Fragmented thinking, broken world -- Toward recovery of wholeness: the radical humanities and traditional wisdom -- Toward recovery of wholeness: another look at science -- Insight-imagination -- Living thinking, living world: toward an education of insight-imagination.

In this paper we look at the relations between knowledge and thinking through the lens of ignorance. In relation to knowledge, ignorance becomes its “constitutive outside,” and as such it may be politically organised in order to delimit the borders of the right to knowledge [the “ignorance economy,” see Roberts and Armitage : 335–354, 2008)]. In this light, the notion of a knowledge-based society should be understood as a society structured along the lines of knowledge distribution: the rights of (...) possession of and access to knowledge demand that ignorance is planned and executed as the condition of their establishment. In relation to thinking, ignorance appears differently. According to Rancière, the teacher's ignorance conditions the student's appearance as Anthropos, a being who can be asked: what do you think about it? Hence, we are dealing with the ambiguity of ignorance which seems to be both the criterion of social exclusion, and the condition of emancipation. Following this thread with reference to Heidegger's discourse on thinking, we would like to explore the possibility of comprehending knowledge and education beyond the relations of ownership and demands of productivity. Following Rancière, we may say that thinking—as displacing the notion of ignorance—stands in the position of “politics” and questions the ways knowledge societies are structured as “police orders” along the lines of knowledge possession and exclusion. (shrink)

In this magisterial survey of the Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel returns to the primary texts to offer a major new reinterpretation of the nature and development of the important currents in philosophical thinking, arguing that supposed national enlightenments are of less significance than the rift between conservative and radical thought.

In this paper I offer a new interpretation of Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question which re-states its key ideas but removes unnecessary debates that are not relevant to current political and legal problems. Because OJQ is a demonstration of critique it does not offer positive proscriptions or suggestions for change. Its utility, I argue, lies in the way it can help us think about the limits of resolving deeply entrenched power-relations without a thoroughgoing engaging of how those powers are (...) created and enacted in civil society. With this in mind I read OJQ alongside the recent campaign to legislate for marriage equality in Australia and the movement to recognise environmental human rights. While both movements might ameliorate instances of discrimination and harm, I argue that they cannot resolve those powers that limit certain kinds of access or render people and things subordinate to other interests. (shrink)

Abstract:Liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment understood that surplus moral constraints, imposed by invalid moral norms, are a serious limitation on liberty. They also recognized that overcoming surplus moral constraints — what we call proper de-moralization — is an important dimension of moral progress. Contemporary philosophical theorists of liberty have largely neglected the threat that surplus moral constraints pose to liberty and the importance of proper de-moralization for human emancipation. This essay examines the phenomena of surplus moral constraints and proper (...) de-moralization, utilizing insights from biological and cultural evolutionary thinking. (shrink)

This book argues that Hip Hop’s early history in the South Bronx charts a course remarkably similar to the conceptual history of artistic creation presented in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. It contends that the resonances between Hegel’s account of the trajectory of art in general, and the historical shifts in the particular culture of Hip Hop, are both numerous and substantial enough to make us re-think not only the nature and import of Hegel’s philosophy of art, but the origin, essence (...) and lesson of Hip Hop. As a result, the book articulates and defends a unique reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics, as well as providing a philosophical explanation of the Hip Hop community’s transition from total social abandonment to some limited form of social inclusion, via the specific mediation of an artistic culture grounded in novel forms of sensible expression. Thus, the fundamental thesis of this book is that Hegel and Hip Hop are mutually illuminating, and when considered in tandem each helps to clarify and reinforce the validity and power of the other. (shrink)

This paper is a response to INQUIRY editor Frank Fair’s invitation to me to write a reflective piece that sheds light on my involvement in the field of Critical Thinking Studies . My response is in two parts. The two parts together might be called “Reflections on the nature of critical thinking and on its status across the college/university curriculum.” The parts together have been written with a long term and large-scale end in view. If successful the two (...) parts will shed light on why the critical thinking movement has not yet contributed significantly to human emancipation or to more just and fair-minded communities . It will also present some strategies for making such a contribution. (shrink)

SPANISH: En el presente trabajo nos hemos propuesto la factura de una interpretación en torno a la idea de la filosofía, entendida como liberación del pensamiento, a partir justamente de la obra de José Gaos. Consideramos que esta posibilidad es viable en virtud de que en la obra de nuestro autor pueden localizarse por lo menos dos alusiones a este sentido de emancipación de la misma filosofía. La primera de éstas tiene que ver con el derrumbe del espíritu de sistema (...) como la forma y camino exclusivo del pensamiento filosófico. Asimismo, la segunda alusión de esta emancipación se ve satisfecha cuando mediante la hipostación de la conciencia histórica, el autor dibuja el horizonte para la liberación de la existencia individual y el pensamiento, so pretexto de una filosofía inmanentista. ENGLISH: The purpose of this paper is drawing an interpretation around the idea of philosophy understood as thought’s liberation, just based on the work of José Gaos. We think that this is possible because in our author’s work at least two mentions to this sense of emancipation of the philosophy can be found. The first one has to do with the collapse of the spirit of system as the only form and unique way of philosophical thinking. Likewise, the second mention to this emancipation is fulfilled when, through hypostatization of historical consciousness, the author sketches the horizon for the liberation of the individual existence and thinking, under the pretext of an immanentist philosophy. (shrink)

This essay surveys Henry David Thoreau’s extensive commentary on slavery and freedom in the 1840s and 50s, tracking the ways he toggles between the literal (i.e., the institutions of racial chattel and capital’s value-form resisted by civil disobedience and reconfigured by civil war) and the figurative (i.e., the existential and spiritual slavery evaded by the individual and collective attainment of ‘real values’), and how his natural philosophy at once illuminates and obscures the true stakes of his abolitionism and that of (...) his fellow Transcendentalists. It notes that there is much to be said for and much yet to be done on the burgeoning intersectional critique of Transcendentalism, one that highlights both its strengths and limitations—or, at times, its outright problems—regarding race, nation, class, gender, sexuality et al. So too for the literature celebrating Thoreau ‘as much for his politics as his aesthetics,’ avowing how his ‘reform writings and lectures alone have earned him the reputation of being a social activist who didn’t rest on high-minded principles.’ The focus here is adjacent and complementary: to consider the prospects of a Black Transcendentalism that is coeval with and prior to Thoreau's articulation of the principles of ‘Elevation’ and ‘Emancipation.’ Beyond that, it speculates about something like the blackness of Thoreau’s own evolving relation to the political-intellectual movement of Transcendentalism itself. (shrink)

Often overlooked is the fact that postmodern theory brought to the fore a crisis in the humanities. The implied universalism of the current “iconic turn” in postmodern thinking is a blow to the traditional sciences grouped around national literatures and cultures. In the 1980's, postmodern practitioners in the United States began to assault the discursive practices of the mainstream under the banner of cultural studies. The current crisis in the humanities surfaced in the emancipation of the various studies (...) from their traditional fields in the humanities. The German Studies practiced today in the United States for instance, has no counterpart in Germany's traditional departments of Deutsche Philologie. Whereas the icon in the United States has become an object of investigation for the various studies, it has not yet displaced the littera in Germany's literary sciences. However in the 1990's, the historical sciences in Germany responded to the challenge of the various studies by directing their attention not to cultural studies, but to cultural history, with its well-defined set of methodologies. But what kind of cultural history is it? Is it built on 19th century German foundations, or is it grafted to current North American notions of post-industrial culture? In this paper I show that the supposed opposition between cultural studies and cultural history is artificial. Through a close reading of Hayden White's extremist questioning of historical practice in Metahistory (1973), I demonstrate that there is no opposition between the icon and the littera in this recent radical critique of mainstream humanistic science. The vehement German reaction to his North American assault on European Kultur is based on a misunderstanding of White's premises. Rather than being constructed on a hodgepodge of postmodern approaches, I show that White's postmodern history is in fact conventionally grounded in 19th century Nietzschean thinking. 1 Hans-Peter Söder, Junior Year in Munich Program (Wayne State University). (shrink)

