Browse

One of the greatest challenges Agamben presents to his readers is the vast and often bewildering range of sources he draws upon in his work. This volume is a one-stop reference for clarifying Agamben’s relationship to the many figures he engages with, providing a wide range of articles by scholars with special expertise in Agamben and the figure in question. It covers his primary interlocutors, his more occasional and secondary points of reference as well as figures who are often lurking in the background of his arguments but are seldom directly mentioned. The result is a thorough overview of Agamben’s philosophy, as illuminated by his practices of reading.

A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approaches and traditions ranging from transcendental and speculative idealism to phenomenology and deconstruction for failing to do justice to the real world as it is ‘in itself’, that is, as independent of the structures of human consciousness, experience, and language. This volume presents a collection of essays that take up the challenge of realism from a variety of historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives. This volume includes essays that engage the fundamental presuppositions and conclusions of this new realism by turning to the writings of seminal figures in the history of philosophy, including Kant, Schelling, and others. Also included are essays that challenge anti-realist readings of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Nancy. Finally, several essays in this volume propose alternative ways of understanding realism through careful readings of key figures in German idealism, pessimism, phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, and deconstruction.

This book shows how all necessity – logical, mathematical, physical, transcendental or metaphysical - is consequent. It argues that reason and God, although necessary with respect to essence, are, with respect to existence, eternal contingencies. The first chapter critically reverses Meillasssoux’s claim for the necessity of contingency. The second chapter positively outlines the possibility of contingent necessity by means of Boutroux’s neglected book The Contingency of the Laws of Nature. The third chapter further grounds this possibility by means of the early Schelling’s reading of Plato’s Timaeus. Chapters four and five turn to Schelling’s late philosophy, detailing an ontology that treats reason and God as matters of fact rather than as truths of reason. Chapter six draws parallels and differences between Schelling’s approach and the “passing by” of the last God in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. The book’s final chapter argues for a new typology for philosophical theology, theomonism, and how this conception can provide a contemporary response to the Euthyphro Dilemma. While some authors, e.g. Meillassoux and Kearney, have recently argued for a possible God who does not exist now but may in the future, this book addresses an unexplored alternative, a contingent God that eternally exists but could have eternally never existed.

After the humanism/anti-humanism debates of the 1940s and ’50s, and after the ‘death of man’ in the linguistic philosophy of the late twentieth-century, French philosophy today is laying fresh claim to the human. This is not to be mistaken for a return to previous ideas of the human, nor is it posthumanism, strictly speaking. It is a series of fundamentally independent and yet strikingly simultaneous initiatives arising in the writing of diverse French thinkers to transform and rework the figure of the human. This book brings together these new figures of the human for the first time, offering the a critique of this contemporary trend in terms of the three categories: the human as ‘capacity’ (Badiou and Meillassoux), as ‘substance’ (Malabou) and as ‘relation’ (Serres and Latour). Tracing these varied transformations of the human makes visible for the first time one of the most widespread, surprising and potentially transformative trends in contemporary French thought. This book draws out both the promises and perils inherent in today’s attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to “nature” and “culture”, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and to our own brains, arguing that the stakes of this project are high for our technologically advanced but socially atomised and ecologically vulnerable world.

David Hume (1711–1776) remains one of the most equivocal thinkers in eighteenth-century Europe. Some emphasise his conservatism because of his criticism of rationalism in morals and of the social contract theory in politics, while others deem him one of the most important liberal thinkers. He can also be characterised as a forerunner of utilitarianism or even postmodernism. How can these images be integrated? To address this issue, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment demonstrates the uniqueness and complexity of Hume as an Enlightenment thinker through an investigation of the ‘historical’ Hume. Based on a sceptical adaptation of Epicureanism, he delineates the variable and vulnerable nature of the workings of our imagination and opinions, and emphasises the essential instability of civilisation. In addition, he retains a positive assessment of such modern values as liberty, politeness and refinement, and carries the banner for secularisation. His ‘spirit of scepticism’, which permeates even his non-epistemological writings, enables these seemingly paradoxical positions. This book is not only for Hume specialists, but is also a contribution to the flourishing fields of the Enlightenment study. This intellectual history connects Hume’s early eighteenth-century Continental and British predecessors not only to Hume, but also to British philosophers writing up until the nineteenth century.

