Deleuze and Nietzsche

Nietzsche on the Affirmation of LifeCharles Boddiker, University of Southampton

I argue that Nietzsche’s distinction between the affirmation and negation of life is a distinction between two ways in which we “will power.” Nietzsche disapproves of willing power when it tends toward the decline of life: this kind of willing constitutes life-negation. He approves of willing power when it tends toward the enhancement of life. I argue that affirming life just is willing power of the kind that Nietzsche approves, namely, the kind that enhances life.

In part one I situate my view within the secondary literature. Accounts of affirmation form two camps. The first claims that affirmation involves reflective endorsement of a state of affairs. The second claims that it is an unreflective expression of one’s drives. I argue that latter kind is more fundamental than the former.

In part two I argue further that commentators from both camps falsely assume that affirmation must involve a reflective or unreflective state over and above “life” itself; either an unreflective desire for it, or a reflective endorsement of it. If one properly attends to Nietzsche’s target, Schopenhauer, one can see that this is not the case. For Schopenhauer, one affirms the will to life automatically, simply in virtue of maintaining one’s body and satisfying one’s various desires. Since willing is the essence of life, affirming life is not a state over and above willing, it just is willing. The structure of Schopenhauer’s account carries over into Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche identifies life with the will to power by claiming that it is the essence of life; and one affirms life’s essence, the will to power, simply in virtue of willing power in the appropriate way. I conclude that affirming life means willing power in a way that enhances or expands life’s essence, namely, the will to power itself.

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Force is what can, will to power is what wills: On the relation between the virtual and the intensive in Deleuze’s Difference and RepetitionNathan Widder, Royal Holloway, University of London

 Recent Deleuze scholarship has become more focused on Deleuze’s notion of intensity and in particular on the relationship developed in Difference and Repetitionbetween virtual Ideas and their actualisation on one side and intensity and individuation on the other side. This paper will propose an interpretation of this relationship by linking it to the relationship between force and will to power that Deleuze offers in Nietzsche and Philosophy.  It will first examine the idea that the will to power determines forces from the double point of view of their quantity and their quality and link this to Deleuze’s contention that intensive processes of dramatisation and individuation determine the differenciation of the virtual in actualised species and parts.  It will then examine how for Deleuze these intensive processes do not actualise but rather incarnate Ideas, and that it does so by way of a synthesis of the disparate that does not constitute a substantial individual as such but rather a perspective, again along lines articulated in Deleuze’s Nietzsche book where the will to power constitutes distinct moral perspectives dramatised in the figures of noble and slave.  Finally, it will use these considerations to highlight a crucial aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy seemingly missed by most commentators – that for Deleuze the virtual is never subject to a single actualisation but is always simultaneously actualised in diverse and irreducible ways, engendering a world of incompossibles at the level of the actual and not simply the virtual. 

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Anti-Topology in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy

Evrim Bayindir, Istanbul

In this presentation, I will to a large extent restrict myself to a reading of Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy and try to understand the specific way it relates temporality to spatiality or topology. I will use this substantial work strategically to push Deleuze towards a direction of anti-topology in favour of temporality. I do not want to consider space and time as equals as conventionally accepted, but locate the former as the subservient of the latter. Although Deleuze doesn’t make this claim explicitly and never examines time and space on their own, my aim here is to show that his exposition of active forces relies clearly on their temporal qualities, while that of reactive ones on their obvious spatial features. Just like active forces are qualified as acting and reactive forces as being acted, temporal relations are superior to topological or spatial ones. Time dominates space, in precisely the same way as active forces dominate reactive forces.

First, I will briefly touch upon Deleuze’s own explicit but narrow account of topology in Nietzsche and Philosophy, where he gives a completely negative sense to spatiality. Second, I will show in three aspects how there is a broader implicit critique of topology that pervades this work. It will then be concluded that topology amounts to nihilism and metaphysics in general. Third, I will benefit from Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s dice throw metaphor with the intent to explain how this broader topology is converted into an entirely temporal mode of thinking. The dice throw finds its ultimate practice in the test of the eternal return by which forces become temporal as they become active, and gain the ability to dominate topological reactions or reactive becomings.

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Derrida and Politics

Rethinking the “Political” with Heidegger and Derrida Markus Wolf, BTU Cottbus‐Senftenberg

Based on the social philosophy of the early Heidegger and the late Jacques Derrida, my talk proposes a new reading of the concept of the “political”.

With reference to Heidegger’s fragmentary social philosophy in Being and Time, I begin with showing that social norms und practices have the following characteristics: immanence, contingency, overridingness/revokeability (“Nichtigkeit” as Heidegger puts it), absoluteness, facticity, and entanglement with relations of responsibility. Drawing mainly on insights of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, I argue that social practices are political for three interconnected reasons: Firstly, the inclusion and exclusion of subjects is a necessary feature of social norms and practices. Secondly, social norms and practices inevitably imply hierarchical relations of responsibility among and toward the subjects included and excluded in these practices. Thirdly, any justification of responsibility must be either incomplete or self‐referential and, therefore, groundless. This groundlessness, however, is the foundation of the political. Political actions, conflicts and processes essentially uncover, question, chal‐ lenge and (re)negotiate the hierarchical relations of responsibility inscribed in social practices.

In the final part of my talk, I will go on to argue that we can derive a normative conception of emancipatory politics from the deconstructive concept of the political presented before. Emancipatory political strategies and actions aim to deconstruct unjustified and unjust exclusion and hierarchisation in social practices. Anti‐emancipatory politics, in contrast, aims to establish, justify and fortify unjust relations of power and domination within social practices and institutions. At the end of my talk, I will, very briefly and selectively, compare the deconstructive conception of the political presented here with competing post‐marxist and post‐structuralist approaches in political philosophy in order to point out its strengths and advantages.

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Derrida on the Public Space and ReasonCillian Ó Fathaigh, University of Cambridge

Though often neglected, Derrida took multiple public and political positions during his life. Though this has been acknowledged by some commentators, what has yet to be considered is how Derrida conceives of the public space. Though Derrida offered no thorough reflection on the public space, there is good reason to think that this was of real interest to him. The first is his collaboration with Pierre Bourdieu in the International Parliament of Writers, which specifically sought to change the relationship between the intellectual and the public space. The second is his very late engagement with Habermas in favour a collective European public space. Looking closely at these, as well as comments in interviews on radio and television, I want to interrogate what is at stake in Derrida’s engagement with the public space and consider how this ties into his own philosophical positions.

I will argue, in fact, that Derrida has a well-thought out view of the public space and that this justifies the returned interest in reason in his later work (in works such as Rogues (2002)). I will demonstrate that even though Derrida has a different view of reason than the likes of Bourdieu and Habermas, this is still compatible with the use of reason in the public space. I will argue that this view of reason underpins his political engagements and that it is not possible to fully understand his later philosophy without properly considering this question.

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Panel F: The Future of Philosophy

The Future of Philosophy as MetaphysicsAndrew Haas, The Higher School of Economics, Moscow

Does philosophy have a future? What about philosophy today? On the one hand, now, there is no philosophy, and there are a priori no philosophers (although there are many philosophy professors, as Heidegger reminds us). If a truly philosophical problem presents itself, it must be immediately simplified, broken down and made palatable, in order to be quickly solved. The inverted world prevails: opening is closing, freeing enslaves, truth is faked, ethics is unethical, epistemology knows nothing, aesthetics is unaesthetic, reason is irrational, power disempowers, otherness is just more of the same—and ‘the desert grows’ (Nietzsche).

On the other hand, ‘the saving also grows’ (Hölderlin). And so, a few suggestions: (1) The rediscovery of the question of the meaning of being as the presence and/or absence of the ground (abyssal or not) of everything that is (objects and subjects, finite or infinite, stones and plants, animals or humans or gods, real and imaginary, true or false), and so anything that is said and done, felt or known—but in order to consider (taking a clue from language) the ancient understanding of being as implied, an implication, as I have argued in Unity and Aspect (2018), neither merely present nor absent. (2) The recollection that metaphysics is not simply the science of being qua being, ontology—for ‘being and unity imply one another’ (Aristotle), and everything that is also is one—it is far more the study of being and unity, or onto-henology. (3) The realization that time is the ‘horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being’ (Heidegger) because being is, first and foremost, a verb, Zeit-wort, expressing an action or event through tense (that is, temporally, whether determined as past-present-future, a now-series, now and then, before and after, or in some other way)—but then, being is just as much the horizon of time, and metaphysics is the study of being and unity and time, or onto-heno-chronology. (4) The reconsideration of the clue that all verbs, including being, have both tense and aspect—but then, metaphysics is actually the study of being and unity, time and aspect, or onto-heno-chrono-phenomenology (at least if we give the name of ‘phenomenology’ to the study of how an action is done or an event takes place, whether completely or incompletely, continuously or discontinuously), which has implications for the future of philosophy, and for any future whatsoever.

The Future of Philosophy as PoliticsChristoph Schuringa, New College of the Humanities, LondonI retrace the development in Marx's thought (from 1841 to 1845) of the notion of the 'realization of philosophy' into that of the 'supersession of philosophy', and show how this resolves a problem that had faced all of the Young Hegelians: that of how philosophy could become praxis in the wake of the 'total' philosophy of Hegel. The supersession of philosophy is not a turn away from philosophy, in the form of its abandonment, suppression or replacement, but a praxis of its ongoing realization in the world. It was only through an intensive working-through of the responses to Hegel's legacy of Bauer, Feuerbach and Stirner that Marx was able to see this possibility, as I demonstrate. I go on to show the relevance of Marx's path to the idea of the supersession of philosophy to our current conjuncture. There is a great deal of uncertainty today about what philosophy can still be, if anything. A guiding assumption is that philosophy must give up its previous pretensions to grandeur as the attempt to think being, and take on an altered remit (be it, for instance, the clarification of concepts, or the sociology of knowledge), or give way to other disciplines (such as cognitive science). But this is mistaken, in precisely the way in which contributors to the conjuncture of the early 1840s who fell short of Marx's development of the idea of the supersession of

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philosophy were mistaken. The future of philosophy is one in which its grandeur is maintained precisely through its own continuing supersession. 

The Future of Philosophy as AestheticsArto Haapala, University of Helsinki

Heidegger famously argued that building and dwelling are closely related: one of the goals of building is to construe places for human dwelling. Most often these dwellings are houses, but building obviously covers a much wider range than mere house construction. Dwelling does not only mean inhabiting a shelter of some kind, but covers human existence more broadly. Heidegger himself mentions bridges as examples of building, but when one thinks of urban environments, it soon becomes obvious that just about anything we encounter is constructed, to a certain extend even green and blue areas, e.g. parks and forests, as well as ponds and rivers. Urban areas are prime examples of sites that are supposedly construed primarily for human dwelling.

In this paper, I will explore the manifestations of the aesthetic and accordingly of aesthetic experience is urban settings. I will argue that cities offer possibilities for a great variety of aesthetic experiences, starting from peaceful contemplative experiences to very powerful multi-faceted ones. Cities have sometimes been compared with works of art, and one of the reasons for this is the potential of both artworks and urban environments to raise aesthetic experiences. Compared to a single work of art, an urban environment often has exactly the benefit of offering a variety of experiences rather than just one kind. These kinds of analyses are also a way of making philosophical considerations useful. This is what aesthetics could be in practice: showing the aesthetic richness of the human environment.

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Analytic/Continental Intersections

Blurring the Differences Between Hegel and Wittgenstein: A Response to Robert Brandom Bruna Picas Prats, Universitat de Barcelona

The aim of this contribution consists in overcoming the difference that Robert Brandom in Georg Hegel's Phenomenology (2008) establishes between Hegel and Wittgenstein's understanding of language. To this aim, the philosophies of language of both philosophers are going to be analyzed starting with the two main consequences of the German "Linguistic Turn". The first consequence considered is an analogy to the problem about instrumental knowledge that Hegel develops in the introduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which concludes in establishing the thesis that the conditions of possibility of doing philosophy are that knowledge expresses itself. In the same direction but from a very different context, Wittgenstein in the Blue Book (1960), is arguing against semantic internalism which drives him to his famous turn to a pragmatic understanding of meaning; as a function of this, the idea of the language games arises. Knowledge, in order to be something, has to be expressed. If it is not, conveying meaning is impossible. The difference that Brandom establishes between these two authors that we aim to bridge consists in saying that, on the one hand, for Hegel language has a downtown named "Absolute Knowledge" where even what has been refuted, that is, the incompatible, is integrated. On the other hand, Brandom considers that Wittgenstein insists that language has no essence, but consists in a sprawl of suburban neighborhoods whose disposition is intelligible only genealogically. However, this gap is only apparent. To Wittgenstein, what determines a neighborhood are its boundaries. What these limits are delineating is the specific neighborhood, but the boundaries are not the neighborhood itself, something escapes it. To Hegel, in this Absolute in which everything has to be integrated, what is non-integrable cannot be integrated. It is precisely this décalage what we consider to solve the difference between Hegel and Wittgenstein presented by Robert Brandom, and one of the most fundamental approaches to them both.