Ask any Civil War historian about the cost of the Civil War and they will recite a host of well-known assessments, from military casualties and government expenditures to various measures of direct and indirect costs. But those numbers are not likely to include an appraisal of the humanitarian crisis and suffering caused by the wartime destruction of slavery. Peace-time emancipation in other regions and in other societies certainly presented dangers and difficulties for the formerly enslaved, but wartime emancipation (...) chained the new opportunities and possibilities for freedom to war’s violence, civil chaos, destruction and deprivation. The resulting health crisis, including illness, injury, and trauma, had immediate and lasting consequences for black civilians and soldiers. Although historians are more accustomed to thinking of enslaved people as the beneficiaries of this war, rather than its victims, we cannot assess the cost of this war until we answer two important questions: first, what price did enslaved people have to pay because their freedom was achieved through warfare rather than a peacetime process; and secondly, in this war in which so many Americans paid such a high cost, to what extent did racism inflate the cost paid by people of African descent? In answering these questions, we reconsider this specific war, but we must also tie the U.S. Civil War to a larger scholarship on how wars impact civilians, create refugee populations, and accelerate harsh treatment of people regarded as racial, religious, or ethnic outsiders. We are reminded that war is not an equal-opportunity killer. (shrink)

In this review, I discuss Balibar’s ‘proposition of equaliberty’ with regard to its theoretical status and contribution, its relationship to other contemporary theories of radical democracy as well as to the problematic of bourgeois versus communist emancipation in Marx. The primary interest of this essay is to develop a detailed understanding of Balibar’s analytical schema, which draws a complex picture of our contemporary ‘human condition’, and to place it within his own theoretical development since his contribution toReading Capitalin the (...) 60s. On that basis, it will be possible to assess his contribution to thinking politics with and after Marx and place it more concretely within the generalised radical-democratic turn in post-Marxist theory. (shrink)

All politics (i.e., a collective organised thought-practice), if it is to be emancipatory, must exhibit a dialectic of expressive and excessive thought. The absence of the dialectic implies the absence of a politics. The same point can be made by stressing that, in emancipatory politics, thought and practice are indistinguishable. The dialectic here concerns an emancipatory politics latent in excluded popular African traditions. Such latency means that a potentiality for dialectical thought often already exists within African traditions. Yet it can (...) only be activated in struggle. I show through three examples separated by long periods of time, that Africans—or more accurately some Africans—have successfully activated existing potentials into emancipatory politics by thinking against and beyond the oppressive particularities of interests, place and identity embedded in dominant cultures (such as those typical of civil society today) and have thus emphasised the centrality of universal humanity in the politics of emancipation. (shrink)

In a case study of an undergraduate course in art education, modes of mastery learning and propositions of intellectual emancipation were explored as interventions in curriculum design. By adopting Rancière’s framework of a ‘will to will’ relationship between instructor and students, the core assignment—a visual journal—became a site of student positionality through mastery methods, rather than information gathering. The visual journal provided a record of the event of knowledge and served as a forum to verify that acts of student (...) thinking were done with attention, congruent with Rancière’s perspective that learning generates greater consciousness, feeling and action. Requiring both qualitative and quantitative criteria within the parameters of the visual journal functioned as a means to experiment with the potential convergences of mastery and emancipatory approaches. The visual journal then operated as a third space where ongoing, consistent engagement demonstrated the capacity of students to encounter more equitable relations with the instructor and with the content in ways that have implications for knowledge creation in teaching and learning. (shrink)

This essay surveys the appropriations and transformations of the modern concept of citizenship by the actors of the Haitian Revolution, analyzed through the intertwining of race, plantation labor, and the postcolonial state. The concept of citizenship is interpreted as an instrument of emancipative struggles as well as of practices of government. The reconstruction is focused around four moments: the liberal critique by free people of color of the racial boundaries of French citizenship; the strategic uses of citizenship by the insurgent (...) slaves to secure their freedom; the inclusion of former slaves into citizenship to preserve the plantation system within the republican order; and postcolonial Haitian citizenship. By analyzing the constitutional shifts and the political thinking of different figures, such as Julien Raimond, Georges Biassou, Jean-François, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the essay shows the conceptual originality of Haitian political thought and its relevance for the history of modern political concepts. (shrink)

The study explains the perception of the nation in the political thinking of Svetozár Hurban Vajanský, which is founded on primordialist starting points and has a holistic character. In this context, the relationship between the nationally conscious elite and the people is analysed in more detail. The ambivalence of Vajanský’s political thinking is evident in the fact that, in many ways, he formally promotes Ľudovít Štúr’s original idea of unity, but, within Slovak political discourse, he promotes the idea (...) of programme uniformity. Subsequently, this becomes a source of cultural and political isolationism. This fact is complemented in parallel by reflecting the primary acculturation importance of the national elite in developing the national consciousness of the population. Vajanský also incorporated the idea of Slavic mutuality into the national emancipation concept of developing Slovak national identity. Its content is in line with Štúr’s ethnic romanticism. The historicist concept of the development of Slavs under Russian protection also appears in his thinking. Vajanský’s Russophilism was, thus, loosely tied to the ideas of Russian Slavophiles and the idealising perspective of the Slavs’ civilisational mission, who were to form a new, more spiritual and culturally advanced, civilisation circle compared with the morally declining nations of the West. (shrink)

Like Frege's distinction of sense and force in semantics, the central distinction of pragmatics is that between perlocutions and illocutions. All speech acts theorists offer a version of this distinction, including Habermas in his theory of communicative action. However, whether or not there is such a distinction at all remains an essentially disputed issue. In this paper I consider the importance of this distinction for analyzing both ideology and rhetoric, but in particular for analyzing one species of rhetorical speech for (...) the purpose of changing beliefs, that engaged in by the social critic. To make these substantive points, I must first consider important recent criticisms of Habermas's distinction, especially those of Erling Skjei and Allen Wood. While I agree with the core of both criticisms, I still think the distinction can be made along the lines that Strawson proposed. I argue that there is not a completely disjunctive, mutually exclusive set of properties defining each type of speech act. There are, and must be, overlapping, nontrivial features common to both. These common features are in fact crucial to the analysis of the sort of speech engaged in by social critics and emancipators. To show this, I argue for the existence of an intermediate class that I call "communicative perlocutions." This class, in turn, overcomes the traditional, Platonic enmity to rhetoric which ought not be imported unquestioned into the philosophy of language or the justification of rational social criticism. (shrink)

The project of critical management theory is based on a view of a theorist who intervenes in the activity of managers and employees aiming at their emancipation. It involves an image of subjectivity governed by structural determinants that render the subject incapable of freeing himself without a scholar's involvement. In the discussion that follows, I seek to explain how this image has been developed and how it paved the way to ethical–methodological necessity, which obliges the theorist to intervene in (...) the realities of the objects of their study. I contrast this with a view of subjectivity provided by Søren Kierkegaard. I explain how he theorizes its relationship with the ethical and the limitations in generating knowledge claims about the morality of the other. (shrink)

From its origins, the philosophy of liberation has had both a critical and a creative aspect. The first seeks to critically examine domination, dependency, and the permanent effects of colonization. The second aims to create and re-create the liberation of peoples, developing and reconstituting ways of existing, imagining, thinking, and philosophizing that surpass colonial ways of existing, imagining, thinking, and philosophizing. Thus, for the philosophy of liberation, the liberation of peoples is distinguished from the notions of emancipation (...) and freedom that hide reality under processes of ideologization. An example of the latter is modernity’s notion of emancipation. In this paper, I propose to approach the critical and creative function of the philosophy of liberation from a childist lens in which not only the voices of children are considered, but also the adultist and modern vision of emancipation is overcome. This will be particularly important to continue the legacy of the philosophy of liberation, and its mission to criticize and create from the political and philosophical participation of the victims in the processes of ideologization. From this legacy the children are participants, who, by engaging in pedagogical practices of liberation, act as un pueblo, a collective political actor without age. of the latter is modernity’s notion of emancipation. In this paper, I propose to approach the critical and creative function of the philosophy of liberation from a childist lens in which not only the voices of children are considered, but also the adultist and modern vision of emancipation is overcome. This will be particularly important to continue the legacy of the philosophy of liberation, and its mission to criticize and create from the political and philosophical participation of the victims of the processes of ideologization. Of this legacy, the children are participants, who, by engaging in pedagogical practices of liberation, act as un pueblo, a collective political actor without age. (shrink)

