Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2024)
WHO COMES AFTER THE SUBJECT?
THE REEVALUATION OF SUBJECTIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY,
Part Two
Guest Editors: Lisa Kampen, Lucas Gronouwe, and Luca Tripaldelli
PETER HALLWARD, Enter the Actor
abstract
The concept of the subject is fundamentally equivocal, and its political connotations remain ambiguous. I propose to foreground instead the general category of the actor, in both its theatrical and action-oriented senses. The theatrical register helps remind us of the difference between being and doing, or between a performer and a role; it also serves to foreground the deliberate, trained, prepared, and situated quality of any performance. More importantly, the actor understood as capable of action helps to foreground aspects of agency that the philosophers of Jean-Luc Nancy’s generation tended to downplay or condemn, notably those of intention, purpose, and will. If we are actually to confront the enormous problems facing the world, we need an adequate account of collective action and thus of collective purpose. Rousseau and Marx help to frame some of the elements of such an account, while Luxemburg, Sartre, and Fanon, among many others, help to clarify some of its contemporary dimensions.
ANNABELLE DUFOURCQ, Réinstitution du concept de sujet dans une approche phénoménologique zoocentrique. Sujets imaginaires et réalisme écologique
abstract
Can we exit the anthropocentric bubble in which many human cultures are trapped and which is a source of blindness, denial, and inefficiency? Postmodern philosophies are valuable allies in this respect, as they explode ossified thinking patterns, but their suspicion toward subjects can also become a barrier to the development of new ecological worldviews and agencies. This article explores an alternative path, adopting a renewed phenomenological approach that starts from animal subjectivity and investigates the links between non-human and human animal subjects. The central question: how does the integration of non-human animal subjects into our perspective modify our relation to the world? Discussing Merleau-Ponty’s, Deleuze’s, Derrida’s, and Haraway’s works, I investigate the structures of a phenomenology of human-animal intersubjectivity and I develop the concept of imaginary subjects.
RUBEN HORDIJK, After Man, the Child? Nietzsche, Wynter, Fanon, and Overcoming the Spirit of Revenge
abstract
Nietzsche employs the Child as a futural figure of affirmation beyond the human, which overcomes the “spirit of revenge” and the weight of the past. As Nietzsche dreams of the Child, colonialism/coloniality specifically targets children to sever communities and impose a civilizational-colonial future. In this article, I read Nietzsche’s question of the human/Overman through Wynter’s sociogenic terms of Man/the human. Then, I turn to Fanon’s sociogeny of childhood and its transformation during the Algerian Revolution. Recasting Nietzsche’s questions in light of violence against children, Fanon provides a different response: overcoming the spirit of revenge and the creation of new values occur through the shared commitment and praxis of decolonization. Children participate in and are witnesses to this transformation beyond the figures of Man and Child.
SIMON GUSMAN, Biographical Illusions: Sartre and Bourdieu against Narrative Identity
abstract
This article explores the ideas on narrative identity of two prominent French philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre Bourdieu. Both independently described what they called the “biographical illusion,” the idea that the events of life are not structured in the same way as they are presented in stories such as biographies. Sartre and Bourdieu both argue against a common conception of narrative identity. Interestingly, however, Bourdieu presents his notion in part as a critique of Sartre’s ideas about identity. By investigating their similarities and differences, light is shed on the debate concerning criticism of the classical notion of subjectivity in contemporary thought.
REGULAR ARTICLES
JIM VERNON AND KRIS SEALEY, Philosophy Shaped by the Autobiographical: An Interview with Kris Sealey
abstract
Kris Sealey received her Ph.D. from the University of Memphis and is now Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. Her work ranges across a variety of fields from existential phenomenology to the Philosophy of Race, Caribbean philosophy, and decolonial philosophy. In this interview, conducted over email across several months, we track Sealey’s intellectual journey, focussing on her first book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence, and her recent Creolizing the Nation, which received the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Along the way, we touch upon her shift from biology and mathematics to Continental philosophy, the relationship between philosophy and personal biography, the nature and promises of a creolizing approach to philosophical research, and the need for philosophy to remain expansive, diverse, and inclusive.
IAN H. ANGUS, Ontology of Living Labour and the Transcendental-Phenomenological Reduction
abstract
From the 19th century to the present, philosophy has grappled with the domination of received form over ongoing experience and has proposed a return to the concrete in order to ally itself with social and intellectual liberation. My recent book, Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism, identifies three historical phases of this task. The first, associated with Karl Marx, takes political economy as its object and projects the liberation of labour. The second, associated with Edmund Husserl, takes mathematical physics as its object and projects the liberation of philosophy and the human sciences from objectivism. The third takes ecology as its object and projects its central role in the rehabilitation of experienced nature from its objectivistic reduction to a resource—whose latest critical phase consists in the contemporary war between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity.
BETTINA BERGO, Anxiety as Theme of an Alternative History of Philosophy: A Glimpse into the Monograph, Anxiety: A Philosophical History
abstract
This article offers an overview of my 2020 study, Anxiety: A Philosophical History. I discuss the philosophers and theorists examined, and show how anxiety, understood in German as Angst (it has but one term for this affect), moved through Idealism from a largely noxious state (Kant) into the role of an emotion-adjuvant of reason (Hegel), into the sign of imminent birth—of nature (Schelling). I focus on the existential turn given anxiety, as a “state” prior to freedom in Kierkegaard, and draw from his work and Nietzsche’s a unique, affective dialectic. The 20th century opens with Husserl’s “genetic” concern with passivity and affective forces, Heidegger’s “attunements,” and Freud’s perplexity over the meaning of anxiety. Levinas closes the work, considering the intersubjectivity of feelings and its implications for lived time and human interrelationality.
LORENZO C. SIMPSON, Towards a Negative Hermeneutics: The Hermeneutics/Critical Theory Debate in a New Register
abstract
The relationship between hermeneutics and Critical Theory is often understood in terms of Paul Ricœur’s opposition of a hermeneutics of meaning recovery to a hermeneutics of suspicion. I propose to bridge this divide between recovery and suspicion by leveraging the idea that the legitimacy of a society is a function of the adequacy of its self-understanding and by suggesting that a fundamental way in which illegitimate social power operates is through the strategic promulgation and policing of the semantic resources available to individuals for their own self-understanding and agency. I argue that hermeneutic democracy, one that promotes participation in the interpretive practices that generate collectively binding and enabling social meanings, is an antidote to such illegitimate restrictions on the agency of individuals and social groups.
RYAN S. BINGHAM, Derrida, Différance, and a Materialism without Substance
abstract
Near the end of his 1993 Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida makes a subtle appeal to a “materialism without substance: a materialism of the khôra for a despairing ‘messianism.’” Here, I investigate the hardly suspected role of this materialism in the emergence of Derrida’s early notion of différance. I begin by outlining and explicating for the first time Derrida’s unpublished 1961 khōra interpretation. I then track its implicit convergence with Derrida’s 1962–64 engagement with messianic eschatology, followed by the repetition of this configuration in 1964–66, in order to draw out the significance of khōra and the messianic in the emergent articulation of différance. Remarkably, at the moment in which Derrida developed the major initial gestures of deconstruction, this configuration was before him—both devant and avant—such that a deconstruction responsible for the conditions of its own inscription would have to come to articulate this materialism.