For over a decade, Reiner Schürmann considered his phenomenology of symbolic action to be the centerpiece of his philosophical project. After 1980, however, it drops out entirely. This article argues that a central tension surrounding this theory lies in its complex reliance on categories sourced from nineteenth- and twentieth-century theorists of mythology. In his theory of “symbolic difference,” Schürmann attempts to extract from the experience of mythic epiphany and ritual the groundwork for a philosophy of collective action liberated from any (...) reference to ulterior origins. This effort to return to myth in search of the post-metaphysical generates a tension that will come to a head in the late 1970s, when Schürmann attempts to purge the mythic content from his symbolism, with only partial success. The eventual failure of this demythologization, it is here argued, casts new light on the category of “natality” in Broken Hegemonies. (shrink)

Reiner Schürmann’s late meditations on anarchy, in his engagements with Heidegger as well as Broken Hegemonies, unfold out of an unexpected ancestry—his early studies on Meister Eckhart. The fruits of such work date from the early ’70s, particularly the luminous Maître Eckhart et la joie errante (Schürmann 1972.1), but also a number of essays attesting the continuity, centrality, and consequentiality of this line of inquiry. In Schürmann’s reading of the Rhenish Master, the present essay especially highlights the question concerning ethics, (...) the status of praxis or, more precisely, the semantic torsion impressed upon the language of action. It also underscores Schürmann’s emphasis on the genuinely philosophical significance of Eckhart’s sermons and of mysticism as such, refusing to confine the theme of “knowing nothing” to the mystical experience and the theological elaborations thereof, as though this could be kept safely separated from the exercise of thinking. (shrink)

This article examines Schürmann’s oeuvre in light of his reflections on language. Schürmann’s meditations raise the question whether language is capable of truly expressing the ultimate conditions of human experience. This article argues that, after hegemonies have been broken, or rather are seen to have always been broken from within, one can continue to speak, but only on condition that tragic irony doubles every natal general word with a mortal singular shadow.

Translators’ Abstract: In this introduction to his Italian translation of Reiner Schürmann’s, Gianni Carchia offers a short yet incisive interpretation of the compelling originality of Schürmann’s reading of Heidegger. Carchia points out that, contrary to much Heidegger literature, Schürmann insists on a three-tiered temporal difference rather than on a simple dichotomy between beings and being as the driver of the deconstruction of metaphysics, and it is only through this distinction that the an-archic as the evental and ahistorical origin of being (...) comes into view. What this displacement affords is a certain historicization of Heideggerian philosophy that brings out the anarchic, polymorphous, and protean nature of being and restores to acting its spontaneity and innocence. Observing that this anti-humanist naturalization of an-archy may indeed be closer to Eugen Fink’s cosmology, which grants autonomy to the extra-human, than to Heidegger’s history of Dasein, which confines us to “the prison of the human,” Carchia locates the contribution of Schürmann’s work in its deconstruction of the Idealist remnant in Heidegger. (shrink)

In this posthumously published interview, conducted on February 4, 2021, philosopher and activist Drucilla Cornell (1950–2022) discusses the importance of Reiner Schürmann’s work and reminisces on the seminars they led together with Jacques Derrida in the early 1990s.

Translators’ abstract: This article considers the concept of originary dissension in Reiner Schürmann’s. The ultimate conditions of experience are natality and mortality, which universalize and singularize respectively. These conditions are in originary dissension with one another in the sense that they cannot be resolved into a unified whole. But natality institutes the universal precisely by denying the mortal singular. Recognizing and sustaining the originary dissension therefore requires prioritizing mortality over natality.

