition, he discusses structural power, instrumental reason, the objectification of nature and human beings, the reduction of both to mere means, and the colonization of scientific-technological ways of knowing and being—all of which continue to impact our social and political lives together and threaten the very existence of every living being. This speech is essential reading for Gadamer scholars interested in the social, political, and ethical dimensions of his thought and for those interested in bringing Gadamer into conversation with critical theory.

This article is a review of two recently translated books by Italian philoso­pher Elettra Stimilli: The Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017; translated by Arianna Bove) and Debt and Guilt: A Political Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018; translated by Stefania Porcelli). The essay critically engages with (1) Stimilli’s interpretation of the nexus between ascesis and capitalism; (2) her account of the ascetic dimensions of contemporary economies of debt; (3) her reflections on the subversive potential of ascesis in the context of contemporary regimes of neoliberal governance.

This essay proceeds from the assertion that Derrida’s work has consistently been concerned with translation. This has been clearly evident since “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968). This concern comes to the fore in Geschlecht III, where countless features of Heidegger’s language are underscored as untranslatable. This does not prevent Derrida from proposing re-translations, of doing what he describes as “harassing” Heidegger’s language “with wave after wave of touches, caresses, and blows.” Untranslatability, as he argues here and elsewhere, is simply a matter of economy, of the one-word-for-one-word principle, according to which standard every text is untranslatable. But translation is also for Derrida a touchstone for the broadest questions posed by or to philosophy. One such important question or problem is hospitality, which, as he asserts in his 1995–1996 seminar on the topic, is “basically the same problem” as translation. This confluence of the questions of hospitality and translation is particularly relevant for his reading of Heidegger’s essay on Trakl, “Die Sprache im Gedicht.”

The article seeks to outline the relationship between Geschlecht III and Jacques Derrida’s published texts devoted to the mark “Geschlecht,” in order to detect the general strategy followed by Derrida in the construction of his archive during his lifetime. Indeed, we suppose that his archive has to be built in accordance with his deconstructive statements about the classical conception of the archive: a totalizing closure of a textual production able to trace it back to the unity of an ideal identity (Archive Fever). In particular, the article aims to focus on a passage at the end of Jacques Derrida’s Geschlecht III, where the question of the animal in Heidegger comes into the foreground and in a way that is slightly different from what we already know through Derrida’s published works and that could require a re-reading of his “entire” work.

This article takes up the specifically poetic dimension of what Jacques Derrida calls Martin Heidegger’s “philosophical nationalism” in the recently published Geschlecht III, arguing that this text doubles as a self-interrogation of Derrida’s own practice of reading poetry. Thus reading Geschlecht III alongside the nearly contemporaneous “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” I claim that Derrida’s critical deconstruction of Heidegger’s philosophical-poetic nationalism both allows us to read the traces of a more affirmatively deconstructive thinking of literary community in “Shibboleth” and draws attention to the limits and traps of such a project. Further, I demonstrate that Derrida’s and Heidegger’s respective approaches to the question of literary community cannot be separated from their respective approaches to the question of translation and their respective ways of mobilizing the motif of the “untranslatable.”

Derrida states at the beginning of Geschlecht III that at stake is the question of sexual difference, one that is referred in Heidegger’s 1953 essay on Trakl to a twofoldness that precedes the opposition of sexual duality, a duality which, according to Derrida, neutralizes sexual difference. I follow the development of what Derrida also called the “dream” of “another sexual difference,” one that would not be ruled by the opposition of the two. Derrida’s guiding interpretation in Geschlecht III is that Heidegger privileges “gathering” (Versammlung) and the reference to the “one” in this thinking of difference, and of sexual difference, thereby neutralizing difference. Drawing a contrast between difference as polysemy (gathered) and difference as dissemination (dispersion), I attempt in what follows to discuss Derrida’s interpretation, raising questions concerning some of his readings with respect to the motifs of dispersion, dissemination, polysemy, and gathering.

This paper tracks Derrida’s allusion to the “phoenix motif” in the recently published Life Death seminar, showing how it foreshadows and overlaps with the political problematic of “national humanism” made explicit in Geschlecht III. I argue that, be it in Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, biological life is always in the service of a spiritual life that finds its breath in a certain reappropriation of the German idiom. Following Derrida, I argue that this “philosophy-of-life German” (cet allemand philosophe de la vie) introduces a sinister equivocality between these thinkers and National Socialism, and this in spite of all their prudence to shield their discourses from such a co-option.

Derrida’s seminar “The Phantom of the Other” (1984–1985), reads Heidegger’s “Language in the Poem” (1953), which has the poetry of Georg Trakl at its center. Among the principal themes of Derrida’s seminar and/or of Heidegger’s essay are Heidegger’s effort to “place” Trakl’s presumably single, unsung poem; the relation of pain (Schmerz) to poetry; the two “strokes” of Geschlecht, a word that in part means the sexes, the first stroke being neutral, the second being evil; the German language and the Heideggerian idiom; philosophical nationalities and nationalisms; Derridean double-reading.