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The Twofold Role of Actuality in Hegel’s Modal Metaphysics Mert Yirmibes, University of Warwick

In this talk, I will argue that Hegel offers an alternative modal-metaphysical account to modal eliminativist and modal reductionist views. Modal eliminativism is a view that denies the clarity and analysability of modality without certain other non-modal terms, and suggests eliminating modality in virtue of the requirement for a further analysis on terms that explain modal concepts—e.g. Quine’s critical view of modality arguing that the ambiguity of the modal necessity in the determining conditions for an necessary object needs a further analysis of essence and accidents of the object, which, for him, makes modal analysis redundant. On the other hand, modal reductionism is a view suggesting that modality could be grounded in non-modal primitive accounts—e.g. David Lewis’ semantical theory of possible worlds, which intends to overcome the Quinean impasse by conceiving possible worlds as the foundation to which modal concepts are reduced without appealing to essence metaphysics. Although these two common views constitute different approaches to modality, they both argue that modality is supposed to be grounded on non-modal explanatory accounts. Against those views, I claim that Hegel’s theory of modality, particularly the two-dimensional concept of actuality, provides a self-sustaining modal metaphysics, which accounts for modality on the basis of modal concepts. In order to prove this claim, I explain how Hegel achieves such an account with two major points: first, the domain of modal metaphysics must be understood to be restricted to the actual and the modal determinations of the actual, and, second, this restricted primary domain needs to include a two-dimensional concept of actuality, which is expressed concurrently as a modal, and as a totality in which modal-objects are located as actuals alongside their modal determinations. I conclude that these two points put forward Hegel’s account of modality as a persuasive alternative to the eliminativist and reductionist modal accounts.

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Friendship and Fission: Personal identity in Derrida and ParfitKit Barton, Bartonkit@regents.ac.uk

Amongst many arguments and claims about friendship in Politics of Friendship, Derrida writes in the eighth chapter, “Recoils”, that a person is only capable of having friends insofar as the person is capable of both thinking as a subject while also thinking the other. He writes, “If man has friends, if he desires friends, it is because man thinks and thinks the other.” He then translates this assertion into a Cartesian formulation, writing “I think therefore I am the other”. Thus, he offers a striking alternative to the traditional cogito. On the surface this appears to be another, typical Derridean performative contradiction in a book that knowingly contains many (“O friends, there are no friends”, etc.). On this interpretation, Derrida may be adding another example of deconstructive undecideability to his overall oeuvre. Another interpretation might suggest that he is introducing a Hegelian, or generally dialectical, element to the traditional Cartesian cogito. Both of these interpretations are plausible but my paper will argue for another.

Derek Parfit’s 1984 book Reasons and Persons offers a strong argument against the widespread belief in a Cartesian account of identity. By developing and analysing a couple of important thought experiments (Fission & Teletransporter), Parfit demonstrates that personal identity, conceived as a Cartesian ego, which would be non-reductive to brain, body or mental life, leads to contradictory conclusions. If identity, or a strong idea of personal self, is assumed, then certain contradictions are unavoidable. Whereas, if it is not assumed, Parfit’s reductionist position, then these problematic contradictions disappear. This would mean that personal identity, the ‘I’ at the heart of the Cartesian cogito might not matter in the way most think it does.

On this point both Derrida and Parfit are on very similar ground. My paper will argue that Derrida’s alternative cogito with its odd, seemingly contradictory, conjunction of the ‘I’ and ‘the Other’, personal thinking and ‘thinking the other’, is fundamentally similar to Parfit’s thought experiments and like them similarly leads to the philosophical conclusion that personal identity based on a Cartesian ego is not necessary and might not matter much. In other words, Derrida and Parfit both conclude that the difference between people, myself and the other, me and my friend, might be best understood without the traditional Cartesian boundaries on personal identity.

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After HeideggerThe importance of the Heideggerian term “Fuge” for the question of systematic thinking – an experiment inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy Jonathan Jancsary, University of Innsbruck/University of Applied Science Dornbirn

Though some important publications (especially in the German speaking realm) have been written concerning the importance of the term “Fuge” (jointure) in Heidegger’s later philosophical works, few philosophers have actually tried to take the meaning of this term beyond Heidegger’s own thoughts. Obviously, the (French) so-called post-modern and post- structuralist thinkers (and some who cannot be categorized by these terms) have been heavily inspired by the German philosopher and have tried to develop their own seemingly a- systematic systems of thought with the help of his concepts. However, the term “Fuge” seems to be one which did not – for various reasons – obtain the recognition it might deserve, even though it could hold important clues of how to avoid the seemingly dualist problem of either having a strict system of thought or of being an a-systematic (or even non- or anti-systematic) thinker. The “Fuge” offers the possibility to widen the term “system” and to open it for a new meaning.

In this paper – which is going to be a chapter in the context of a larger dissertation paper – an attempt is made at actually operationalizing the term “Fuge” and making it applicable to socio- political problems and phenomena, thus granting a new perspective on these issues. This paper is therefore split into three sections: (i) Firstly, the paper wants to show that Heidegger’s idea of the “Fuge” is neither an obscure nor completely abstract term which is only useful in his own building of thought. An in-depth discussion of the term “Fuge” will take place in this section. (ii) Secondly, inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s political writings, it is attempted to demonstrate how the “Fuge” may offer a change of perspective when dealing with socio- political phenomena. (iii) Thirdly, the usefulness and applicability of the so-called “Fugendenken” will be demonstrated on a concrete socio-political example.

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From Time to Time: Auto-Affection in Derrida’s 1964-65 Heidegger CourseTracy Colony, Bard College Berlin

Derrida always stressed the importance of his engagement with Heidegger and often returned throughout his life to different aspects of Heidegger’s thought. With the recent publication of his 1964-65 course, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History greater insight is now possible into the exact terms of Derrida’s early engagement with Heidegger and the significance he would accord it in the major works of 1967 and beyond. With the reception of this text just beginning, many lines of interpretation are being unfolded. However, one aspect not yet addressed in this early reception which will be crucial for approaching and orienting this work is the theme of auto-affection. The concept of auto-affection is important for assessing Derrida’s Heidegger course for two reasons. Firstly, Derrida understands auto-affection to be Heidegger’s most radical figuration of temporality in the period of Being and Time. Secondly, tracing Derrida’s early focus on auto-affection in Heidegger can provide an important context for understanding the initial development of what would become a prominent theme in Derrida’s own work. My argument in this paper is structured in three sections. In the first, I give a brief introduction to Derrida’s course. I then present the theme of auto-affection in this course and demonstrate its central importance. In conclusion, I show how Derrida’s treatment of this theme in the context of his early Heidegger engagement can be seen to look forward to his employment of auto-affection in Speech and Phenomena.

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On truth and gossip: The position of ‘communication’ in Laruelle’s non-philosophyThomas Sutherland, University of Lincoln

In an essay from the early 1990s, François Laruelle characterizes philosophy as ‘that rumour which, speaking with itself and speaking only of itself, extends itself across the entire boundaries of the West’, a discourse which ‘propagates on the basis of its menacing vacuity and impending ruination’ (‘La rumeur et le savoir’, my translation), counterposing it against a more rigorous science or knowledge of the One. And although he would soon abandon such recourse to scientificity, his derisive description of philosophy as a constantly circulating form of rumour, gossip, or hearsay remains consistent.

Accordingly, in this paper, I wish to argue that Laruelle’s critique of ‘mediatic communication’, which he views as having supplanted sophism as the nihilistic abyss into which philosophy leads us, representing a total unification of worldly experience under the aegis of a universal exchangeability, as well as his broader characterization of philosophy as a kind of gossip, maintains a rather common philosophical presupposition: namely, the inadequacy of both everyday speech and technologically-mediated communication in accounting for the real. Of course, Laruelle does not claim to wholly reject such communication, and yet, ultimately, he stills appeals to a pre-communicative experience that claims to determine all communication in the last instance, and a pre-worldly subject unsullied by any logos that would situate them as a Being-in-the-world.

By considering this attempt to both disrupt and reappropriate the communicative, dialogic function of philosophy in relation to the Heideggerian notion of ‘idle talk’, I propose that Laruelle’s non-philosophy is beholden to a markedly philosophical distinction between truth and doxa that ultimately comes to regard all communication and exchange as a transcendence that alienates us from the radical immanence of our lived existence.

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Kairos: site of authenticity, production or both?Seb Thirlway, Newcastle University

Although the word kairos is famously never explicitly mentioned in Being and Time, an extensive secondary literature on it traces the relationship between Heidegger's exposition of temporality and one or both of two notions of kairos. One of these notions is Aristotelian, related to phronesis and possibly to praxis; the other is the Pauline, eschatological notion. Assimilating the Augenblick of Heideggerian authentic temporality to either of these, to the extent of asserting outright identity or dependent derivation, has proven problematic, and some of these conceptual problems will be discussed in my paper. On the other hand, reading the Augenblick side by side with kairos may be fruitful in that it raises the question whether – and in what sense – the former can take effect, and this will be the second strand to be explored in my paper.

In a completely different context, Antonio Negri carries out an independent retrieval of the notion of kairos and this, at least initially, appears to have some points in common with Heidegger's account of the Augenblick. However, Negri’s thinking takes place in a very different context: one of an explicitly anti-transcendentalist materialism in the service of an avowedly political project. The other striking difference is that Negri thinks kairos as emphatically productive and generative: for him, the kairos is a site of production, of a "praxis of truth".

In this presentation, I will set out the differing starting points and aims adopted by Heidegger and Negri, and explore whether their respective approaches to the notion of kairos reveal points of intersection between them, or whether the differences between them are too pronounced to be reconcilable.

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What is Philosophy?

Reading the Enemies Jaako Karhunen, Loughborough University)

In this paper I discuss Reading the Enemies, the philosophical and artistic research project that I have been organising for the last two years. It is a series of workshops where invited speakers present readings of their enemies: texts or arguments that are in opposition to their own theoretico-political positions. We have held 25 workshops or talks on the thematic of the project, with scholars and artists from the UK and Finland. The project aims to create a collective space for the production of shared political opinion via philosophical reflection. The starting point is that the notions of reading and animosity are in apparent contradiction to each other: to provide a reading of an enemy is fraught with difficulty. The notion of reading implies a shared space of meaning, while enmity implies precisely the absence of such a space. If in the act of reading a shared space of meaning is formed, it can be said that enmity disappears, risking the legitimation and platforming of discourses that the reader was originally opposed to. On the other hand, reading fails if enmity is maintained: the act of reading hazards becoming the simple reiteration of already existing, locked-in caricatures of the opposing theoretico-political positions. The intention is not simply to reconceptualise or better define the terms 'reading' and 'enemy', nor to re-enact any Schmittian conception of politics as the existential antagonism between opposing enemy- positions. Instead, the above contradiction between the two notions functions as a philosophical thought-experiment, which forces the participants to self-reflectively inquire into their theoretico-political first principles. As such, the exercise of reading enemies provides conceptual tools for the examination of the co-articulation of theoretical and political positions, or ‘political epistemology’ understood from the perspective of European philosophy. More info can be found from the webpage: https://www.readingenemies.co.uk/

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On Philosophy Considered as one of the Fine Arts Moritz Gansen, Technische Universität Darmstadt

“The compulsion to engage with the world of pre-established expressive forms — regardless of whether their origin is in the past or the present — signifies the decisive critical moment for any artist intending to assert their own character.” Aby Warburg’s claim, though geared towards a specific predicament of “the artist”, might equally apply to our idea of the “philosopher”: The compulsion to engage with the world of pre-established ideas or concepts... But are philosophers, in their practice, really like artists? Gilles Deleuze, parallelising philosophical work with artistic creation, famously conceived of philosophy as “the creation of concepts”. Others, however, like for instance Pascal Engel, a French philosopher closely associated with the so-called ”analytic tradition“, distinguish different philosophical “dispositions”, suggesting that the image of the philosopher as a creative individual, a type of genius, ideally, is a very specific development within a “continental” context; in the analytic tradition, he claims, philosophy is typically a “collective enterprise” governed by the intersubjective professional rules and conventions of the scholarly trade. But how do we ourselves – especially within a “Society for European Philosophy” – conceive and experience our philosophical practice? Aren’t we indeed frequently disposed to look for novelty, for interesting arguments, easily bored with the professionalism of the mere scholar? In short: How do we work? And who actually is this “we”? Rather than presenting results, this intervention will seek to provoke a discussion about our own philosophical activities, about our normative presumptions as to what (good) philosophy is and should be, and what this means, methodologically, for being philosophers within (or outside of) the academy.

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Posthuman Passivity or Xeno-Agency?David Roden, The Open University

What remains of the political agent in posthuman thought? I have argued that a rigorous posthumanism seeks to question and, in many cases, disable the filters that render humanist thought about future agents coherent. That, at least, was the intervention that Speculative Posthumanism sought to make in the debate between Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism and, more recently, in the debate surrounding Accelerationism (Roden 2014)!

Yet, to pursue the analogue synthesis metaphor, this appears to leave us with a lot of 'unfiltered noise' from the future and no basis for discerning action or wider goals.

Does this commit the posthumanist to an apolitical life of quietist acceptance and private irony? In this talk I attempt to respond to this criticism by considering how a posthumanist deconstruction of agency traces homologies between aesthetic experimentation and the schema for forms of non-identarian politics where a denuded idea of agency becomes a site of experimentation within the affordances of an actualizing future (Roden 2016). I will finish by noting contrasts and affinities between this insurgent futurity, accelerationism and xenofeminism.    

Representative Readings

Roden, D. 2014. Posthuman life: Philosophy at the edge of the human. Routledge.