In this paper, I propose to reconstruct Schürmann’s early concept of translation in dialogue with Eckhart and Heidegger and in connection with the concept of releasement. Taking recourse to the different versions of his research on Eckhart’s German sermons, from his early thesis and dissertation to the French and American editions of Wandering Joy, I comment on Schürmann’s practice of translation and seek to elucidate the stylistic, existential and ontological dimensions of his translation theory. In conclusion, I discuss the relevance (...) of what I call “wandering translation” for contemporary philosophy of translation. (shrink)

This text, touching on the problem of the ontology of the image from a political-theological perspective, focuses on Reiner Schürmann’s philosophical reading of the pictorial art of Louis Comtois. While placing it in the context of post-World War II modernism, he nevertheless underlines its special spiritual quality that, far from any theorization of messianic abstractionism or any affirmation of artistic sovereignty, shows all the anarchic simplicity of painting. It is a form of modernity still to be imagined but one that (...) is already in some way active in the unpredictable meeting of matter and light, which Comtois’s pictorial act and Schürmann’s thought contemplate in the inseparable connection between history and immortality. (shrink)

Reiner Schürmann’s work received a much delayed reception due to his early death and a complicated situation surrounding his estate. In a personal account of his experiences, the author describes essential stages that led to numerous posthumous publications and translations and outlines Schürmann’s understanding of the concept of “origin,” which is central to his thinking, along the lines of his literary practice against the background of a lifelong confrontation with his own biography.

The article discusses Schürmann’s essay “‘What Must I Do?’ at the End of Metaphysics” (1983). Although acknowledging the importance of the ethical question (“What must I do?”) and the need for ethical orientation, Schürmann here connects his ethical project to an account of the history of metaphysics in a way that rules out any positive answer to the ethical question. Schürmann rather envisages what I call a transformative ethics, a basic modification of our ways of thinking and acting. Key to (...) this project is the recognition that normative claims are of an intrinsically contradictory nature, leading to what I call his liquid normativity view. I then contrast two ways of understanding the link between ethics and the history of being: the sequential or revolutionary and the phenomenological model. While Schürmann opts for the first, I argue that the latter is preferable. (shrink)

Reiner Schürmann, known for his readings of Heidegger and Eckhart, was also known for his philosophy of ontological anarché. The transition from metaphysical theory to post-metaphysical practice, for him, meant the transition from theoria, which looks at phenomena monomorphically in accordance with principles (archai), to a praxis that is an-archic and thinks in recognition of polymorphic singularities. Here, I seek to clarify Schürmann’s notion of ontological anarchy and the praxis following it. I inquire into its political implications and relation to (...) political anarchism. What is the connection between his “radical phenomenology” of ontological anarché and what he called anarchic praxis? (shrink)

In Broken Hegemonies, Reiner Schürmann looks to Meister Eckhart as the preeminent thinker of the “destitution of natura” as a hegemonic fantasm. He indicates that, to some extent, Ockham is also a thinker of the destitution of this fantasm. The problem, according to Schürmann, is that Ockham reverts to a natural law morality in his political writings. This essay investigates whether Schürmann is correct in this assessment, shows that he is not entirely correct, and then points to the ways in (...) which thinking through this issue points out some interesting features of Schürmann’s overall project. (shrink)

Tracing a path opened by an enigmatic reference in Reiner Schürmann’s dissertation to the symbol of water in James Baldwin’s, this essay follows the thinking of Schürmann and Baldwin to the tragic denial that perverts the ideals of the United States from the moment of its founding. Drawing on Schürmann’s imperative hermeneutics, we attend to Baldwin’s essays from the 1960s as they call white citizens of the United States to take on the “hideously difficult” task of achieving our identity as (...) a nation by facing our history and transforming ourselves as human beings. The symbols of water, fire, and love point us to new ways of existing rooted in practices of love—sensual releasement, ethical candor, and ethical imagination—that just might enable us to create a more perfect union. (shrink)

The connection between ontology and “the political” is one of the most widely discussed themes of Reiner Schürmann’s thought. Yet, it is also the strongest reason for the relevance of his legacy today. The present contribution investigates Schürmann’s political ontology through the lens of his notion of a fissure between metaphysics and its overcoming. The core of his ontology is a politics of mortals, i.e., a political action able to dismiss metaphysical universalism and to deal with the fragility of singularity.

Reiner Schürmann’s early engagement with Meister Eckhart seems to have been of major significance for his original thought as a philosopher and social critic. Schürmann thought “along with” Eckhart, something which enabled him to write a challenging interpretation of Eckhart at the outset of his career in 1972, a book which maintains its value fifty years after its original publication. This essay evaluates the significance of that book, Wandering Joy, in the past half-century of Eckhartian studies.