Inspired by the views by the American educationalist Henry Giroux on the role teachers and educationalists should be playing in the time of postmodernism and by Abraham Maslow's concept of biological idioscyncrasy, the author discusses how the concepts of the dialogues created by the representatives of Norwegian Dialogue Pedagogy, Hans Skjervheim, Jon Hellesnes, and Lars Løvlie, can be applied in the area of higher education. The aim of pedagogy in the time of postmodernism is to provide learners with knowledge and (...) skills that will allow them to earn a living, maintain democracy and fight social, racial or gender injustice. This can be achieved only if educationalists provide for educating thinking and emancipated individuals and accordingly consider the issues of identities, ethics, differences, language, transformative intellectuals, and biological idiosyncrasy. The main pedagogical function of the dialogue concepts is to encourage Bildung by enlightening learners to seen and unseen power and authority relations. The dialogue can have a form of a discussion in class, at meetings, in talk between a teacher and a learner, and parents and a child, where everyone should be allowed to speak his or her mind. The dialogue in instructional situations is also understood as a dialogue in a broad sense, including texts in the text-books. Depending on the type of problem that is discussed, a dialogue can take many different forms, all of which can and should be used in supervising graduate and post-graduate students, as the use of the concepts will promote emancipation and self-determination. When it comes to the issues of ethics, transformative intellectuals and biological idiosyncrasy, the use of the concepts should be an approach of choice. However, the author argues that the dialogue concepts do not meet the requirement for the language that Giroux suggests that pedagogy in the time of postmodernism should use, and are based on assumptions that partly conflict with the postmodern understanding of the truth. The author proposes that a new type of a dialogue, the dialogue that allows existence of several narratives at the same time, should be developed. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke sit together in the canon of political thought but are rarely treated in common historical accounts. This book narrates their intertwined careers during the Restoration period, when the two men found themselves in close proximity and entangled in many of the same political conflicts. Bringing new source material to bear, In the Shadow of Leviathan establishes the influence of Hobbesian thought over Locke, particularly in relation to the preeminent question of religious toleration. Excavating Hobbes's now (...) forgotten case for a prudent, politique toleration gifted by sovereign power, Jeffrey R. Collins argues that modern, liberal thinking about toleration was transformed by Locke's gradual emancipation from this Hobbesian mode of thought. This book investigates those landmark events - the civil war, Restoration, the popish plot, the Revolution of 1688 - which eventually forced Locke to confront the limits of politique toleration, and to devise an account of religious freedom as an inalienable right. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 130-131 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on 'The Birth of Tragedy.' James I. Porter. Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 449. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $19.95. James I. Porter. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on 'The Birth of (...) Tragedy.' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 224. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $16.95. Every year an astonishing number of books are published on Nietzsche. Here are two more from a single author. James I. Porter's thesis--in both of them--is that "The Birth of Tragedy does not mark a break in Nietzsche's thinking, whether away from his philological understanding of antiquity or toward... emancipation from metaphysics" (Philology of the Future, 2). Perhaps to lend drama to his case, he assumes an unwarranted degree of unanimity among those who see a break between the philological writings of the young Nietzsche and the philosophical ones written later. But Porter's elaboration of his own thesis is quite persuasive nonetheless. He shows that essential tenets of Nietzsche's later philosophy can be found in his early philological writings, and that Nietzsche's interpretations of the ancient Greeks were as ambiguous, "mythological," and self-critical as his later books. In this way, Porter extensively reinterprets Nietzsche's early writing.The Invention of Dionysus is the shorter and more closely argued of the two books. Here Porter attempts to show that in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche both began his exposé of the fictional nature of all metaphysics and recognized that metaphysics would forever haunt the human mind. Porter asserts--more forcefully than earlier authors--that Nietzsche was decisively influenced by Friedrich Albert Lange in this; indeed he ascribes much of what is thought most characteristic of Nietzsche's philosophy to Lange! But what Porter takes away from Nietzsche and awards to Lange in originality, he returns to Nietzsche in subtlety.Porter contends that throughout his career Nietzsche defended an "embattled position" (18), attempting to preserve both appearance and metaphysics as necessary dimensions of human consciousness. This is perhaps Porter's contribution: to assert that Nietzsche never thought he had abolished metaphysics in favor of appearance, as so many writers have claimed. According to Porter, Nietzsche understood in The Birth of Tragedy and throughout his career that metaphysics could never be abolished; that the act of trying to abolish metaphysics is itself inevitably metaphysical, and that any philosophy of appearances including his own must also be metaphysical. Porter characterizes Nietzsche's rhetorical stance as "mythological."Porter quotes a passage from The Birth of Tragedy to show that Nietzsche was both eager to reveal the mythological status of Greek metaphysics, and fully aware that his own efforts to reveal it were mythological as well: "It is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later generation as a unique fact with historical claims"(45). So if readers take Nietzsche's arguments at face value, that is understandable; but it does not make them any less mythological. According to Porter, this stance gives the lie to claims that The Birth of Tragedy was "still" metaphysical. And it should establish that from the first Nietzsche had a more subtle view of his project than previously acknowledged.Porter makes this enduring mythological stance the central issue for interpreting Nietzsche's oeuvre. Interesting as this is, it makes Nietzsche out to be impossibly consistent and prescient about his later writing. And it leaves him an oddly disembodied thinker--quite contrary to his own understanding of the philosophical career. The obvious contortions [End Page 130] in Nietzsche's early writing--rooted in his attempt to be true to his own best insights while maintaining a strenuous discipleship to Richard Wagner--are entirely glossed over. While this might be... (shrink)

Any given society will be comprised of multiple forms of life. That is to say, people will adhere to diverse patterns of organizing and justifying how they make use of their time. One might think that for all of us, time is divided by seconds, minutes, and hours and thus we all live in the same form of life. We are all given 24 hours in a day, and it is up to us all, individually, to decide how best to (...) maximize the value we can squeeze out of the time that we are given. In this view, abstract and homogenous time is the "natural" state of the world. Some people may want to spend their time by focusing on their careers, families, or volunteering, for example. What matters is that we are all free to choose what we will do with the finite seconds, minutes, and hours that we have. The assumed naturalness of "clock time", as Lewis Mumford describes it, allows us to develop a sense of injustice as the unjustified control or evaluation of another's time. To impose one form of life onto another is to violate their dignity as a self-determining agent who has their own reasons for shaping the pattern of their life in light of their own values and goals. So, preliminarily, we might distinguish between forms of life by examining how a bundle of social practices normatively shape the use of time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity by Steven B. SmithSteven NadlerSteven B. Smith. Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii + 270. Cloth, $30.00.Steven B. Smith’s aim in this elegant, well-written book is to restore Spinoza to his important and rightful place in the history of political and religious thought. At the heart of the book is (...) a discussion of the central themes of the Theological-Political Treatise, with a good deal of attention given both to Spinoza’s other writings and to other political thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, as well as to the immediate historical situation in the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. But this is more than just a commentary on a work that for a long time has largely (and unjustly) been ignored by philosophers. Smith has a full appreciation of the radical nature of the Treatise, and uses it to bring out what is peculiarly fascinating about Spinoza’s religious and political ideas.According to Smith, it was Spinoza who first made the “Jewish Question”—the problem of how the Jews, after centuries of separation and ghettoization, can be granted admission to, and even assimilation into, the modern polity—central to reflection on the “theological-political problem,” that is, the problem of the place and role of religion in the state. Smith sees Spinoza’s solution to both problems in the process of secularization. Jews must, in order to become an integrated part of modern society, shed their ancient, traditional identity; Judaism has to be transformed from “an authoritative body of revealed law into what today would be called a modern secular identity” (xiii). The allegiance of Jews must be transferred from the Law to laws, from a life of halakhic (or Jewish legal) ritual to a life focussed on nonsectarian, civil and social duties. Particularism—and this would be true of all historical religious identities that will, ideally, be absorbed into the modern state—must be exchanged for universalism.Smith shows how Spinoza’s thinking on the Jewish question is intimately bound up with his particular political philosophy. He argues, in fact, that the Treatise represents the “first and most profound expression of the Jewish-liberal symbiosis that has survived to the present.” For the kind of polity that will make Jewish emancipation possible and foster the emergence of a modern, secular, nonparticularistic Jewish identity is the democratic, liberal state. But if liberalism, through its offer of toleration and participation, nourishes modern Judaism, it is no less true, Smith claims, that it has taken its own sustenance from Jewish traditions. Rabbinic Judaism, with its emphasis on law, has long served as a model for classical liberal thought.Spinoza himself is, in Smith’s eyes (although Smith is certainly not the first to suggest this) the “prototype” of the modern emancipated Jew, liberated from (and even critical of) religious tradition and authority. He is, in other words, the first “secular Jew.” Amsterdam, meanwhile, with its linked traditions of toleration and commerce, is the prototype of the modern, liberal society, one that both offers the conditions for Jewish emancipation and is ever vigilant against interference from ambitious religious authorities. Smith does not really take note of the fact that Dutch society in the Golden Age, with its rigid system of regent families controlling the all-important municipal governments, was far from democratic. And it seems to me misleading to speak of Spinoza as a “secular Jew.” Spinoza seems to have liberated himself—with a [End Page 321] little help from his congregation’s rabbis—not only from an orthodox conformity to Jewish traditions, but from any sense of Jewish identity whatsoever. Perhaps it might be more accurate to call Spinoza the “first secular citizen.”One of the more contentious claims of Smith’s book is his insistence that Spinoza’s Treatise contains an esoteric dimension, an intentionally hidden doctrine that only the most careful readers could ascertain. Part of the defense of this Straussian model is the identification of “deliberate contradictions” in the text. I, for one, do not see any esoteric doctrines in the Treatise; nor... (shrink)

