Drawing on Heidegger's corpus, the work of historians and biblical specialists, and contemporary philosophers like Levinas and Derrida, Zarader brings to light the evolution of an _impensé_—or unthought thought—that bespeaks a complex debt at the core of Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology. Zarader argues forcefully that in his interpretation of Western thought and culture, Heidegger manages to recognize only two main lines of inheritance: the "Greek" line of philosophical thinking, and the Christian tradition of "faith." From this perspective, Heidegger systematically avoids any (...) explicit or meaningful recognition of the contribution made by the Hebraic biblical and exegetical traditions to Western thought and culture. Zarader argues that this avoidance is significant, not simply because it involves an inexcusable historical oversight, but more importantly because Heidegger's own philosophical project draws on and develops themes that appear first, and fundamentally, within the very Hebraic traditions that he avoids, betraying an "unthought debt" to Hebraic tradition. (shrink)

N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In Unthought, she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking—how we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. Marshalling fresh insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive biology, and literature, Hayles expands our understanding of cognition and demonstrates that it involves more than consciousness alone. Cognition, as Hayles defines it, is applicable not (...) only to nonconscious processes in humans but to all forms of life, including unicellular organisms and plants. Startlingly, she also shows that cognition operates in the sophisticated information-processing abilities of technical systems: when humans and cognitive technical systems interact, they form “cognitive assemblages”—as found in urban traffic control, drones, and the trading algorithms of finance capital, for instance—and these assemblages are transforming life on earth. The result is what Hayles calls a “planetary cognitive ecology,” which includes both human and technical actors and which poses urgent questions to humanists and social scientists alike. At a time when scientific and technological advances are bringing far-reaching aspects of cognition into the public eye, Unthought reflects deeply on our contemporary situation and moves us toward a more sustainable and flourishing environment for all beings. (shrink)

In response to Mader's and Deutscher's questions, the author defends her approach to reading Irigaray and Butler, which entails extending the ideas of these thinkers into areas of thought with which they do not engage directly themselves. This involves relating Irigaray's ideas to the tradition of the philosophy of nature and interpreting Butler as offering, in spite of her focus on the genealogy of claims about sex, also a theory of sex itself, a theory of sex as an effect entirely (...) of gender. This approach to reading differs from Irigaray's own reading method of expanding and transforming philosophies in light of their constitutive exclusions. An example of this, explored here, is Irigaray's expansion and transformation of Merleau-Ponty's late ontology of flesh in light of its constitutive exclusion, the "maternal sojourn." This article also asks whether rhythmic sexual difference, which the author has attempted to differentiate from biological sex difference, ultimately remains tied to biological sex difference. This commentary suggests that it does but that reference to biological sex difference need not be politically problematic. Finally, the author asks whether the metaphysics of potentials and tendencies that she attributes to Irigaray impedes social change by inevitably reinstalling the actual as the horizon of possibility. Irigaray's strategy of reading texts and cultures for their constitutive exclusions offers a solution to this problem. (shrink)

Drawing on Heidegger’s corpus, the work of historians and biblical specialists, and contemporary philosophers like Levinas and Derrida, Zarader brings to light the evolution of an impense;—or unthought thought—that bespeaks a complex debt at the core of Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology. Zarader argues forcefully that in his interpretation of Western thought and culture, Heidegger manages to recognize only two main lines of inheritance: the “Greek” line of philosophical thinking, and the Christian tradition of “faith.” From this perspective, Heidegger systematically avoids any (...) explicit or meaningful recognition of the contribution made by the Hebraic biblical and exegetical traditions to Western thought and culture. Zarader argues that this avoidance is significant, not simply because it involves an inexcusable historical oversight, but more importantly because Heidegger’s own philosophical project draws on and develops themes that appear first, and fundamentally, within the very Hebraic traditions that he avoids, betraying an “unthought debt” to Hebraic tradition. (shrink)