This essay follows Jean-Luc Nancy’s meditation on whether it is possible for thought to stand before the untenable in the present predicament and his call to confront the alló, the irreducibly other. It looks into Martin Heidegger’s considerations regarding the refusal of world and the possibility of its reversal. It discusses Catherine Malabou on two kinds of outside for philosophy and her privileging of the decolonial outside, which she uses to critique Reiner Schürmann’s position on the possibility of justice. Against (...) Malabou, it then examines Schürmann’s understanding of justice in a Nietzschean vein, and it concludes with a reflection on nihilism and its other side with a view to establish Schürmann’s fundamental position. (shrink)

This paper investigates the themes of transcendental anarchy and the practical a priori in Reiner Schürmann’s reading of Heidegger. After elucidating these concepts, as well as showing how they are operative in Heidegger’s own texts, I raise questions regarding the stability of the dependency-claim of the practical a priori once transcendental anarchy has unsettled the very distinction between theory and practice.

The article discusses the aesthetic dimension of Reiner Schürmann’s thoughts on tragic differing, which he connected to the birth of light and colors in abstract painting. It raises the question of tragic blindness and visibility, the play of light and darkness, and moreover the sacrifice of the beautiful in present times. Focusing specifically on the few texts written by Schürmann on Louis Comtois’s abstract painting and on his readings of tragic differing in the poem by Parmenides, the article presents a (...) meditation on the right to beauty in dark times. (shrink)

To circumvent both historicism and utopianism, Reiner Schürmann develops an account of a three-tiered temporal difference in which the entitative and the event-like are connected by an “economy of presence.” This paper investigates Schürmann’s notion of “economy” to draw out the historical-systematic status of what he construes as “economic anarchy” in distinction from both Giorgio Agamben’s idea of a “true anarchy” purged of all oikonomia and from Miguel Vatter’s rights-based notion of “politico-legal anarchy.” What is at stake in “economic anarchy” (...) is the preparation of a place that puts an end to domination by first principles without fantasizing a clean cut that ends up reproducing hegemonic fantasms. Rather, Schürmann insists on the aporetic and incongruous nature of that “caesura-place” in which the synchronic and the diachronic, universalization and singularization, are bound together. At variance with both Agamben’s appeal to a destituent potential and Vatter’s assertion of constituent power, Schürmann draws out the discordance of times that is implied by what he calls originary or individual practice. The paper concludes with a brief confrontation of Schürmann’s critique of epochal economy with a Marxian critique of political economy. (shrink)

This article explores Schürmann’s relation to religion and theology. Since the publication of his early essays in Ways of Releasement (2023), Schürmann scholarship will find new ways to think about Schürmann’s troubled relation to religion. This article will name some significant traits that surface in these early papers: First, Schürmann’s sense for the mystery, which will, however, quickly vanish from his thinking. Second, the growing influence of Heidegger from 1966 onwards. Third, an increasing departure from determinate religion through a reading (...) of Eckhart, and a growing taste for a universal experience, first, of the mystery, and then of “borrowed being.” Our aim is to show Schürmann’s farewell to religion and theology through succumbing to Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology, which, for Schürmann, seems to have spelled the end of theology. (shrink)

This article draws on Bernard Stiegler’s insights and articulates them alongside other contemporary reflections in order to understand the psychic, social, and political issues raised by our contemporary digital hypomnesic milieu. I will explore the theoretical presuppositions underlying the functioning of digital devices to try to show that this computationalist technoscientific paradigm is based on problematic epistemological foundations, which an organological approach implicitly deconstructs. I will thereafter attempt to develop a pharmacological analysis of “generative artificial intelligence,” showing that its massive (...) proliferation risks a new kind of “symbolic misery,” a “proletarianization” of expression and a generalization of social “disbelief.” Finally, I will try to show that the project of a “hermeneutic web” suggested by Stiegler needs to be revived and transformed in this new organological context: I will suggest some proposals to fight against attention economy and expression economy and to put computational automata in the service of collective intelligence. (shrink)

