Continental Philosophy Research Articles

The Ethics of Innovations in Genomic Selection: On How to Broaden the Scope of Discussion

The use of genomic selection in agricultural animal breeding is in academic literature generally considered an ethically unproblematic development, but some critical views have been offered. Our paper shows that an important preliminary question for any ethical evaluation of (innovations in) genomic selection is how the scope of discussion should be set, that is, which ethical issues and perspectives ought to be considered. This scope is determined by three partly overlapping choices. The first choice is which ethical concepts to include: an ethical discussion of genomic selection approaches may draw on concepts central to (Anglo-Saxon) applied ethics, but some critical views have been based on concepts from critical animal studies and continental philosophy. A related choice is to what extent discussion should focus on new ethical issues raised or on existing ethical issues that will be ameliorated, perpetuated or aggravated by an innovation in genomic selection. The third choice is to treat an innovation in genomic selection either as a technique on itself or as a part of specific practices. We argue that ethical discussion should not limit attention to new issues or ignore the implications of particular ways of applying genomic selection in practice, and this has some consequences for which ethical concepts ought to be included. Limiting the scope of discussion may be defensible in some contexts, but broader ethical discussion remains necessary.

Stanislas Breton

Abstract The name Stanislas Breton likely drums up a few interesting facts: chum of Louis Althusser or Michel de Certeau, author of an obscure spiritual classic (The Word and the Cross) or bewildering treatises on Nothing, the Imaginary, and the “poetics of the sensible” – an idiosyncratic figure at the margins, writing on St. Paul or Proclus well before it was mainstream. Coming across his name can be like discovering a great record that none of your friends are talking about or taking a chance on Netflix to find an arthouse ‘hidden gem’. To facilitate that experience (perhaps why you got into Continental philosophy and into religion in the first place), I offer a brief introductory essay sounding some of the major notes in his thought and life, followed by a translation of his “Examen particulier,” written in 1988 as a late-stage critical self-interrogation. The reader should find here that Breton’s oeuvre develops a coherent and penetrating philosophy of conceptual rigor and thematic range that is as deeply indebted to its modern engagements as it is to its medieval and late antique sources of inspiration.

The Catholic Reception of Continental Philosophy in North America, by Gregory P. Floyd and Stephanie Rumpza, eds.

The Catholic Reception of Continental Philosophy in North America, by Gregory P. Floyd and Stephanie Rumpza, eds.

About the Authors

About the Authors

Towards a Phenomenology of Kenosis: Thinking after the Theological Turn

AbstractWhat could it mean to think “after the theological turn”? This article proposes one possible answer by reframing the theological turn in light of the way in which Paul’s kenosis serves as a metaphor for deconstruction in a variety of continental philosophers who are all nevertheless hostile to overt theologising. Tracking this notion through the history of theology and philosophy, the article argues that it has been philosophically appropriated so as to indicate the point within the Christian theological complex that constitutes its fatal agent by setting in motion Christianity’s own self-deconstruction or de-theologisation. This dynamic, which implies that every engagement with theology ultimately carries itself outside of theology proper, will then allow the article to reconceive the gesture operated by phenomenology’s theological turn: in their right turn towards theology, the philosopher must be careful not to simply remain stuck there, for it only serves their investigation insofar as this engagement is precisely what allows them to turn away from “the theological,” or for phenomenology de-theologise itself. By drawing out the kenotic motif in contemporary continental philosophy and connecting it to phenomenology’s theological turn, the article thus argues that what is needed now is a deconstruction of the theological turn. This can be accomplished by way of what the article proposes to call a “phenomenology of kenosis”: namely, a phenomenology that starts from theology (Paul’s notion of kenosis), precisely so as to move beyond it (to de-theologise itself).

Jürgen Habermas and the public intellectual in modern democratic life

AbstractThis paper provides an overview of Jürgen Habermas's writings as a public intellectual and relates this work to recent debates about the proper relationship of theory to practice. In addition to being one of the most influential continental philosophers of the postwar era, Habermas is also the leading public intellectual of the Federal Republic of Germany and increasingly of the European Union as well. Unfortunately, his political writings have not received the attention they deserve. As a result, he is often misconstrued as an ideal theorist who is both ignorant of and apathetic toward ‘real’ politics. By showing how his philosophy relates to his political engagement, I present Habermas as a model for how the philosopher can apply theoretical insights to political developments in an indirect, mediated manner that focuses on debates within the democratic public sphere. This approach has distinct advantages when compared to active participation in the policymaking process and the direct application of philosophy to political practice, both of which threaten the principle of democratic equality in the public sphere.