Spinoza has very little to say concerning the creative arts. A careful consideration of those passages in which he discusses art, however, reveals art to have an importance for him that far outstrips what his relative silence might suggest. In this paper, I argue that Spinoza situates art at the genesis of rational, philosophical knowledge. The importance of abstract reason, Spinoza’s “second kind” of knowledge to which most of philosophy belongs, has been well appreciated by scholars. In the Ethics, Spinoza offers a developmental account of this kind of knowledge: reason develops out of the knowledge of sense experience. By tracing his account of this process, I argue that art has an important role to play in the transition from sense experience to philosophical knowledge.

Building on the theory of humor advanced by Yves Cusset in his recent book Rire: Tractatus philo-comicus, I argue that we can understand the phenomenon in terms of what Jean-Luc Nancy, following Roland Barthes, has called the exemption from sense. I attempt to show how the humorous sensibility, understood in this way, is entirely incompatible with the experience of others as contemptible. I conclude by developing some of the normative implications of this, focusing specifically on the question as to whether it is ever morally permissible to treat others with contempt.

The so-called Menschenpark-debate on genetic engineering—originating in 1999—turned out to be one of the most controversial and contentious debates in German philosophy. It is also regarded as the first manifestation of the struggle between Sloterdijk and Habermas. While Sloterdijk’s ideas had a significant impact on Habermas’s theory, Sloterdijk’s philosophy has been consistently ignored and dismissed until today due to two reasons. First, he was accused of advocating for fascist ideology. Second, philosophers from the same academic circles claimed that his method does not meet academic standards. The debate therefore signifies a larger problem that concerns the methodological difference between analytic-Continental philosophies that work on a formal level and Continental philosophies that work with a tropological account experimenting with different non-formal philosophical expressions. I will carve out this distinction with respect to the Menschenpark-debate to argue that Sloterdijk is an integral part of our philosophical historical moment.

In this essay, I read Freud and Merleau-Ponty as voices for a more perceptive and nuanced discourse on the child. Their works, I suggest, contain two complementary approaches in this direction. The first approach concerns the structural asymmetry of child and adult. In his early writings, Freud assumes a radical break between the child’s and the adult’s sexualities. Taking seriously this assumption of asymmetry cautions us against the hasty application of adult standards to the child. The second approach concerns what I would call a “thick description” of the child’s lived experience. Merleau-Ponty exemplifies this approach in his lectures on child psychology and the notion of institution, where he develops a concrete, phenomenologically informed account of childhood and puberty.

Jan Patočka holds that both the Husserlian and the Heideggerian descriptions of history remain abstract because they lack an authentic reflection on historical sense’s appearing, which presupposes a description of the transition from the nonhistorical and prehistorical states of humanity to its final historical state. Nevertheless, it seems that Patočka would confront an internal aporia here because, even if he sought to think the continuity of these three movements, he tends to affirm the rupture between them. To overcome that aporia, it becomes necessary to formulate the hypothesis according to which the prehistorical is characterized by a repression of sense’s problematic character, whereas the historical as such is characterized by a conversion of consciousness toward this problematic character. Justifying this hypothesis requires exploring Patočka’s anthropology, confronting it with Arendt’s anthropology, and formulating metaphysical perspectives.

This article sets forth a compositional model of ideology by drawing on the tradition of historical materialism and further developing its insights into the aesthetic composition of reality. It demonstrates how ideology is not simply a set of false beliefs but is rather the process by which social agents are composed over time in every dimension of their existence, including their thoughts, practices, perceptions, representations, values, affects, desires, and unconscious drives. By working through a number of diverse debates and authors—ranging from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Louis Althusser, Eduardo Galeano, Rosaura Sánchez, and Paulo Freire—it thereby elucidates how ideology is best understood as an aesthetic process that includes aspect of sense and sense-making, and that therefore requires a collective, cultural revolution as its antidote.

This article aims to reread Jonas’s famous lecture on “Heidegger and Theology” linking it with a still unpublished lecture course on Being and Time Jonas held in 1967 at the New School for Social Research. From the reading of Heidegger’s masterwork, Jonas takes the idea of the “burdensome” character of the existence, which he interprets in terms of a “polarity” between man and his “other” (other men, God, world). Such a polarity is for Jonas the very essence of “religion” (as religamen) and of responsibility. From this vantage point, “Heidegger and Theology,” with its sharp criticism of the theological appropriation of Heidegger’s post-turn philosophy, appears to be a strong defense of the burden of “polarity,” as developed in Being and Time, against its removal by the thought of Being: a Being which is nothing but a mirror image of Dasein. Partially reconsidering his views on Heidegger’s Gnosticism, Jonas turns (the earlier) Heidegger against (the later) Heidegger himself.

This essay strives to show the relationship between current efforts to explain the nature of play and the essence of post-postmodernism. The muddied and arduous world of work becomes the site not only for creative play but for post-postmodern solutions to the complex situations we find ourselves in today.