Beginning with The Automatic Society, where Stiegler, on the occasion of an analysis of the unification of the technical system by the digital, synthesizes his thought of the three stages of the process of "proletarianization," this paper comes first to a critical examination of the originary "prosthetic conditions" which, according to Technics and Time, made possible the ambivalence of the technical pharmakon and the "systemic stupidity" of today. This leads then to a development on the problem of the status of (...) desire in the stieglerian pharmacology of mind, which makes it infinite and specific to humans. Finally, this development leads us to a confrontation between Stiegler’s mobilization of doing-right (faire-droit) to unify the domains of philosophy, and a redefinition of doing-right within a differently unified human ecology, whose archireflexive methodological questioning is translated secondarily in this redefinition in terms of suffering needs versus consumerist Desire. (shrink)

This article draws on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau’s theorizations of bricolage in order to explore Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical practice. Taking as its point of departure the elements of intellectual biography provided by Stiegler in Acting Out (2009), it explores his (re)deployment of existing philosophical concepts and the sedimentary nature of his own thought. The article then moves to consider the presence of concepts and practices of mystagogy in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010), arguing that these (...) are a restaging of the dynamics of Acting Out on a collective, rather than an individual scale. Ultimately, the article turns to Stiegler’s late aesthetic writing to explore how his theorization of the roles of amateur and artist might point us towards the lineaments of his unfinished “mystagogy.”. (shrink)

What does it mean to teach philosophy today? This question occupies a central position in Bernard Stiegler’s thinking and his practice. For Stiegler, to teach philosophy is to initiate, so that an individuation, or a quantum leap, could take place within and between the teacher and the participants. This article traces a mystagogical thinking in Stiegler’s work, especially his reading of Plato and Simondon. This mystagogical thinking, present in philosophy and art, is also an antidote against the becoming herd in (...) the consumerist society, which also means disindividuation. (shrink)

Stiegler understands the Anthropocene as the age in which planetary enframing engenders an avalanche of entropization, putting humanity’s survival at risk. To avoid catastrophe, the so-called technosphere should be transformed from an entropic-destructive into a negentropic-constructive assemblage, ushering in the Neganthropocene. Stiegler’s focus is on the noetic dimension, in particular as constituted and conditioned overwhelmingly today by the digital pharmakon. In this article I want to make a case for the importance of an entirely other noetic pharmakon not addressed by (...) Stiegler: the nontechnical pharmakon of psychedelics, which allows for the expansion of humanity’s noetic frontier beyond the digital, providing access to dimensions of experience—and possibly also of reality—that may support the emerging neganthropos to awaken on a postanthropocentric planet in which it is enabled to commune in a noosphere made up by many other, nonhuman intelligences, which may prove essential for the neganthropic transformation to succeed. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler’s theory of consciousness claims: consciousness is cinema. The invention of the technological dispositifs of photography, phonograph, and cinema, have made this structure visible. He develops the thesis of the cinema of consciousness in Technics and Time, where it leads to a deconstruction of Husserlian consciousness and of the Kantian I. This theory also orients Stiegler’s large-scale criticism of contemporary cinematic capitalism that engages with the works of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Debord. This article presents and critically examines Stiegler’s theory (...) of consciousness as a nonconscious power of dreaming that is not based on the imagination hidden in the the unconsciousness but on collective technical image-objects. While Stiegler criticizes the colonisation of the imagination by the cinematic industry, this article looks for its creative potential. The article also presents a theory of mimesis that is presupposed but ignored by Stiegler and that explains the pharmacological nature of cinematic consciousness. (shrink)

The opening contribution to this special edition on “The Truth of Stiegler” tests the claim that the more Bernard Stiegler develops his analysis of the catastrophic collapse of society, the further he risks departure from the philosophical rigor of his earliest ideas on the technical constitution of “intermittently not-inhuman” (“noetic”) life. His diagnoses of the collapse of trust revolve around a critique of misplaced faith () in computational capitalism’s pursuit of certainty, but are arguably themselves undermined by Stiegler’s dogmatic certainty (...) in his own arguments. We can make more sense of the apparent inconsistency by extending Stiegler’s ideas on exhaustion and the disintegration of the public sphere to show how a surfeit of certainty gives rise to a defensive posture that complicates his insistence on the therapeutic value of truth and openness. (shrink)