The narrative framework of psychological jurisprudence: Virtue ethics as criminal justice practice

Recently, Ward and Durrant (2021) utilized the construct of “practice frameworks” to better organize the important theoretical aspects of two major correctional interventions (i.e., Good Lives Model and Restorative Justice). This organization included the configuration of three interlinked conceptual levels that bridge ontological and epistemological gaps between core functional values, causal assumptions, and practical applications. In this paper, we employ the practice framework strategy to highlight a different way to think about forensic and correctional psychology. We explain how this alternative way advances ethical principles that reconceive the nature of offending and redirect the epistemology of offender treatment. First, we elucidate the key conceptual principles of Psychological Jurisprudence (PJ). These include the values of reciprocal consciousness, inter-subjectivity, and mutual power as conceived of and developed within continental philosophy. Second, we examine the operating assumptions of PJ. These include the stipulations that: (1) the unconscious exists and it is structured much like a language; (2) subjectivity is always politicized because unconscious structured language pre-codes and prefigures conscious thought; and (3) power functions through the politics of discourse, producing circumscribed and deferred knowledge about human interrelatedness and interdependence. Third, we explain how PJ's core set of values and operating assumptions reframe the therapeutic practice of forensic and correctional psychology. This reframing radicalizes the ontology of offending and the epistemology of offender treatment. To substantiate this claim, we discuss several prevailing approaches to therapeutic practice, including the deficit-correcting (RNR), desistance-management (GLM), and normative-reconciliation (NRJ) models. Fourth, we propose alternative therapeutic practice guidelines for practitioners who work within treatment and therapy as well as recovery and reentry spaces of carceral coexistence. • Psychological jurisprudence (PJ) is an alternative way to think about forensic and correctional psychology. • PJ advances ethical principles that reconceive the nature of offending and redirect the epistemology of offender treatment. • PJ’s core set of values and operating assumptions reframe the therapeutic practice of forensic and correctional psychology. • Several prevailing approaches to therapeutic practice are discussed. • Therapeutic practice guidelines for practitioners who work within treatment, therapy, recovery and reentry are proposed.

Review: Life-Destroying Diagrams, by Eugenie Brinkema

Review: <i>Life-Destroying Diagrams</i>, by Eugenie Brinkema

Introduction: Schelling and the Environment

IntroductionSchelling and the Environment Chelsea C. Harry (bio) Scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change is anthropogenic, caused by our greenhouse gas emissions.1 Given the evidence that exists, we should be able to convince ourselves to change the everyday behaviors resulting in these emissions. If we hope to save ourselves, other animals, plants, and the environment from a devastating future, then why would we continue to use fossil fuels? The answer here is not an easy one. And yet, the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, provides us with a possible cause. In his most famous work on ethics,2 Aristotle argued that being weak-willed, suffering from what he called, “akrasia,” is the reason we do things that we know we shouldn’t do. It is a condition that results when desire wins over reason. For example, I eat a chocolate bar when I know I should eat a salad because my desire for chocolate wins over what I have reasoned to be best for my health. Simply put, reason might be what distinguishes us from other animals and plants, but it is not always our most powerful faculty. It stands both to experience and to reason, then, that rational decision might not be what is going to get us out of this climate crisis. Then, what is? In this special issue, we hear from five contemporary scholars of the 18th–19th century German philosopher, F.W.J. Schelling, an oft-called “protean thinker” whose prolific, sometimes creative, and diverse works spanned over seventy years. A onetime roommate of Hegel and Hölderlin, Schelling’s works are lesser-known outside specialist circles, and yet one finds that his prescient insights continue to have much to offer. This is especially true vis-à-vis the climate crisis, as Schelling was the first post-Kantian philosopher to take nature seriously. He eschewed the modern, Kantian, and post-Kantian trend to focus on [End Page 1] ipseity, the self, and on what we as humans can rationally know. Instead, he returned to metaphysics and argued for a wholistic conception and experience of life—all life. For Schelling, humans are rational as an expression of nature, rather than as an exception to nature. As John Sallis put it so well as he argued for the Platonic influence in Schelling: “For what Schelling rewrites within the text of modern philosophy is a discourse on nature.”3 Sallis then reminds us that in Schelling’s 1809 text, Philosophical Investigations of the Essence of Human Freedom (“Die Freiheitschrift”), he openly criticizes post-Cartesian philosophy generally for its exclusion of nature; “All modern European philosophy since it began with Descartes has this common defect, that nature does not exist for it and that it lacks a living ground.”4 Schelling’s intention was to resolve the defect, and because of his efforts in this regard, his work has something to say to us about our relationship to the environment. The idea to think about what Schelling can offer us in our current climate crisis is hardly new. In 2014, the North American Schelling Society (NASS), hosted by Bruce Matthews and Bard College, thematized its third international conference on “Schelling in the Anthropocene,” asking scholars to think beyond modern philosophy’s legacy of the human/nature divide and to discuss Schelling’s contribution to the anthropogenic environmental crisis we currently face. Since then, published work on this topic includes: Bruce Matthews’s, “Schelling in the Anthropocene,”5 Christopher Lauer’s, “Confronting the Anthropocene,” 6 and Vincent Lee’s, “Schelling and the Sixth Extinction.”7 Other journals have published special issues on related topics, including McGrath et al. Schelling After Theory special issue of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, McGrath et al. The Many Faces of F.W.J. Schelling special issue of Analecta Hermeneutica, Tritten et al. Nature, Speculation, and the Return to Schelling special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, and Bahoh, et al. Philosophies of Nature special issue of Comparative and Continental Philosophy. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, other contemporary thinkers who have been part of this conversation include: Kyla Bruff, Charlotte Alderwick, Manfred Frank, Markus Gabriel, Iain Grant,8 Lore...