Roden, D. 2015. ‘Posthuman Life: The Galapagos Objection’, https://enemyindustry.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/the-galapagos-objection/

Roden, David. 2016. ‘Letters from the Ocean Terminus’, Dis Magazine. http://dismagazine.com/discussion/81950/letters-from-the-ocean-terminus-david-roden/

Roden, David. 2017a. ‘On Reason and Spectral Machines: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism’, in Philosophy After Nature edited by Rosie Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn, London: Roman and Littlefield, 2017, pp. 99-119.

Roden, David. 2017b. ‘In the Country of the Broken’, gobbet magazine, https://gobbetmag.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/david-roden-prose/

Roden, David. 2018. “Disconnection at the Limit: Posthumanism, Deconstruction, and Non-Philosophy”, Symposia Melitensia 14, 19-33.

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Evolution and Entropy

Deleuze, Whitehead and Evolutionary ChaosmologyBill Ross, Independent Scholar

‘The problem of a unity or multiplicity of science, therefore, must not be posed as a function of a system of coordinates that is possibly unique at a given moment. As with the plane of

immanence in philosophy, we must ask what status before and after assume, simultaneously, on a plane of reference with temporal dimension and evolution. Is there just one or several

planes of reference?’

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

‘The general aspect of nature is evolutionary expansiveness’

A.N. Whitehead

A.N. Whitehead characterised his thought as a cosmology. This paper intends to establish that Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of nature can be read coherently in the same vein; his ‘chaosmos’ is a cosmology. Moreover, reading both philosophers in this light reveals productive connections to themes at large in contemporary cosmological physics, and in particular to the increasingly broad range of evolutionary accounts of cosmological history.

The universe is currently understood to have evolved through qualitatively distinct stages or epochs to date, with attendantly distinct sets of predominating natural kinds, constants and laws. The initial ‘quark-gluon soup’ after the big bang ceded to lighter elemental formations, enabling the subsequent accretion of stellar bodies and thereby the nucleosynthesis of heavier elements. Both philosophers provide a metaphysical framework which speaks to a diversity of scientific theoretical accounts of this evolutionary aspect of nature, most saliently to ‘network’ and ‘holographic’ paradigms, such as those put forward by Lee Smolin and David Bohm. Both foreground a novel conception of ‘limits’ (e.g. of the speed of light) and ‘constants’ (e.g. of the conservation of energy) in science which clarify what is at stake in any attempt to explain what it is for a universe to evolve (Whitehead in relation to Spinozistic expression, Deleuze in conversation with Bergson on ‘negation’). The paper highlights points of convergence and divergence on themes in physics such as entropy, quantum non-locality and spatial dimensionality, and draws out criteria for what might count as a truly open, evolutionary cosmos; criteria which confront the science and the philosophy alike. These criteria are encapsulated in Deleuze’s discussion of ‘The Ideal Game’ in The Logic of Sense, and Whitehead’s nuanced conception of the cosmological Epoch. As Deleuze has it, ‘Is there just one or several frames of reference?’

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Bernard Stiegler’s Thermodynamic Politics: A Critique of the Political Use of NegentropyBen Turner, Political Theory, University of Kent

In his recent interventions into the politics of the Anthropocene Bernard Stiegler has adopted the language of ‘entropy’ and ‘negentropy’ as part of both his broader philosophy of technology and his intervention into the political stakes of climate change. This paper will explore the stakes of Stiegler’s adoption of the language of thermodynamics in order to argue that it constitutes a closure of the open and pluralist conception of the political that is made possible by his earlier work. It will first summarise how Stiegler’s philosophy of technics can be used to generate a radically open conception of politics where the nature of political judgment is inseparable from the particular, technically supported processed of individuation from which it emerges. Second, it will show how the language of thermodynamics, according to Stiegler, extends the local nature of political judgment by situating it within a set of political problems defined by the tension between entropy and negentropy in a particular technical context. Third, in contrast to Stiegler’s own position, the paper will then argue that the language of thermodynamics imposes upon this local understanding of the political by, on the one hand, reducing it to the language of energy, and, on the other, restricting politics to the modern language of order against disorder. In conclusion, brief remarks will be made regarding the nature of the relationship between ontology and conceptions of the political that arise from this critique of Stiegler’s work. Namely, that his use of thermodynamics is a clear example of how the attempt to derive a pluralist politics from ontological premises will inevitably impose upon and short-circuit that pluralism.

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PhenomenologyMaking sense of self-awareness: phenomenology beyond qualitative feelArtem Bourov, The University of Melbourne

Can we make sense of our conscious experience in the same way that we make sense of the physical world? In this paper, I will respond to this question by demonstrating two ways in which the phenomenological philosophical tradition enriches and expands on classic arguments for the irreducibility of consciousness in analytic philosophy of mind. Drawing on the Husserlean and Sartrean model of consciousness developed by Dan Zahavi (1999, 2005, 2014), I argue that pre-reflective self-awareness – the immediate, intimate, reflexive awareness we have of our own experiences – is just as integral to conscious experience – and just as epistemically irreducible – as the paradigm marker of the irreducibility of consciousness within Analytic debates, that of ‘raw’ or ‘qualitative’ ‘feel’. I further suggest that if pre-reflective self-awareness constitutes a core and foundational form of selfhood (as Zahavi insists), then the experiential self is likewise epistemically irreducible to the physical. In this case, we add a new constraint to the question of how we can comprehend ourselves both as a subject for the world and an object in the world (Zahavi 1999). I conclude by outlining potential responses within a Zahavian framework, which emphasises: the need for a multi-dimensional account of the self; the embodiment and embeddedness of experiential subjectivity; and the intimate connection between self-awareness, self-fissure and alterity.

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Phenomenological Description as Existential Therapy: Re-Reading Merleau-Ponty’s “Preface” to Phenomenology of PerceptionJeffrey McCurry, Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center and Department of Philosophy, Duquesne University and Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can change not only how we think but how we live. That is, his thought is therapeutic. It not only diagnoses the epistemic weaknesses and artificialities of pensée de survol theorizing and explanation, but even more offers the possibility for us to embrace what we can call “phenomenological life”. His philosophy’s practical and therapeutic nature is one of the reasons why he explicitly says in the “Preface” that his phenomenology is rightly read in the company of Freud’s thought.

In this light, through a reading of the famous “Preface” I suggest that what Merleau-Ponty calls “perception” is not finally just the fundament of consciousness that we can reflectively come to know, but a kind of life that is lived. Life can be committed to perception—indeed life to be authentic needs to be converted to perception. Perception is a way of life that tarries with the dangerous but most real edges of experience—temporal, embodied, sexual, free, finite, and more.

Yet this phenomenological life is not merely an unreflective return to primordial lived experience. It involves, rather, a conscious acceptance of consciousness—a reflective living with the grain of embodied, temporal, sexual, free, and finite consciousness. This way of life is made possible by the reflective work of phenomenological description, which is best seen as a guide to more full, real, authentic existence. Through the practice of phenomenological description, the essences of perception are, to use Merleau-Ponty’s own language, put back into existence — in a most radical way.

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Silence and Action: Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology ofFaith Nikolaas Deketelerae, Balliol College, University of Oxford

In this paper, I propose a phenomenological reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The book’s central motif is the religious horror felt by the pseudonymous author at Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son when God demands it. For the author, who lacks faith, this is absurd given that Isaac is the son of promise: how could God keep his promise whilst also asking Abraham to kill Isaac? Abraham, however, has faith and does not doubt that God will keep his promise, without understanding it. Kierkegaard’s readers distance themselves from him here: isn’t he defending religious fanaticism? The answer is no: for Kierkegaard, faith has a phenomenological role and as such structures how the reality that is the divine will is experienced. Through faith, what seems paradoxical is not impossible for God. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author, meanwhile, cannot see how this could be possible because he lacks faith. Yet, neither does Abraham see anything, for he too fails to understand how this could be possible. What we find in Kierkegaard is therefore what Jean-Luc Nancy has called a ‘phenomenology that is theological, but not theophanic,’ for God is not revealed to Abraham, but in Abraham: his life, characterised by faith, bearing witness to his passion for the infinite, and thus to God. Hence, Kierkegaard emphasises how Abraham’s faith is both silent and performative: first, Abraham does not justify his actions by pointing to something that would explain them; second, his faith doesn’t consist in understanding God (his will), but in doing it. God is what Nancy calls ‘the practical conversion of the theoretically impossible’, through faith, and has ‘the objective reality of the task (Aufgabe)’. Or, as Caputo might put it: the name of God is a deed.

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A Place Beyond Insomnia – Sleep and Position in the Philosophy of Emmanuel LevinasPatrick Levy, University of Dundee

“The summoning of sleep occurs in the act of lying down. To lie down is precisely to limit existence to a place, to position.” – Levinas, Existence and Existents, p. 66

Emmanuel Levinas’s early, post-war, writings – Existence and Existents and Time and the Other – are famous for their rich phenomenological descriptions of insomnia and fatigue. However, the place of sleep itself within these texts, and more broadly within Levinas’s oeuvre, is much less frequently discussed. It is, I argue in this paper, only through a careful re-examination of sleep in Levinas’s work – in the later work as well as the early – that we can expose both its true significance and gain clarity about Levinas’s understanding of place, the body, and the subject as found in the pivotal term ‘position’. In explicating the relationship of these two concepts, position and sleep, we also approach a new assessment of both the question of sleep in Levinas’s philosophy more broadly and the evolution of Levinas’s thinking of the subject.

In reconsidering the place of sleep in Levinas’s work and the “act of lying down” it is possible to elaborate a Levinasian, and crucially a bodily, phenomenology of sleep. In undertaking such a task I will contrast my reading of the sleeper’s place and somnolent positioning in Levinas’s thinking with those offered by two recent commentators on these topics: namely; Bettina Bergo’s ‘Radical Passivity in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (Lectures 1954)’, and Daniele Rugo’s Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness. This engagement with Bergo and Rugo has the added advantage of positioning not only my reading but also Levinas’s thinking in relation to that of two other key figures of French philosophy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy.

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Political Theology and its Critics/Heretics

Despite the prophetic announcements of the ‘death of god’ and ‘disenchantment of the world’ at the end of the 19th, the 21st century remains captivated by concerns with the religious and theological. This is particularly so in that equivocal field of study known as ‘political theology,’ a terminological conjunction whose existence alone disturbs liberal philosophies of history. This panel will question (again) the significance of this conjunction, by bringing together various researchers working in this field, to  stimulate and facilitate discussion, critique and collaboration.

Convened by Luke Collison and Philip Waldner.

Spinoza and Agamben on the names of GodPhilip Waldner, Universität Klagenfurt

Spinoza’s philosophy is often viewed as taking an entirely critical stance towards language. According to the Ethics language operates on the level of the imagination, which, as a kind of knowledge, generates solely inadequate ideas. (Cf. E2p49s) But this categorization of language is only half the picture. In my talk I want to develop a new perspective on language in Spinoza by focusing on the constitutive role that language plays in political processes. From this perspective the question how we act with words is more vital than the question whether words can give us insight into the nature of things or not.

In order to show how this approach works I will concentrate on a short passage from the 13 th

chapter of the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) that Spinoza dedicates to the names of God. In this passage Spinoza asks the question of what name expresses God’s essence. He comes to the conclusion that the names of God revealed in the Bible are mere “signs” and not attributes of God. (See TTP, Ch. 13, III/169f., 259f.) This seemingly negative result, however, has a political punchline. I will show that in the context of this passage Spinoza is not interested in the discussion of how the name relates to the divine substance but how the name is efficacious within particular speakers’ situations.

In order to shed more light on this political dimension I will consult Giorgio Agamben’s The Sacrament of Language (2008). According to Agamben, the appeal to the name of God cannot be understood through the name’s denotative function, but only through its performative character, which is supposed to guarantee the efficacy of language as such. The overall aim of my talk is to use Spinoza’s and Agamben’s insights to improve our understanding about what constitutes man as a political animal.   

Disenchantment in Leopardi’s Philosophical Thought: Illusion and the ImaginationAlice Gibson, Kingston UniversityLeopardi’s work is critical of how theological ways of thinking relate to politics and society. His writing addresses itself to a ‘desolate time’ in which the meaning and purpose of history are no longer shaped by God, a point of view encapsulated by Nietzsche’s proclamation ‘God is dead’. According to Leopardi, modern philosophy attempts to destroy illusions, whilst religion, which encourages illusions, prevents this, leaving us no more informed than the ancients, despite our increased access to knowledge. In this presentation, I will examine how Leopardi conceives of modern philosophy in relation to that of the ancients, suggesting that ancient philosophy involved a similar mode of thinking to that encouraged by religion. I will use this groundwork to follow how Leopardi’s refusal to accept religious myths, similarly to

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humanistic myths, led him to contend with the question of, how in an age of reason, we can create lives of value for ourselves. Ultimately, I aim to show that Leopardi eschews illusions, while he praises the imagination, which he sees as bearing the capacity to help us comprehend our shared suffering. I highlight how this, in turn, for Leopardi holds the power to strengthen our communities, a project from which we can draw value today, since it guides us in resisting the individualistic effects of neoliberalism.