The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy shares with the thinkers of the ‘theological turn in phenomenology’ the programmatic desire to place the ‘theological’, in the broad sense of rethinking the religious traditions in our secular time, back on the agenda of critical thought. Like those advocating a theological turn in phenomenology, Nancy’s deconstructive approach to philosophical analysis aims to develop a new sensibility for the other, for transcendence, conceptualized as the non-apparent in the realm of appearing phenomena. This (...) is why Nancy launches a project looking for the ‘unthought’ and unexpected within the Christian traditions, called deconstruction of Christianity. However, the deconstructive approach to the non-apparent differs fundamentally from that of the thinkers of the turn (1) in its being non-apologetic and non-restorative with regard to religion, because it starts from a problematization of the—typically modern, that is romantic—desire to defend and protect what would be ‘lost’ and possibly to restore this, (2) in its focus on the complex difference-at-work (différance) between religion and secularism, a difference that can be termed entanglement and complicity between these two, (3) in its hypothesis that this entanglement is essentially one between (the meaning and experience of, the rituality around) presence and absence in modern culture, (4) in its conviction that the philosophy and history of culture must join, support, complete and maybe even turn around phenomenology when dealing with the difficult task of determining what exactly would be ‘left’ of the ‘theological’ in our time. In this article, both positions are compared and confronted further, leading to an account of Nancy’s re-readings of the Christian legacy (its theology, doctrine, art, rituals etc.), and ending in a more detailed, exemplary inquiry into the tension between distance and proximity, characteristic of the Christian God. (shrink)

Mohammed Arkoun is one of the Muslim world's foremost thinkers. His efforts to liberate Islamic history from dogmatic constructs have led him to a radical review of traditional history. Drawing on a combination of pertinent disciplines ? history, sociology, psychology and anthropology ? his approach subjects every system of belief and non-belief, every tradition of exegesis, theology and jurisprudence to a critique aimed at liberating reason from the grip of dogmatic postulates. By treating Islam as a religion as well as (...) a time-honoured tradition of thought, Arkoun's work aims at overcoming the limitations of descriptive, narrative and chronological modes in history by recommending that the entire development of Islamic thought ? from Quranic to present-day fundamentalist discourses ? be subjected to a critical analysis guided by these categories. The expected outcome of such a strategy is an emancipated political reason working hand in hand with a truly creative imagination for a radical re-construction of mind and society in the contemporary Muslim world. (shrink)

The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy shares with the thinkers of the ‘theological turn in phenomenology’ the programmatic desire to place the ‘theological’, in the broad sense of rethinking the religious traditions in our secular time, back on the agenda of critical thought. Like those advocating a theological turn in phenomenology, Nancy’s deconstructive approach to philosophical analysis aims to develop a new sensibility for the other, for transcendence, conceptualized as the non-apparent in the realm of appearing phenomena. This (...) is why Nancy launches a project looking for the ‘unthought’ and unexpected within the Christian traditions, called deconstruction of Christianity. However, the deconstructive approach to the non-apparent differs fundamentally from that of the thinkers of the turn (1) in its being non-apologetic and non-restorative with regard to religion, because it starts from a problematization of the—typically modern, that is romantic—desire to defend and protect what would be ‘lost’ and possibly to restore this, (2) in its focus on the complex difference-at-work (différance) between religion and secularism, a difference that can be termed entanglement and complicity between these two, (3) in its hypothesis that this entanglement is essentially one between (the meaning and experience of, the rituality around) presence and absence in modern culture, (4) in its conviction that the philosophy and history of culture must join, support, complete and maybe even turn around phenomenology when dealing with the difficult task of determining what exactly would be ‘left’ of the ‘theological’ in our time. In this article, both positions are compared and confronted further, leading to an account of Nancy’s re-readings of the Christian legacy (its theology, doctrine, art, rituals etc.), and ending in a more detailed, exemplary inquiry into the tension between distance and proximity, characteristic of the Christian God. (shrink)

Mind, in pursuing its natural thrust toward knowing reality and knowing itself knowing reality, has too often carried along with itself an empty structure which interferes with its objective. This structure is the ordinary formal-logical categories possible, impossible, contingent, necessary.

