Intellectual Affinities Research Articles

Violence Today: A Comparative Reading of Jacques Ellul and René Girard

This article explores the differences and intellectual affinities between Jacques Ellul and René Girard on the question of violence in today’s world. In this respect, both thinkers share the conviction that violence has changed form because of material and spiritual factors. The presentation of these factors will enable us to show the differences, but above all the complementarities, between Girard and Ellul. Finally, based on these two authors, the article sketches out an attempt to describe the future of violence.

North of Carmel: Jeffers, Bringhurst, and the Ecological View

This article proposes that the works of the modern American poet Robinson Jeffers and those of the contemporary Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst are linked by an ecological ethos. Although specific instances of Jeffers’s influence occur here and there in Canadian literary history, the connection between Jeffers and Bringhurst is more substantial, if not immediately obvious. It consists in an aesthetic and intellectual affinity—in a shared poetic terrain that is a conceptual equivalent of the western North American geography they have in common. (Jeffers was a Californian poet; Bringhurst is often associated with the Pacific Northwest.) The poets are comparably concerned with wilderness, which in their works is not always remote or uninhabited but rather characterized by the peripheral place of humanity. In attending to parallels between the authors’ works, the article suggests that reading across the border between Canada and the United States brings into view significant literary connections.

Suhrawardi’s Ishraq in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism: A Phenomenological Reading of Knowledge and Intuition

Among all the Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) looked forward to a more glorious state in America than history had yet recorded at a turning point in the foundation of his nation’s literature. The belief in human progress culminating in a religion of humanity is the reason that Transcendentalism came into understanding Asian religions and doctrines to which Ishraq (Philosophy of Illumination) belongs. By explicating the phenomenological ontology of Suhrawardi’s concept of light in The Discourses of Philosophy of Illumination and placing this ontology within regard for Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Ontopoiesis (phenomenology of Life) and Emerson’s Transcendentalism, a descriptive framework for such an analysis can be found with an emphasis upon knowledge and intuition. This comparative reading will bring an entire range of genuine phenomenological reflections in Ishraqi philosophy to the occidental forum of Transcendentalism, looking for parallel development and cross-cultural dialogue to reflect an intellectual affinity.

British Formalist Aesthetics and Its Literary Writing Practice

British Formalist Aesthetics and Its Literary Writing Practice

Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism and Kabbalah ed. by Jeremy P. Brown and Marc Herman