Prior to the publication of his first work on the co-origination of hominization and technicization, Bernard Stiegler formulated the elements of his philosophical outlook, embodied in the concept of the “idiotext,” conceived as a way of thinking beyond the metaphysical opposition of the empirical and the transcendental. This concept describes the meeting of the spirals of different kinds of memories, and the way this meeting also involves the spiraling of a milieu that supports this encounter, and which is itself a (...) kind of memory—and a support of dreams. The profound reflection that underlay the formulation of this concept never ceased to inform the continued unfolding of Stiegler’s work, and never ceased to return in constantly renewed ways. This article elaborates Stiegler’s notion of the “idiotext” and attempts to indicate its significance for Stiegler’s work and for any thought that wishes to take the measure of our decomposing times. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler’s prolific career consisted both in philosophical reflection and concrete political interventions. In this article, Stiegler’s project in Technics and Time is re-evaluated with an eye towards its philosophical specificity and radicality. Technics and Time, read in this way, is shown to be a genuine rival to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology from Being and Time. By making use of André Leroi-Gourhan’s paleoanthropological reflections among other forms of non-philosophical knowledge, Stiegler is able to grasp the fundamental importance of technics in an (...) unprecedented way, in turn pushing his thinking beyond other important philosophical influences such as Bergson, Simondon, and Derrida. Stiegler’s distinctive attention to technics is thus shown to be an essential factor in his prescient political diagnostics. (shrink)

Silence is reserved for what cannot be verbally expressed. The well-known Wittgensteinian quote summarizes an established understanding of the relationship between language and silence: because language is not enough to account for reality and thinking, it must be transcended by other means of expression, like music or silence. But what if the opposite is the case and silence is not the extension but the precondition of language, the ultimate source of meaning? This paper explores how this is the phenomenological and (...) Derridean philosophical framework of Coetzee’s novels, a literary universe created from the will to signify and build singular meanings. (shrink)

While regarding twentieth century French philosophy as a protracted conceptual war, Badiou has largely avoided an encounter with Foucault on the philosophical battlefield. According to Badiou, Foucault constructs a history of systems of thought starting from something other than philosophy (linguistic anthropology, postmodern sophism, democratic materialism) and, in so doing, exits the philosophical battleground. The present essay explores the prospect of rapprochement between these two thinkers, drawing attention to their shared concern with the theme of true life. For Foucault and (...) Badiou, the life in truth and for truth compels the subject to invent a new way of being at the site of exception to what there is. Although Badiou remains ambivalent about the Foucauldian notion of the philosophical subject, he ultimately endorses Foucault’s conception of the philosophical life, which calls for courage insofar as it summons the human animal to think differently and become other than what one is. (shrink)

While Hermann Levin Goldschmidt didn’t read Yiddish anarchists, there seems to have been a convergent evolution in their thinking. Goldschmidt’s looking up to Jewish lore as a source of liberating creativity is commonly encountered in Yiddish anarchist texts. His view of action as a constant response to internal and external challenges in the struggle for an open future is developed by Isaac Nachman Steinberg on the basis of nineteenth-century vitalism. Goldschmidt’s theory of anarchist individualism as willed self-limiting solidarity has a (...) compelling parallel in Hillel Solotaroff’s view of history. His use of impressionism and photography to eternalize the immediacy of human actuality is akin to Rudolf Rocker’s championing of decadent literature. In both cases, the goal of anarchism is not a dictatorship of the former downtrodden, but a continuous and contradictory evolution of freedom in ever-changing contexts. (shrink)

This paper offers a neo-Aristotelian approach to PCSR aimed at enabling us to more systematically ascertain which sorts of corporate political activities, if any, might be politically acceptable. Part 1 sketches Aristotle’s account of the “political.” Aristotelian politics have at least four key dimensions. When we speak of PCSR, we should, from this Aristotelian perspective, evaluate how specific behaviors accord with or undermine these four aspects of political life. Part 2 of the paper explores which forms of activity by corporations (...) qualify as genuinely (and thus acceptably) political within a neo-Aristotelian framework. Part 3 highlights strengths and limitations of this approach to PCSR. (shrink)