The attributeless Catholicism of Alexandre KojèveJorge Varela, Tallinn UniversityIn 1945 Kojève wrote a series of documents reflecting on the reconfiguration of post-war European politics. One of these (usually referred to as the “Latin Empire”) has attracted attention both from the right (Alain de Benoist) and from the left (Giorgio Agamben). Nonetheless, little consideration has been given to the way in which this text originates from an engagement with the theological revival of the interwar years. I will present how Kojève’s argument in these post-war memorandums is sustained by a continued criticism of the reliance on the attributes of God. Kojève’s criticism of the interwar religious obtrusion into politics is a constant ever since the early 1930s. Therefore, the reconfiguration of Europe that Kojève proposes is not only shaped by the post-war geopolitical reframing, but from a more profound awareness of an intellectual unsustainability of European politics. His adoption of Catholicism as the new ideological sustenance of imperial politics shall not be seen as a dissonant aspect of a thinker that had thus far identified as atheist, but as the rebuttal of the interwar attempts to reinvigorate the theological elements of politics. It is my argument that these essays represent a maturation of Kojève’s political thought that aim at the secularization of all theological concepts.

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Deleuze

Learning from a Cup of Coffee: Russell and Deleuze on LeibnizJeffrey A. Bell, Southeastern Louisiana University

In his early work on Leibniz (Russell 1900), Bertrand Russell can be seen to be doing two things which will be of fundamental importance for twentieth-century philosophy. First, Russell finds in Leibniz an ally in his battle against Bradley’s idealism, and by extension the Spinozist monism that Bradley adopts. Russell’s presumed success in this battle will pave the way for an effort among philosophers to embrace a form of realism contrary to Bradley’s idealism. Secondly, and following from the first point, Russell uses Leibniz’s philosophy as a springboard for setting forth a method of analysis that will both accept the reality of discrete particulars (in contrast to Bradley’s monism) and support the efforts of the sciences. Russell’s work on Leibniz will thus set the stage for the analytic philosophy that will come to dominate the concerns of philosophers in the English-speaking world. In his work on Leibniz, Deleuze will also find in Leibniz’s philosophy an ally in his attempt to understand the conditions for the possibility of determinate differences—that is, differences between determinate terms. In contrast to Russell, however, and as will be argued for in this essay, Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz poses a serious challenge to some of the key guiding assumptions of analytic philosophy. In particular, Russell reads into Leibniz a representational model of knowledge whereas on Deleuze’s reading Leibniz’s philosophy provides us with the resources to critique this model. These contrasting readings of Leibniz will be explored with the aid of the processes professional coffee tasters engage in as they come to identify the determinate tastes in a cup of coffee. Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz provides, I shall argue, the better account of these processes than does Russell’s reading of Leibniz.

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Locating the Deleuze-Guattari Encounter: On Gilles Deleuze’s Flight from StructuralismIain Campbell, Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh

This paper takes as its concern two texts that each mark a pivotal moment for their respective authors, namely Gilles Deleuze’s ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, written in 1967, and Félix Guattari’s ‘Machine and Structure’, written in 1969. ‘Machine and Structure’ is widely recognised as catalysing a significant turn in Deleuze’s thought: engaging with Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969), Guattari argues that structural accounts are inadequate to some aspects of these texts, suggesting that in the place of ‘structure’ must come a practical and productive form that he names the machine. But less often noted is that in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, and carrying through into the major texts that followed, Deleuze too expresses an anxiety concerning a perceived limitation of structuralism, and that here too the theme of practice is central.

In this paper I will examine how the distinctive formulation of structuralism that Deleuze develops in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ sets the conditions for Deleuze to then depart from structuralism. By reading ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ alongside ‘Machine and Structure’ I will argue that Deleuze’s structuralism, capped by the ambiguous practical figure of the ‘structuralist hero’, is marked by an ambivalence with regards to the efficacy of structuralism, and that this ambivalence is only resolved through an anti-structuralist adoption of Guattari’s concept of the machine. I will outline the immanent procedure with regards to structuralism that they both work through in the development of their ‘machinic’ thought, and suggest that their work maintains a certain continuity with structuralism (what Étienne Balibar has termed a ‘structuralism without structures’) while departing from it.

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Responses to Schelling

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Philosophical Exploits: Identity in Schelling and Laruelle Benjamin Norris The New School for Social Research

“Philosophy exploits Identity as a keystone of systems, but it does not think according to Identity” writes Laruelle in the introduction to his 1992 Theory of Identities. Therein Laruelle demarcates philosophy’s constitutive neglect of Identity, understood as a pre-philosophical actuality which is foreclosed by the eviscerating mechanics of philosophical reflection (i.e. the Philosophical Decision). The purpose of this paper is to contextualize these claims through an engagement with F.W.J. Schelling’s Identity philosophy, a period of his philosophical journey commonly dismissed as a failure. In 1801, Schelling takes Spinoza as a formal model in order to construct a systematic philosophical science of the Absolute, thought in its own Identity prior to the egress of the opposed disciplines of realism and idealism - for Schelling, the only two possible systems of philosophy. Schelling thereby attempts exactly what Laruelle claims to be impossible: a philosophy (of) Identity in accordance with Identity itself.

This presentation stages a conversation between Schelling’s philosophy of Identity and Laruelle’s non-philosophy of Identity with the goal of a mutual elucidation of each. In the spirit of the non-philosophical ethos, I do not seek to side or decide in favor of either Schelling or Laruelle, or to argue against Laruelle’s above cited claim by demonstrating Schelling’s imperviousness to this criticism. Instead, the encounter staged between the two thinkers (in the last analysis, closer bedfellows than Laruelle would perhaps admit) allows us to answer perhaps the most pressing question regarding the future of non-philosophy: namely, what is philosophy after non-philosophy? Schelling demonstrates that Identity (a hyphenated, disjunctive and therefore augmentive unity) is too much for even the Absolute to bear; the Absolute must therefore become otherwise. Non-philosophy, I conclude, must and can only become philosophy once again. This philosophy after non-philosophy follows in the footsteps of what I have called elsewhere Schelling’s “ideal-realism”.

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On the Impossibility of Presuppositionless Thought: From Kant to DeleuzeEdward Thornton, Royal Holloway, University of London

This paper will begin by highlighting an unresolved problem in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Specifically, I will discuss the claim – initially raised by Schelling – that Kant’s First Critique shows that it is impossible to decide between idealist and dogmatic approaches to metaphysics, because neither of these “two exactly opposed systems” admit of any argumentative support. This is an important issue because, if Schelling is correct, then philosophy can never attain a state of presuppositionlessness, and must always begin by taking something for granted. Here I will also offer an outline of Schelling’s critique of Hegel – on exactly the grounds that Hegel’s goal of constructing a presuppositionless thought is theoretically unattainable – and consider the viability of this critique. After concluding that the problem of presuppositionlessness remains unresolved in 19 th century post-Kantianism, in the second section of my paper I will show how Deleuze responds to this challenge in Difference and Repetition. My contention in this section of the paper will be that, rather than trying to resolve this issue, Deleuze dissolves the question of presuppositionlessness by showing that while all thinking rests on a number of “implicit presuppositions”, it is possible to accept the fact that these presuppositions are ungrounded and use this recognition to reframe philosophy as a creative discipline. The paper will close with a discussion of Deleuze’s analysis of “images of thought”. Here I will show how Deleuze’s project of constructing a “thought-without-image” differs from the traditional metaphysical project of dispensing with all presuppositions. Does Meillassoux Successfully Relegitimise Metaphysics?  Umit Akyol, University of Dundee

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s main aim is to provide philosophy with the status of science by limiting metaphysics as speculation. To do this, Kant proposes a revolution in philosophy, which entails a “change in the ways of thinking”. The blueprint of the revolution could be, according to Kant, found in the examples of the scientific revolutions such as Galileo’s rolling ball experiments or Copernicus’ explanation of the celestial motions.  

However, in After Finitude, Meillassoux argues that Kant’s revolution to legitimise the place of philosophy turns into something opposite of which he promises: a counter-revolution, namely a ‘Ptolemaic counter-revolution’. Kant reverses the blueprint of the revolution by reducing non-correlational knowledge of the world, which science provides, into a correlate of thought. Thus, Kant does not succeed in his main aim.       

Meillassoux, I think, could succeed in proving the illegitimacy of Kant’s project; but this still does not mean that actually managed to fulfil this task successfully.  I shall argue that Meillassoux has inadvertently committed a mistake, similar to Kant’s mistake and thus his position turns out to be illegitimate for the same reason as Kant’s revolution.

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Violence and Resistance

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Alt-Right Politics and RessentimentWilliam L. Remley, Department of Philosophy, Saint Peter’s University, Jersey City, NJ

It is widely believed that the shift in American politics in the 2016 election, and the rise of alt-right politics, came as a result of working-class voters feeling themselves economically and politically “left behind” by those who rule the “swamp” known as Washington D. C. Those who lost their jobs to foreign outsourcing or experienced stagnant incomes, it is said, rose up to punish the incumbent party. In this paper I argue that it is not the economically based left behind theory, but the perceived threat to the social hierarchical status that propelled the alt-right movement to its place in American political prominence.

I argue three main points in this paper. First, that the alt-right is not grounded in Fascist philosophy but emanates from the Traditionalist Movement, largely premised on Perennialist Philosophy that originated in the period between the wars and is associated with the works of René Guénon and Julius Evola.

Secondly, I put forth the position that all human societies tend to be structured as systems of group-based social hierarchies. I rely on Social Dominance Theory to point out that most forms of group conflict and oppression can be regarded as different manifestations of the same human predisposition to form not individual but group-based hierarchies. Consequently, a trimorphic structure emerges that both produces and maintains the hierarchical society structure: the age system, the gender system, and the arbitrary-set system where racism is but one example.

In order to illuminate this point, I turn to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre’s concern has always been with human freedom, which he believes diminishes as groups become more organized and ultimately institutionalized. Sartre observes that when individuals form groups they organize themselves through function (a requirement of Traditionalist Philosophy), which is hierarchical by nature. Within the hierarchical social structure, one or more groups, deemed superior, dominate and oppress inferior groups. When these group structures break down, as I argue they are in America, the dominate group, fearing its imminent displacement at the top of the hierarchical ladder by a group thought to be inferior, will use its position of dominance to erode and curtail freedoms of those perceived usurpers.  

Within the American social structure, whites have been in the position of power while Blacks and other minority groups have occupied the lower rung of the social hierarchy. However, with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, and the legislation the movement spawned, the white dominated social hierarchy began to break down. While Blacks are citizens of the United States, the anger or ressentiment of certain groups of whites has been directed at others, mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America, Muslims, and to some extent Asians. Today, some whites see their position within the social structure as threatened; they fear the loss of status, either real or imagined, at the hands of groups they deem inferior.

Lastly, I ask the question how individuals who perceive themselves to be at the top of the social hierarchy react when they perceive that position as threatened. I turn to the philosophical and psychological arguments Sartre utilizes, based on Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment. Sartre sees racism as an emotion aimed directly at a particular person or group. In America, that fear manifests itself in white paranoia of loss of domination in the social hierarchy that gives rise to ressentiment.

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Vulnerability, Solidarity and Violence: Reflections on the Dialectics of Recognition and DisrespectMartin Huth, Messerli Research Institute /Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna

This paper aims to argue that the social recognition of vulnerability and the responsiveness to vulnerability inevitably oscillate between inclusion (solidarity) and exclusion (violence).First, the concept of vulnerability will be clarified. It is frequently conceived as an inclusive category that counters the ratiocentric and ableist bias in traditional ethical theories (deontology, utilitarianism, contractualism,…), which betray a conceptual link between capacity or contribution and entitlement or moral status (Turner 2006). The point of departure in pertinent theories (e.g. Butler 2004, 2009; Gilson 2014) is our fundamental susceptibility to harm and the equally fundamental dependency on others. Solidarity can be conceived as responsiveness to vulnerability that sustains social recognition and the existential attachment to others; violence is the exploitation or neglect of the dependency.

Second, drawing from Butler, vulnerability is understood as an ontological dimension of our corporeality (precariousness), yet it is inevitably socially mediated (precarity). Butler’s concept of recognizability shows the social dimension of any kind of responsiveness to vulnerability. Recognizability imbues our perceptions, affective responses and dispositions for actions. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body provides a thorough analysis of the social constitution of bodily habits of perception and behaviour.

Third, recognizability, and the socially imbued perceptions and responses to vulnerability, are inevitably selective. The flip side of recognition and solidarity is tacit or open violence towards those outside the scope of recognizability. However, as will be argued in the vein of the Critical Theory, even the recognition of vulnerability is in danger of unintended dialectical shifts that increase vulnerability. Taking the example of people with disability, problematic phenomena will be identified that show failures in our responsiveness to vulnerability despite the best intentions: generalizations insensitive to singular needs, competition over whose vulnerability counts (more), stereotyping, social control, and a deficit oriented view on people with disabilities.

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Panel B: Political Theology and its Critics/Heretics II

The metaphysical constitution of political theologyLuís Carneiro, University of Porto According to Carl Schmitt in his Political Theology I, «the metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization». Neither pure theology nor pure politics, political theology is, from its inception, structured as the metaphysical dimension of conceptual analogy and mediation between theology and politics.

One of the main points of contention in the initial debate between Schmitt and Erik Peterson was Peterson’s rejection of the possibility of a Christian political theology. According to the German theologian, only the Arian heresy could imply a political theology and ground the political authority of the Roman imperial monarchy on the basis of the theological conception of a divine Monarchy. The analogy between earthly and heavenly monarchy revealed the metaphysical structure of Arian political theology. Trinitarian theology, with its anti-metaphysical character, on the other hand, could not ground any analogy with the earthly political sphere; due to this fact, a Christian political theology would then be «theologically impossible».