Reviewed by: Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism and Kabbalah ed. by Jeremy P. Brown and Marc Herman Dana Fishkin jeremy p. brown and marc herman (eds.),Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism and Kabbalah (Études sur le judaïsme médiéval 86; Leiden: Brill, 2021), Pp. vii + 300. $188. This collection on the commandments in medieval Jewish thought brings together a wide range of scholars and topics, reinforcing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to Jewish studies. The enumeration and rationalization of the commandments emerged from the realms of medieval philosophical and mystical thinking, and this book demonstrates how fundamental those approaches were to various medieval thinkers for concepts as well as imagery and terminology. Often, as revealed by several chapters, one’s approach to the commandments served as a gauge of sorts, signaling one’s ideological, cultural, or intellectual affinities. In “Dê Maḥsoro as the Key to Jewish Almsgiving: A Maimonidean Interpretive Innovation and Its Legal Afterlife to the Fifteenth Century” (pp. 27–44), Alyssa M. Gray traces the commandment of almsgiving, alongside its evolving interpretation, from the rabbinic to the early modern periods. Rabbinic interpretations of “Dê Maḥsoro,” a shorthand reference to the biblical verse (Num 15:8) that orders Israelites to furnish an impoverished person with enough to satisfy his lack, identified concrete and specific acts of charity. Gray demonstrates how Maimonides transformed this concretized concept into a general commandment encompassing all types of charity. However, Gray shows that the Maimonidean reappraisal was not adopted until the fourteenth century when Iberian and Ashkenazic cultural sensibilities became enmeshed. Also indicating engagement between the Ashkenazic and Iberian worlds, according to Ephraim Kanarfogel, the Ashkenazic rationalization of commandments is examined in “Ṭaʿame ha- miṣvot in Medieval Ashkenaz” (pp. 177–90). This important historiographical corrective examines three groups of scholars whose engagement in the rationalization of the commandments signals exposure to Iberian rationalism. Anti-Christian polemicists and exegetes who authored biblical commentaries according to the literal sense (pashtanim) rationalized certain commandments in accordance with natural logic. The robust rationalizations of the mystically inclined German Pietists, however, highlighted their two-tiered [End Page 173] approach, in which mystical adepts and common folk each grasped different reasons for commandments. Similarly, a two-tiered social structure highlighted by the rationalization of the commandments, is also explored by Elisha Russ-Fishbane in “Pietism in the Law and the Law of Pietism: From Moses to Abraham Maimonides” (pp. 191–207). Russ-Fishbane demonstrates Abraham’s nuanced view of the pietistic ideal, founded upon key elements of the Maimonidean approach to law and supererogatory ethic, but reinforcing Sufi mystical ideals. Albert Dov Friedberg, too, examines Maimonidean notions of Pietism in “Maimonides’s Long Journey from Greek to Jewish Ethics” (pp. 97–117). He compares two Maimonidean works on ethics, the Eight Chapters and the laws concerning character traits (Hilkhot De’ot) from Mishneh Torah, to posit a noticeable revision of Maimonides’s position on ethics. In his commentary on Mishnah Avot, known as the Eight Chapters, Maimonides promotes the mean between two extremes as leading to perfect morality. Yet, as Friedberg notes, the Aristotelian stance expressed by Maimonides contradicts the valorization of supererogatory behavior found in rabbinic literature. Inferring Maimonides’s intellectual maturation, Friedberg claims that Maimonides elevates the commandment to imitate God into an independent one expressing rabbinic valorization of Pietism. Using a creative angle through which to appreciate the impact of Maimonides on the enumeration and rationalization of the commandments, Marc Herman’s “Early Evaluation of Maimonides’s Enumeration of the Commandments against the Background of the Eastern Maimonidean Controversy” (pp. 83–96) examines the exchange between a reputed “anti-Maimonidean” Daniel ben Saadia and Abraham Maimonides. Herman’s focus on the congenial exchange between Daniel and Abraham Maimonides leads him to problematize the controversial nature of the Maimonidean controversy in the East, and to conclude that, despite being a student of an anti-Maimonidean scholar, Daniel nevertheless adopted Maimonidean linguistic and conceptual elements in his own approach to Ṭaʿame ha-miṣvot. Guadalupe González Diéguez’s “The Reasons for the Commandments in Isaac...

Семен Франк и Яков Голосовкер: о кантианских мотивах в творчестве Ф.М. Достоевского

Russian philosophy is “a sphere of conversation” in which thought is “divined”. It is a realm of search for “universal meaning” and “cultivation” of historical reality. Such a “conversation” around the work of Dostoyevsky took place in the 1920s among philosophers (including members of the Free Philosophical Association or Volfila in its abbreviated form). The theme takes on added significance at the hands of Ya. E. Golosovker and S. L. Frank whose intellectual affinity manifests itself today in the way they interpret Kantian motives in the work of Dostoyevsky. Reflecting on “the logic of imagination” Golosovker draws attention to the fact that the concrete-metaphysical method of seeing the world is not identical to the amphiboly of Kant’s reflexive concepts. He made it the central theme of his book, Dostoyevsky and Kant, immersing the philosophical component of the novel The Brothers Karamazov in the context of Kant’s antinomies. The later Frank took up the subject of Dostoyevsky’s worldview in response, as it were, to the discussion of the problem of cultural crisis at Volfila (including at meetings “In Memory of Dostoyevsky”). Following Yakov Golosovker, Andrey Bely, Aron Steinberg, Semyon Lurie and others, he continued the discussion of the crisis in its organised forms. In this context, too, Kant is a significant presence. For Frank, as for Golosovker, Dostoyevsky’s world view has a “concrete-metaphysical character”. They come to this conclusion reflecting on the problem of freedom as seen by Dostoyevsky who sought to overcome Kant’s antinomies.