As is well known, Plato was a significant influence on Gadamer’s thought. Nevertheless, Gadamer’s interpretation of Plato changed through the years, and he became increasing sympathetic towards Plato in his later works after 1960’s Truth and Method. This article will examine how Gadamer’s writings on Plato after Truth and Method may inform our interpretation of his magnum opus. I will present the case that this not only leads to rethinking Gadamer’s relation to Plato, but also has wider implications for his (...) hermeneutics and for potential reconsiderations of key aspects of the text. I point to the possibility that if we do not sufficiently appreciate these changes in Gadamer’s interpretation of Plato, this may not only distort our understanding of Gadamer’s reading of Plato, but perhaps more importantly neglect how Platonic conceptions may inform his own hermeneutic project as it is outlined in Truth and Method. (shrink)

In this essay an engineer and a philosopher, after many conversations, develop an argument for why the Aristotelian version of virtue ethics is the most promising way to develop what we call artificial moral, social agents, i.e. robots. This, evidently, applies to humans as well. There are several claims: first, that humans are not born moral, they are socialized into morality; second, that morality involves affect, emotion, feeling, before it engages reason; third, that how a moral being feels is related (...) to some narrative, whether moral or not; and finally, that narrativity is what builds a sense of a “moral” I, namely an authorial moral self. (shrink)

This essay attempts to rethink what is here called “the Socratic Moment” in Western philosophy, that is, the unique turn that philosophy takes in the early Socratic dialogues of Plato. The essay begins by contesting the traditional view that the goal of Socratic inquiry is to gain irrefutable knowledge of ethical concepts such as courage, justice, friendship, and the holy for the purposes of future action. It argues instead, through a close reading of key passages from Plato’s Apology and Euthyphro, (...) that Socratic inquiry actually begins with the concept under consideration in order to put the interlocutor themself—their beliefs and their actions—into question. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point the central place given to contradiction by Hermann Goldschmidt in his book Contradiction Set Free, and it compares his approach with that of the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch. At the same time as Goldschmidt, Jankélévitch also assigned a central role to contradiction in thought, so much so that he often referred to his own philosophical method as “paradoxology.” For him, as for Goldschmidt, paradox is the driving force behind thought that is always on the (...) move. This article presents the main features of Jankélévitch’s paradoxology and illustrates it with two themes: forgiveness and Jewish identity. By highlighting this proximity between Goldschmidt’s approach and that of Jankélévitch, I suggest that they are both part of a more general movement in continental philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, one of whose main challenges was to rethink philosophical rationality in depth. (shrink)

Critique currently leads a life akin to a zombie. It is torn between attempts to surpass it and radical gestures of its dismissal, while moderate forces dwell on the business of inventorying its history. Starting from critique’s historical turn on itself, this essay focuses on destabilization and self-questioning as its essential features. Regarding Adorno’s model, it seeks to locate critique’s focal point before it was split by surpassing and dismissal. This model is still challenging because it is situated at a (...) crossroads in critical thinking where the historical aspect of failure is tied to structural aspects of critique: resistance, disruption, and dissolution. It concerns a movement of critique that leads into delirium—without thereby abandoning its claim to objectivity. In the contemporary situation, where critique is at once generalized and dismissed, it is precisely the specific link of disrupting and claiming objectivity that challenges the universalized regime of opinion. (shrink)

In Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), an apparent tension arises between his pursuit of a self-proclaimed “new theory of everything,” or general ontology, and his assertion that any ontology must be able to account for distinctions among various regions of being. This paper delves into this tension between universality and specificity, particularly concerning the question of animal ontology, and examines the potential for constructing an object-oriented animal ontology. By juxtaposing Harman’s perspectives with those of Matthew Calarco and other scholars, I (...) aim to demonstrate the feasibility of developing an animal ontology using the framework of OOO. (shrink)

Recent developments in Continental philosophy have included the emergence of a school of “speculative realism,” which rejects the human-centered orientation that has long dominated Continental thought. Proponents of speculative realism differ on several issues, but many agree on the need for an object-oriented ontology. Some speculative realists identify realism with materialism, while others accord equal reality to objects that are non-material, even fictional. Several thinkers retain a focus on difference, a well-established theme in Continental thought. This paper looks at speculative (...) realism from the perspective of systems theory. Many of the tenets of speculative realism have long been features of systems metaphysics and are expressed clearly in a systems framework. However, some views of some speculative realists differ substantially from systems theoretic ideas. (shrink)

This article explores Thomas Hobbes’s political translations of Euripides’s Medea and, particularly, his representation of the Dionysian ritual of killing and dismembering a sacrificial victim (sparagmos). To answer the question of what forms political theology may take in modernity, I contend that Hobbes seeks to reverse the political theological meaning of ancient Greek sparagmos—which was originally depicted in Euripides as a legitimate religious sacrifice whose objective was to reunify the polis—by turning it into a senseless act of political violence that (...) will dissolve the civil state into competing interest groups or body parts. If Hobbes seeks to expel religious sacrifice from his political state into archaic pre-history, however, the article goes on to argue—via Bramhall, Schmitt, and Cavarero’s revisionary readings of his work—that the philosopher’s critique of Medea ends up bestowing a legitimacy upon the tragic heroine that disarticulates the political theological unity upon which his Commonwealth is founded. In the tragic figure of Medea, Dionysian sparagmos returns to dismember and even potentially consume the body parts of the Leviathan. (shrink)

This essay reshapes our understanding of the origin and trajectory of the phenomenology of feelings. In contrast to accepted interpretations, I show that Husserl’s 1896 manuscript “Approval, Value, and Evidence”—and not his 1901 Logical Investigations—is the foundation of his subsequent phenomenology of feelings as it is found in Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory, Ideas I, and other manuscripts. This is for two reasons. First, in the 1896 manuscript—published in Studies Concerning the Structures of Consciousness—Husserl introduces the core problem, which (...) continues to motivate his philosophy of feelings. He sees that feelings are not just affective, but also surprisingly rational. Second, Husserl addresses this enigmatic duality, by pioneering the method of analogizing, which he would employ for the next twenty years. In sum, I show that the 1896 manuscript introduces the problems and methods, in the absence of which Husserl’s later phenomenology of feelings appears inconceivable. (shrink)

This article seeks to problematize Agamben’s interpretation of sovereignty in light of the “archaeological method” he uses in his Homo Sacer project. In contrast to Agamben’s exposition, which treats biopolitics as the original and ontological paradigm of Western politics, the essay discusses how, historically, sovereign power has been conceived as a “double body”—transcendent and immanent, sacred and sacrificial, absolute and perpetual—from whose tension conceptual and political metamorphoses of sovereignty arise. The first attribute of sovereignty—absoluteness, on which Agamben has often focused—should (...) be seen as an ordering and essentially modern function of its second “body”: the perpetuity of power. The article illustrates, then, how the retrospective projections through which the Italian philosopher constructs his ontological reading of sovereignty depend on some logical and epistemological lacunae that characterize his “archaeological method,” which is based, essentially, on an arbitrary use of historical analogies. (shrink)

This paper addresses the notion of political theology by way of accounting for modern manifestations of transnational Islamism with a particular emphasis on the establishment of theocratic rule through the contemporary political spheres of praxis in Twelver-Shiism (Shīʿa Ithnā-ʿAsharīyya). This is undertaken by way of giving some principal highlights concerning the conceptual aspects that can be accounted for from the standpoint of political theology in the broad context of Islamist fundamentalist movements. A more detailed focus is also presented in this (...) context on the eschatology that underpins the theocracy of contemporary Twelver-Shiism in terms of its religious outlooks on history, and the conduct of its communal affairs along with the organization of its associated politicized institutions. (shrink)

This paper considers whether the category of sovereign “decision,” as it is used in Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, has analogies with the paradigm of “choice,” as it is theorized in neoliberalism. Both decision and choice belong to that mode of judgement that “cuts” the field of alternatives into two, into two “extreme” alternatives. This mode of judgment not only presupposes the subject of the decision, but also sets up the terms of the choice, clearly indicating the optimal option. For Schmitt, (...) a political decision arises in a “case of necessity”: in the “serious case” of war. And yet, it is precisely the neoliberal depoliticization of war that reduces it to a rule, and every choice fundamentally to a stance for or against. To escape from the neoliberal reduction of political decision in the form of a choice, I examine another mode of decision, absent from Schmitt’s texts: “disclosedness.”. (shrink)

The article addresses the question of whether Derrida in his political theology can be considered an “unfaithful” reader of Schmitt. While Derrida does not quote Schmitt’s Political Theology, some of his assertions are reminiscent of Schmitt’s disciplinary use of political theology. Indeed, Schmitt’s account of the relationship between exception, decision, and sovereignty was abundantly discussed in Derrida’s last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign. Derrida attempts in this seminar to deconstruct the sovereignty of the nation-state and its onto-theologico-political foundation. The (...) question I raise in this article is whether, in previous years, Derrida himself had not implicitly made a different political theology that, considering the negative theological path, develops an alternative idea of power. The hypothesis explored is that this alternative paradigm is derived from one of the names of the impossible: the gift. (shrink)

Scholars in multispecies ethnography, the ontological turn, new materialisms, science and technology studies (STS), assemblage urbanism and other movements within the posthumanities broadly considered often treat cosmopolitics, initially proposed by Isabelle Stengers and subsequently taken up by Bruno Latour, as a single coherent concept. However, Stengers’s cosmopolitics differs considerably from Latour’s. The difference is most clearly visible in their contrasting positions on the concept of universality. Even though their divergence on universality could be considered a minor philosophical dispute among intellectual (...) allies, it should not be underestimated. It determines what sort of political practice each of these philosophers envisions with cosmopolitics. Their visions of political practice are substantially different. This article will examine Latour’s and Stengers’s diverging positions on universality, delineate the two types of cosmopolitics, and, finally, analyze what sort of political practice each of these cosmopolitics implies. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt’s political theology—which refers to the translation of theological concepts into secular political and legal categories, namely sovereignty and the state of exception—is defined against a background of “metaphysical” constellations where, according to Schmitt, bourgeois individualism and the nihilism of technology have come to dominate the modern age. My argument is that our contemporary age is dominated by a new “metaphysical” constellation—the Anthropocene. This condition—to which the ecological crisis is inextricably related—demands an entirely different kind of political theology to (...) Schmitt’s sovereign-centric and anthropocentric version. As an alternative, I propose a political theology of planetary entanglement and care based on approaches from eco-political theology (Moltmann, Latour, Keller) and animal studies (Deleuze, Agamben, and Ciamatti). (shrink)

We argue in this paper that unveiling of concepts is a viable means of promoting the growth of African languages in contemporary African studies. We show that African languages face serious threat of extinction due to neglect from their users and undue influence of colonial languages. We contend that the ratio of indigenous languages used as official languages compared to colonial languages is poor and despicable. The growth of African languages has been stunted due to the multilingual nature of African (...) continent. It has rendered the languages underdeveloped, thereby limiting their propagation and audience. We demonstrate how conversational thinking aids the growth of African languages and philosophy through conceptual articulation. Conversational thinking whose arumaristic approach aims at creating new thoughts and unveiling new concepts offers African philosophers a robust tool for expanding the vocabularies of African indigenous languages by creating concepts from underexplored African traditional wisdom and clichés. (shrink)

This essay returns to Jacob Taubes’s messianism in order to short-circuit a contemporary political and conceptual impasse between left- and right-wing Schmittianisms. It first seeks to expose the limits of both Schmitt’s originary political theology and post-war Italian Marxist rehabilitations of Schmitt, which, it is argued, remain caught in the same political-ontological matrix. To answer the question of what (if anything) might come after political theology, the essay turns to Jacob Taubes’s “counter-political theology” in order to find an alternative genealogy (...) for modern democracy, not in Schmitt’s Christian conservative hierarchy, but in the antinomian and heretical elements within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In conclusion, the essay argues that Taubes transforms the political theological impasse and makes possible a new reading of the contemporary political false choice we face between democracy and authoritarianism, liberal pluralism and populism. (shrink)