More recently, Agamben, in his book The Kingdom and the Glory, proposed to show how Peterson’s purported liquidation of any Christian political theology, on the basis of the trinitarian dogma, merely obscured the existence of a distinct economico-theological paradigm which this theology founded and which would later lead, through the process of secularisation, to the depoliticisation constitutive of European models of government.

Through the renewed historical understanding of the case of Emperor Constantine’s trinitarianism, as deduced from his letters, speeches and political decisions – contrary to the petersonian assumption of his reliance on the crypto-arian theology of Eusebius of Caesarea – we will attempt a return to the above-mentioned point of contention of the original debate and propose the following theses: 1) that trinitarian theology, as Peterson suggested, is not defined by a metaphysical structure, 2) that this trinitarian theology possesses, nonetheless, political effects. Consequently, the status of political theology in its metaphysical structure will be called into question and problematised.

Political theology and InoperativityGerman Primera Villamizar, Brighton University‘Secularization is a form of repression’ writes Agamben in Profanations. ‘It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another’. Thus the political secularization of theological concepts for Agamben does nothing but ‘displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact’. Secularization, in this sense, is an operation that neither indicates a structural identity between theology and politics nor does it refer to an epistemological break between the sacred and the secular, but rather distributes and controls the political and the theological through a relation of ‘mutual referentiality.’

Taking on board Agamben’s examination of theology’s relation to politics, my departing point and my focus for this paper is, instead, the problematisation of the ambiguous relation between theology and metaphysics. More precisely, my aim here is to read secularization through Agamben’s philosophical archaeology and his critique of western metaphysics. The underlying argument that I want to develop is that Agamben’s archaeology of power has to be read as an attempt to render what I will call the ‘signature of secularization’ inoperative both in political and in economic theology. I will argue that what is at stake in the relation between the sacred and the secular is the constitution of a threshold

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of indifference in which the theological and the political coincide. In this sense, my claim in this paper is that secularization, (that is, the apparent de-sacralisation of the divine) and sacrifice (as the sacralisation of the secular and the profane), are the two sides of the same topological process. Yet, I will argue in this paper that it is precisely this continuous oscillation between the theological and the political that Agamben seeks to deactivate through his notions of profanation and inoperativity.

Hobbes’s ‘political theology’ as a physics of signsLuke Collison, University of Kingston

In Schmitt’s Political Theology he postulates the existence of a structural homology between the political forms and theological concepts. Through this mapping he produces a ‘physics’ that determining the rules of interaction of otherwise imaginary and fictitious politico-legal forms and institutions. In Hobbes’s canonical texts of political philosophy, De Cive and Leviathan, he develops a precursor to Schmitt’s homology through a functionalist understanding of the nature of signs. In this paper I aim to show how Hobbes theory of signs offers a similar homology between religious ritual performance and political power. To achieve this I will demonstrate that Hobbes plays on two key ambiguities: (i) a causal ambiguity in the performance of rituals to develop a ‘physics of signs’, through which the natural laws of potentia (material power) bridge between the religious and legal aspects of the modern state form; and (ii) a semantic ambiguity of cultivation, playing on the synonomy of cultus and colendus. Foreshadowing Jan Assman’s temporal reversal of Schmitt’s hypotheis, Hobbes’s theory of cultus (worship) offers a naturalised and universalised understanding of religion as determined by a logic of potentia, key to all political organisations of the human species.

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After KantSimone Weil: The Ethics of Affliction and the Aesthetics of Attention Christopher Thomas, Manchester Metropolitan University

Simone Weil’s thought is characterised by its use of paradox and contradiction. This paper will turn to two central concepts in Weil’s work, namely, affliction (malheur) and attention (l’attention), in order to argue for a new understanding of their paradoxical relationship. More specifically, I will suggest that by turning to Weil’s aesthetic theorisation of ‘attention’ we can make sense of her claim that ‘Thought flies from affliction as promptly and irresistibly as an animal flies from death’.

For Weil, the afflicted are both anonymous before themselves and anonymous before others. This paper will argue that one potential way the afflicted become visible and articulate to both themselves and others is through the practice of ‘attention’. However, I will argue that what it means to be attentive to the afflicted is to enter into a state of disinterestedness towards their suffering, whereby one ceases to think of the afflicted.

By expanding on the Kantian aesthetic concept of disinterest I will argue that, for Weil, the afflicted become visible and articulate through a relation of attentive disinterest that does not attempt to conceptualise their condition. In Weil’s ethics of affliction, the impossibility and helplessness that we feel in the face of extreme affliction is negated by disinterested attention that, like the Kantian aesthetic feeling of life, does not attempt to represent through concepts what is ultimately un-representable. For Weil, then, the specifically aesthetic practice of attention is key for taking a compassionate stance towards the afflicted.

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Love makes the world go ‘roundSteve Ballard, Independent Scholar

The paper will reiterate Immanuel Kant’s hypothesis that the survival of intelligent life on earth until its unpreventable extinction is conditional on all human populations, like all populations of all the other intelligent species it evolved from, sharing the means of their convivial existence with compassionate equanimity, regardless of their population size, bodily size or degree of intelligence.

In his 1755 essay ‘Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,’ Kant used the latest scientific evidence made visible by the development of more powerful optical instruments to demonstrate that earth’s solar system has a life-cycle with an unpreventable natural end just like the life-cycle of every living creature in earth’s ecosystem. Kant was the first person to use his knowledge of the inter-planetary research of Copernicus and Kepler and the inter-species research of Linneus and Banks to deduce that all species on earth evolved from lifeless material by natural processes governed by universal laws of evolution which all species must uphold as the condition of their survival, regardless of their degree of intelligence.

In another 1784 essay ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ Kant defined enlightenment as humankind’s ‘coming of age’, the adolescent period during its time on earth when its global majority comes to recognise (as he was the first to recognise) that the survival of intelligent species on earth until their common extinction is conditional on them sharing the available means of their convivial existences without fear or favour.

Although today’s ecologically-aware schoolchildren recognise the self-evident merit of Kant’s hypothesis, self-serving protégés of the world’s oldest universities continue to scorn it.

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Ontologising God’s Empty Tomb:The Atheistic Transcendentality of Badiou’s and Agamben’s OntologiesKing-Ho Leung. Chester University

In recent years, European philosophy has witnessed a revived interest in speculative ontology, as notably found in the works of influential leading figures such as Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. This paper suggests that one can find in this recent revival strong resemblances to the metaphysical account of ‘transcendentals’ developed in medieval philosophy. In particular, this paper argues that insofar as both Badiou’s and Agamben’s post-critical ontologies assert that a ‘transcendental’ notion of ‘emptiness’—the ‘null-set’ in Badiou’s set-theoretical ontology and the indistinct ‘whatever being’ in Agamben’s biopolitical ontology—can be found in all existent entities, their influential philosophies constitute a return to medieval understanding of ‘transcendentals’ as the possibility of existence (e.g. ‘oneness’, ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’), as opposed to the modern Kantian conception of ‘transcendental ideas’ as the conditions of experience (namely, space and time).

While Agamben does acknowledge that his own ontology is influenced by the medieval conception of transcendentals and Badiou makes explicit comparisons of his set-theoretical ontology to the Platonic ontologisation of the One and the many which underlies much of scholastic metaphysics, this paper offers a new perspective into understanding Badiou’s and Agamben’s respective ontologies of ‘emptiness’ by comparing their ‘transcendental’ notions of the ‘null-set’ and ‘indistinction’ to the medieval scholastic treatment of the transcendentals as divine names of God. Through this comparison, this paper seeks to show that Badiou’s professed agenda of overcoming the transcendent metaphysical structure of ‘the One’ with his account of the ‘null-set’ as well as Agamben’s endeavour to collapse the metaphysical distinction between essence and existence with his notion of ‘indistinction’ are philosophical efforts to develop holistic ontologies that are committedly atheistic at their very core.

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Žižek, Kant, and EvilTimothy Lowe, University of Chichester

Evil is a central but often overlooked category in Zizek’s thought. It is primary in his analysis of how to think about and construct political change. However, his analysis of evil also reveals some central gaps in his project, and these gaps can be revealed by thinking specifically about the relation of his thought on evil to the work of Kant. An often made criticism of Kant’s project in Religion within the Limits of Reason alone is that, despite his attempts to move beyond Christian understandings of sin, he collapses back into certain assumptions deriving from that position. Kant’s claim that human beings have an innate propensity to evil arguably places him closer to the Christian position than he might wish for, and makes it hard to explain the process of moral conversion. I argue that these problems carry forward into Zizek’s project despite his attempts to radicalize the Kantian thesis through Schelling. Zizek’s claim that people have always-already chosen evil to the extent that they are human indicates that evil is a category and feature of humanity as such. It is difficult, therefore, to see how social and political change can arise on this basis, even given his claim that it is the choice for evil that is, in fact, the ethical act. Such a conversion would require an overcoming of your own humanity, an act difficult to conceive. It is these aporias that this paper will seek to investigate and analyze, attempting to show that Zizek’s position requires something transcendent of the situation to explain the possibilities for political and social change, a position that he explicitly wants to avoid.  

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Feminist Philosophy

Nothing new beyond the Canon (Re-reading Feminist Critiques of the Philosophical Canon) Hannah Wallenfels, Folkwang University of Arts / Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

In the past decades, there has been an explosion of feminist writing on the philosophical canon. Since the 2000s, however, at least within the discipline of philosophy, most of the books produced within this branch of scholarship have been entitled either „Re-reading ...“ or „Feminist Interpretations of ...“. Oftentimes, this seems to be a very reasonable endeavour, albeit – as with 1

Aristotle or Hegel – a rather complicated one. Still, already the titles of these books necessarily all end up reaffirming major figures of the Western philosophical tradition and thus the traditional canon itself. In my presentation, I will use previous explorations of this problem as a vantage point in order to sketch a possibly new image of philosophy. In a first step, I will therefore revisit the array of positions of critique that were already articulated in the 1970s, when many explored both the problem of historical exclusion and the difficulties of establishing extrainstitutional forms of thinking, that is a thinking outside of the canon. While these discussions tend to lead to diverse, overarching trajectories, I would like to start with a typologisation of three different strategic paths in regard to the canon and a following investigation of what has become of them today:

1. Moderate Revision (Add Others and Stir): Include women in the canon, search for the lost or forgotten great Women or Foremothers in a field;

2. Radical Revision (Down with the Patriarchy): Re-examine the standards and values of the canon and change it. What do the omissions tell us about problems with the values in a field?

3. Destruction (Towards a New Human, Down with the History): Identify our desire for orientation and its effects – demolish not only its path dependencies but, as far as possible, the desire for the idea of greatness itself.

While devoted to the work of a single philosopher, each of those volumes contains different essays covering diverse 1approaches that are now being used by feminist critics. See for example the Re-Reading the Canon series of Penn State University Press, edited by Prof. Nancy Tuana [http://www.psupress.org/books/series/book_SeriesReReading.html].

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The Same Other? Irigaray and Marder on Vegetal BeingAndrea Rehberg, Philosophy, Newcastle University

In 2015, Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder published a brief discussion piece called “Thinking Anew: Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder on the Possibility of a Human Re-Birth”, which they followed up in 2016 with their co-authored Through Vegetal Being. In this paper I aim to trace in outline the intellectual trajectory that brought each of them to the point of convergence of concerns, if not complete agreement, with the other. Having both, if not exactly started out from, then at least come through what are now best called post-phenomenological approaches, Irigaray to feminist issues, Marder to the philosophical consideration of plant-life, both seek to re-negotiate and re-configure the relation of our contemporary Western thought to the marginalised, forgotten and elided other. What this paper also discusses, though, are the inevitable divergences between Irigaray’s and Marder’s conceptions of this project. This paper also asks whether these divergences are inevitable, given the different philosophical orientation of each, or whether they are a function of other factors. Lastly, this paper explores the limitations of their respective post-phenomenological projects, and with it the limitations of their jointly authored texts. It therefore asks not just whether Irigaray and Marder’s co-authored texts are the most efficacious way of overcoming the ethico-political and ecological impasse into which humanity has been driven, but whether their very conception of this impasse is the most productive way of approaching this conundrum.

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What are ‘Male’ and ‘Female’? The Aristotelian ChallengeStella Sandford, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University

This paper is concerned with two questions, the answers to which seem to be presupposed in Aristotle’s theory of biological reproduction: what, for Aristotle, is the nature of being-male or being-female? And what kind of a difference is the difference between male and female? ‘Male’ and ‘female’ appear in the Metaphysics as particular kinds of qualities; as classificatory terms in the History of Animals and the Parts of Animals; and as ‘principles’ in the Generation of Animals. In each case, this paper argues, an examination of their specificity in relation to their philosophical or scientific context shows that they seem to enjoy a unique logical, classificatory or metaphysical status that exceeds the explicit terms of Aristotle’s analyses. The nature of the grouping of ‘females’ and ‘males’ is thus a peculiar phenomenon that deserves our attention, not least because this philosophical problem in Aristotle’s work still resonates in the contemporary, social and existential, problem of the ontology of male and female.