The unthought means that which it is possible to think, but which has not yet been thought, and also what we are prevented from thinking. Philosophical systems can prevent us from thinking otherwise and restrictions on women’s access to knowledge can prevent women from thinking apart from what is prescribed as suitable. The unthought is both what hasn’t been thought and what could be thought if there wasn’t a barrier of some sort. Michèle Le Dœuff directs us towards the unthought (...) as a measure of the extent to which writers on women’s education have allowed the possibility of women’s access to the unthought, not just to received knowledge to date. This unthought is also connected to creativity and originality, and philosophy that is not systematic. In this paper, I elucidate the nature of Michèle Le Dœuff’s project and the structure of her argument in The Sex of Knowing (2003) through the idea of the unthought. (shrink)

This article takes up Hortense Spillers’ conception of ‘ungendered’ flesh and Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the ‘position of the unthought’ occupied by the figure of the Black-qua-Slave in order to explore their resonance for considering the interrelations between anti-black racial antagonism, ontological positioning and hegemonic renderings of gender formation and sexual taxonomies. Examining the performance and reception of the recent Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch starring Taye Diggs as a case study, it asks what role race, and (...) specifically (anti-)blackness, plays in the representation, recognition and intelligibility of proper, (non-)normative gendered corporealities within the dominant imaginary and collective unconscious. (shrink)

This article is drawn from my translation of Zarader's *Heidegger et la dette impensée*. I explore both Zarader and J. Derrida's (De l'esprit) investigations into Heidegger's recourse to "Old Testament" and Judaic logics (including apophatics) in his quest for the origins of religiosity.

Basing his view on the object relations theories of the "British School" of psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas examines the human subject's memories of its earliest experiences (during infancy and childhood) of the object, whether it be mother, father, or self. He explains in well-written and non-technical language how the object can affect the child, or "cast in shadow," without the child being able to process this relation through mental representations of language.

In giving landscape the name 'mountain-water', the Chinese language provides a powerful alternative to Western biases. Francois Jullien invites the reader to explore reason's unthought choices, and to take a fresh look at our more basic involvement in the world.

Infra-white : an impossible beginning -- Color and white, the blank canvas : the reverse reconstruction of non-dimension -- Remnant and white, color and blankness, qi and white -- Empty and white, empty-empty-substance-substance, the empty room filled with light -- The white layout of the 'Woodcutter fighting for the path' : the ethics of remnant yielding.

The present investigation aims to elucidate the presence of myth in the work of Eduardo Nicol. This inquiry of course, is something not thought about, since the author in question from the beginning of his philosophy has recognized that the path of thought is beyond myth, that is, it is nuanced by reason and by conceptual rigor. In other words, for him philosophy is about what is phenomenologically accessible and about what is rationally intelligible. Precisely for this reason, one of (...) the names with which Nicol's philosophy is known is under the name of "Metaphysics of expression" by virtue of the fact that what is given is commonly acquired through an expressive or communicative act. However, and despite this conceptual position, the fact is that the presence of myth can be found at the very heart of this philosopher’s philosophy. It should be noted that there is a particular myth that prevails in the clearing of his work, namely the myth of the androgyne. Through this myth it is possible to elucidate the origin of man and the original idea about symbol. (shrink)

François Jullien’s Living off Landscape, or the Unthought of in Reason,, is another outstanding work in a series of...

The French feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff has taught us something about “the collectivity,” which she discovers in women’s struggle for access to the philosophical, but also about “the unknown” and “the unthought.” It is the unthought which will matter most to what I intend to say today about a fundamental ignorance on which speaker vulnerability is built. On International Women’s Day, it seems appropriate to speak about – or, at least, to evoke – the silencing which has been imposed (...) on women by an oppressive form of ignorance. My question is: how do our resounding voices as women – on 8 March 2016 – avoid what feminist philosophers have distinguished as wilful forms of silencing? Silencing exploits vulnerability; and speaker vulnerability is an exposure either to violence or affection, in its dependence on an audience. My response seeks to undo the silencing of women by transforming an ignorance of vulnerability into a distinctively ethical avowal. To see the significance of this undoing, we will consider how our contemporary global world reduces vulnerability to an openness to violence, ignoring what has been unthought: an openness to affection. A wilful ignorance of vulnerability develops not as a lack of knowledge but its disavowal – on which various forms of oppression are built. An active disavowal of thinking (the unthought) is the other side of a striving for invulnerability; and this striving is encouraged by a social world which remains ignorant of its own wounding, as well as its own potential for ethical relations in vulnerability. Like la mauvaise foi of the French existentialist, invulnerability is a form of self-deception; and those who claim it embrace ignorance of their own and others’ vulnerability too. (shrink)

This essay explores various meanings of the word crisis (krisis): in philosophy, law, and psychoanalysis; but also in relation to truth, law, judgement, and thinking. In various axioms—on truth and negation; and on being and reproduction—the essay asks why blackness is often excluded from crisis theory. I then go on to explore the unintended consequences and complications of this exclusion in respective works by Donald Winnicott (on tolerance and contraception), and then only through what is deemed to be neither an (...) object nor a relation, neither a negation nor a phantasy. In the wake of these lacunae I conclude: blackness is an example of an unthought, and that this n’est pas cannot be thought, or determined, as krisis. (shrink)

I argue that the unthought philosophical bias in favor of seriousness and sense rather than nonsense and joking blocks the path to reality. Because of this bias we obsess over significant signs and forget to consider what signs are signs of; we lose sight of the forest because there are so many interesting trees. Through a thoroughgoing interrogation of signs or appearances, we can reveal what it is that all signs present or represent: the underlying real joke. Once the “sensible (...) bias” of philosophy is overcome and the sense of nonsense restored, we can reveal the object of ontology—the Kantian noumenon—and, therefore, understand the necessary order of signification or representation. In this way, I argue, we can come to be equally amused by all appearances, recognizing that their deceptive character is necessitated by the playful nature of the real thing which, qua joke, provokes amusement. (shrink)

The thought of François Jullien has made valuable contributions to contemporary philosophy, primarily by enriching the interpretation of certain classic themes through the uniqueness of ancient Chinese wisdom. This approach has revealed aspects that Western philosophy, with its metaphysics focused on being, has overlooked. Among these aspects, Jullien has drawn attention to how a series of resources of what could be called ‘Christian thought’ have remained unthought-of, at least from a philosophical perspective. The central question of this research is whether (...) this Christian logic represents just another resource, among several, that Jullien has utilized in his intellectual work, or if it also constitutes one of the fundamental sources of his own work and the beginnings of possible de-coincidence from the philosophy of being. The conclusions indicate a notable and indispensable presence of these Christian notions in his argumentative proposal, albeit without resorting to faith. This study will begin by reviewing the main theses of the French philosopher and, at the same time, will describe how he has been relating and discussing them with Christian doctrine. (shrink)

This paper provides a phenomenological analysis of postphenomenological philosophy of technology. While acknowledging that the results of its analyses are to be recognized as original, insightful, and valuable, we will argue that in its execution of the empirical turn, postphenomenology forfeits a phenomenological dimension of questioning. By contrasting the postphenomenological method with Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology as developed in his early Freiburg lectures and in Being and Time, we will show how the postphenomenological method must be understood as mediation theory, (...) which adheres to what Heidegger calls the theoretical attitude. This leaves undiscussed how mediation theory about ontic beings involves a specific ontological mode of relating to beings, whereas consideration of this mode is precisely the concern of phenomenology. This ontological dimension is important to consider, since we will argue that postphenomenology is unwittingly technically mediated in an ontological way. The upshot of this is that in its dismissal of Heidegger’s questioning of technology as belonging to “classical philosophy of technology,” postphenomenology implicitly adheres to what Heidegger calls technology as Enframing. We argue that postphenomenology overlooks its own adherence to the theoretical attitude and ultimately to Enframing, and we will conclude with calling for a phenomenological questioning of the dimension that postphenomenology presently leaves unthought, meaning that we will develop a plea for a rehabilitation of the ontological dimension in the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

"In the first study of its kind, David W. Johnson's "Watsuji on Nature" reconstructs the astonishing philosophy of nature of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), situating it in relation both to his reception of the thought of Heidegger and to his renewal of core ontological positions in classical Confucian and Buddhist philosophy. Johnson shows that for Watsuji we have our being in the lived experience of nature, one in which nature and culture compose a tightly interwoven texture called "fūdo". By fully unfolding (...) Watsuji's novel and radical claim that this is a setting that is neither fully external to human subjectivity nor merely a product of it, this book also sets out what still remains unthought in this concept, as well as in the relational structure that underwrites it. Johnson argues that what remains unarticulated is nothing less than the recovery of a reenchanted conception of nature and an elucidation of the wide-ranging implications of a relational conception of the self for questions about the disclosive character of experience, the distinction between fact and value, and the possibility of a place-based ecological ethics. In an engagingly lucid and deft analysis, "Watsuji on Nature" radically expands our appreciation of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy and shows what it has to offer to a global philosophical conversation"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This article attempts an organological and pharmacological re-interpretation of the later Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology as a provocative mode of revealing of beings, in particular of its central notions of Gestell [enframing] Gefahr [danger], Kehre [turning] and Ereignis [event]. Although these notions in principle allow us to think what is at stake currently in the Anthropocene as the age of total automation, generalized toxicity of the technical milieu and post-truth calling for a radical bifurcation, they need to be reframed (...) and re-imagined in terms of the process of exosomatization issuing from humanity’s original and necessary default of origin and situated within the perspective of entropy and negentropy, both unthought by Heidegger. Only thus will it become possible to really think and take care of what Heidegger called the danger of technology and its turning into the event as the destiny of enframing. This also requires a rethinking of Aristotle’s theory of four causes as it is invoked by Heidegger in his analysis of technology, in particular the efficient and final causes, in terms of what Deleuze called quasi-causality, here understood as the need and the obligation for mortals to make their fault come true, i.e., to make it truly happen or make it advene in truth, out of the experience of the danger as the ordeal of the necessary default. Thus becoming the anti-anthropic cause of anthropic toxicity, humans would restore final causality as quasi-causality and inaugurate, as neganthropos, the bifurcation into the Neganthropocene. (shrink)

This book is the companion to Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford University Press, 2000), which dealt with the psychoanalytic clinical problem of resistance to interpretation. The key to this resistance is the unconscious registration and repudiation (disavowal) of the reality of difference. The surprising generality of this resistance intersects with Nietzsche's, Heidegger's, and Derrida's understanding of how and why difference is in general the “unthought of metaphysics.” All three see metaphysics engaged with a “registration and repudiation of (...) difference,” and all three rethink interpretation in relation to this question. The synthesis of these theories of interpretation and difference provides the philosophical foundations for a new thinking of how interpretation functions, and is a critical intersection of deconstruction and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

The nursing profession has a responsibility to ensure that nursing goals and perspectives as these have developed over time remain the focus of its work. Explored in this paper is the potential problem for the nursing profession of recognizing both the promises and pitfalls of informational technologies so as to use them wisely in behalf of ethical patient care. We make a normative claim that maintaining a critical stance toward the use of informational technologies in practice and in influencing the (...) thought patterns of the younger generations of nurses is a moral imperative of the discipline, because without this practice can become subverted from professional goals in various ways. We use a synthesized concept we call “intentional authenticity” derived from the writing of Heidegger and Feminist care ethics to provide a foundation for the development of nurses who understand the importance of the nurse‐patient relationship and how the unthoughtful use of informational and other technologies can militate against effective or good nursing care. (shrink)

But say you,surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees,for instance,in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no dif?culty in it:but what is all this,I beseech you,more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may perceive them? But do you not yourself perceive or think of (...) them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind;but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. (shrink)

Ch. 1: Inadequate approaches to the question of God -- 1.1. Initial clarifications -- 1.2 Wholly unsystematic direct approaches -- 1.3. Semi-systematic indirect approaches -- 1.4. A wholly anti-systematic, anti-theoretical, and direct approach: Ludwig Wittgenstein -- 1.5. A characteristic example of a failed critique: Thomas Nagel's objections to God as "last point" -- Ch. 2. Heidegger's thinking of Being: the flawed development of a significant approach -- 2.1. Heidegger's failed and distorting interpretation and critique of the Christian metaphysics of Being (...) -- 2.2. Heidegger's four approaches to "retrieving" the "question of being" -- 2.3. What is unthought in Heidegger's thinking of Being I: Being-as-Ereignis -- 2.4. What is unthought in Heidegger's "thinking of Being" II: Being and being(s)- Ereignis and Ereignete(s) -- 2.5. The "overcoming [Überwinding] of metaphysics" as "transformational recovering [Verwindung]" of metaphysics and "the end of the history of Being" -- 2.6. The status of Heideggerian thinking I: thinking of Being as thinking within Ereignis, thinking that reaches its destination with Ereignis (Denken, das in das Ereignis einkehrt) -- 2.7. The status of Heideggerian thinking II: absolute claim, provisionality, the poverty of language, the language of thinking, the finitude of thinking -- 2.8. Heidegger's thinking and the topic "God" -- 2.9. Heidegger's "thinking": a fundamentally deficient and confused form of thinking -- Ch. 3:The structural-systematic approach to a theory of Being and God -- 3.1. The systematic context: the theoretical framework of the structural-systematic philosophy -- 3.2. The unrestricted universe of discourse as the universal dimension of primordial Being -- 3.3. Explication of the dimension of Being I: theory of Being as such -- 3.4. Explication of the dimension of Being II: theory of Being as a whole -- 3.5. Explication of the relation between absolutely necessary Being and the contingent dimension of Being as key to a conception of absolutely necessary Being as minded (as personal) -- 3.6. Absolutely necessary minded (personal) Being as creator of the world (as absolute creating) -- 3.7. The clarified relation between Being and God and the task of developing an integral theory about God -- Ch. 4: Critical examination of two counterpositions: Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion -- 4.1. Levinas's misguided conception of transcendence "beyond B/being" -- 4.2. Jean-Luc Marion's failed conception of "radical and non-metaphysical transcendence" and of "God without Being". (shrink)

In our contemporary moment, when machine learning algorithms are reshaping many aspects of society, the work of N. Katherine Hayles stands as a powerful corpus for understanding what is at stake in a new regime of computation. A renowned literary theorist whose work bridges the humanities and sciences among her many works, Hayles has detailed ways to think about embodiment in an age of virtuality ( How We Became Posthuman, 1999), how code as performative practice is located ( My Mother (...) Was a Computer, 2005), and the reciprocal relations among human bodies and technics ( How We Think, 2012). This special issue follows the 2017 publication of her book Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, in which Hayles traces the nonconscious cognition of biological life-forms and computational media. The articles in the special issue respond in different ways to Hayles’ oeuvre, mapping the specific contours of computational regimes and developing some of the ‘inflection points’ she advocates in the deep engagement with technical systems. (shrink)

Through careful analysis of phenomenological texts by Husserl and Heidegger, Marion argues for the necessity of a third phenomenological reduction that concerns what is fully implied but left largely unthought by the phenomenologies of both ...

To Stiegler’s notion of pansable (curable), one might also need to add that penser (to think) relates to the Latin penso, the frequentative of pendo, to hang, suspend. The pansable (that which can be healed) is as much the pensable (that which can be thought) and the suspensible (that which can be hung). Stiegler’s final act revealed that which was always already there: an unhealed pharmacological shadow that preceded him. While he entered philosophy with the argument of technics as the (...) impensé (unthought) of continental philosophy, he concluded in a final acting out, an impansable (uncurable) that ended his life. He, who believed that life is about cultivating rêveries and protentions capable of promise. Protention means both a capacity to invent and an ability to project oneself into the future through the practice of imagination and desire. He, who pondered about the retentions we have and the various forms of memory they take, and how to make them become the true modes of being-in-the-world. I know now that his fatal transgression is as much an accident as a departure, an emotional ceasefire and a bifurcative ending. Somehow, he found a way to remain faithful to the originary beginning of his thinking in act. (shrink)

Following the publication of her 2017 book, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, N. Katherine Hayles discusses the themes of the book with Louise Amoore and Volha Piotukh. From the development of a theory of nonconscious cognition, to the capacities of novels to enact the connections between disparate phenomena, Hayles reflects on what is at stake ethically in new human-technical assemblages.

This article explores the theme of the 2021 ALTER conference “norms questioned by disability,” by proposing a parallel with the process of questioning norms carried out by gender studies. After a contextualization of the role of norms in sociology and the link between the interrogation of norms and collective mobilizations, two examples of this approach are identified and illustrated by comparing gender studies and disability studies: naming the unthought (e.g. evidence of hierarchy, evidence of bicategorization), and specifying a presumed neutral (...) (by demonstrating the situated character of norms, concepts or characteristics associated with a dominant group and previously perceived as neutral or universal). Using examples from the fields of work, organizations and politics, similarities are pointed out between the modes of reasoning of the two fields of study. If disability studies have been able to benefit from a certain number of analytical achievements of gender studies, they can reciprocally offer new approaches for the latter, notably around the issue of constructivism. (shrink)

I argue that dreams can contain perceptual elements in multifarious, heretofore unthought-of ways. I also explain the difference between dreams that contain perceptual elements, perceptual experiences that contain dream elements, and having a dream and a perceptual experience simultaneously. I then discuss two applications of the resulting view. First, I explain how my taxonomy of perception in dreams will allow “dream engineers”—who try to alter the content of people’s dreams—to accurately classify different dreams and explore creating new forms of perception (...) in dreams. Second, I consider the consequences of the view for the role of memory in dreaming and imagination. I argue that not every element of dreams or sensory imaginations must rely on memory. The resultant view of sensory imagination provides a counterexample to Hume’s account of sensory imagination, according to which sensory imagination must be built up from faint copies of sensory impressions stored in memory. (shrink)