In Heidegger’s Black Notebooks some ideas about political embodiment can be found, which have come under suspicion to justify the Third Reich’s race law. In the following article, the analysis and discussion of Heidegger’s political embodiment will firstly be traced back to the traditional understanding of the human as a “rational animal”, and will then look at how the “racial being” is subsequently developed and eventually transformed into political absolute subjectivism. Moreover, Heidegger’s in-depth explanation and critique on Nietzsche’s metaphysics, which (...) he views as having transformed human experiences to a metaphysical representation and thus misunderstanding human nature, will also be clarified. Through Heidegger’s critic on biologism, a profound disclosure which potentially imply an attack of the racism at his time can be shown. Furthermore, Heidegger’s thinking of Being as a kind of emancipation of European political embodiment will also be analyzed. Lastly, although Heidegger and Confucianism have different ideas of lived-body, both schools basically show the same fundamental understanding of human nature. In regard to this, their understanding of political embodiment, their similarities and divergences, will be elucidated. (shrink)

Can the Marxist tradition still provide new resources for thinking the specificity of historical time? This volume proposes to transform our understanding of Marxism by reconnecting with the 'subterranean currents' of plural temporalities that have traversed its development. From Rousseau and Sieyès to Marx, from Bloch to Althusser, from Gramsci to Pasolini and Postcolonialism, the chapters in this volume seek both to valorise neglected resources from Marxism's contradictory history, and also to read against the grain its orthodox and heterodox (...) currents. Privileging not the single time of historical development, but the plural temporalities that intertwine in and constitute any given historical conjuncture, and arguing against merely subjectivist theories of temporal multiplicity, this volume studies the articulation of the real, plural temporalities of mass political action. Comprehending their dynamics is a necessary precondition for a renewed politics of emancipation.Contributors include: Luca Basso, Stefano Bracaletti, Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Fabio Frosini, Augusto Illuminati, Nicola Marcucci, Vittorio Morfino, Luca Pinzolo, Peter D. Thomas and Massimiliano Tomba. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response 4: The Summer of Our DiscontentCaroline EdwardsI write this response on the eve of another wave of industrial action in the UK in November 2022—the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) “UCU Rising” campaign, the latest in a series of regular disputes over pay and working conditions, the gender and ethnicities pay gap, and casualisation that has been ongoing since 2018. In 2022’s “summer of discontent,” we’ve seen our (...) rail, maritime and transport workers, airport staff, bus drivers, telecommunications workers, postal workers, nurses, refuse workers, and higher and further education staff engage in ongoing industrial disputes with intractable bosses. Even criminal barristers continue with an indefinite, uninterrupted strike after years of government cuts and chronic underinvestment. Everywhere you look, there is a palpable sense of a country on its knees. It’s nearly 100 years since the last General Strike of 1926 and in the UK it’s looking increasingly likely that we will have another General Strike on our hands soon. In “Two Cheers for Blueprints, or, Negative Reasons for Positive Utopianism” Antonis Balasopoulos contextualizes this within the longer economic durée of the shift from Fordist production to so-called flexible accumulation after 1972, writing in this issue that “the turn of capital to the faster and higher [End Page 554] profits involved in financialization rather than infrastructural and industrial investment, form much of the objective, structural ground for what can only be described as the rapid rise of a dystopian structure of feeling in western societies since the early 1970s.” Antonis’s brilliant summary reminds us of the monumental scale of the challenges facing utopian thought and praxis in our current moment. Make no mistake—the “crisis ordinariness” of everyday life under late capitalism that Lauren Berlant identified in Cruel Optimism (2011) has intensified in the years following the Global Financial Crisis (2007–8), the wave of Occupy protests in 2011, and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–). “For some time now,” as Antonis writes, the utopian goals of “happiness, fulfilment, [and] emancipation... have been out of the question altogether.”It’s hard not to agree with this assessment, given the current chaos of life in the UK. Adam Stock’s roundtable contribution “Funding Utopia: Utopian Studies and the Discourse of Academic Excellence” focuses on the academy’s complicity with the neoliberal financialization of what were previously protected as public goods (education, our health service, transport infrastructure, and so on) over the past three decades. As Adam notes, the rhetoric of “excellence” that has come to dominate all areas of university life—teaching, research, public engagement, and the quantifiable “impact” of university research beyond the academy—is really just another way of using competition to mask the market logic of scarcity. Swingeing cuts to publicly funded research have led to a scarcity of resources in scholarly knowledge production, which is legitimated through the discourse of “excellence” and “prestige.” Only a handful of elite research leaders are granted awards and the value of all research becomes judged by its proximity to this distribution (concentration) of wealth within a small number of institutions. Defending education as a public good has long given way to the desperate, existential struggle for survival at UK universities. Numerous institutions are on the brink of bankruptcy, which was the goal all along for the ideologically driven Office for Students (OfS). Market exit, as they euphemistically term it, proves market efficiency.At my own institution, Birkbeck, University of London, the challenge to utopian thinking is all too violently clear. Birkbeck has a special place in the UK higher education system—a university founded nearly 200 years ago in the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand (it was called the London Mechanics’ Institution back then) to offer education to working-class Londoners that [End Page 555] fitted around their busy working lives. As my colleague Joanna Bourke writes in Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (2022), life expectancy in the poorest parts of London was just twenty-nine years; cholera, typhoid, and typhus were major killers; and illiteracy was widespread. At Birkbeck, we are the only university to teach evening classes and offer the requisite support... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whose Voice Matters? The Role of Ethics Consultation in Supporting the 16-Year-Old Healthcare Decision-Maker of a Critically Ill NeonateMichelle ProngEditor’s Note. The details of the patient case presented below have been modified to protect the family’s privacy. Despite these modifications, the author has made every effort to preserve the story’s clinical, social, and ethical nuances.The patient was born at 31 weeks with Trisomy 13 and lived her entire life (...) in the NICU. She was born to a 16-year-old mother (who I will call M.H.) as the result of an unintended pregnancy. This child was just about a month old when I became part of her care team. The patient was born with a severe congenital heart defect that our pediatric cardiac surgery team—as well as surgical teams at multiple other academic children’s hospitals—determined to be inoperable. Because of her severe heart defect, she required significant respiratory support throughout her life and continuous IV medications to keep her organs perfused.When I came on service, M.H. visited irregularly and depended on her mother (the patient’s grandmother, who I will call D.R.) for transportation. Social work had arranged for M.H. to have daily transportation to the hospital after school and work; however, M.H. was denied the opportunity to spend the night with her infant. It was against hospital policy for minors to stay overnight as visitors, and additional visitation guidelines related to COVID precautions were also in place at the time. As her biological mother, M.H. was designated as the patient’s healthcare decision-maker. The inability for M.H. to stay overnight on the basis of her age despite being the patient’s parent and healthcare decision-maker generated significant moral distress for several members of the care team. The social dynamic between M.H. and D.R. was such that D.R. was far more participatory in rounds and goals of care conversations, and M.H. was almost always reserved and withdrawn. On multiple occasions, different team members attempted to have conversations directly with M.H. She either was not engaged in the conversation, would answer with short phrases, or, when D.R. was present, would defer to D.R. to speak for her.Throughout the patient’s life, D.R. seemed to be the driving force behind most treatment and goals of care decisions. In multiple conversations I had with the family, both one-on-one with M.H. and jointly with M.H. and D.R., it was made clear that they wanted “everything done” and were hopeful for “a miracle.” D.R. emphasized that she didn’t want anyone to “give up” on the patient and wanted to exhaust all possible options for a cure. Overall, our team had become increasingly concerned that the medical decision makers for this patient did not comprehend the very poor prognosis of her congenital cardiac anomaly, either with or without surgery. As the medical team, we would be subjecting this child to harm that would be unlikely to change her prognosis. [End Page 19]Our NICU team, as well as various other teams, discussed the case repeatedly without a resolution that felt satisfactory. A complicating factor for this particularly socially and ethically challenging case was that the team turned over relatively frequently during the patient’s long-term stay, making it difficult for each successive team to understand what had already been done for this patient and her family. We decided to seek help from the Clinical Ethics Consulting (CEC) service. My expectation for the CEC service was that the consultant would help our team think differently about both the clinical and social elements of the situation and help us come to a resolution since we could not figure out a good solution on our own.Our consult question for the CEC was fourfold: 1) Did the patient’s mother meet criteria for an emancipated minor (to get around the visitation policy), 2) Is M.H. the appropriate healthcare decision maker given her lack of engagement in goals of care conversations and perceived understanding of the severity of her... (shrink)

The publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971 coincided with a complex set of changes in the political situation of the west, the role of intellectuals, the state of the social sciences and humanities, and in the development of the welfare state itself. These changes provided the conditions for the creation of a body of thought quite different from the one the sixties had produced, and a significant change from the discipline-dominated thinking of the period after (...) the Second World War. The immediately relevant events included the effective demise of Parsons’ systems theory, the waning of the passions of 1968, and an enrollment crisis in universities’ humanities and social science departments as economic fear drove students into professional programs, creating a sharp downturn in demand for faculty. The optimism that had characterized disciplines in these fields during the 1960s quickly faded. The idea that sociology was soon to become a “science,” the source of the positivism dispute of the sixties, faded along with it. Logical Positivism as a coherent movement collapsed under the weight of the problems of the theory-observation distinction. At the same time Political Theory, which had been taught largely as an historical study – a history of error, as Leo Strauss described the standard textbook of the time, George Sabine’s A History of Political Theory, or as a continuation of the mood of Kulturpessimismus, as in the writings of Sabine’s critic, Leo Strauss – revived, partly in response to the stimulus from the success of Rawls, partly in response to new ideas about participatory democracy rooted in the experience of the sixties. Social theory also changed: the role that Parsons had played as a focus of theoretical discussion was replaced; the work of Ju˝rgen Habermas, particularly his Theory of Communicative Action, reassessed and re-appropriated the classical theoretical tradition in social theory to replace Parsons’ synthetic account, and this work coincided with a systematic reconsideration of the classic social theorists, especially Weber. An additional source of new thinking came from the “dependent” periphery, as thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which emancipated Socialist theory from received dogmas about class struggle and recognized the centrality of other antagonisms and the need for open democracy. (shrink)

This paper examines the striking absence of women philosophers from German historiography of philosophy during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While the general topic has been considered before, additional documents and considerations are presented that will help us better understand the omission of women philosophers in the German context. Firstly, material is presented showing that women philosophers were widely discussed in Germany prior to 1800. These discussions stand sharply in contrast with the silence about women in subsequent general histories (...) of philosophy. Secondly, it is shown that the absence of women philosophers in German historiography of philosophy during the nineteenth century is not entirely new but has to be seen as a continuation of tendencies characteristic for the historiography of philosophy already during the eighteenth century. Thirdly, it is argued that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was a new stimulus for thinking about women in the history of philosophy, namely women’s emancipation and, more specifically, the right to a university education. Seen in this light, the renewed and intensified effort to diminish women philosophers can be understood as a symptomatic attempt to keep women out of academia in general, and out of philosophy in particular. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

With the message that everything in a sense is alive, thus allowing us to join forces with new politico-ethical communities stretching across human and nonhuman realms, the new materialisms have captivated the minds of many academics, artists, and intellectuals by stressing that it is time to return to a premodern mindset and discard modernity and its concepts of secularization, autonomy, and finitude. The Embarrassment of Being Human not only demonstrates how these magical materialisms are beset by grave theoretical and practical (...) inconsistencies and self-contradictions. It also demonstrates how their demand for humans to step down and allow for an emancipation of things qualifies the new materialisms as a metaphysics of neoliberalism that reproduces and fortifies the self-contradictions rampant in the current neoliberal hegemony. While helping us to gain a comprehensive understanding of the tenets of the eerie ills of our epoch, the critique of the new materialisms can furthermore inspire us to appreciate how the exact inversion of the new materialist complex amounts to a revitalization of the modern project. A revitalization that is critical to think our epoch differently. (shrink)

There is considerable critical literature on information technologies, algorithms, big data and artificial intelligence. It emphasizes how such tools have enabled the development of new forms of power and control over individuals. However, it is also necessary to think about the new alternatives of collective emancipation that they allow. Thus, for example, the concepts of e-democracy, cyberdemocracy, wikidemocracy, digital communism and cybercommunism have been proposed. The aim of this article is, therefore, to discuss the above concepts in order to (...) foresee possible emancipatory uses of these concepts. (shrink)

Tolstoy had a lifelong interest in education and philosophy. However, he was suspicious of using philosophy as a foundation for educational practice or applying philosophy to the educational problems of his day, most importantly, the development of an education system in Russia around the time of the emancipation of the serfs. Tolstoy’s rejection of the philosophy of education arose from his concerns about what would be identified in contemporary terminology as ‘epistemic injustice’ or ‘epistemicide’. How could European philosophy inform (...) a curriculum and pedagogy for the Russian peasantry when the peasants’ own forms of knowledge were more valuable to their ways of life? Tolstoy sought to answer this question by engaging with children in peasant schools. This experience informed the development of his own worldview, articulated in the latter years of his life—a vision of uniting the insights of indigenous peoples from various times and places to inform what he considered to be the pursuit of authentic knowledge. This article considers Tolstoy’s apparent rejection of the philosophy of education, exploring how this seemingly bombastic position led to the evolution of an innovative meta-philosophy that offers some contribution to thinking about contemporary educational problems. (shrink)

Social responsibility initiatives within a corporate environment continue to be met with deep scepticism. My concern is with exploring this scepticism, which I argue is due to there being more to the underlying objectives of SR than has previously been investigated. I begin by outlining and substantiating my project as a social ontological enquiry, one in which I unpack key concepts to reveal the nature of SR. These ontological findings then underpin my argument that SR is problematically grounded in liberalist (...) thinking, and CSR is in fact just one manifestation of SR. I advance the thesis that SR has emancipatory ends, of meeting human needs and flourishing, and that it is best explicated using feminist care ethics. The argument is then focussed on both shoring up and advancing the emancipatory project of SR. The scepticism of interest is revealed to be the incongruity between care and business; that businesses are deemed as being incompatible with SR, at least in their present capacity. Any claims to the contrary by the business community are branded inauthentic and the aforementioned scepticism ensues. The paper concludes with a brief discussion concerning implications for CSR initiatives and future changes and developments are considered. (shrink)