The Potentiality of Brown

The Potentiality of Brown Ariana Ruíz (bio) A Review of The Sense of Brown by José Esteban Muñoz. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. 224. $99.95 cloth, $25.95 paper. In Cruising Utopia (2009), José Esteban Muñoz proposes a strategy of critical hope that is actively practiced in response to a "here and now" that is not enough, especially for minoritarian subjects.1 Muñoz draws on this concept from the work on concrete utopia by Marxist philosopher Ernest Bloch to describe a type of hope that is indeterminate, anticipatory, and revolutionary. It is what Muñoz would later describe as "not announcing the way things ought to be, but, instead, imagining the way things could be."2 The practice and potentiality of critical hope (also referred to as "educated desire") underpins many of Muñoz's theoretical projects, including his final work, The Sense of Brown (2020). Published seven years after the untimely passing of the distinguished scholar of performance studies, queer theory, and Latinx studies, José Esteban Muñoz's The Sense of Brown delves into a theorization of "Brownness" and "Brown commons" that is driven by this type of utopian hope. That is, he explores a desire to know Brownness and what a Brown commons could be. While Muñoz does not explicitly engage Bloch here as fully as in Cruising Utopia, the two nevertheless continue to be linked in thought and theory. As the editors of The Sense of Brown, Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o tell us, the manuscript was produced concurrently [End Page 211] with Cruising Utopia. In fact, Muñoz had already started to develop and present on this project before the publication of his first book, Disidentifications (1999).3 With Muñoz's passing, Chambers-Letson and Nyong'o were tasked in finalizing a draft still in development that drew from about fifteen years of Muñoz's writing. Many of the chapters included in The Sense of Brown are revised and sometimes expanded versions of previously published journal articles and chapters in edited collections. And while the editors did not omit any of the chapters from Muñoz's draft and kept his initial sequence, they did add six chapters not originally included to help frame the narrative. The result is a manuscript made up of thirteen chapters organized in two parts. The first section of the book focuses on affect and Brown feelings, whereas the second section explores the concept of Brown commons. Given the strong connection among Muñoz's scholarship, those familiar with his earlier work will recognize many of the scholars he engages here, including (among others) Raymond Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Norma Alarcón, and Jean-Luc Nancy. This theoretical range—from performance studies and postcolonial theory to ethnic studies and continental philosophy—provides Muñoz the foundation from which to consider the relationship between affect and U.S. ethnoracialization of minoritarian subjects that runs throughout. Taken together with his earlier writing, what sets this project apart is the substantial attention to the field of Latinx studies by way of Brownness. The Brownness that Muñoz posits is of the present moment and, further, urges readers to not only recognize but also act on its utopian possibilities. The question then is, what is Brownness? Indeed, Brown takes many forms in Muñoz's analysis by way of Brownness, Brown feelings, sense of Brown, Brown commons, and Brown worldings. Each of the proposed variations work to describe a sense of belonging among subjects deemed at odds with normative national affect. In other words, building from the work of May Joseph, Muñoz maintains that the United States has established unofficial affective norms that are impressed in everyday performances of (White) citizenship. The failure of subjects to correctly perform these standards marks them as Brown. This is perhaps best illustrated and complicated in the fifth chapter of Muñoz's monograph titled, "'Chico, What Does It Feel Like to Be a Problem?' The Transmission of Brownness." The question, derived from W. E. B. Du Bois, addresses the way subjects can affectively recognize they are seen as problematic. Muñoz...

Review: Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology, by Adam Nocek

Review: <i>Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology</i>, by Adam Nocek

Contempt for the Whos? or: How to Read Nietzsche Autobiographically after the Death of the Bios

This paper examines French philosopher Sarah Kofman’s fractured relationships to her identities as Jew and woman. Active participant in postwar debates surrounding deconstruction and psychoanalysis, acclaimed reader of Freud and Nietzsche, and interlocutor of Derrida, Kofman is today most widely remembered for her autobiographical writings about her childhood as a young Orthodox Jewish girl during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Kofman’s mother sent her to pretend to be the daughter of a Christian woman, which both ensured Kofman’s physical survival and led to an uncanny Freudian doubling of the maternal figure, such that both “Jew” and “Christian” became unstable, mimetic identity categories which Kofman could never again fully inhabit. The paper examines Kofman’s writings on Nietzsche, suggesting that her attempt to absolve the German philosopher of the charges of antisemitism oft leveled against him functioned as a similarly failed and incomplete means of asserting control over her personal identity. If Kofman could demonstrate that Nietzsche was not in fact an antisemite, then she could write herself into the lineage of Continental philosophy and reclaim the stable ancestry she lost during the war. Yet the paper concludes that a counter-narrative running throughout Kofman’s writings suggests an awareness that she could never fully absolve Nietzsche, and therefore that her attempt to claim Nietzsche as a father figure would always fail. The paper thus suggests that the illusion of control and stability epitomized by Kofman’s reading of Nietzsche provides an interpretive thematic to understand the unstable figure of the post-Holocaust Jewish philosopher.

Post-Neo-Kantianism and/or Transcendental Idealism

This article explores the development of continental philosophy of critical transcendentalism after World War II. The intention to interpret Kant’s transcendentalism corresponds both to the demand to establish feasibility and necessity of conclusive rational grounds for the validity of our cognition and to the need to legitimise the claim of philosophy to be irrefutable in the justification of its principles. While resisting attempts to find the basis for the determination of reason outside the reason itself, post-neo-Kantian continental transcendentalism also rejects the voluntarist scheme of the constructive relation of reason to the external environment. This approach implies the emergence of philosophical projects that offer alternatives to the postmodernist relativisation of philosophical results and to the skepticism that emerges within that framework.

Philosophy and theology

The contributions of “the turn to religion” in continental philosophy have begun to find their place in South African theological and philosophical circles. This article asks: how are we to position this phenomenon in the South African context and what implications it might have for the future of systematic theology? After situating the “turn to religion” in general, the article traces the historical development of philosophy’s creative relationship to theology by focusing on three representatives from the Stellenbosch tradition: the theologian Johannes du Plessis, the philosopher J.F. Kirsten, as well as the philosopher, Johann Degenaar. It argues that the relationship between philosophy and theology cultivated in these figures is characterized by what can be called the “propaedeutic” model, whereby theology is subjected to a “preparation” by philosophy. This model raises questions about the “use” of philosophy in contemporary systematic theology within the context of the secular academy and an ever-pluralizing world. The article suggests that recent debates in the continental “turn” are uniquely positioned to help reflect on such questions of methodology, and to this end makes a tentative proposal drawing on the philosophical-theological approach developed by the French thinker, Emmanuel Falque.

Postmodern Philosophy as a Condition for the Emergence of Posthumanism Theory

The article presents a brief retrospective of the conceptions of philosophical postmodernism in their connection with posthumanism. Posthumanism is a philosophical movement that has been actively developed in the last decade, with its roots in the 60s and 70s of continental philosophy. The discourse of posthumanism implies work and development of conceptions and notions used by M. Foucault, J. Derrida, J. Deleuze and F. Guattari, R. Barthes and others. Connecting with such philosophical trends as disability studies, animal studies, postcolonial philosophy, actor-network theory, intersectional feminism, posthumanism expands, complements and reincarnates many provisions of postmodern philosophy. This article outlines the main concepts used in posthumanist discourse.