Skjönsberg, Max. The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Skjönsberg, Max. <i>The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain</i>

Decisionism and Liberal Constitutionalism in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao’s Critique of Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political

ABSTRACT This article examines the prominent Japanese postwar thinker Maruyama Masao’s critical engagement with his contemporary German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Maruyama engaged with Schmitt’s decisionistic notion of “the political” and sovereignty since he found it useful in addressing the pathological elements of Japanese political culture, namely, the widespread political passivity and fatalistic ethos of the Japanese public. In his view, such a “decision-avoiding” political culture, which had contributed to the rise of fascism in interwar and wartime Japan, posed a fundamental threat to the viability of Japan’s postwar democracy. Although Maruyama objected to Schmitt’s authoritarian theory of political leadership, he nevertheless believed Schmitt provided important insights into the key concepts of modern politics, such as political agency and the constituent power of the people. In his efforts to foster political subjectivity and liberal individuality in postwar Japan, Maruyama attempted to strike a balance between two extremes: Schmittian normless decisionism, on the one hand, and a politically naïve liberal constitutionalism, on the other. I conclude by suggesting that the hitherto overlooked intellectual affinity between Maruyama and one of the leading Weimar-era constitutional theorists—Hermann Heller—can enrich our understanding of Maruyama’s unceasing effort to formulate and insist on the imperative role of political subjectivity and liberal individuality in consolidating liberal democracy in postwar Japan.

Hesiod’s Verbal Craft: Studies in Hesiod’s Conception of Language and Its Ancient Reception by Athanassios Vergados

Reviewed by: Hesiod’s Verbal Craft: Studies in Hesiod’s Conception of Language and Its Ancient Reception by Athanassios Vergados George Boys-Stones VERGADOS, Athanassios. Hesiod’s Verbal Craft: Studies in Hesiod’s Conception of Language and Its Ancient Reception. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xii + 370 pp. Cloth, $105.00 Starting from Hesiod’s “etymologies,” this work explores Hesiod’s relationship with language in general, and the language of the Greek mythological tradition in particular. In part 1 three chapters present worked examples of “etymology” in Hesiod: two mythological groups with contested histories and genealogies (the Muses, chapter 2; the Cyclopes, chapter 3), and others including Pandora in chapter 4. A significant result is that Hesiod shows himself to be more optimistic about finding stable meaning and objective truth in the study of names in the Theogony than in Works and Days where, as the slippery name “Pandora” shows, meaning can be more up for grabs. A corresponding division between these two works is discovered in the five chapters of part 2. Beginning with Hesiod’s famous “correction” of his Theogony account of Eris (in Works and Days 11–12 he says that there are two Erides, not one), Vergados asks us to see that, for Hesiod, discourse about the divine realm (in the Theogony) can achieve a greater stability than discourse aimed at the “complexities and ambiguities of the human condition in the Iron Age” (in Works and Days). “Eris” divides (in chapter 5 Vergados calls this a Begriffsspaltung), and with its division is no longer “absolute.” Further Hesiodic divisions and revisions are explored in chapter 6 and 7 (where the focus is on Dike). Chapter 8 looks at “kennings and riddles,” that is, the naming of things by riddling allusion, as when the ant is called idris, “the wise one” (Works 778). Chapter 9 looks at a case, the day called “Triseinas,” where Hesiod makes an explicit claim for the “truth” of this name (used, he says, by few; Works 818). In part 3 Vergados moves to consider Hesiod’s ancient reception as an intellectual, showing that he was spoken of in the same breath as mythographers such as Acusilaus and shares many of the characteristics of a historian like Hecataeus. His role as a voice of authority for the etymological inquiries of Plato’s Cratylus occupies chapter 11 (Vergados finds “a certain intellectual affinity” between Hesiod and the dialogue’s [End Page 644] eponym); and in chapter 12 his role in the Homeric scholia as a sort of authority—albeit not an incontestable one—is explored. The details and broad conclusions of this study are illuminating about Hesiod’s art—for example, in unpacking the “micro-narratives” embedded in the focus on names and in unwinding the tacit engagements with Homer. They also lend strong support to the trend for rehabilitating Hesiod as a serious player, even a pioneer, in the Greek intellectual tradition. Whether Vergados delivers on his promise of a Hesiodic “philosophy of language” is another question, though the aspiration clearly guides the work. The very word “etymology,” which Vergados uses for Hesiod’s interest in names, is applied in a way that leads him regularly to compare Hesiod to modern linguistic science (but Hesiod always gets “wrong” what it gets right), and also to attribute to him the view that name-origins ideally have their own philosophical authority, that is, reveal truths about the world. The more straightforward possibility that Hesiod thought that he was merely exploring the views of whoever gave his subjects their names is not considered here—although it might have given the basis for a more organic integration of the chapter on “kennings,” and it might have helped Vergados avoid some obvious missteps. Epōnumos is overtranslated as “true name”; Eris is not “relativized” because there are two “Erides” differing in moral valence (any more than “egg” is a relative term because there are good and bad eggs); Heraclitus is not “attacking” the epic poets when they use a word for “bow” that has the same written form as a word for “life.” Vergados argues that Hesiod’s ultimate aim is to establish his “authority” through what amounts to...