Jacques Lacan comments repeatedly on anamorphic art as it exemplifies for him how the mind from a certain angle perceives through law-like patterns the world that would otherwise be nothing but a chaos of arbitrary multiplicities. The angle, though, has a certain effect on what is perceived; an effect that, as such, cannot be perceived within the realm of experience. The article tries to make the link between diffraction laws of perception more explicit in the subject-object dichotomy and refers for that purpose to the work of both Hegel and Lacan. A reference to Hegel is necessary, as Hegel was not only one of Lacan’s own most important sources of insights, but the author who first focused on justified true belief through a theory of a missed encounter between truth and knowledge.

This essay considers Deleuze and Guattari’s paradoxical claim that Marx’s critique of political economy implies as a universal history derived from the singular features of capitalism. In this critique, capitalism is defined by the commodity form, as a relationship of economic equivalence that replaces the bonds of dependence underlying other social formations. By negating relations of kinship and caste, capitalism reveals, a contrario, the universal foundation of other societies. As the “negative of all social formations,” capitalism conditions a universal history, defined, retrospectively, from the singular standpoint of a society, based upon the negation of kinship and caste. In this universal history, moreover, the negation of capitalism is identified with the possibility of a new and equally singular form of society. In Anti-Oedipus, the latter is defined as a “schizophrenic” condition liberated from the commodity as well as from the bonds of dependence that constituted the universal foundation of earlier societies.

Both Marx and Freud are children of the Enlightenment in certain manners. As such, they each display a qualified but firm optimism about history inevitably making progress in specific desirable directions. Freud predicts that continuing scientific and technological advances eventually will drive religiosity from human societies once and for all. Marx likewise forecasts the withering away of religions. Moreover, he treats this predicted process as symptomatic of even more fundamental socioeconomic developments, namely, his (in)famous anticipations of subsequent transitions to socialism and communism. However, the past century of human history has not been kind to any sort of Enlightenment-style progress narratives. My intervention on this occasion takes inspiration especially from Lacan’s reckoning with a “triumph of religion” defying Freud’s expectations of relentlessly broadening and deepening secularization. I argue that socio-political phenomena of the past several decades bear witness to religious superstructures having infused themselves into economic infrastructures.

In Volume Three of Capital in a striking but somewhat uncharacteristic formula, Marx argues that the labor relation is the “hidden basis” of the entire social edifice including the state and politics. As an attempt to clarify and develop this insight I examine the dual nature of labor as abstract and concrete labor, arguing that the two sides of labor correspond not just to two sides of the commodity, but to different ethics and alienations of labor, and ultimately to different philosophical anthropologies.

Why might alternative taxonomies be needed in contemporary life, and how might the notion of categorisation or anti-categorisation be thought speculatively? This essay considers some of the ways that life and matter have been historically divided and segmented and asks how this might be rendered mobile, offering new divisions and definitions for those who exist outside hegemonic segments or scales.

This essay advances a new materialist philosophy of faith. Mobilizing affect, I show that a change in the capacity to act, such as that created through belief or non-belief, is an experience that unites both secular and religious people. Belief in the superiority of secular culture over religious culture, or vice versa, are affectively similar corporeal orientations.

Plants synthesize with photons, so we commonly say. This article on photosynthesis introduces a notion of concepts that are to be thought of as capital and yet natural. They constitute a metaphysics of meteora alloys and copiousness through “actively lacking” a “proper” notion of conception.

Transversal Posthumanities emerge within the posthuman convergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism. Environmental, medical, and digital humanities reposition academic practice towards advanced technologies and climate change issues. A neomaterialist theoretical framework will help distinguish different kinds of Posthumanities: from the profit-oriented knowledge production practices of cognitive capitalism, to community-driven, non-profit experiments with minor knowledges.

This essay shows how Conrad Hal Waddington is at the very center of divergent genealogies of theoretical biology: he is at once remembered for his contribution to epigenetics and complex systems biology (in its current formation) and largely forgotten for the debt that he owes to Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. The essay traces Waddington's debt to Whitehead and demonstrates the way in which this conceptual lineage challenges the transcendental conditions of biological knowledge presupposed by the reigning paradigm of complex systems biology.

This essay re-problematises the Aristotelian concept of techne in terms of the mathematical function to demonstrate the centrality of agency in technics. This schema animates computational theory as an agential operator or computer, to situate agency’s necessity to the technical apparatus and the production of abstract relations.

This essay explores “sculptural plasticity” through neuronal matterings of the brainbody in philosophy, literature, and art. It focuses on Socrates’s cataleptic condition as evidenced in Plato’s Symposium, the plasticities at work in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, and morphogenetic acts of cell formation in the sculptural installation of Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead.

Ruinology is defined here as the study of the speculative reconstruction of ruins. Its remit encompasses both the study of the mechanisms of ruination as well as attempts to reverse-engineer ruination and reconstruct architectural remains.