In the Midst: A Discussion of Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life

Abstract

Katherine Sarah Moody and Steven Shakespeare begin this collection of essays, produced from the inaugural conference of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion (Liverpool Hope University, 2009), by reflecting on life’s ‘haunting’ of philosophy. Life’s dynamism—constantly shifting, fluctuating, hesitating and pushing forward, stretching between birth and death in anything but a safely predictable manner—has always been problematic for philosophy, resisting categorisation and explanation. They present life as an ongoing hermeneutical negotiation, wherein ‘lies the possibility of affirmation’ (p. 1). However, from which standpoint should we affirm life? Immanence or transcendence? Or, with Derrida, should we foster a notion of survival that confounds this dualistic separation (p. 2)? Starting with Kant and Hegel, the editors provide a contextual background and discuss the problems of separating organic life from inorganic nature and the organic human body from unifying supersensible concepts like ‘consciousness’, ‘freedom’, ‘creativity’. Further, they trace modern philosophy’s concern with the organism’s duplicitous nature, arguing that ‘it calls for an irritated thinking, rather than a process of rationalisation which aims at a totalising conceptual grasp’ (p. 6). Nietzsche shows that life-affirmation does not consist in transporting oneself to an imaginary ‘outside’ or resting in the pure spontaneity of immanence, but relates to a sovereign moment of ecstasy. They suggest that this moment of sovereignty may be found in living through negative experiences, a moment ‘always internally divided, never resting in a fixed position’ (p. 6). Affirming a conflicted life could shape our political and ethical engagement with it, allowing for an appropriately interested hermeneutics. This could lead to a moment which—like Žižek’s take on the reversal of idealism in Marx (and Feuerbach)—is not a mere reversal, turning back to practice from theory, but a change of direction that risks dangerous revolution for the sake of emancipation, creating and engaging in a struggle (p. 7). Presenting Foucault’s argument that biopower has rendered individuals submissive and manipulable, and adding Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of contemporary politics which stratifies life to determine forms of subjective possibility, the editors SOPHIA (2014) 53:289–298 DOI 10.1007/s11841-014-0412-6