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Chinese culture and psychoanalysis

An emotional and intellectual affinity between Chinese culture and psychoanalysis has surprised and attracted many of us who work and teach in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. A primary motive for seeking analysis and psychoanalytic training is because psychoanalysis serves as an inner resource for modern Chinese to resist the authority and moral coercion from family, repressive institutions, and the state. Despite the current focus on the narcissism of wealth, power, and fame among affluent urban Chinese, the reception of psychoanalysis is conditioned by contemporary and ancient cultural factors. For contemporary Chinese, psychoanalysis is an exciting tool of personal liberation to build a sense of an autonomous self that is not a part of traditional Chinese values and family structures. This article will focus on the traditional imperatives, suggesting that explicit trends in Chinese culture and philosophical and religious traditions contribute to explaining why there is currently an enthusiastic responsiveness to psychoanalysis in China (Scharff &amp; Varvin, 2014). To those who have worked and taught in China there appears to be a cultural aptitude for the psychodynamic modes of thought, its dialectics, the coexistence of contradictions, the suspension and collapse of linear time categories that allows Chinese students and candidates to “take to” and under-stand analytic thought and practice. I believe the Chinese will, in the tradition of their rich and ancient intellectual heritage, develop a form of “Chinese psychoanalysis” which will synthesise the Western psychoanalytic “schools” and teachings with uniquely Chinese tempers, flavours, registers, and characteristics (Gerlach et al., 2013).

Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism has been invoked to stress the potential advantages of thinking beyond the nation with regard to human rights, diasporic or intellectual affinities, as well as other forms of affiliation. However, nationalism does not have to amount to a mere manifestation of ethnic or xenophobic closure, and it may foreground an effective cosmopolitanism that ensures social rights on a local and a transnational level. The author considers not only the European nationalist tradition but also the ways in which it was appropriated and redefined in non-European places as a condition of the possibility for more effective transnational, cosmopolitan alliances.

Clough, Emerson, and Knowingness

Abstract The poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough has tended to be read in dialogue with the writings of his friend and critic, Matthew Arnold. This essay explores how bringing Clough’s work into conversation with that of a very different friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, offers to cast his intellectual affinities and poetic technique in a new light. Interweaving close readings of Clough’s verse with detailed attention to the essays he is known to have read and admired, I trace how Clough adapts and revises Emerson’s critique of ‘knowingness’. Beginning by tracing the history of this term in nineteenth-century literature and culture, I argue that Clough’s Dipsychus shapes an Emersonian ethic and aesthetic of encounter as an alternative to complacent and proprietorial forms of knowing. Turning to the rest of Clough’s oeuvre, especially Amours de Voyage, I then consider how fantasies of the future are central to what it means to be knowing about oneself, and examine how Clough applies poetic pressure to Emerson’s conviction that ‘A man … never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going’.

