This article examines the tensions between the values of freedom and equality along the lines of an immanent critique to the libertarian approach— an approach that claims absolute priority to the value of freedom. The article seeks to defend the idea of positive duties through a criticism of the negative absolute value of individual liberty. The article also makes the case for positive duties in a more direct way, i.e., by showing how positive duties are consistent with the value of liberty as a political value. The idea is to bring to light the thesis that positive duties are a necessary condition of liberty properly understood.

This essay explores the metaphysical and philosophical implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) through the intersecting insights of René Guénon (ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥiā), Martin Heidegger, and Ibn al-ʿArabī. It argues that modern AI systems, particularly in their statistical and data-centric forms, are not merely instrumental tools but expressions of a deeper metaphysical worldview-one rooted in quantification, abstraction, and utility. Guénon’s critique of the “reign of quantity” and Heidegger’s notion of Enframing (Gestell) converge in diagnosing the loss of qualitative and sacred dimensions in modern life. While Heidegger’s phenomenology provides a powerful immanent critique of technological reductionism from within the Western philosophical tradition, Guénon’s metaphysical traditionalism articulates a diagnosis of modernity that resonates with Islamic metaphysics, especially as articulated by Ibn al-ʿArabī. The essay includes Heidegger in the argument as a representative of a critique of modern technology issuing from the Western tradition itself, and by emphasizing his shared concerns with Guénon, whose metaphysics resonates with Ibn al-ʿArabī’s metaphysics. Through a comparative metaphysical framework, this paper proposes an Islamic response to AI that avoids both technophilia and technophobia, insisting instead on a spiritually grounded ethic of technology that preserves human’s dignity and mission. Methodologically, the essay restores a prior order often inverted in contemporary AI ethics: ontology (what AI is) grounds epistemology (what it can know), and only then can ethical evaluation be coherent.

The subject of this study is Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, analyzed as a project integrating three key aspects: the ontology of the "will to power"; its teleological function as a tool for cultural critique and myth-making; and its existential-performative dimension, realized in Nietzsche's style and life. The article aims to reinterpret his legacy by overcoming the dichotomy between dogmatic and reductive readings, revealing the intrinsic link between the logical aporias of his philosophy and its enactment as a life project. The methodology combines immanent critique of the "will to power" (identifying contradictions like chaos vs. law, tautology), analysis of its strategic role as a "hammer" and "foundation" in combating nihilism, deconstruction of self-referential aporias (e.g., perspectivism's paradox), and a final synthesis viewing Nietzsche's philosophy as a holistic performative act. The results demonstrate that the contradictions in the "will to power" are not flaws but serve a teleological purpose in Nietzsche's therapeutic project. The aporias of self-reference, which prevent validation of his teachings as propositional truth, shift the focus to their existential-performative significance. The article proposes the concept of Nietzsche as a "philadox" (philosopher-performer), whose biography, including his descent into madness, becomes the culminating argument of his thought. The conclusion asserts that Nietzsche's true legacy is not the doctrine of the "will to power" but the development of a performative ontology—a mode of thought enacted as a tragic, risky experiment in creating meaning in a godless world. His relevance lies not in a system of answers, but in a radical methodology of questioning, inviting co-creation of being amidst ontological emptiness.

This study is meant to develop an immanent critique following the dialogism of socio-poetics in the literary criticism of Mikhail Bakhtin. Socio-poetics in the reception and composition of Shakespeare's works reflect the first intimations of social and political transformation to a modern nationalized society from a premodern feudal society. This study explores Shakespeare's use of metaphor through his dramatizations and characterizations at the dawn of modernity and the decline of feudalism: identifying contradictions and tensions that intimate this transformation in English society and language, and, providing an approach to this globalizing language that partakes in simultaneous modes of confabulation and possible de-commodification of that language through an understanding founded in a socio-poetics. Shakespeare's unique historical position in delimiting later formations of the English language, his composition of modes of reference and literacy, also prepares a potential critique of the contemporary use of figurative language in the present socio-political moment. Author Biography Thomas Bechtold, University of Tennessee Thomas Bechtold is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee- Knoxville where he studies critical social theory and environmental sociology.

ABSTRACT This essay examines H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom to explore how anti-Black violence and colonial desire constitute the conditions of possibility for weird horror. Drawing from theories of anti-Blackness, social death, and racial monstrosity, we argue that LaValle’s novella refigures Lovecraft’s racist constructions of Otherness by placing Blackness as both the site and revelation of horror in civil society. Where Lovecraft identifies immigrants and Black bodies as the cause of “strange egress” and cosmological disruption, LaValle locates the origins of horror in the colonial desire to master and exploit the Other and articulates Blackness as a mode of critique. Through this inversion, The Ballad illuminates the weird affective potentiality of anti-Black violence, revealing how speculative horror relies upon the same logics that structure anti-Black social death. By linking the “weird” to lived experiences of racialized terror, the essay situates LaValle’s rewriting as an immanent critique of speculative horror and its underlying racial assumptions, offering a framework for understanding monstrosity as a mode of defiant subjectivity against the symbolic order of whiteness.

This article is an attempt at formal analysis as immanent criticism, a kind of close reading describing and commenting on Júlio Bressane's film O anjo nasceu (The Angel Was Born, 1969) as an internal rupture within Cinema Novo, operating mainly on a formal level. Instead of the expressive mobility of “a camera in hand and an idea in mind” and the narrative dynamism associated with mobility around popular characters or their representatives — such as in Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe (1967) and so many other Cinema Novo works — the film constructs a rigid, frontal, and orthogonal visual space, as if viewed from infinity.

This paper presents the results of a philosophical analysis of the ontological foundations of sociocultural identi-ty. In the context of the contemporary anthropological crisis, characterized by globalization and digitalization, the problem of defining the foundations of identity becomes particularly relevant. The study aims not only to identify and critically examine the main ontological paradigms (substantialist and constructivist) but also to positively resolve their antinomy through the development of a synthetic multi-level model of sociocultural iden-tity. The methodological basis comprises comparative-historical analysis, hermeneutic interpretation of texts, and immanent criticism. The conducted research has enabled the systematization of key ontological models of identity and the identification of their methodological limitations. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of classical concepts—from the Aristotelian substantialist tradition to modern constructivist approaches. As a re-sult, an ontological model is proposed, describing the being of socio-cultural identity as a multi-level phenome-non existing simultaneously in the modes of intersubjectivity, incorporation, narrativity, and practicality. The model integrates the achievements of various philosophical traditions, offering a holistic understanding of iden-tity as a unity of stability and variability, objective and subjective, individual and collective. It is shown that the proposed model, overcoming the limitations of substantialist and constructivist approaches, opens new per-spectives for non-classical ontology and possesses significant potential for social epistemology. The proposed synthetic approach creates a theoretical basis for analyzing contemporary transformations of identity in the context of digitalization and global migration processes, which determines its practical significance for social and humanitarian research.

Based on the Purahéi Trio's version of the polka-song "Lucerito Alba" (Eladio Martínez), released in the album Paraguay Purahéi (2014), this paper addresses and discusses the relationship between modernization of popular music and socioeconomic modernization. The immanent critique of the song unfolds a historical-sociological commentary on the development of popular music in Paraguay, aiming to highlight the tension between the emergence of modern historical temporality and the efforts to contain its transformative force. The conclusions points to the exhaustion of the dynamic established between musical modernization and socioeconomic modernization throughout the 20th century.

This study explores, from decolonial economics perspective, how nineteen Zimbabwean banks engage with both Euro-American and indigenous knowledge systems in their sustainable finance practices. Despite growing global interest in sustainability, limited research has examined the relevance of these models within Zimbabwe’s socio-economic context. Addressing this gap, the study employs transformative sequential mixed methods, incorporating 289 structured questionnaires, 30 focus group discussions, and 45 archival documents. Data were subjected to descriptive statistics, narrative analysis, Marxist immanent critique, and decolonial theory. Findings reveal that Zimbabwean banks predominantly adopt Euro-American sustainability frameworks such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Paris Accords and accounting standards. However, these frameworks often misalign with local realities, obscuring sustainability colonialism, promoting exclusion of indigenous knowledge, reinforcing Global North dominance, and perpetuating weak sustainability theory. This results in superficial compliance that conceals extractive investments and carbon-intensive practices. Moreover, these models deepen subordinated financialization, commodification, elite capture, resource expropriation, and socio-environmental inequalities. The study calls for a paradigm shift, either rejecting Euro-American models in favor of indigenous approaches or adopting a hybrid model that integrates indigenous knowledge. Such a shift would promote strong sustainability, pluralism, and decolonized institutional frameworks to foster financial inclusion, community resilience, and ecological regeneration in Zimbabwe.

This paper contextualizes Shao Yihui's recent works within the evolving framework of feminist film theory, examining how her cinematic practice constitutes both a theoretical intervention and a formal revolution. Through close analysis of Love Myth (2021) and Her Story (2024), this study demonstrates how Shao's directorial efforts fashion complex female subjectivities while systematically challenging patriarchal narrative conventions. Her achievement lies not in merely applying feminist theory to cinematic content, but in generating what might be termed an "immanent critique"working through innovation from within cinematic form itself, rather than external criticism that raises the problem of form. This paper explores in particular Shao's soundscape, narrative and spatial manipulation to emerge from the conception of space, structure and spatial dynamism. The "feminist formal language" that reconfigures the bond between characters within these films and their cinematic environment. More specifically, by comparing Shao's construction to the gender politics in box office hit animated film Ne Zha: The Demon Boy Churns the Sea , this discussion illustrates how the problems of patriarchal representation remain while highlighting Shao's unique role in the making of what can be interpreted as "feminine gaze" in the Chinese cinema of today. The paper examines how digital counterpublics are challenging what feminist discourse can look like in China's rapidly evolving media ecology.

Abstract Critics have argued that Husserl’s analysis of Europe, rationality, and the lifeworld in his groundbreaking 1936 work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is ultimately Eurocentric. Others defend Husserl’s articulation of the cosmopolitan universalist aspirations of philosophy and a lifeform of individual autonomy and free rational inquiry in the context of his response to growing irrationalism and fascism. Both perspectives have their validity: Husserl’s genealogy addressed a unique Occidental history and ideal of rationality, identified with the idea of “Europe” in contrast to specific national identities, and his analysis retained Eurocentric elements that restricted its universalist cosmopolitan intentions. The present contribution outlines a more comprehensive perspective by differentiating Eurocentric, cosmopolitan, and intercultural moments in Husserl’s works in a liberalizing or pluralizing immanent critique that interculturally modifies Husserl’s phenomenology of rationality, history, and the lifeworld. By drawing on modern Chinese philosophy, his contemporaries such as Georg Misch, and Husserl’s phenomenology, I critically reconstruct how Husserl’s philosophy already indicates a more pluralistic and critically intercultural understanding of the lifeworld and reason beyond the dialectic of pseudo-universalism and ethnocentric particularism that continues to confront contemporary thought.

The objective of this research is to uncover the mechanisms through which platform ideology is transformed into a form of total domination, embedded within the very infrastructure of digital capitalism. This paper demonstrates that digital platforms are not merely neutral intermediaries in the realm of communication; rather, they actively constitute new forms of subjectivity. In doing so, they reframe the human being as an object of algorithmic control and a source of user data. The scientific novelty of the study lies in its examination of the phenomenon of platform ideology through the lens of the intellectual tradition of immanent critique, as developed by the leading theorists of the Frankfurt School. This theoretical framework allows us not only to draw parallels between processes of digitalization and the logic of the culture industry but also to identify a radicalization of alienation and reification under the conditions of digital capitalism. The findings affirm the continued relevance of Critical Theory as an indispensable tool for a scientific understanding of digital society. Furthermore, they underscore the necessity of rethinking traditional categories of domination and subordination within the context of platform capitalism.

This article reexamines the normative dimension of Marx’s critique of capitalism, arguing that value theory and reification carry intrinsic ethical implications. Against readings that detach Marxism from questions of justice, it deploys immanent critique to show that freedom and autonomy are not external ideals but contradictions immanent to capitalist society. Through analyses of alienation, the value-form, and capital’s apparent autonomy, it shows how capitalist relations invert human purposes: value appears to act, while agency is rendered derivative. Reconnecting these processes to Marx’s emancipatory horizon, the article reconstructs the normative core of his critique and clarifies its relevance to domination, including platform labor, digital commodification, and ecological crisis. Rather than moralizing, Marx’s method grounds critique in capitalism’s own promises and failures. In doing so, it provides a structural diagnosis of domination and a situated horizon of emancipation oriented toward collective self-determination and the recovery of time, cooperation, and purposive human freedom.

This article offers a reinterpretation of Epicurean ethics as an immanent critique within the Greek rationalist tradition. Contrary to reductive depictions of Epicurus as a private hedonist or metaphysical minimalist, this article argues that Epicurus deploys reason not to affirm speculative truths. Instead, he dismantles the affective and ideological residues embedded within traditional rationality. Central to this transformation is the concept of ataraxia, defined not merely as emotional tranquility but as a normative condition of freedom from irrational fear, particularly those induced by myths of divine retribution and the afterlife (Warren, 2002, pp. 48–52). Through a comparative analysis with Aristotle’s eudaimonia and Stoic apatheia, the article demonstrates that while all three schools uphold the regulative role of reason, Epicurus uniquely reorients its function toward existential healing rather than cosmological alignment or civic virtue. This redirection is grounded in a materialist metaphysics and expressed through practical techniques such as philosophical correspondence, aphoristic distillation, and communal withdrawal. Furthermore, the paper incorporates Foucault’s notion of “care of the self” and Hadot’s concept of “spiritual exercises” to contextualize Epicurean thought as both ethical and political resistance. Epicurus thus emerges not as a marginal thinker but as a radical dissident within the Hellenic intellectual order, a philosopher who redefines reason as a therapeutic instrument of liberation from epistemic anxiety and institutional control.

Ideologiekritik finds itself in an apparent impasse: the ambiguity of the concept of ideology and the lack of clear practical outcomes cast doubt on its usefulness. The present article addresses the problem by examining the very possibility of ideology critique. It is structured in three parts: 1) it reconstructs the concept of immanent critique in the work of Rahel Jaeggi and examines how this perspective seeks to navigate the theoretical dilemmas of ideology critique; 2) it analyzes the notion of “ferment” as a description of the transformative effect of ideological critique, highlighting its limitations in terms of procedure, teleology, and instrumental function; 3) it proposes that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics –through the notions of anticipation of perfection, experience, and dialogue– expands the scope of the ferment metaphor, conceiving social transformation as a process of learning and hermeneutical appropriation of normative-practical contradictions. In doing so, the article reopens the dialogue between critical theory and hermeneutics, and argues that Ideologiekritik can be understood as an interpretive dynamism capable of producing social change without resorting to external foundations or merely restoring prior values.

On medical ideology and the production of docile doctors: The politics of care in an age of authoritarianism.

Abstract Although nominally about the Son of Sam killings, Spike Lee's 1999 film Summer of Sam is typically interpreted as an auteurist allegory for racial scapegoating. Such allegorical reading raises a question about the nature the film's textual properties vis-à-vis the textual nature of intellectual property in American jurisprudence. This essay argues that Summer of Sam poses an immanent critique of the concept of property, as refracted through the more capacious concept of arbitrage capture: the speculative positing of difference and the subsequent appropriation of that difference via identification. Through its narrative and aesthetic form, the film systematically, reflexively, and critically stages processes of capture between characters, their personal properties, and the semiotic and phenomenal properties of the image as such, consequently aligning the protocols of allegorical interpretation with those of capture. Implicit in the film's immanent critique of capture are critiques of intellectual property and allegorical reading, ultimately staged as problematically isomorphic within the film. At stake is the possibility of reading for fugitivity, rather than for property.

Abstract At the conclusion of “Minima Moralia,” Theodor W. Adorno invokes a “standpoint of redemption.” I interpret this formulation as a methodological self-description and argue that it does not conflict with critical theory’s commitment to immanent critique. After distinguishing between two divergent accounts of immanent critique in recent scholarship, I turn to the idea of a “standpoint of redemption” or “inverse theology,” traced back to Siegfried Kracauer’s early writings on Franz Kafka. In his “Notes on Kafka,” Adorno develops motifs from Kracauer into his most thorough articulation of the negativist-messianic device. Instead of contrasting social phenomena with ideal alternatives, “inverse theology” presents the absurd as normal, rendering reality uncanny through analogies that depict humans as animals and the present as if it belonged to a distant past. In this way, the standpoint of redemption emerges indirectly, by estranging everyday life. Adorno’s reading of Kafka thus clarifies his own method of social critique. This method neither contradicts the version of immanent critique that, I contend, most faithfully captures the tradition of critical theory, nor does it entail substantive theological commitments. Rather, it can be understood as a form of “inverse utopianism.”

ABSTRACT: This article revisits Foucault's reading of Nietzsche, with a special focus on the medical metaphors surrounding the definition and practice of genealogy. It argues that, in addition to the emphasis on the notion of diagnosis as a key medically inspired element of genealogy, it is important to consider an aspect that has been significantly less explored in existing scholarship on Foucault's appropriation of Nietzsche's philosophy: that of genealogy as a "curative" art or as a "science of remedies." Hence the article presents Nietzsche as a thinker of health and disease, and his views on the philosopher as a kind of physician. Then, it moves on to examine the "historical sense" as a notion that plays a key role in Foucault's reading of Nietzsche in his 1969–1970 lectures at Vincennes and his definition of genealogy as a practice of history that both emerges from epochal disease and points to possible forms of healing. My claim is that, in the Vincennes lectures on Nietzsche, the historical sense can be described as something that can poison and heal, and as a process of immanent critique of the present, carrying the possibility of its transfiguration.

St. Augustine famously argued that those who do not orient their loves toward God lack true virtue, offering as a test case pagan sages who cared too much for their own honor. For this polemic he has been lauded and lambasted; however, in significant ways, I contend, he has been misunderstood. A close reading of Augustine in his historical context helps us understand him as a revisionary yet committed classical eudaimonist, whose attack on pagan virtue was an immanent critique of views attractive to many Christians, including his younger self. This approach reveals the complexity of his relationship to pagan virtue theory and suggests that Augustine's modern readers have overestimated the severity of his critique. Although Augustine came to think of true virtue as a theological good that can only be had in grateful dependence on God, he also drew on little-noticed neo-Platonic traditions that distinguished perfect, true virtue, from civic virtues that are imperfect but nonetheless worthy of praise. This allowed him to admire pagan exemplars while critiquing the lack of compassion and humility that vitiated both their understanding of greatness and their ability to promote lasting communal flourishing.