Beginning with a critical discussion of attempts, based on comments in the Metaphysics, to specify the logical and philosophical form of the predicates ‘male’ and ‘female’, the paper shows that this fails to account for their specificity in relation to other ‘in-itself accidents’, and that it is just this specificity that presents us with such a puzzle. When the nature of and the difference(s) between male and female become an explicit topic in the zoological works this puzzle deepens, with the impossibility of locating ‘male’ and ‘female’ differences, and male and female themselves, within the classificatory categories that structure those works. This suggests that ‘male’ and ‘female’ appear in Aristotle’s History of Animals and Parts of Animals as non-technical, unanalysed common-sense categories, about which we should perhaps not expect much clarity. When the nature and origin of male and female become one of the major topics in the Generation of Animals something more is required, but here too Aristotle is unable to move beyond the limit of common sense. The paper ends with a critical reflection on the introduction of the generic category of ‘sex’ in English translations of Aristotle and a positive reflection on what we can learn from Aristotle’s discussion.

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Art: Ethics, Politics, Subject

What are the possibilities of art beyond its aesthetic function? Can art contribute to a better ethical self-understanding or a more progressive political praxis? What is the role of art in the constitution of subjective experience? This panel will attempt to answer the above questions by applying the insights afforded by phenomenology, critical theory, and deconstruction to pop culture, photography, iconography, and cinema. The panellists are: Ricardo Samaniego De La Fuente (University of Essex), Jakub Kowalewski (University of Essex/University of Winchester), and Timothy Secret (University of Winchester).

Aesthetics and Communication: or the political role of popular culture Ricardo Samaniego De La Fuente, University of Essex

In an early article on Walter Benjamin, Habermas criticizes Adorno for opposing the false abolition of art with a hermetic modernity, thus downplaying forms of art with a collective mass reception. Adorno thus opts for artworks that require individualized, contemplative, and isolated forms of reception. This, Habermas argues, leads “down the road to bourgeois individuation.”1 Positing modernism as the locus of political resistance seems to block the path towards social praxis. Nevertheless, I will argue in the first section of this presentation, Habermas’ solution to this retreat—which tears art apart from its potential political role—is unsatisfactory. In his attempt to go beyond Adorno by turning toward communication, he risks losing the subversive and world-disclosing role of what I will call ‘aesthetic reason.’ But what is more, the cognitive functions he does assign to art are ultimately limited to high, autonomous forms of art, showing that Habermas retains Adorno’s bias against popular culture, and is thus unable to transcend the latter’s position.

In the second section I turn to Albrecht Wellmer and his attempt to salvage the cognitive and political role of art, both from a downplaying of the aesthetic against conceptual language, and from the reduction of what counts as ‘art’ to hermetic and isolated artworks. Wellmer is able to legitimize the aesthetic and political role of popular forms of art by addressing the relation between the artwork and the receiving subject and by dropping the link between art and a metaphysical idea of reconciliation. Exploring Wellmer’s work on art and culture, therefore, provides us with a way to understand the role of culture and of cultural movements in the struggle to constitute a rational society and to transcend the gap between theory and practice.

The Idol and the Sovereign: phenomenology of iconography in Marion and Agamben Jakub Kowalewski, University of Essex/University of Winchester

For Jean-Luc Marion religious paintings can be divided into two categories, which correspond to two kinds of experience: on the one hand, the artwork can be a reflection of the viewer’s presuppositions – in such a case, the painting allows the viewer to experience oneself through the artwork; on the other hand, the artwork can point beyond the viewer’s prejudices – in this case, the painting elicits an experience of alterity, which, in turn, can have a transformative effect on the viewer. In other words, the distinction between the two types of religious paintings – which Marion calls the idol and the icon respectively – is based on their ability to give raise to two distinct types of vision: whereas the idol produces what may

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be called a self-directed experience, the icon engenders a transformative experience which is other-directed. In my paper, I will show how Marion’s distinction between the idol and the icon can be applied, albeit in a modified way, to political art. Drawing on Agamben’s analysis of the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, I will show how political artwork can simultaneously play the role of the idol and the icon: as I will argue, Leviathan’s frontispiece reflects the viewer’s presuppositions, while, at the same time, being able to have a transformative effect on the viewer. In short, political art can engender a new type of vision in which the self-directed experience of the idol coincides with the transformative experience of the icon.

Blind Narcissus, a.k.a. Touching yourself on cameraTimothy Secret, University of Winchester

Starting from apparently incompatible claims within the Platonic corpus – that a true philosopher in the Apology and Phaedrus is concerned with self-knowledge rather than knowledge of things beneath the earth or in the heavens and that claim in the Timaeus that the desire for distinctively philosophical truth can only be born via the sense of sight through looking at the heavens and their eternal harmony – we will turn to the paradoxical description of narcissus as blind that recurs across Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre: narcissus being a figure who can only see himself to the exclusion of all else yet also the prototype of all human subjectivity. Combining this with Merleau-Ponty's claim that to touch oneself or to see oneself is not to apprehend oneself as an ob-ject but to be destined to oneself, we will consider how such "destination" is elucidated by the twin technologies of psychoanalysis and cinema that according to Derrida in Ghost Dance combine to constitute a science of phantoms later named hauntology. Building on a recently published paper 'Dead Ringers: Plato and Turning the Camera Back', originally delivered at the SEP-FEP in 2017, this opens a promised engagement with Diderot’s account of a doubly-impossible figure for Plato, the shameless yet morally superior blind mathematician Nicholas Saunderson in his Letter on the Blind for the Use of those who can See.

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Meillassoux

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Tone and colour as features of philosophical writing: Deleuze, Derrida, MeillassouxPolina Khanova, Dept. Of Ontology and Theory of Knowledge,Lomonosov Moscow State University

Continental philosophy has often being characterised (most significantly by Badiou) as having a particular relationship with language manifesting in an acute sense of and purposeful usage of style.

Yet the matter of tone has rarely been addressed as something significant. One of the rare examples is Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy by Jacques Derrida. Having long dismissed with the separation of "rhetorical decorations" and "conceptual content" (in, e.g., White Mythology) Derrida proposes a certain tone as a defining characteristic of philosophy, capable of saving it from a crisis or killing it altogether. Another we encounter in the works of Gilles Deleuze who characterises style and even concept itself as a "hue" or “colour” of a text (in L'abécédaire) and in relation to the notion of Stimmung (in Logic of Sense) in opposition to the language’s function of designation. The same notion – Stimmung, meaning "attunement" or "mood", linked to Verstimmung - "delirium" or "mis-tuning" - appears in Of the Apocalyptic Tone.

Is philosophy itself a particular kind of tone or hue of a text? Can it be utilized in a purposeful manner? Is there a crisis of tone in philosophy today? The answers to these questions, as I suggest, will differ depending on which of the two approaches -  Derrida's "harmonic" one or Deleuzian "colouristic" - one takes to philosophical writing style. By analyzing and comparing these two approaches this paper suggests a particular relation between tone (both in the sense of sound and of colour) and the self-identification of philosophy. It also suggests that a certain integration of these two approaches can be achieved through analysis of time (as rhythm and wavelength, as presented in Quentin Meillassoux’ Subtraction and Contraction.

References:

Deleuze G., The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, Columbia University Press, 1990. Derrida J., 'White Mythology', in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass, Brighton: Harvester (1982). Derrida J., "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," trans. John P. Leavey Jr., Oxford Literary Review 6, no. 2 (1984).L'abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, dir. Pierre-André Boutang, Michel Pamart. With Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet (1996). [TV movie]Meillassoux Q. Subtraction and Contraction. Collapse: 63-107 (2007).

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The making of the self and the making of the object, Kant’s unity of apperception and the transcendental object and its role in knowledge of an ‘outside’ worldSean Donnelly, University of Dundee

It is currently in fashion to be dismissive of Kant, ‘the Kantian Catastrophe’ and the attendant sin of ‘correlationism’ (Meillassoux) have prevented philosophy’s access to ‘the absolute outside’, and that ‘we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’.  It is argued we must go beyond correlationism is to get to the things themselves, independent of the knowing subject. Kant restrict knowledge to ‘appearance’ viewed both as extrinsic properties of things-in-themselves, and as ‘mere’ representations within consciousness of a perceiving subject. I mount a defence of Kant’s correlationism and argue that the knowing subject is ineliminable in knowledge, but this does not undermine objectivity, despite barring access to the noumenal world in itself.  Kant argues that proving the existence of something outside us does not require showing a connection between things-in-themselves but only the conformity of appearances to the laws of experience. He argued that things-in-themselves are not immediately perceived in a transcendental sense but that this is false in the empirical sense because objects in space are not something apart from, and prior to, our representations of them. I will defend this claim but argue it does not undermine objectivity and that we do have knowledge of an outside world. Central to this is the notion of the transcendental object which is distinct from specific representations and provides necessary formal conditions of the experience of objects in space. I agree with Kant that the transcendental object requires a reciprocity between the unity of apperception and the synthetic unity of representations which provides the necessary conditions for all cognition. The subject, therefore, is ineliminable in attaining ‘objective’ knowledge. I will argue that Kant provides us with a knowledge of an ‘outside’ world that is objective, but that is not the noumenal, in-itself, knowledge anti-correlationist desire.  

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Philosophy of TechnologyEstablishing A Postphenomenological Reading of Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of TechnologyJoe Jones, University of Kent

Hannah Arendt is not often drawn into current postphenomenological discourse, because the postphenomenological investigation of the mediating role played by technology, and the resultant impact this mediation has on our experience of the world, is seen as incompatible with Arendt’s own political and ontological goals. Indeed, a pervasive attitude exists in postphenomenology towards philosophers writing before the ‘ethical turn’ as being foundational, but irrelevant or out of touch with current discussions. Hannah Arendt, among others, is therefore largely left out of discussions relating to modern technology and the mediating role it plays in our experience, to the detriment of postphenomenology as a whole. I will argue in this paper that this exclusionary reading of Arendt’s work rests on an incomplete understanding of the role that technology plays in her writing. I will demonstrate that Arendt offers an implicit treatment of technology that is in line with the tenets of postphenomenology, and one that may in turn further the aims of contemporary postphenomenological thinkers.

This paper will focus on The Human Condition (1958) to draw out Arendt’s complementary technological arguments for a postphenomenological reading, and distance Arendt from criticisms currently levelled at her writing within postphenomenology. Specifically, I will investigate Arendt’s ontological mode of “work”, to show the embedded mediating role technology plays throughout her ontological philosophy. This new approach to Arendtian work will in turn allow for a fresh analysis of her ultimately meaningful mode of “action”, and by extension Arendt’s arguments relating to the nature of the human condition, and its place in the modern technological world. This distinctly technological reading of Arendt can then be utilised in contemporary postphenomenological writings, to further investigate the relationship between humanity, technology, and the world.

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Film and Aesthetics

At the Edge of Aesthetic Negativity: Désœuvrement in Giorgio Agamben and Maurice Blanchot Malte Fabian, Humboldt University

The aim of this paper is to clarify Giorgio Agamben’s ambivalent relation to negativity as it plays itself out in his writings on aesthetics. In his entire work, and most explicitly in The Place of Negativity, Agamben distances himself sharply from negativity and negation. Almost unanimously, Agamben’s commentators have followed suit and considered his philosophy without recourse to the categories. Yet, many of Agamben’s signal concepts, and especially those that have emerged over the last years—potenza desituente, inoperosità and the translation Agamben himself introduced, désœuvrement—retain an extremely complicated relation to negativity, especially if one takes into account its anti-Hegelian forms (Bataille, Blanchot, Benjamin). This productive ambivalence is most evident in the development of Agamben’s writings on art. In Man Without Content, Agamben hauntingly writes of canonical forms of aesthetic negation, while calling for a need to move beyond them to uncover a more “originary structure” of the artwork. In his subsequent works, Agamben silently distances himself from such a search for the “original structure” of the artwork in order to develop what he has most recently called a “poetics of désœuvrement.” Focusing on this concept in Agamben and Blanchot, the paper argues that Agamben’s désœuvrement must be understood as a concept at the edge of aesthetic negativity that opens a new perspective on both canonical forms and contemporary art practices, an understanding where the “negative” moment is restated as a different form of use.

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Surgical Film Aesthetics and the Ethics of Community in Eyes without a FaceAhmet Yuce, Georgia State University

Although affective and expressive potentials of the face have been much discussed in film theory, the ethical aspects of the face have usually been overlooked in the field. To compensate for this gap, this paper argues that, in its concentration on unethical and unsuccessful face transplants, Eyes without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960) mobilizes a surgical visual aesthetics that connects and separates visages, thereby mirroring the foundational tension of community between sameness and otherness. As such, the film recalls both Levinas’ and Nancy’s philosophy. For Levinas, by disclosing the insurmountable inaccessibility of the Other, the face incessantly ruptures the regime of sameness. Otherness also plays a crucial role in Nancy’s aporia of community: in its gesture towards the common, community aims to terminate otherness; nevertheless, in its dependence on the bodies differentiated from one another, community requires otherness. Thus, community remains as community insofar as it aims yet fails to ensure an ultimate sameness.

Kidnapping young women and forcibly removing their facial skins to perform heterograft surgeries on his daughter’s, Christiane’s disfigured face, Dr. Génessier devours his victims’ facial singularity in Eyes without a Face. Christiane’s face, however, rejects all the transplants. That is to say, the film not only problematizes the integration of the Other into the Same but also emphasizes that such an integration is doomed to failure. The film’s surgical aesthetics supports this premise by revealing the merger and division between Christiane’s and the victims’ faces in a pseudo-medical context. Overall, approaching the face as the locus of the tension between sameness and otherness and utilizing face transplants to picture the connection and separation between bodies, the film links Levinas’ ethics of face with Nancy’s ethics of community.