A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch ed. by Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galen Tihanov

Reviewed by: A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch ed. by Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galen Tihanov Richard Lambert III Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galen Tihanov, eds., A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 278 pp. In their edited volume A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch, editors Graham Bartram, Sarah McGaughey, and Galin Tihanov deliver a comprehensive scholarly introduction that valiantly strives to render the works of a great Austrian modernist—finally—more accessible to a broad audience. Impressive in both scope and depth, the Companion leaves no stone unturned in its attempt to chronicle both the longevity and scope of Broch's diverse writings and offers both tried-and-true assessments of Broch's major novels alongside new perspectives and disciplinary approaches toward some of the author's less prominent works. The resulting collection is thus a fitting testimony to the breadth of Broch's intellectual engagements, ranging from art and literature to ethics, politics, and social theory. This commitment to comprehensiveness is without question the major success of the volume. The Companion wrangles Broch's complicated, complex aesthetic and oftentimes explicitly philosophical writings into a concise, comprehensible, and exhaustive introductory work. The Companion is effectively structured chronologically. After Bartram and McGaughey's introduction, which offers a full biographical overview of Broch's life and career, each contribution profiles a subsequent work or critical evolution in Broch's thought according to its date of publication or its emergence as a salient theme in his writings. The scope and focus of these contributions vary from chapter to chapter, and the interpretive impetus accordingly fluctuates between exploring new perspectives, methods, and themes, on the one hand, and relating canonical interpretations on the other. Kathleen L. Komar's examination of Broch's Die Schlafwandler, "Perspectives on Broch's Die Schlafwandler: Narratives of History and the Self," embraces both of these tendencies by offering accepted readings of the trilogy alongside novel, if brief, examinations of the motifs of degrading images and female writers. Two subsequent contributions devoted to Broch's earliest writings aim to define Broch's intellectual affinities discursively. Gunther Martens ("Hermann Broch and the Dilemma of Literature in the Modern Age") returns to a familiar mode of inquiry in Broch scholarship by linking the author's voluminous secondary writings on literature to both Die Schlafwandler and Der Tod des Vergil, while Galin Tihanov attempts to [End Page 106] contextualize Broch's relationship to literary modernism vis-à-vis Romantic refrains ("Interrogating Modernity: Hermann Broch's Postromanticism"). Beyond these earlier and better-known works, the Companion also contains a number of contributions that provide thorough yet economical (re-)introductions to some of Broch's underappreciated, overlooked, or overly complex work. Brechtje Beuker's "Broch and the Theater: Die Entsühnung and Aus der Luftgegriffen as Tragic and Comic Dramatizations of the Economic Machine" furnishes a glimpse into Broch's brief theatrical forays and contextualizes his works for the stage within historical trends in economic and social criticism. In "Limits of the Scientific: Broch's Die unbekannte Größe," Gwyneth Cliver explores Broch's short novel Die unbekannte Größe as a referendum on the author's past flirtations with logical positivism and the Vienna Circle. Meanwhile, Judith Ryan ("Hermann Broch's Massenwahnprojekt and Its Relevance for Our Times"), Sebastian Wogenstein ("Human Rights and the Intellectual's Ethical Duty: Broch's Political Writings"), and Jennifer Jenkins ("Broch's Der Tod des Vergil: Art and Power, Language and the Ineffable") deliver glossaries of keywords, passages, and definitions to orient new readers in the nuances of Broch's social theory, political theory, and his novel Der Tod des Vergil. Finally, a cluster of contributions investigate Broch's devotion to a series of intellectual interlocutors. Appearing in the first half of the Companion, Gisela Brude-Firnau's "Broch's Die Verzauberung: Ludwig Klages and the Bourgeois Mitläufer" traces the narrator's ambivalence in the face of ideology to the anti-urbanism and anti-intellectualism associated with Ludwig Klages and, in turn, Klages's following in National Socialism. Similarly, Judith Sidler's contribution "From the 'Tierkreis-Erzählung' to Die Schuldlosen: The Creation of Broch's Last...