Practising with Deleuze offers the first systematic reading of Gilles Deleuze’s mature philosophy from the perspective of contemporary creative practitioners, including fine artists, a dancer, a creative writer, designer and philosopher. It offers a way of rethinking notions of aesthetics, art, and creativity within the field of practice. Unconventional in presentation, this book is reflective of the engagement of contemporary creative practices with the generative philosophy of Deleuze. Each chapter focuses on a key aspect of production - practising, forming, framing, experiencing, and encountering - and is accompanied by short summary texts outlining the context of Deleuze’s contributions to each of these aspects. These discussions contextualise Deleuzian thought within a range of practices. In so doing, they enable the reader to approach these philosophical concepts within the milieu of creative practice.

As calls mount for resistance to recent political events, Simon Morgan Wortham explores the political implications and complexities of a psychoanalytic conception of resistance. Through close readings of a range of authors, both within and outside of the psychoanalytic tradition, the question of the politics of psychoanalysis itself is read back into the task of thinking resistance from a psychoanalytic point of view. Simon Morgan Wortham explores what he sees as the phobic resistance at the centre of the politics of psychoanalysis, one that creates fresh possibilities for contemporary cultural and political analysis.

This collection of essays explores the contemporary significance of Alfred North Whitehead’s book Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. Given the recent and rapid changes in modern science, culture, and technology, as well as the recent upsurge of interest in the work of Whitehead (particularly among continental philosophers), this reexamination of his thought is more timely than ever, situating Whitehead’s arguments within the contemporary intellectual scene.Whitehead's Symbolism is often neglected in favor of studies of Process and Reality. Symbolism, however, is unique in several ways: it relates the question of symbolization to a complex interplay of modes of perception; it integrates language—whether written or spoken—into its field of manifestations, and it harbors the only example of a direct application of Whitehead's theory of prehension to issues of the construction of human society and, indirectly, ecology.In reconsidering Whitehead’s book, this collection of essays will address the question of symbolization and its complex to modes of perception, and how these modes in turn relate to language—whether written or spoken. By drawing from a number of disciplines, Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism sets the stage for further discussions on the contemporary meaning and effects of symbolism. The variety of themes addressed in these essays illustrate the varied and fruitful ways in which Whitehead’s thought can illuminate and contribute to contemporary discussions.

Following the recent ‘speculative turn’ in Continental philosophy, the aim of this volume is to propose a ‘counter-discourse’ of speculative approaches to art history. How could today’s materialist, realist, pragmatist, vitalist or object-oriented speculations offer alternatives to the mere complementarity of philosophy of art and art history, often based on mutual recognition and critical limitation rather than imaginative crossovers? What new intermedial methodologies for art and art historical writing do they provide? Or vice versa, how can the encounter with art induce new forms of philosophy? How do speculative concepts of time, past and contingency challenge typically modern engagements with art’s ‘history’? Is there, for example, an unexpected contemporary relevance for pre-modern, e.g. or mannerist or gothic ideas of art? Is it possible for art history to experience a work of art in its novelty beyond its historical facticity? And what is the speculative potential of works of art themselves? Does the speculative open up new ways of extending art into fields of biology, mathematics or the digital? What is the ‘thing’ or ‘object’ of art, whether inanimate or animate? What does it mean to have an ‘idea’? And finally, what remains of ‘beauty’ and ‘expressivity’, after decades of critical mistrust and embarrassed deconstruction?

Can experience be thought systematically without transforming the richness of the world as it is lived into reductive philosophical generalities? Can the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with a method of systematic cosmological speculation? Didier Debaise’s reading of Whitehead shows clearly what a philosophy that makes this possible looks like, how it works and what is at stake. He focuses in on Whitehead’s attempt to construct a metaphysical system of everything in the universe that exists whilst simultaneously claiming that it can account for every element of our experience: everything enjoyed and perceived, willed or thought.