This article engages the concept of hospitality as it relates to the maternal. I critically evaluate the current conceptions of hospitality by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, focusing on their dematerialized definition of the feminine found at the heart of hospitality, and Derrida's aporia of hospitality that deals with ownership. The foundation of hospitality, I show, is the maternal relation and its specific acts of hospitality that encompass the notions of gift and generosity. While remaining unthought in philosophy, however, maternal (...) acts of hospitality are appropriated when hospitality is defined as interiority, habitation, expectancy, and unconditional welcoming of the other within oneself. I argue that hospitality would remain Derrida's and his proponents' “impossible” ethic as long as it undercuts its own promise, does not fully think through its foundation in the maternal, and fails to welcome the mother unconditionally. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Almost all philosophers recognize the fundamental importance of the Phenomenology of Spirit. But Hegel's way of thinking and speaking—which he names, “speculative”—needs explaining. The example of “the speculative sentence” is helpful—for here, speculating means implying, that is, neither bringing meaning to presence nor keeping it in absence; but rather, speaking and thinking by implication. If the history of philosophy, however, overlooks what is implied, then it cannot grasp what is, and what is thought and said in the speculative sentence. (...) Luckily, there is another way: implying that which can neither be said nor left unsaid, neither thought nor unthought. Reinterpreting Hegel's speculative sentence, therefore, for implication, for what is implied—and neither present nor absent—Haas demonstrates how to think and speak speculatively about thinking and speaking, substance and subject, being and becoming, whether in philosophy or not, even if we implicate ourselves thereby. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman JacksonBernabé S. Mendoza (bio)Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World New York: By New York University Press, 2020, 320 pp. ISBN 978-1-4798-9004-0the radical work of black feminism is to upend Western dualistic ways of thinking that structure our understanding of what it means to be human. In Becoming Human: Matter and (...) Meaning in an Antiblack World, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson troubles the dominant dualistic distinction of the human and the animal. Jackson argues that antiblackness undergirds Enlightenment discourses on the human-animal divide such that blackness cannot be extricated from the very concept of the animal because both “are not only interdependent representations but also entangled concepts” (28). Central to Jackson’s argument on the animalization of blackness is the notion of “ontologized plasticity,” which posits the being of black(ened) people as infinitely malleable and mutable matter and further points to the fluidification of form and “fleshly existence.” Far from seeing the human as a category that has “ontological integrity,” as scholars in the fields of animal studies, new materialisms, and posthumanism presuppose, Jackson instead seeks to redefine the concept of the human through the theorization of blackness (16). She points out that such theorization has been, for such scholars, a lacuna and the “space of the unthought,” which thus marks her intervention in these fields. [End Page 211]The author offers a sustained engagement with the knowledge claims of science and philosophy, reading them through and against the intellectual contributions of black feminist writers and artists. She draws from such luminaries as Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the artist Wangechi Mutu to show the ways in which they reject an enclosed notion of the human that is defined only by keeping the racialized other at bay and in a degraded animalized and liquified state. As such, she showcases how black feminist visual and literary culture “theorizes and philosophizes” and reveals the faulty, antiblack premises upon which science and philosophy establish their claims of knowledge on the human.Offering a materialist theory of black ontology and temporality, Jackson poses three main arguments on the racialization of the human-animal distinction. The first is the aforementioned notion of ontologized and black(ened) plasticity that speaks to the constant modulation and manipulation of black matter as it relates to gender, sexuality, and sexual reproduction. Reading US slavery as an experimental playground for testing the limits of the human, Jackson argues that “black female f lesh... functions as the limit case of ‘the human’ and is its matrix-figure” (4). She defines plasticity as a “praxis that seeks to define the essence of a black(ened) thing as infinitely mutable in antiblack, often paradoxical sexuating terms as a means of hierarchically delineating sex/gender, reproduction, and states of being more generally” (11). There is, in other words, an inversion that takes place in that it is only through opposition and the imposed instability and illegibility of blackness—of black matter and the black mater(nal) situated as “chaos by design”—that such categories as “woman,” “mother,” and “female body” can themselves take hold and become intelligible forms (11). Jackson engages with the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter in order to argue that “Man,” as the object of analysis within liberal humanism, “produces an untenable dichotomy—‘the human’ versus ‘the animal,’ whereby the black(ened) female is posited as the abyss dividing organic life into ‘human’ or ‘animal’ based on wholly unsound metaphysical premises” (12). This claim on the centrality of the black female in the plasticization of blackness is given support in chapter 2, which focuses on Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative novel Brown Girl in the Ring, where plasticity gives way to opacity.In this chapter, Jackson explores the ways in which the black female body, as that which is opaque and nonrepresentable within the “dominant grammar of representation,” shatters what she argues is Heidegger’s metaphysical and hierarchical ordering of human, animal, and world. In exploring “how our received conceptions of being hinges on our im/perception of black mater... (shrink)

Phenomenology and the Kyoto School implement an interaction among cultures1 that is not limited to illustrating Western philosophy wxith exotic similes. Insofar as my position is concerned, I will start out with phenomenology in order to study Nishida's work, trying on the one hand to understand the meaning that he gives to nothingness in relation to the Merleau-Pontian concept of creux in order, on the other hand, to enlarge reason and philosophy.To achieve this, I shall establish a comparison of the (...) two thinkers that will help to shed light on their conceptions, while at the same time demonstrating the efficacy of thinking the unthoughts or negativities indicating a... (shrink)