John Dewey and James Baldwin on History, Tragedy, and the Forgetting of Race

Abstract This essay examines various intellectual affinities between Dewey and Baldwin, including their pragmatic and tragic conceptions of history. I argue in the first section that Dewey’s attention to the precarious dimensions of experience and his critique of dominant modes of inquiry that prioritize the stable over the precarious pay insufficient attention to race, though this focus on the precarious over the stable aspects of experience is enough to show that pragmatism does acknowledge the tragic dimension. The subsequent section argues that this insufficiency might be rectified through a reading of Baldwin’s work. While Dewey and Baldwin both acknowledge that existence is finite and precarious (and hence the tragic), Baldwin shows that racism and the promotion of white identity is essentially an attempt to disavow the precariousness of existence. Baldwin’s writings should supplement Dewey’s theory of experience and his account of history because we find in them an acknowledgement of the deep institutional roots of racial oppression and various forms of resistance to this oppression as a key dimension of American history.

Theory of a practice: A foundation for Blumenberg’s metaphorology in Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor

Hans Blumenberg is celebrated for demonstrating that metaphors have had a more foundational influence than concepts on European intellectual history. Many acknowledge that his insights might have achieved even greater impact if he had articulated a more explicit theory of metaphor. In 1960 Blumenberg discusses the historical formation of metaphors that have given rise to meaningful discourses on metaphysical abstractions, like God, existence, or Being, but he does not develop a general model of metaphoric language, and his work rarely engages with other contemporary theories of metaphor. During Blumenberg’s lifetime, French and German postwar philosophers rarely cited one another. Yet French hermeneutics, and the work of philosopher Paul Ricoeur in particular, may have strongly influenced Blumenberg’s research group, Poetik und Hermeneutik. This paper is an attempt to recuperate intellectual affinities between Blumenberg and Ricoeur, in order to demonstrate that Ricoeur’s claims about metaphor provide the theoretical background for a fuller appreciation of Blumenberg’s metaphor analyses.

Adolescent's psychological health in Iran.

Adolescence is characterized by dynamic brain development in which the interaction with the social environment shapes the capabilities an individual takes forward into adult life. Improvement of adolescent psychological health depends on the recognition of their needs during this critical transition period. This study aimed to explain the concept of psychological health needs from the perspectives of male adolescents to improve the health of both adolescents and society. In this qualitative study with a content analysis approach, 52 male adolescents aged 13-18 years participated in 10 semi-structured individual interviews and seven focus group discussions. They expressed their experiences and opinions regarding psychological health needs. Purposive sampling was performed to recruit the adolescents in different areas of Tehran in 2017. Collected data was analyzed using the conventional content analysis method. The findings were divided into two main themes and five sub-themes including 'self-esteem (self-cognition and Suitable relationship between teen and family)', 'Well-being and calmness (Intellectual affinity, Rich leisure time, Religious beliefs)'. To promote emotional health in adolescents, it is necessary to plan for the empowerment of community, family, schools by health authorities and devise appropriate health policies.

ON COMMERCIAL GLUTS, OR WHEN THE SAINT-SIMONIANS ADOPTED JEAN-BAPTISTE SAY’S VIEW

A standard reading in the history of economic thought sets the classical stream of economists drawing upon the influence of Adam Smith (Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, etc.) in opposition to a “black box” of social thinkers (Louis Blanc, Fourierism, Saint-Simonianism, Jean de Sismondi, Robert Owen). This article, however, argues that, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Saint-Simonians and the liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say can be seen to adopt convergent views during the famous controversy about commercial gluts.First, we show that the Saint-Simonians and Say both see undersupply and lack of industry as causes of gluts. Next, we assert that their intellectual affinities are also visible in their belief that increasing production remains an appropriate solution for gluts. Finally, this convergence is explained by their common belief in industrialism: Saint-Simonianism is embedded in a French industrialist tradition for which Say can be taken as representative. We argue that their common belief in industry explains their convergence.