The key problems of Ivan Vyghovsky’s rule (the main problem among them – is Gadiatskiy pact in 1658) in Mykhailo Grushevskiy’s works are considered in the article. It’s emphasized the scientist’s ambiguity in treatment of polish Ukrainian compromise in 1658. On the one hand the researcher highly evaluates Ivan Vyghovskiy and his like minded persons for their realization the basic idea of social and political development of Ukrainian nation, the necessity of being independent and trying to legalize it in the (...) appropriate paragraphs of “Big kingdom of Russia”.On the other hand emphasizes the factors which caused the union “lack of vitality” and hopeless of I. Vyghovskiy’s polish foreign policy choice.In the scientist’s conception the compromise of 1658 is the result of acombination of a set of factors, opposing tendencies, which had a deep foundation; the current geopolitical realities. For the «Zaporizhzhya Army» it was seen as a salvation from the expansionist, incorporationist policy of Muscovy, the mechanism of affirmation of the Orthodox « Grand Duchy of Rus» as an equal component of the reorganized Commonwealth.Mykhailo Hrushevsky, while paying tribute to the Treaty of Hadiach asa political and legal act, which testified to the level of state thinking of the then Ukrainian elite, indicates, at the same time, his doom.First of all, the historian observes that the treatise was in a hurry, under pressure of circumstances, it may have a temporary character. The most dangerous thing in the treaty is the «... competition of the Cossack and Nobility element...». The researcher believes that the basis of the Hadiach Union was nobility, because it was called «... to restore the economic and political affluence... of this social stratum...».Even the acquisition of the nobility`s rights by the Cossack sergeant «... meant only the strengthening of the nobility stratum against the Cossack masses». Therefore, for the Cossack public (for the common people - moreover, because it was not mentioned in the treaty) the union was unacceptable. In addition, the weak power of the Commonwealth government was incapable of fulfilling allied obligations to the «Zaporizhzhya Army» and the magnate-nobility community has demonstrated its inability to engage in relations with it on a parity basis.In contrast to the Hadiach apologists in 1658, who admired the preferencesfor the Ukrainian in the field of education and culture. Mykhailo Hrushevskyconvincingly states: «For us, from a retrospective perspective, it is quite clear that the Hadiach Union did not look to be successful...».In fact, only a formal Ukrainian-Polish compromise on the 6th(16th ) September 1658, could have been the basis of a federal union of Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania: the really progressive provisions of the treaty, which were proposed by Y. Nemirich - I. Vyhovsky, were already limited in time by signing it near Hadiach ; then - substantially eliminated in the process of ratification by the Warsaw Sejm; The illogical view of the coexistence of the Cossack emancipated Ukraine with the state-regulated Crown (with privileged nobility and followed by a feudal dependent slap) is seen in the «renewed» Commonwealth. That is why the Hadiach Treaty eventually became one of the decisive factors in defeat of Vyhovsky as a hetman.And at the same time it remains a Memorandum of such a desired mutual forgiveness and consent of the elites of the two peoples for a better life of each of them. (shrink)

_Radical Atheism_ presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious "turn" in Derrida's thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs Derrida's work from beginning to end. Proceeding from Derrida's insight into the constitution of time, Hägglund demonstrates how Derrida rethinks the condition of identity, ethics, religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the logic of radical atheism. Hägglund challenges other major interpreters of (...) Derrida's work and offers a compelling account of Derrida's thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other. Furthermore, Hägglund does not only explicate Derrida's position but also develops his arguments, fortifies his logic, and pursues its implications. The result is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the perennial philosophical themes of time and desire as well as pressing contemporary issues of sovereignty and democracy. (shrink)

With the notion of the form-of-life as a counter-figure to the notion of bare life, Agamben seems to invite us to place at the center of a critical theory of capitalism a reflection on bios. To envisage a form of emancipation that unfolds against bare life suggests, at first glance, another relation to the living body. Such a gesture seems to be inspired by the desire to think a natural life that would also be a politically qualified life. The (...) idea with which Agamben closes the Homo Sacer series, namely that of a use of bodies, also gestures in this direction. In this paper I show how the categories of bare life and of the use of bodies fail to live up to their promise, before demonstrating in what sense the idea of a subtraction of law as a political project which subsumes all others ends up weakening the critical potential of the idea of a form-of-life that is to be realised against the force of production of bare lives. (shrink)

In a work that draws on an impressive array of scholarly resources and an extensive study of Spinoza’s teaching, Steven Smith’s recent book examines the status of Spinoza as “the first emancipated Jew” in the broader context of “the Jewish Question”. The author’s interest is to relate Spinoza’s treatment of the theologico-political problem to his advocacy of liberalism and commercial republicanism in the Tractatus theologico-politicus. The authority of the doctrine conveyed in that work is reflected in the championing of religious (...) toleration, political liberalism, and popular education that was embraced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, as Smith acknowledges, “it was the Enlightenment, above all, that made the case for Jewish emancipation and Bildung that is the theme of this book”. In particular, the author seeks to establish the “profound and determinative influence” of Spinoza’s Tractatus on the thinking of Mendelssohn, Lessing, Kant, and Hegel. (shrink)

For the work of listening can be understood as a collaboration with the musical work itself, and in this sense for Adorno listening, as will be discussed below, is an activity of co-composing or reconstituting the music. Certainly Adorno’s dialectical philosophical approach is at great variance with the 'empirical musicology'2 through which contemporary music studies explores these topics, but its contemporary relevance is all the greater in that it puts Adorno’s contributions in the larger context of critical social theory and (...) its commitment to sustaining the human capacity for a vision of emancipation. It is not my intention here to enter into a detailed consideration of the relationship between Adorno’s perspective and the work of contemporary musicologists and music theorists. Rather, my aim is to elaborate Adorno’s conception of the work of listening in some detail, in the context of his thinking about what he calls ›the new music‹ and its place in the history of Western art music. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Subjectification', the cornerstone concept of Biesta's philosophy of education, refers to how autonomy should be realized in educational settings and to the fact that explanation is irrelevant to emancipation. In this article a critical realist reading is provided of how Biesta links narrative learning to emancipation and of the shortcomings that spring from this connection. The central thesis of my argument is that truth and values should take center stage in an educational philosophy of emancipation and that (...) these two concepts are left out of Biesta's conception of emancipation. It is suggested that Biesta's philosophy of emancipation has no criteria for distinguishing what is true from what is false and valuable from invaluable. This happens because it cannot adequately address (i) how one passes from ‘is' to ‘ought’ (ii) the ways in which rational thinking could be emancipatory and (iii) the grounds on which emancipatory living is better than non emancipatory living. (shrink)

While critical utopias sought to rescue the political import of utopia, recently scholars have questioned their overemphasis on literary forms and a disempowering pluralism. Challenging the applicability of these claims to one of the instigators of critical utopias, I provide a political reading of Miguel Abensour's understanding of utopia and connect this to councils as a concrete institutional infrastructure. This begins with a re-reading of his influential conception of the ‘education of desire’ in relation to the simulacrum as a utopian (...) ‘model’ that, in rejecting identity-thinking, refuses to reduce utopias to a blueprint. I then turn to conceptualising the utopia of councils through the simulacrum on two fronts: first, as a form subject to innovation in the context of the dialectic of emancipation; second, as a content that aims to both ‘democratise utopia’ by embracing plurality and ‘utopianize democracy’ by expanding the realm of democratic space. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to introduce a correction into the notion of self-directed adult learning by way of conjoining it with philosophically elaborated notions of autonomy, self-reflectiveness, and maturity. The basic premise of this intervention is that in andragogical theorizing, learners’ self-directedness ought not to be thought as obvious and thus beyond question. Since adult selves are not transparent but socially, culturally, and discoursively constructed, adult educators are encouraged to think of themselves as facilitators of adult learners’ self-awareness (...) and self-directedness in their learning processes. Adult learners need to be assisted in developing critical skills that can be used to eliminate distortions in their perception of social reality, in understanding their own personalities, their needs and decisions concerning continuing education. The problematization of the concept of human autonomy amid external influences, is first discussed in Immanuel Kant’s idea of maturity as an ability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. I then turn to Habermas’s philosophy of communicative action and three knowledge-constitutive interests where the human interest in emancipation comes to the fore. Its significance for critical adult learning is further emphasized in line with Stephen Brookfield’s and Jack Mezirow’s association of self-directed learning with empowerment, understood as freeing consciousness from its dependence on hypostatized powers. Drawing on Foucault’s work, I argue that attaining the state of autonomy requires practice in “the care for oneself” which amounts to the lifelong endeavor to create and govern oneself and to learn how not to be governed. The agenda for adult education for citizenship opted for in this paper attributes essential significance to learnable skills of critical reasoning, deliberation, and self-reflectiveness which all operate within three proposed dimensions of adult education: experiential learning, literacy, and vocationalism. (shrink)

"1910 stands out as a model of interdisciplinary and comparative study.... It brilliantly illustrates the complexity of a crucial period in European culture... focusing in particular on the intellectual intricacies of Mitteleuropa on the eve of World War I and of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire."—Lucia Re "Compellingly original.... In Harrison's work, Michelstaedter and his confreres (Campana, Slataper, Kokoschke, Rilke, Kandinsky, Lukàcs, Trakl, et al.) turn out to be considerably more fascinating and more emblematic of their time than anyone (...) has been able to perceive before."—Gregory Lucente, University of Michigan. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 22-25. The Author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento do Ensino Superior), Brazil. From the multifarious subdivisions of semiotics, be they naturalistic or culturalistic, the realm of semiotics of value is a ?eld that is getting more and more attention these days. Our entire political and economic systems are based upon structures of symbolic representation that many times seem not only to embody monetary value but also to determine it. The connection between monetary (...) and linguistic exchanges is self-evident: the former requires the latter and develops in direct relation to it. Creative experimentation and design of digital systems of value exchange are blossoming on the web. Dr. Gilson Schwartz, an economist turned media theorist and professor at the University of São Paulo, adopted the concept of Iconomics, originally created by Michael Kaplan, an author concerned with the linguistics of economic value. Empowering local communities and unlocking new levels of value creation and representation via digital technologies are the main goals of Dr. Schwartz’s projects, aiming at the re-designing of our relationship to the economic value of imagination and the social control of property. Schwartz is Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, a former Chief Economist at BankBoston, Brazil and Advisor to the President of the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). FURTHER READING: Kaplan, Michael. “Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation.” Public Culture . 15.3 (2003): 477-493. Renata Lemos-Morais: You have recently produced and directed a short documentary about Creative Currencies in Latin America. Could you tell us a bit about its process and its findings? Gilson Schwartz: The “Creative Currencies” project is a work-in-progress platform which unfolds as an action research agenda connected both to the production of audiovisual content and the development of social currency software. The initiative dates back to 2003 when I led an experimental project supported by the Presidency of Brazil. At that time, we issued paper currency in a small, touristic village in the Northeast Region which stimulated local cultural projects. But it was only in 2009 that the Central Bank of Brazil acknowledged “social currencies” as a legitimate economic agenda, calling for more debate at the I Financial Inclusion Forum. This year, the monetary authorities organized a second forum that also opened the room to discussions on mobile payment systems and new perspectives on poverty alleviation via State subsidies. The Ministry of Culture funded the “Creative Currencies” project in 2009-2010 and our next stage in this discovery process is to be supported by the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). In short, there is genuine interest among public officials in different areas and public funding for social currencies is on the rise in Brazil. However, after all these years we are still at a very early stage of research and practice. Some of the most successful initiatives (such as Banco Palmas) actually evolved out of local monetary creation to become correspondent banking operations for commercial banks and other financial groups. After eight years of price stability and social inclusion, Brazil stands out as a major opportunity for social experimentation, even the Grameen Bank is now entering the Brazilian market and many NGOs are geared towards different forms of entrepreneurialism in the base of the pyramid, riding solidarity economic models, microfinance and microcredit for local development. It is yet to be seen, however, whether these developments are just one more stage of “bankarization”, that is to say, an extension of regular banking services or actually a new form of social and symbolic self-determination at the local level. So far, the Central Bank of Brazil is open to new forms of credit and local finance as long as they are strictly territorial and very close to barter among the poor. In other words, whether the process of monetary creation could be made to fit an open source paradigm is yet to be seen. Community banking and social currencies might as well end up as just another channel for access to and use of banking services. The “Creative Currencies” project aims at promoting the discussion of more fundamental issues, such as the limits of central banking, the prospects for local financial development and the possibility of creating and managing financial icons as cultural assets. The purpose of this project is to produce short documentaries that will bear testimony to this evolving regulatory framework while inducing more discussion about the fundamental iconomic issues concealed in the process of money and wealth creation. RLM: What new potential is there in applying digital technologies to currency creation? GS: Globalization is a result of the virtualization of money, that is, the overcoming of illusions such as the “gold standard”. Money is an icon created by institutions, not on supposedly natural or material foundations but out of political and financial interests. The “dollar standard” is an outstanding evidence of this phenomenon and Kaplan´s paper, the first to use the expression “iconomics”, insists on the rhetoric and semiotic effects associated to a supposedly scientific model of money creation and management. This is a fundamental change that was perceived and discussed much before the digitalization of the world by unorthodox economists such as John Maynard Keynes since the early 20th century. The digitalization of global financial flows accelerated this immateriality and the creation of the Euro was yet another evidence of the political foundations of currencies. The banking establishment, however, is keen on the idea that scientific formulae hold the key to sound money creation. Keynesianism has been repeatedly associated to “inflationism” while the supposedly sound monetary policies of the Orthodoxy serve well the political and financial interests of a technocratic elite. Corporate media also serve this fictitious depiction of the monetary process despite the cyclical bust of monetary rules and financial regulations. The internet, however, has created numerous opportunities for the disintermediation in industries such as film, music and commodities. There is no reason to doubt that the financial industry can also be transformed by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructures. Money is media as well. Credit is but confidence. Once people realize that the distributed computing power of networks can also be the platform to weave new monetary and credit operations, there is room for grassroots emancipation out of the established owners of monetary institutions. So far, however, there has been a privatization of monetary management and there is not a clear path or model for the emergent (P2P) property democratization that is inherent to the internet. Digital assets, however, clearly have an inherent potential to escape central control and proprietary regulatory frameworks. RLM: How are social networks transforming the ways in which we exchange value? Do you believe that online influence and reputation might be translated into a new kind of currency? GS: The foundation for social currencies as envisaged by solidarity economics is the territory. Authorities are willing to concede local monetary creation as long as it is restricted to poor neighborhoods, as a proxy to barter. In this relevant but limited context, reputation, personal knowledge and informal ties form the matrix of local or “proximity” finance which are expected to keep credit and leverage to a sustainable level. Anything beyond that should and would lead to an integration of local finance into the established banking system. However, inasmuch as the internet promotes virtual territories and reputation is now subject to all sorts of digital manipulation and stardom becomes an everyday cultural process among teenagers and elders alike, the territorial “foundation” is substituted for more complex patterns of solidarity, cooperation and exchange that reach beyond the physical territory and even the “human.” Digital assets embody knowledge, technology, cultural and educational values that are exchanged at a global scale beyond the control of democratic States (Chinese-like intervention is the exception, not the rule). Hacktivism is unstoppable and so is monetary hacktivism. Especially in the Third World, mobile communications fast became conveyors of money transfers and other appropriation strategies. Banking and telecom sectors already battle for the control of these emerging markets and, as a matter of fact, have so far contributed to the containment of these processes. Governments serve these moguls and have usually adopted a wait-and-see attitude. If open source hardware and grassroots social movements combine to challenge these proprietary battles, then social networks may evolve into new forms of social capital and thus form the ground on which to design and implement social currencies. The global financial crisis, as well as the dollar demise, are an event of such a proportion that social networks may open the path for emancipator subjects to seize the opportunity. RLM: What are some of the social experiments that you think are revolutionizing the way in which value is exchanged? GS: There is a broad evolution of economic systems towards the valuation of intangible assets such as knowledge, reputation and sustainability. There are many examples of local as well as global events that call the traditional systems of exchange into question, from carbon credits to educational bonuses, digital barter frameworks and locally based solidarity and fair trade networks. These emerging examples, no matter how different in nature or scale, represent a challenge to the traditional value creation schemes and theories which are based on use and exchange value, supply and demand. This is not to say that utility and labour or scarcity are to be totally dismissed, but there is now an emerging perception that value is also a function of behavioral codes, symbolic patterns and the energy of institutional frameworks. The plasticity of digital platforms is relevant insofar as intellectual property becomes the central source of value creation. But when you discuss the property rights of public goods such as the environment or basic social rights (of minorities or localities), then a new paradigm seems to emerge. RLM: Are gaming and online storytelling digital practices that might have an impact on the way new currencies are created and developed? GS: “Play money” has been one of the early and most intriguing phenomena associated to the diffusion of virtual worlds. These virtual currencies have also been prone to “boom and bust” dynamics, speculation and pure theft (Second Life scams were common and led to “intervention” by the owners of the game). Storytelling is a major source of value, that is, the value of attention and the markets for audience. There are plenty of private monies created and managed by corporate entertainment groups, telecom operators (via mobile virtual network operators) and marketing frameworks. The casino economy, as already depicted by Keynes and other unorthodox economists, is always storytelling about future states of the world, confidence building and leverage of animal spirits. The novelty of current events is not the fictitious nature of any form of capital, but the potential for digital democratization of controls over the imaginary nature of value creation. But this is just a potential, a possibility, a figment that more often than not is appropriated by centralized and opaque private powers. The game industry is a testbed for new connections between storytelling and money creation. RLM: Monetary value was originally connected to the scarcity of precious metals, such as gold. Our entire monetary system seems therefore to function according to a logic of scarcity. Do you believe it is possible to reverse this logic into a logic of abundance? GS: The gold standard was a fiction itself, the “scarcity” is always produced by institutions that regulate confidence and access to credit. The key issue is not to fabricate abundance, but to question the institutions which produce scarcity out of any standard, gold or whatever. Central banks are at the service of private banks in the creation and management of scarcity. RLM: The promise that nanotechnology holds for our future is one of radical abundance (or so say transhumanists). The possibility of creating any kind of material substance through nanoengineering seems each day more feasible. What would this possibility entail in terms of systems of value exchange? GS: Nanotechnology, environmental concerns and grassroots appropriation of distributed knowledge are the frontiers of a new horizon of energy creation and management. Social groups in charge of managing scarcity for the sake of wealth and power concentration must be held accountable for the destruction of our future. Once this key political conundrum is accounted for, new systems of value exchange and even a non-mercantile society will come into existence. Revolutionary theorists such as Marx envisaged transformation via the extreme clash of contradictions between capital and labour. This approach has never led to a change in the systemic logic of scarcity for the sake of social control. We are once again facing the threshold of large scale societal change, but the outcome of the current crisis should come from our imagination, not from yet another paradox of abundance and scarcity. As long as we remain attached to the materiality of value, the illusion of freedom will but reinforce the massive manipulation of necessity. RLM: What do you think is the role of crowdfunding in this context? GS: Crowdsourcing as well as crowdfunding are examples of the peer to peer opportunities that come along with distributed computer power. However, the power structure behind wealth and scarcity creation may or may not be changed by crowd management. But it should not be taken at face value, so to speak. The stock market of course is an early form of crowdfunding without calling into question the proprietary framework of the companies offering their investment projects to the market. Any market is a form of crowdsourcing, that is to say, of distributed forms of supply and demand matchmaking. The wealth of networks, however, depends on the contractual ecosystem, the institutional framework, the channeling of social imagination, not on the purely quantitative distribution of bids and offers. I see economics as supply, demand and code. Once you have access to the code, once openness becomes part of the game, then there is a chance of crowd behavior becoming collective intelligence and sustainable imagination. RLM: Is the development of digital currencies headed towards a pluralistic ecology in which many micro currency systems co-exist, or is it penetrating the mainstream monetary system? If it is affecting the mainstream financial system, what would be its effect in the long-term? GS: The same issue is at stake both at local and global levels. The global system is, as a matter of fact, an unstable ecosystem of “micro currencies” whereas the dollar has so far exerted an overwhelming influence. Local currencies and private monies coexist with national currencies only to the extent that the Central Bank admits, for instance, that grassroots monetary emissions remain territorial and strictly connected to poverty. However, the question of how new developments in digital technologies and nanotechnologies might alter not only our current monetary systems but also our understanding of value in itself, is still an open question. (shrink)

Rejection is an essential part of the scholarly publishing process, acting as a filter to distinguish between robust and less credible scientific works. While rejection helps reduce entropy and increase the likelihood of disseminating useful knowledge, the process is not devoid of subjectivity. Providing more informative rejection letters and encouraging humility among editors and reviewers are essential to enhance the efficiency of knowledge production as they help ensure that valuable scientific contributions are not overlooked.

Thinking Radical Democracy is an introduction to nine key political thinkers who contributed to the emergence of radical democratic thought in post-war French political theory: Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Miguel Abensour. The essays in this collection connect these writers through their shared contribution to the idea that division and difference in politics can be perceived as productive, creative, and fundamentally democratic. The questions they raise regarding equality (...) and emancipation in a democratic society will be of interest to those studying social and political thought or democratic activist movements like the Occupy movements and Idle No More. --Provided by publisher. (shrink)

George Smith argues that modern humanity suffers from a late-stage, pre-fatal addiction to scientific-technological thinking. Like most pre-fatal addictions, this one will most likely result in one of three ways: misery, extinction, or human transformation. The question remains, wherein lies the third way? According to Smith, mankind's chronic and as yet undiagnosed sickness originates in early Western metaphysics and has long been thoroughly globalized. It explains unstoppable extractionism and its relentlessly increasing by-product, carbon dioxide. It also explains today's ever-increasing (...) rate of species extinction, and it explains the increasingly likely collapse of the biosphere. Citing climate change tolerance and denial as symptomatic of pre-fatal addiction, Smith turns his analysis to Heidegger's "question concerning technology" and shows that even Heidegger had become "hooked" on scientific-technological thinking. Surrendering to his disease, Heidegger "steps back" into "meditative thought." This in turn opens Heidegger to an East-West mode of scientific-poetic consciousness, the thinking of artist-philosophers such as Laozi, Hölderlin, and Rachel Carson. For Heidegger, this way of thinking lays the path to mankind's transformative emancipation from an otherwise inescapable catastrophe. The book will be of interest to scholars of the arts and culture, histories of consciousness, and climate studies. (shrink)

Radical Orthodoxy (RO) accepts the post-structuralist critiques of autonomous human agency while liberation theologians embrace Enlightenment ideals ofsubjectivity and the secular political space where agency is exercised. RO theologians think that by accepting these premises, liberation theology fails to resist violence and nihilism that are the inevitable fruit of secular autonomy. I want to formulate a liberationist response to these objections. Liberationists do not see human and divine agency as fundamentally opposed, but rather the deepest strivings of the human spirit (...) for justice are on the same trajectory as the Kingdom of God. Human and divine agency are tied together through the notion of a utopia whereby these strivings for justice are expressed in a finite and historical way. This emancipative use of reason in the construction of a utopia provides a means for divine and human agency to interact without destroying the human autonomy of the secular sphere. (shrink)

For Herbert Marcuse, the terrifying specter of communism at the end of the 1960s served the interests of counterrevolution in discrediting revolutionary aims and legitimizing all necessary repressive counter-measures against emancipatory programs. Slavoj Žižek adds a second function, namely, that during the Cold War the specter of communism also served to humanize Western liberal democracy, necessitating strong social welfare measures and thus forming capitalism with a human face. But with the fall of the Eastern Bloc the threat to this system (...) has become more spectral than ever, because any mild deviations from a neoliberal vision of free market capitalism now bring with them charges of totalitarianism. In the face of such formidable obstacles, Marcuse and Žižek argue that the nature and means of emancipation necessarily remain indeterminate. Hence, the emancipatory possibilities that they do sketch out remain overwhelmingly negative and spectral. This raises the question of whether a political theory ought to be sufficiently detailed as to be directly actionable. I conclude that their work largely satisfies the set of justifiable criteria for a successful political theory articulated or implied by Kant and Horkheimer, and therefore, remains highly relevant to our thinking of the political. (shrink)