Recent Continental Philosophy Research Articles

When Knowledge Is Not Enough

When Knowledge Is Not Enough

Art, Philosophy and the Connectivity of Concepts: Ricoeur and Deleuze and Guattari

ABSTRACTConcepts are traditionally pictured as discrete containers that bring together objects or qualities based on the possession of shared, uniform properties. This paper focuses on a contrasting notion of the concept which holds that concepts are defined by their capacity to reach out and connect with other concepts. Two theories in recent continental philosophy maintain this view: one from Ricoeur, the other from Deleuze and Guattari. Both are offered as attempts to bring art and philosophy into relation, but they differ over how the process of connection is theorized. With Ricoeur, a concept is only a concept if it is inherently predisposed to connect with others, and open to being misapplied through metaphor, whereas, with Deleuze and Guattari, connection is left as the general notion of each and every concept being mutually consistent with other concepts, with the consistency attributed to the external action of “bridging.” The author demonstrates the impact of this difference on how the philosophers perceive the art–philosophy relation, and argues that Ricoeur is better placed to provide a theory of philosophical discourse that is open to the aesthetic. Ricoeur can show it through metaphor, while Deleuze and Guattari can only assert or state an art–philosophy relation through a series of technical claims. The significance of the showing–saying distinction is that it can demonstrate the depth with which conceptual connectivity is located within the philosophers’ respective ontologies, and can help to reveal the value of conceptual connectivity for that ontology.

A Late Adventure of the Feelings: Eulogizing Male Intimacy in <em>I Married a Communist</em> and <em>The Human Stain</em>

When intimacy has been discussed in Roth’s work, it has usually been in regard to the lack of it between the sexes. This essay instead analyzes the friendships between men that occur in the later Zuckerman novels. Connecting Roth’s oeuvre to the classical philosophy of friendship, as well as recent continental philosophy and queer theory, I argue that the elegiac male intimacies at the center of these novels gesture towards the broader preoccupations of Roth’s late work: aging and mortality.

An education in impermanence: historical intermittency and Lessing's The Golden Notebook

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks a reengagement with Doris Lessing's classic novel The Golden Notebook in relation to the concept of intermittency outlined in Andrew Gibson's recent theoretical work. Gibson argues that recent continental philosophy has broken with a linear reading of history in favour of the intermittent occurrence of Events: moments of crisis and rupture from which truth, politics, and justice emerge into the actual. Lessing's novel, praised for its honest depiction of women's experience at the dawn of the Sixties, is situated resolutely in a post-war world between Events, a time Gibson would depict as concrete in its non-Evental stasis. However, the vision of history which emerges in the novel is porous, ephemeral, one moment splintered between characters’ contested ideologies and the next fused in bodily interpellation. By returning to this work of considerable historical significance we can also contest Gibson's categorisation of literature as a ‘residue of events’. A paradigmatic rupture in the cultural framework forces a reengagement with the historical present with equal, if not superior force to the physical manifestation of the political. Lessing's novel, this paper argues, stages the Evental entrance of the permeable emotional body into a post-war British discourse dominated by ‘managed’ technocratic forms.

Politics, power and the state: a Marxist response to postanarchism

Recent years have seen the development of a new form of anarchism. Under the label ‘postanarchism’, writers such as Todd May, Saul Newman and Lewis Call have sought to combine the insights of anarchism with those of recent Continental philosophy, in particular post-structuralism. A central but neglected element of postanarchist thought is its critique of Marxism. The main aim of this article is to counter the postanarchist dismissal of Marxism. It will: introduce the key ideas and arguments of postanarchism; locate its critique of Marxism, demonstrating its importance to the postanarchist project; and highlight weaknesses in the postanarchist critique of Marxism. It argues that the postanarchist portrayal of Marxism is reductive and misleading. Contrary to postanarchist claims, many post-structuralists have drawn inspiration from Marxism rather than rejecting it: as such, Marxism anticipates many of the post-structuralist-inflected ideas of postanarchism, in particular their approach to the state, power, subjectivity and politics. In addition, some Marxist criticisms of classical anarchism apply equally to postanarchism, thus raising questions to which postanarchists should respond.

SPINOZA AND THE BIOPOLITICAL ROOTS OF MODERNITY

Much has been written about biopolitical sovereignty in the wake of Agamben's work, which relies, at least in the first volume of Homo Sacer, on Carl Schmitt's transcendental account of sovereignty. This article argues, however, that Foucault and Arendt rightly identify what Derrida once called the “changing shape and place of sovereignty” in modernity, which for them is horizontal and disseminated within a presupposed nation. For this reason, we will look to the source of modern philosophical immanentism, Spinoza, to show that he is not extrinsic to this modern biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign exception and its nationalized version work hand-in-glove in the era of which he was a part – and thus is part of all thinking that would take this to form a new communitas. In this way, we argue that it is Spinoza's political theology, not Schmitt's, that is the better pass-key to what Foucault and Arendt identify as biopolitical. By doing so, we put in tension two trends in recent Continental philosophy: philosophical vitalism and the critique of biopolitics at the heart at any contemporary thinking of community.

Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’

In this article, I explore the cosmic ramifications of Algernon Blackwood’s famous outdoor horror story ‘The Willows’ (1907). I show how the extraterrestrial teratology of the story’s titular creatures and the weird dimensional phenomena recounted in the tale challenge conventional definitions and conceptions of nature, in particular the concept of ‘natural supernaturalism’. Against such readings that synthesize nature into an orderly and unbroken whole, I use recent Continental philosophy to show how Blackwood’s story theorizes nature as a dynamic process driven by the horrifying un-grounding operations of an absolute cosmic outside.

Kierkegaard and Recent Continental Philosophy of Religion

AbstractThe place and significance of religious community is a central concern in recent continental philosophy of religion. Although Kierkegaard is a significant influence for many recent continental philosophers of religion, recent work on his social thought is largely ignored. I begin the paper by describing how recent continental philosophers of religion, in particular John Caputo, John Milbank, and Jürgen Habermas, have used Kierkegaard in order to address social questions. Then I show how recent work on Kierkegaard’s social thought – namely, his social ontology and his account of community – that can enrich discussion in recent continental philosophy of religion about the nature of religious community.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Speculative Philosophies and Religious Practices

This article maps the political and theoretical landscapes that have led to this volume, which represents the first attempt to outline an open, yet strategic and critical, dialogue between certain traditions in philosophy of religion and practical/public theology. It identifies the speculative return of the Real within recent continental philosophy and the interest in the lived materialities and practices of religion as the shared points of connection and overlap between these two disciplines, together with a commitment to make a viable contribution to the current UK debates surrounding the Big Society and the Age of Austerity.

Self and Other: Continental and Classical Chinese Thought

AbstractTraditionally, metaphysical notions of self and other presuppose a dualism that underlies much of Western philosophy. This dualism is opposed by accounts of self and other in recent continental philosophy and classical Chinese philosophy, which I compare. I argue that the self is seen in continental and Chinese thought as embedded in (ethical) relations and language, and not as transcendent or prior in the metaphysical sense to them. I argue for this by focussing on three themes: self and language, self as relational and embedded in the world or contextual environment, and self and the particular other. These three themes show that the complexity and dynamic of the self‐other relation is much more realistically conveyed by continental and classical Chinese thought than by the traditional metaphysical account.

Deconstruction and creation: an Augustinian deconstruction of Derrida

In recent continental philosophy of religion there has been significant attention paid to the Abrahamic doctrines of creation ex nihilo and divine omnipotence, especially by deconstructive thinkers such as Derrida, Caputo, and Keller. For these thinkers, the doctrine represents a form of agency that does violence to various forms of alterity. While broadly supportive of their fundamental philosophical and ethico-political views, especially about the primordiality of alterity, I differ from them in that I argue that creation ex nihilo articulates the very structure of the alterity they are concerned with. The essay proceeds through a reading of Derrida’s representation of the doctrine and a “deconstruction” of his view by means of a reading of Augustine and Anselm.

DIONYSIUS IN HANS URS VON BALTHASAR AND JEAN‐LUC MARION

AbstractThis article evaluates Jean‐Luc Marion's retrieval of Dionysius against the backdrop of the debate in recent continental philosophy over the identity and meaning of “negative theology”. Marion's interpretation and use of Dionysius draws heavily on that of Hans Urs von Balthasar, both in his manner of approaching Dionysius and with the central elements of the Corpus Dionysiacum upon which he focuses. Through this comparison, it is clear that different polemical and apologetic interests shape their similar but distinct retrievals. Marion, like Balthasar before him, is translating Dionysius for a new audience. With this translation, I argue that Marion provides a richer and more complex confrontation with Dionysius than has previously been offered within the contemporary discussions of “negative theology”.

How the Sublime Became “Now”

Writing in the late 1980s, Nancy gives as examples of the for the not only the theoreticians of Paris, but the artists of Los Angeles, Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sublime may of course no longer seem quite so now as it did back then, whether in North America, Europe, or Japan. Simon Critchley, for one, suggested that, at least as regards the issue of its conceptual coupling to postmodernism, the concerning the sublime has become rather stale and the discussion on. Nonetheless, if that debate indeed moved on-and thankfully so-it is not without its remainder, particularly in the very contemporary context of resurgence of interest in explicitly philosophical accounts of art, in the wake of an emergent critique of cultural studies and of the apparent waning of poststructuralism's influence-a resurgence that led to certain return to aesthetics in recent Continental philosophy and to the work of Kant, Schelling, and the German Romantics. Moreover, as Nancy's precise formulations suggest, the fashion [mode] through which the sublime offers itself-as a break within or from aesthetics-clearly contains significance that Critchley's more straightforward narration of shifts in theoretical chic cannot encompass. At stake in this would be the relation between the mode of and art's within modernity itself, from the late eighteenth century onwards. Such conception of art's destiny, as inextricably linked to that of the is not unique to recent French theory. In brief passage in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno also suggests that the sublime, which Kant reserved exclusively for nature, later became the historical constituent of art itself.... [I]n subtle way, after the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism. As such, although the term its classical origins in Longinus, its historical character for us, both Nancy and Adorno argue, associates it specifically with the emergence of the modern. As another philosopher states: It is around this name [of the sublime] that the destiny of classical poetics was hazarded and lost; it is in this name that ... romanticism, in other words, modernity, triumphed.

Violence and the Denigration of Community: Between Transcendental and Revolutionary Violence in Fanon

Is it justified to claim that violence is one of the most fundamental and ubiquitous themes in contemporary Continental philosophy? Or that it is the exploration, diagnosis, and critique of violence in all of its guises that motivates so much of recent theory? Here I'd like to rest on these questions for a moment, with an eye toward the dangers that come with the conflation of the various types of violence in which philosophy traffics, as much as with the ready parsing apart of the different species of violence, and the consonant refusal to recognize their co-implication. To theorize violence these days is to touch on a figure that appears everywhere in the contemporary theoretical landscape. Bracketing, for the moment, the multiple forms which violence assumes, the recent indictments of the ideology of recognition would seem to imply that its ubiquity is not unproblematic. Taking neo-Hegelian accounts of intersubjectivity to task for their inherently conflictual and violent tenor, various authors have suggested that the very model of recognition grounds identity in hostility towards others.1 Moreover, in failing to allow for any radical disruption of the power imbalances implied in the scheme of recognition-that is the fact that one is compelled to seek recognition from the very people loath to confer it in the first place-the model only perpetuates inequity and oppression.2 In this sense, the paradigm of recognition may reenact the very social inequities it hopes to ameliorate. Violence and Philosophy Among the various guises that violence assumes in recent Continental philosophy, there is the violence that Derrida names preethical in "Violence and Metaphysics," the violence of the transcendental subject and the sense with which it illumines the world, imposing continuity and order. Such an analysis demands our complicity in an "original, transcendental violence, previous to any ethical choice, even supposed by ethical nonviolence" (WD, 125).3 This allusion to transcendental violence as the violence of phenomenality, the violence embedded in the intentional action of mind upon world, acknowledges the violence implicit in perception. Its rendering as "pre-ethical" simply calls forth the acknowledgment that it is unavoidable, a function of knowledge as it is rendered in the phenomenological tradition. In this sense, pre-ethical violence is unintentional, embedded as it is in intention itself. The criticism of transcendental violence is shared with Michel Foucault; it was in The Order of Things that Foucault claimed that all thought is essentially practical, a mode of action fraught with force. Foucault writes of reason: "As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites, or reunites; it cannot help but liberate or enslave" (OT, 278).4 Hence the claim that all knowledge rests upon a certain violence or injustice. Derrida, too, wrote that philosophy itself may be described as a "violence . . . returned against violence within knowledge" (WD, 131). It is philosophy's charge, then, to use this violence against itself, to temper, as best it can, this injustice and violence that rests at the heart of reason. In accord with Derrida's description of transcendental violence as "pre-ethical" is the correlative understanding of violence and nonviolence alike as related to those actions exercised in the domain belonging to ethics. Hence set apart from this "original, transcendental violence" is the violence of torture, abuse, rape, and colonization. For those working in existential phenomenology-in particular Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean Paul Sartre-this "ethical" violence frequently connotes the actual enactment of physical force, with revolutionary violence-the taking up of arms in the colonial context-being of chief concern. Insofar as these analyses of violence bear a debt to the Marxist paradigm wherein action is motivated by scarcity and need, the violence referred to here is material through and through. …

Categories in action: Sartre and the theory-practice debate

This paper addresses the topic of creative practice research degrees by looking at the role concepts play in the creation and appreciation of art. The nature of the relationship between conceptual judgement on the one hand and aesthetic experience on the other has been a central topic for discussion throughout the history of Western philosophy. Unfortunately, the greater part of that history has given us arguments which try to wedge the two apart. However, the phenomenological tradition within recent continental philosophy sets out to remove the opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic. Two aspects of phenomenology are important here: 1) its interest in writing, and 2) its emphasis on our condition as beings immersed in and actively engaged with the world, as opposed to being detached observers of it. The two come together in the claim that the concept — any concept — is not something which confines or reduces experience but an ‘action’ through which the speaker brings to light new aesthetic possibilities. By tracing these points through the writings of Kant, Nietzsche and Sartre, I show how the descriptions we employ in aesthetic judgement a) can stand alongside the physical gestures of the artist as ‘constructive interventions’ in the development of an artwork, and b) can bring new perspectives to bear on the theoretical framework employed by the practitioner in their research.

The psychology of human possibility and constraint

The way to read this little book is to share in the authors' concern for understanding individuals and for vindicating psychology as a discipline concerned with the psychological of individuals. The authors' collaboration in the pursuit of understanding of socioculturally enabled individual psychological development (p. xvi) is an extended argument that is didactically satisfying, even as it is intellectually promiscuous. It is satisfying because their concerns are of the heart; it is promiscuous because their expressed effort is one of borrowing and attempted reconciliation from divergent philosophical perspectives. Ironically, there is little concrete psychological inquiry here, and little on the meaning and significance of human suffering in becoming a person. Rather, its strength as well as its weakness resides in the perspective and approach it advocates in the study of human being, and so provides, as Donald Polkinghorn writes in his illuminating Foreword, a groundwork that other scholars can use to explore personhood further (p. xiv).The first three of the book's six chapters are devoted to a presentation and elaboration of the authors' metaphysical thesis of interactionism, the last three to an instantiation of this thesis in the domains of psychotherapy, education, and psychological inquiry. Throughout these chapters the authors juxtapose social constructionism and cognitive constructivism as instances of holism and atomism, respectively, and as extant psychological paradigms for the understanding of individuals. Since they recognize that these paradigms have fundamentally different assumptions and metatheories and so preclude integration, they assume as their task to formulate a theoretical approach, one with ontological and epistemological assumptions different from either of the positions, so as to ground the relation between social-cultural and psychological individual realities (p. 5).This new theoretical approach borrows explicitly from recent continental philosophy, notably from Heidegger's ontology and from Gadamer's hermeneutics conceived as an epistemology for psychology and the human sciences. Less explicit but evident throughout the text are borrowings from Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and from Charles Taylor in support of the individual -- that is, the person -- as that incarnate mode of experience sublimated in language, meaning, and history. Later, in an instantiation of their thesis in the context of education, the authors also find their perspective converging with the work of Mead and Dewey, and indeed, for better or worse, the style of the entire theoretical formulation exemplifies a strong pragmatic orientation. Not surprisingly then, even if their theoretical approach is philosophically overdetermined and therefore promiscuous, they do stipulate their use of such frequently occurring terms as metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology.The proposed metaphysics of dynamic interactionism is presented as a challenge to the lingering Cartesianism of the discipline that separates mind from body and individual from social-cultural context. It is also intended to avoid the conclusions of post-structuralist thought (Barthes and Derrida are cited) that dissolves the individual into text, and the excesses of social constructionist thought that dissolves the individual into social and linguistic practices. Instead, the authors conceive of individual psychological experience and its constituting social-cultural context as shifting ontologies that are dynamically related in a manner that is historically emergent and mutable, and do not permit ontological reduction of one to the other. So that while the social-cultural context is conceived as an enabling and constraining source in the formation of the individual self -- here the authors take cognitive constructivism to task -- the individual is underdetermined by its social-cultural sources. …

Thinking technicity

The evermore explicit technicization of the world, together with the immeasurable nature of the political and ethical questions that it poses, explicitly defy the syntheses of human imagination and invention. In response to this challenge, how can philosophy, in its relation of nonrelation with politics, help in orienting present and future negotiation with the processes of complexification that this technicization implies? The article argues that one important way to do this is to think and develop our understanding of technicity from out of metaphysics, its destructions and deconstructions. The argument proceeds from the aporia of knowledge in Plato's Meno, situates continental philosophical thought's various articulations of the ‘other’ of metaphysics in relation to the problematic of this aporia and claims that certain understandings of this alterity can be further articulated in terms of technical supplementarity. Working between the concept of ‘arche‐writing’ in the thought of Jacques Derrida and that of ‘epiphylogenesis’ in that of Bernard Stiegler, the article then develops this supplementarity in terms of a play between originary technicity and its historical differentiations, one that both holds to the articulation of alterity in recent continental philosophy and develops it further in terms of its relation to historical determination. This relation, posited through a thinking of technicity, permits, finally, the ‘development’ of an ethics of giving time with which negotiation with processes of complexification can be undertaken in the name of justice. An ethical relation to these processes thereby emerges through the very excess of the human.