Toward a Sociology of Nescience

The essay surveys the surprising intellectual affinities between Hayekian neoliberalism and the work of one of its leading critics, Philip Mirowski. One of the chief characteristics of neoliberalism, on Mirowski’s account, is its philosophical skepticism or antifoundationalism—its conviction that human beings can know very little about the economy and its hostility, therefore, to any economics that presents itself as scientific. Such skepticism and antiscientism are shared by most versions of critical theory and science and technology studies (STS), including the version of STS that Mirowski himself practices. Anyone holding Mirowski to his own argument is forced to conclude that he has surrendered to a few of neoliberalism’s central premises. The essay offers a few ways out of this impasse.

Conclusion: Theory Presents

Conclusion:Theory Presents Anna Kornbluh (bio) When is the time of theory? Always already, out of joint, to come, after dinner, is it happening?1 Theory has a past, never less so than when it is dead: periods of emergence, dominance, and residue; conditions of possibility and impossibility; institutional heydays and lost generations. Theory has a future, all the more so when it indicts future thinking, decries synthesis, and exalts dissolutionism: speculative flexing points beyond the already "best that has been thought and said." Theory has a present, the coordinates which it mediates, the constraints that enable it, the place from which it looks. Theory time would seem multiple; theory makes time for abstraction and recoil, velocity and lassitude; theory syndicates. Fittingly then, this special issue "Theories of the Nineteenth Century" explicitly wagers that the nineteenth century is a privileged past for theory, while it simultaneously tacitly gambles that now is a pivotal present. But the torque generated between these two orbits importantly bends the future: the mutually constituting relation between theory and the nineteenth century has reached, in the twenty-first century, a certain end. Those world-historical determinants of nineteenth century life that originally and continually ignited theory's spectrality and mooring, critical dissection and utopian projection, come soon to their limit: capitalism, liberalism, empire, white supremacy, patriarchy, democracy cannot continue their formidable reigns in the same indefinite arc now that climate crisis confronts us with global war and human extinction. How are these ends to be theorized, especially if they stop the time of theory? Who are the theorists empowered to write and be recognized as such, constituting the community or institution of theory, when planetary perils are also pathetically paralleled by the razing of the university? These foreshortened horizons disturb theory's integral spectrality, complicating its multiform temporality. Hence its presents intensify. With theory's future in question for different reasons than all its old deaths foretold, a compression of the past and the present eventuates. Such compression motivates the V21 Collective's call for "strategic presentism"2 [End Page 587] as an under-explored alternative to orthodox historicisms, tracking newly perceptible extensions of conceptual frameworks and social infrastructures that weld the twenty-first century to the nineteenth. Epidemic rickets and scurvy. Expulsionary enclosures. Bald racism. Explosive technology. Decadent spectacle. Financialized inequality. Virulent patriarchy. Environmental catastrophe. Who wore it better, the Victorians, or us? Alongside these many social links linger also the intellectual affinities of then and now, both ideology and critique. The past churning with those numerous terrors offered in its present passionate, systematic, outrageous mediations, and synthetic, projective elaborations of alternatives. Utopia. Socialism. Realism. New Amazonia. Communism. Theory itself. When he broke with philosophy to inaugurate theory, the sideways Victorian Karl Marx started by interrogating philosophy's inability to see that to which it was present. Surveying the state of philosophical idealism amid the emergent German nation, Marx audits the omissions: "It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality."3 Theory materializes from philosophy presented to itself, its relational connections avowed, its social position charted. Reflections on these environments and situations allow theory to encompass the social fact that "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."4 Radicalizing the Kantian procedure of examining the conditions for thought by taking present social situatedness as the ultimate condition, theory looks around at the present of thought, shows the investments and limits of ruling ideas, and at the same time it shows that better ideas (and their attendant better rules) are attainable. Affirming these better ideas at one of his great normative moments of fulfilling the dialectical impulse of critique, Marx describes full luxury contemporaneity: "In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle...