Preview: /Review: Tommy J. Curry, Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of white Racial Empire (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), 278 pages./ Every philosopher sends out his or her most precious insights in hopes that someone will discover this “message in a bottle,” and receive “a testimony to the transience of frustration and the duration […]
Preview: /Review:Antoine Mooij, Lacan and Cassirer: An Essay on Symbolisation, translated by Peter van Nieuwkoop (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2018), 256 pages./ The central argument of Lacan and Cassirer: An Essay on Symbolisation is that each thinker approaches the problem of symbolization in a way that ultimately complements the other; “that their opposing views are in
Abstract: Concerning artistic research, the state of affairs is still one of delusions and confusions. The reason for this is the pluralization and dedifferentiation of rationality pushed forward by the postmodern period. The way out of it is the way of differentiations. Thus, it seems helpful, first, to remember what we already have in philosophical
Abstract: “Human beings have two fundamentally different ways of thinking about and engaging with the world.” Some variant of this proposition is shared by many thinkers across time. This paper focuses on the core similarities and the subtle (but significant) differences between Freud’s theory of primary and secondary processes, Karl Stern’s theory of the scientific
Abstract: Violence occupies a regal position in the work of de Sade. It manifests itself in two forms: sexual persecution (excesses, manias, perversions, cruelty) and enlightened reasoning (unabashed promotion of naturalism, rationalism, hedonism and atheism). De Sade uses his most precious instrument as a semblance, by creating a magic spectacle of a gothic novel, and
Abstract: In this paper, I seek to clarify, criticize, and expand upon the ambiguous-yet-influential concept of divine violence introduced by Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”. I proceed in three parts: in the first, I outline Benjamin’s argument about the cycle of mythical violence and divine violence’s special role as an interruption of that cycle.
Abstract: Through myths that pattern and repeat we figure the world to ourselves. The desire to be done with myth, to surpass mythic thinking in favor of a “more” rational way of thinking, is but one way of perpetrating violence in the guise of similitude. The rejection of muthos by logos is itself a form of
Abstract: It seems that the first two decades of the twenty first century demonstrate political mythology to be still functioning in the political life of the West. In this context, it is interesting to view the recent publications of Hans Blumenberg’s Nachlass: Präfiguration (“Prefiguration,” 2014) and Rigorismus der Wahrheit (“Rigorism of Truth,” 2015), as they
Abstract: One of the major questions emerging in present-day reflections on politics is related to violence and its relation to institutional order and law. In the paper, an issue of concern for a very particular form of political conflict, that is, civil war, is addressed. Violence in politics, and particularly its specific form, that is,
Abstract: In this article, I make an attempt to elucidate the problem of violence in Foucault’s genealogy that, following Nietzsche’s genealogy, seems to be based on the concept of a conflict of forces. Thus, the war of forces that constitutes history is the first dimension in which the presence of violence can be described in