The anti-Antigone: Pākehā settler masculinity, racialized kinship, and contested paternity in Carl Nixon’s Settlers’ Creek

ABSTRACT This article places Carl Nixon’s novel Settlers’ Creek (2010) alongside Sophocles’ Antigone as the springboard for an inquiry into the dynamic relationship between kinship bonds and state legitimacy in a settler-colonial context. Loosely based on a high-profile legal case in Aotearoa New Zealand regarding funerary practices, the novel highlights tensions between settler and indigenous constructions of law. Settlers’ Creek and Antigone share a central premise: rival claims for justice centred around the matter of an unburied corpse. However, where Antigone has been read in Continental philosophy to theorize the ascendance of the impersonal modern state and the deposition of kinship, Nixon’s novel can be read as an allegory of the reverse historical process through a (re)turn to filiative relationships in western nation states. By highlighting the Pākēhā protagonist’s failures to engage with bicultural kinship, the novel critiques a paternalistic colonial regime and undermines the affective grounding of settler cultural racism.

The Way of Becoming-Imperceptible: Daoism, Deleuze, and Inner Transformation

ABSTRACT This essay brings together the discourses of Daoism and Deleuze and Guattari to elucidate the convergence among them on a fundamental metaphysical level that can open, for the receptive mind, a deeper intuitive insight and understanding of what a person is capable of doing and becoming, and how such a person can enter into a different relation with spacetime beyond the conventional understanding of it. After examining how vital energy (qi 氣) is transformed in internal alchemy (neidan 内丹), the focus turns to a consideration of the possible relation between Daoist “immortality” and Deleuzo-Guattarian “becoming-imperceptible.”* * This essay is the result of decades of bodily practices beginning with gongfu 功夫 (Sanhedao 三和道 style) followed by taijiquan 太極拳 (Wu 吳 family style) and eventually qigong 氣功, which informed considerably my later philosophical reflections. Parts of this paper have been presented previously at the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, March 25, 2016; the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, Western Sydney University, Australia, November 23, 2018, the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle, University of Leiden, Netherlands, May 24, 2019; and the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition, University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, September 9, 2021. I am grateful for the opportunity to present my work at these societies and for the important critical feedback I received from their memberships. I also want to thank especially Meilin Chinn and Elisabet Yanagisawa for their many hours of conversation with me about my work on this topic.

Strange ethics, stranger politics: Levinas and Vice on escaping the passivity of shame

In this article, I put Emmanuel Levinas and Samantha Vice into conversation on the topics of shame and politics to demonstrate how each’s understanding on these can help attenuate shortcomings in the other’s position. Vice’s ethical inquiry into how white South Africans can be and live well, is I argue, problematically conceptualised. This tracks a problematic distinction between shame and guilt respectively, and consequently, undermines Vice’s suggested remedy of political silence. Levinas’s account of ethical subjectivity, in which the self is hostage to the other person, requiring a total apology for its shameful being, however, renders the subject so fundamentally passive that it becomes unclear how the passage to politics can be negotiated. In the first movement of my argument, I deploy Levinas to recast Vice’s project, to be and live well (in South Africa) as an ethical project always already a political project. In the second (but diachronous) movement of my argument, I argue that Vice’s prescription that those implicated in, and continuing to benefit from, systems of oppression should remain politically silent, offers a practical way to cash out Levinas’s zig-zag movement between ethics and politics. A secondary contribution of the article adds to the project of putting analytic moral philosophy (broadly Vice’s position) into dialogue with continental philosophy as exemplified in Levinasian ethics.

Literary Attachment: From the Abstraction of Critique to the Unfolding of Story

The aim of this article is to return literary criticism to an interpretation and evaluation of the “literary” in literature. Cognisant of the influence of critique in its intrusion of continental philosophy on literary studies, the contention is that a shift from the abstraction of critique to the unfolding of the story can remind us of what literature can do, as distinct from what, say, philosophical discourse can do. Rather than configure the work to a single idea or set of ideas—the preference of critique—the approach is less theoretically construed and more subjective, less interrogative of underlying causes and determinations and more affirmative of literary achievement. Drawing on the insights of critics such as Hedley Twidle, Duncan Brown, Rita Felski, and J. M. Coetzee on the value of the “literary”, the argument seeks to invoke and evoke a style of intimacy in a correlation between the creative work and the critical act. In illustration, I offer two case studies: my response to a compulsion to “storify” in the work of André Brink, and my application of a theoretical consideration to the literary criticism of Lewis Nkosi.

Wormholes in Hyper-Chaos

In this article, I examine the possible link between Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power and the new movement in continental philosophy known as speculative realism. Nietzsche is never invoked as a possible (re)source in the war against anti-realism, nor is he identified as a leading officer behind enemy lines but remains in the neutral zone. Although Meillassoux does seem to place Nietzsche in the camp of anti-realists, he is not the main target but only mentioned in a passing remark. In this article, I interpret Nietzsche into the framework of speculative realism and argue that he can be said to occupy a position in-between Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and Meillassoux’s speculative materialism.