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Heidegger

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Überwindung or Verwindung? Heidegger on Overcoming MetaphysicsYu Xia, KU Leuven

Heidegger gives an account of truth of being and how being reveals itself as concealing revealing in “On the Essence of Truth” (1930). Because of this peculiar way of revealing he thinks humans could only have partial truth but never full truth; and by focusing on particular truth we humans inevitably forget the origin of truth but take ourselves as the source of truth. A subject-object dichotomy is established between humans and things. Paradoxically, this dualism is precisely what Heidegger himself critiques, i.e. the problem of metaphysics. Therefore, if metaphysics is problematic but also unavoidable, overcoming metaphysics is to annihilate human existence itself. Heidegger deals with this dilemma by saying that tracing the origin and the history of metaphysics already belong to the overcoming of metaphysics.

In Contributions (1936-1937), Heidegger aims for a thorough and heavy criticism towards metaphysics, to the extent that he really seems to “overcome” metaphysics. Not to mention that in the late essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964), he simply leaves metaphysics to modern science and moves on with another way of thinking. Nonetheless, Heidegger also specifies what he means by Überwindung is Verwindung or incorporating in “Overcoming Metaphysics” (1936-1946), where he argues that we cannot abolish metaphysics like getting rid of an opinion but must incorporate it.

With these observations, I argue that Heidegger recognizes but never properly treats the dilemma of metaphysics. His ambivalent attitude toward metaphysics – critique on the one hand and attempting to live with it on the other – reveals a deep alienation which somehow constitutes our existence. This alienation cannot simply be explained by reason. This is the reason why Heidegger always attempts to show the question as question rather than resolving it, especially when there may not be a solution at all.

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What is Heidegger’s problem with time? Alexander Dowding, University of Oxford

Many readers of Being and Time have focused upon what it has to say about being, taking its claims about time as secondary. I argue that doing so puts the cart before the horse: that for Heidegger, clarity about time is a prerequisite for clarity about being.

To show how this is the case, I explain why Heidegger thinks that assertoric judgments tend to lead us towards encountering entities that fit with this traditional conception. I demonstrate that the temporal structure constitutive for the object of a certain kind of assertoric judgment (which any assertoric judgment is at risk of collapsing into) is the same temporal structure which Heidegger attributes as constitutive for the traditional concept of being. Crucially, since Heidegger thinks that this kind of judgment necessitates uncovering entities that fit the traditional concept of being, at least one essential characteristic of the objects of such judgments must be an essential characteristic of such entities: and the only candidate is their common temporal structure.

The concept of time to which this structure belongs is that of a sequence of moments. This concept of time, I argue, is incoherent because it is necessarily unable to articulate time’s dynamism. I demonstrate how both Husserl and McTaggart run afoul of this problem. One must either reject dynamism (as B-theorists may), reject time (as McTaggart did), or reject the traditional concept of time. Heidegger, I show, is unwilling to take either of the former options, and explicitly sets himself the task of securing an alternative conception of time which does capture time’s dynamism.

Achieving clarity about being, therefore, requires either securing a sense of being which is a priori of time (which Heidegger thinks impossible), or securing a coherent sense of time; i.e., one which can articulate time’s dynamism.

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Spinoza and Agency

This panel will examine the various theories of agency developed out of the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza. The purpose of this panel is to show the wide-ranging implications of Spinoza’s philosophy within contemporary theories of agency and thought. Each paper will present Spinoza’s conception of agency as it interacts with different fields of thought.

« Thus it has been demonstrated »: Using Spinoza to define shared decision-making in clinical contexts Maria Elaina Gauthiermamaril, University of Aberdeen

Agency, autonomy, self-determination: being the master of my fate and the captain of my soul is championed as an inalienable right in Western democracy. At least, this is what we like to tell ourselves. When pragmatic decisions need to be made, following an abstract value or concept may not seem like the priority. In health care, well-intentioned policy makers have created guidelines that define what “shared decision-making” and “person centred-care” should look like and medical staff do their best to put them into practice. However, there is only so many times one can read about the importance of “value-based practices” before asking oneself how to bridge the general values of empathy and respect, for example, and the very particular interactions with patients. In this paper, I will argue that the kind of definitions we craft matter and that Spinoza’s concept of agency can help us understand the important theory-practice relationship.

The first section of this paper will outline the current state of the conversation about shared decision-making in healthcare with a focus on the UK. I will explain that even though the idea of a less paternalistic system is largely well-accepted, both patients and practitioners are confused when it comes to changing their relationships with each other. The second section will demonstrate how Spinoza’s belief in the power of definitions can help us interpret his concept of agency in a fruitful way. Finally, the third section will address three key features of Spinoza’s definition that can contribute to the ongoing discussion about what sharing a decision means in a clinical context: degrees of agency, affectivity, and dynamism.

Acting in the net of our relations: Re-Thinking Agency with SpinozaMarie Wuth, University of Aberdeen

In this paper, I will argue for an understanding of agency as a relational and transindividual concept. I am advocating this position against the background of Spinoza’s epistemology and ontology of substance, as well as Balibar’s concept of transindividuality. According to Balibar, the individual is an effect of reciprocal and interconnected processes of individuation. What constitutes the individual are her relations with others, wherefore it is more appropriate to speak of transindividuality since it emphasis the relational character of being. I will show that not only being and selfhood but also action is never possible in isolation and always requires engagement with the environment.

This focus on transindividuality is crucial for my understanding of Spinoza’s theory of action and, respectively, a relational conceptualisation of agency. Discussing Spinoza’s conatus principle and subsequent theory of human action, I will argue that action is always a form of collective practice. On this basis, I will show that the conditions and possibilities of one’s existence and actions are always bound to the relations to our environment and power

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structures, respectively. These relations, that influence the individual’s capacities and motifs of action, are best understood as affective relations.

With Spinoza and Balibar I aim to open up an affect-theoretical perspective towards agency. This approach does not conceive agency as an individual phenomenon and will show that we are always acting within the mesh of our relations. At the same time, the conception of individuals as transindividual entities sheds new light on the connection between agency and representation. It raises the question of whether agency can be grasped exhaustively within a logic of representation, whether representation leads to agency or if we need to think beyond representation in order to understand the capacities and possibilities of our actions.

Spinoza and Colonized AgencyAnthony Zirpoli, University of Aberdeen

Political representation is often considered to be the cornerstone of contemporary democracy. Within Representational Democracy, the general populace votes for representatives whom directly determine the legal framework of a country. Even in a purely idealized democracy, in which everyone directly participates in the process of legal determination, the citizens are thought of as their own representatives, directly enacting their political agency within the political sphere. Yet, even within the theories of direct democracy, those living under the rule of a Settler Colonial state remain at the margins of any and all decision making. First-Nation Peoples, Native Americans, Aboriginals, Palestinians.

The focus of this paper will be to give an account of the political agency those living under Settler Colonialism have retained. Discarding the concept of representation as meaningless in such struggles, this paper will be broken into three parts: the first part of this paper will examine the specific historical structure of Settler Colonialism, specifying how it differs from other forms of colonial rule, the techniques of control used by Settler Colonial states, and the consequences on the colonised populations; the second part of this paper will explore the various forms of resistance that have been utilized by people living under Settler Colonial states, including cultural resistance, armed and unarmed resistance struggles, and the power these different forms of resistance have; the final section of this paper will tie these forms of resistance to Spinoza’s conception of agency, explaining how these forms of resistance represent a true paradigm shift away from representational political agency toward a type of direct political action that allows for the possibility of different conceptions of political agency.

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Spinoza: the Critical Discussion of the Concept of Free WillPrzemysław Gut, Faculty of Philosophy,The John Paul  II (The Second) Catholic University of Lublin

In most synthetic presentations of Spinoza's philosophy in histories of philosophy he is described as the chief critic of the concept of free will in the strong sense, nowadays called the libertarian sense. And indeed, if we consult any overall presentation of the arguments advanced against the conception of freedom of will, we cannot overlook the central role played in that critique by the critical arguments put forward by Spinoza. Thus it is not at all surprising, that most modern thinkers, with G. F. Hegel, A. Schopenhauer and F. Nietzsche in the lead, adopted Spinoza as their chief guide in their polemical writings against theories espousing the conception of  liberum arbitrium. In what follows I will present the principal reasons that led Spinoza's thinking into formulating the view that „In the Mind there is no absolute, or   free, will, but the Mind is determined to will this or that by a cause […]” [E2p48 II].  To begin with, I enumerate the reasons which, according to Spinoza, make of the doctrine of  liberum arbitrium a universally acknowledged theory. I follow that with a presentation of arguments given by Spinoza in the first part of his Ethics with the purpose of showing that these reasons have in fact no value in the context of the basic metaphysical assumptions made in his own theory. Next I discuss in detail two of Spinoza's arguments directed against the Cartesian conception of free will. I round off my reflections with an analysis of Spinoza's case for the thesis that the concept of freedom can be legitimately preserved in a metaphysical theory without postulating the existence of such a special faculty as free will.

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Themes from Plato

Formal Complaints: The Unorthodox Plato of Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit Owen Alldritt, Emory University

In Reza Negarestani’s recent Intelligence and Spirit he invokes an unorthodox reading of Plato in order to provide the meta-ethical foundation for his project. In this paper, I will offer a preliminary reconstruction of Negarestani’s interpretation of Plato. I will achieve this reconstruction by reading Intelligence and Spirit alongside Rosemary Desjardins’s 2004 Plato and the Good and Wilfred Sellars’s 1973 “Reason and the Art of Living in Plato”. Drawing upon these authors, I argue that Negarestani is part of a tradition of thinkers that read Plato as a reconstructive thinker rather than a transmitter of achieved doctrine. My paper begins with a brief summary of the aims of Intelligence and Spirit. I then explain the book’s broadly pragmatic meta-ethical orientation. I portray Negarestani’s Post-Hegelian Plato as anti-dogmatic, functionalist, and practice-oriented. I defend this interpretation of Plato through an explanation of Negarestani’s explanation of Plato’s “Analogy of the Divided Line” from The Republic. I go on to argue that “late” Plato’s rethinking of the Good should provide a theoretical re- framing of the foundation of contemporary rationalist projects. More specifically, I contend that understanding Negarestani’s Platonic frame is necessary if we are to move beyond the language- oriented and “socially liberal” rationalism of Jürgen Habermas and Robert Brandom. I conclude by comparing Negarestani’s position to other contemporary emancipatory appropriations of Plato in the work of Alain Badiou and Jonny Thakkar and considering the significance of Negarestani’s Platonism for broader trends within European philosophy.

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The Crisis of TruthNoel E. Boulting, Independent Scholar

In one sense there is no escape from the prison-house of language. The latter is constituted by words and images and it is where truth claims lie. These claims are either embodied within that prison-house or point to what might transcend it, indicating some reality beyond. In that case we have two problems. First of all, what stance must we adopt in relation to the written – the literate/visual – as opposed to the oral/auditory, the spoken word? This problem surfaces of course at the end of Plato’s Phaedrus. Secondly, how are we to regard the relationship between words – written or spoken – and images in capturing truth claims? For those dominated by a twentieth-century sensibility, the image in the book illustrated, even if it may not have legitimated, the word. For a twenty-first- century sensibility, the word merely amplifies or justifies the image located on a screen! These two problems – the relationship between the spoken and the written word and that between the image that speaks for itself and auditory generated images – can be treated separately before attempting to relate them to each other. But in exploring such relationships, the present cognitive interest is to be found in elucidating four possibilities: the oral/auditory; the literate/visual; the image legitimated by the written word; the image generated through the spoken word. In employing such a methodology it may be possible to ascertain how it is becoming increasingly difficult to establish truth claims for the person-in-the-street, thereby generating the crisis of truth!

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The adequate truth in a world of changeTina Röck, University of Dundee

Ever since Parmenides’ poem inspired western thought, philosophers have argued that there can be no true knowledge of that which fundamentally (i.e. substantially) changes and have therefore devised ways of making truth and knowledge possible by focusing on what remains unchanged - substances, idea(l)s, abstractions or generalisations.  In this paper I will look at the possibility of truth in a genuinely dynamic and temporal reality.

The problem of truth and propositional knowledge in a world of genuine change is one that has plagued western philosophy from its inception in ancient Greece. Consider the account provided by Plato’s Socrates: SOCRATES: Then if it never stays the same, how can it be something? […]CRATYLUS: There’s no way.SOCRATES: Then again it can’t even be known by anyone. For at the very instant the knower-to-be approaches, what he is approaching is becoming a different thing, of a different character, so that he can’t yet come to know either what sort of thing it is or what it is like—surely, no kind of knowledge is knowledge of what isn’t in any way. (Plato, Cratylus, 439d-e)If we are to develop an epistemology that can lead to an unconcealment of the world as truly dynamic, we have to face the problem of truth in a world of change. To be more precise, we have to develop an approach towards an impossible goal, which is the ideal of attaining standards of truth and thus to attain the ability to assess knowledge about that which constantly changes - if we are not willing to give up on knowledge and truth altogether. I will argue that, in order to move past this problem, a shift in our understanding of knowledge and truth is necessary, if we wish to come to terms with dynamic being on a conceptual level. In this presentation I will introduce the term ‘adequate’ to explore the potentials and dangers of such a shift.

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Towards a Unified Theory of Personal Love Dr. Gregor Damschen, Department of Philosophy, University of Oldenburg

Is a theory of interpersonal love and, moreover, a unified theory of personal love that embraces inter- and autopersonal love possible? Four approaches seem to be viable: univocity, equivocity, family resemblances or analogy. A univocal notion of interpersonal love is impossible because the three standard models of interpersonal love – caring [1], dialogue [2], and union [3] – are logically incompatible. A reduction theory in the area of equivalent terms and a cluster theory of family resemblances also fail. Both approaches are circular or arbitrary. A possible solution to the problem of- fers an analogous approach. The working thesis of this paper consists in the assumption that the three standard models of interpersonal love can be paronymically reduced to the basic model of positive self-love, which does contain the moments of caring, dialogue, and union (including identity) without contradictions (i.e. consistently), in an entirely organic way (i.e. coherently) and constantly (i.e. diachronically). For the positive form of self-love, which in contrast to its negative counterparts, narcissism and egoism, is not self-destructive, cannot exist without a person who takes care of herself (self-preservation, self-improvement), who is in dialogue with herself (self-consciousness, self-esteem) and who remains identical to herself over time (self-identity). Interpersonal love conceptually presupposes positive self-love. In this way, a unified theory of personal love becomes possible.

References

[1] Frankfurt, H. G. (2004), The Reasons of Love, Princeton University Press.

[2] Krebs, A. (2015), Zwischen Ich und Du. Eine dialogische Philosophie der Liebe, Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main.

[3] Schmidt, E. E. (2018), “Are Lovers Ever One? Reconstructing the Union Theory of Love”, in: Philosophia 46.3: 705–719.

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DerridaThe aporias of gift in the thought of Derrida Huang Ya-Hsien, Graduate Institute of Philosophy, National Central University Taiwan

In this paper, I aim to discuss the aporias of the gift in Derrida’s thought in two dimensions. Firstly, I will analyze the aporias of the gift. The analysis will then be used to respond to Nietzsche’s genealogy of “good and evil”.

The gift presumes a relationship between the giver and a non-particular recipient. Moreover, the gift itself has an inherent economic issue. That is, the behavior of receiving the gift from the giver puts the recipient into the dilemma of whether returning the gift and bearing the accompanying debt. Such dilemma is contrary to the idea that the act of gift giving should be out of generosity without expecting anything in return. The gift economy therefore deconstructs the generosity embedded in the gift and the unpredictability of gift giving. Finally, given that the gift should be given without expecting anything in return and should not be a means involved in the economic circulation, the accompanying exemption from debts and act of forgiveness should be unidirectional without asking any returns. The aforementioned philosophical meaning is well illustrated in the etymological relationship of French words don (the gift), donner (gift giving) and pardonner (forgiveness). In addition, the exemption from debts and forgiveness associated with the gift responds to Nietzsche’s genealogy of good and evil. That is, if individuals want to save themselves from the conscious debt, they have to have the skill of forgetting to discharge from their obligations to return the gift.

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A hope for a thinker's word to come – Derrida on the Language of Forgiveness Lilja Walliser, Freie Universität Berlin

“Must forgiveness pass through words or must it pass [beyond] words? Can one only forgive or ask forgiveness when speaking or sharing the language of the other?” Or “must one make silence the very element of forgiveness, if there is such a thing?” These are just some of the questions Derrida addresses in his works on forgiveness from the late 90s. Since there is already a large amount of literature regarding the so called 'aporias' of forgiveness as well as the ethical and political implications of Derrida's account, my presentation focuses on the relation of forgiving and language i. e. linguistic practices. In both the texts On Forgiveness and To Forgive: The Unforgiveable and the Unprescriptible, Derrida raises concerns over what he calls the “language of forgiveness”. He claims that “verbal language” is “the disastrous condition of forgiveness, which makes possible forgiveness but which also destroys it”. Even though, on the one hand, it's true that “forgiveness cannot manifest itself in some fashion without calling on the universalising instance of language”, it's also true that to share a language always already involves identification in a way: as soon as we speak or exchange words, the scene of reconciliation –according to Derrida –has already commenced. On the other hand, “it is necessary that alterity, non-identification, even incomprehension, remain irreducible for true forgiveness”. After a brief presentation of Derrida’s arguments on language, forgiveness and reconciliation, I will look at what he presented in his earlier writings, such as The Monolingualism of the Other, and ask whether there Derrida himself didn’t depict a different picture of linguistic practices, arguing that one actually never completely succeeds in establishing identity. Interpreting these paradoxes, I will try to locate the reason in Derrida’s philosophy for why verbal language makes forgiveness simultaneously possible and impossible.

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Criteria, perspectives, and disagreement N. Gabriel Martin, Philosophy, Lebanese American University

Possible candidates for truth in any of the domains of science, jurisprudence, or politics is determined in advance by decisions about the appropriate criteria for knowledge in such domains. These decisions about criteria are essential for the establishment of any domain. However, the contingency and fallibility of the choice of criteria must be acknowledged, and always remain open to debate, at least in principle. Too often, however, criteria are either taken for granted in epistemology, philosophy of science, and other branches of philosophy, or else efforts are made to put them on irreproachably solid foundations. If this is avoided, however, then another question emerges: how should disputes about criteria (or disputes that threaten to turn into disputes about criteria) be handled?

I will argue for an approach to disputes over criteria that draws on Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. The aim of this approach is to facilitate, rather than limit, debate about criteria. Rather than determining the right criteria in advance, positions should be presented, contested, and defended with respect not only to their objective content but to their legitimating criteria. In that way, any declaration can be criticised and disputed not only on face value but with respect to the methodological assumptions and theoretical commitments backing it.

For example, rather than arguing about whether first-person testimony or statistical study provides the correct way of understanding the facts of the problem of gender discrimination, clarity about the competing conclusions that result from relying on one criterion or the other could be attained by making the criteria which supports each claim explicit and including them in the debate about the problem. This will not settle matters once and for all the way that determining criteria in advance hopes to, but it will facilitate discussion and understanding while avoiding dogmatic exclusions.

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Abyss or Continuity between Humans and Animals: Displacing a DichotomyPablo P. Castelló, Royal Holloway, University of London

It is not unusual to hear that we are in language. It is less common, however, to question whether we are in language in one single all-encompassing way or not. I intend to show that we can be in, at least, two ways of being language (with and without “in”). These ways of being are identified by attempting to answer the following question: ‘what ways of being language are relevant for understanding “what” and who animals are?’  (1.) The ‘distanced’ way of being language which consists in a way of being we are in, for example, in those instances in which we look at a ‘real’ animal, whether a cat (Derrida) or a tick (Uexküll), and we feel we encounter an unreachable Other, a radically infinite different being separated from oneself by an indefinite abyss. In this way of being difference appears as most valuable, and with ethico-political implications that question (in response to Haraway’s writings): in what ways we, humans, respect (or not) animals; (2.) in contrast, the immersed-in-the-world way of being language becomes apparent in those moments in which we have a strong feeling of sharing the world (of living in the same world) with other-nonhuman beings, when animals appear as relatable and close to us. In this way of being, the possibility of sharing grief, mourning, suffering, experiencing agony or affection, or being aware of death are examined – in light of Joe Hutto’s work. In conclusion, I will argue that these ways of being language displace the traditional dichotomy – consisting of those, like Singer, who see humans as being animals that feel and experience the world like other animals do, and those, like Heidegger, that see an unreachable abyss between animals and humans – by embracing the dichotomy as integral to what and who human beings are.

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Freedom and the SocialFreedom as a Discourse Concept and its Implications for Free Societies Oliver Milne National University of Ireland, Galway

In this talk, I make the case that the concept ‘freedom’ constantly evolves as part of an ongoing discourse (in Foucault’s sense) centred around the key question of democratic politics: ‘How best can we treat one another as free and equal individuals?’ This fact, I claim, is decisive for the natures of free societies.

After defending the idea of the ‘key question’ (leaning on Anderson, 1999) I present two arguments for my main thesis. The first attempts to make plain the ubiquitous causes of the idea’s evolution, including both factors endogenous to the discourse (today’s discursive strategies are built on or react against yesterday’s, and tomorrow’s will do the same with today’s) and exogenous to it (social and technological changes continually force the key question to be asked in new contexts). The second argument highlights the dangers of the alternative – arguing that treating freedom as a known, fixed ideal that need only be properly implemented for society to be completely free is to invite totalitarianism or illiberal stagnation.

In support of each argument, I make use of historical examples – in particular, the development of feminism over the past century, and the failure of Leninism. I also pay particular attention to Jacques Rancière’s characterisation of ‘the political’ as (to put it as crudely as possible) the renegotiation of the franchise by the excluded (Rancière, 2001), arguing that his claim can be read as saying that all the crucial action happens in wrangling over the scope of ‘we’ in the key question – suggesting that my characterisation of the discourse of freedom is an illuminating extension of his concept of ‘politics’. A free society, I conclude, is not merely one that happens to embody present ideas of freedom, but one robustly capable of sustaining the discourse of freedom and putting its changing products into practice.

References

Anderson, E.S., 1999. What is the Point of Equality? Ethics 109, 287–337.

Foucault, M., 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge, World of Man: A Library of Theory and Research in the Human Sciences. Tavistock Publications Limited, Great Britain.

Popper, K.R., 1943.The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5th ed. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

Rancière, J, 2001. Ten theses on Politics. Theory Event 5.

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Social Assemblages Between Realism and MaterialismAudronė Žukauskaitė, Lithuanian Culture Research Institute

The paper aims to discuss the notion of social assemblage, as it is elaborated in Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory (2016) and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social (2005). DeLanda defines assemblages as individual entities, which do not depend on the relations that form them; by contrast, Latour in his network theory asserts that entities are absolutely defined by interactions with other entities. Thus DeLanda’s notion of assemblage, which is an elaborated version of Deleuze and Guattari’s agencement, can be described in terms of materialist ontology, whereas Latour’s actor-network theory can be named as relational ontology. The divide between materialism and relationalism will be discussed vis-à-vis Graham Harman’s object oriented ontology and Levy Bryant’s onticology. The paper will argue that against Latour’s and Harman’s proposed actualism, DeLanda’s assemblages possess virtual qualities, which engender a qualitative change. In contrast to the “capacity metaphysics”, found in Bryant’s work, DeLanda introduces the notion of virtuality, which is perfectly material without being actual.   

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Law and Politics: Contemporary Challenges of Critical Philosophy of LawGašper Pirc, University of Ljubljana

The important reference points for my research are Benjamin`s Critique of Violence and especially Menke`s enhanced reinterpretation of Benjamin`s inquiries in Recht und Gewalt. Here, I take some important clues by noting the paradoxical nature of law that both opposes and exercises violence. Following Menke, law is by its structure bound to repeat the violence of retribution in different terms since it imposes legal equality which formalizes the violence against violence, creates the boundaries of legal and non-legal, and thus necessarily creates its own other, a non-law, the heteronomous. As such, legal order is an order of mythic violence – structural violence which it cannot but reproduce.

While I concur that there is an intrusion of politics into law, the mechanism of equality that is conceived by the legal is transformed into the mechanism of distribution of assignments rather than the possibility of collective self-reflection. The political in law is ambiguous – it is at once a product of legal form and a second-order apprehension of normativity in the interpretation of law rather than within the sphere of legal relationships proper that cannot but challenge the reified equality produced by law.

Rather than trying to escape the clutches of the antagonistic picture of the fate of law and its intrinsic mythic violence, the challenge is to reconsider legal imposition of equality as a boundary for the excesses of alternative orders of domination and law as a middle sphere in societal realization. Thus, it might be appropriate to not see law merely as a positive mechanism that subdues its subjects and objectifies them by its form but as the sphere of negativity which can still be interpreted in the manner of epoche while the individuals can draw the resources for their identity-formation and individuation from the other domains of social action.

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Democracy as ‘Understanding’: The ontotheological and phenomenological approach of Hannah ArendtDr. Spiros Makris, Political Theory, University of Macedonia

From 1950s onwards the famous German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) formulated step-by-step a neo-republican approach concerning Western democracy which significantly contributed to the deep rejuvenation of postwar and particularly contemporary Political Theory. By drawing a distinct line from the traditional positivism and behaviorism, Hannah Arendt brought to the fore the Aristotelian, Augustinian, Heideggerian and Jaspersian potentialities of an ontotheological and phenomenological approach to politics according to which the political phenomenon (i.e. ’’the political’’) must be considered as a public process of acting, thinking and in the final analysis judging. The entire procedure is termed by Arendt as understanding and since then led to the regeneration of political thought after the historical decline that Totalitarianism has signified for the humanity as a whole. Bearing seriously in mind that more and more this renewal of democracy after the WWII is considered as the ''Epic'' moment of contemporary Political Theory, in this paper we explore further the basic philosophical (i.e. ontotheological and phenomenological), political, normative and also ethical elements of this extraordinary Arendtian neo-republican approach by eagerly exploring its great significance for the shortcomings, the failures and mainly the structural crises of Western democracy in the age of comformism, mass society and chiefly apoliticization. For Hannah Arendt, democracy must not be taken for granted. By contrast, it always should be perceived as a high both normative and experiential stake that have eventually to be approached as a process of a reflectional understanding (i.e. vita contemplativa, vita activa and judging as a dynamic ensemble) or a Sisyphus-like agonism against worldlessness and thoughtlessness.

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