The Society for European Philosophy and The Forum for European Philosophy Joint Conference 2012

In association with the London Graduate School

5th-7th September 2012

CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

Table of ContentsKEYNOTE SPEAKERS 1

PLENARY PANEL 2

PANEL A: The Limits of Hegel’s Dialectic 3

PANEL B: The Problem of Use-Value 3

PANEL C: Contemporary Art/Contemporary Thought 4

PANEL D: The Impersonal Occurrence of Art 6

PANEL E: Bergson and/or Heidegger 7

PANEL F: Nonhuman Art, Nonhuman Philosophy: François Laruelle and Allan Kaprow 8

PANEL G: Object, Refuse, Reject, Abuse: Cynicism and Nihilism in Foucault’s The Courage of Truth 9

PANEL H: Exposing Dialectics 10

PANEL I: Critical Theory and Ideology Panel 10

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF SPEAKERS IN PARALLEL SESSIONS 12

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

What Can Phenomenology Tell us about Social Cognition?Shaun Gallagher (Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of

Memphis, Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Hertfordshire in England, Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Affiliated Research Faculty Member at the Institute of Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida)

In several recent papers the relevance of phenomenology, understood as a philosophical method (in the tradition Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others), has been challenged specifically within the context of studies of social cognition. For example, Pierre Jacob (2011) suggests that since processes that explain social cognition are not available at the experiential level, phenomenology misses the mark. Spaulding (2010, 131) from a theory of mind perspective suggests that phenomenology is simply irrelevant. This is not the minority opinion in philosophy of mind. Most, although not all, theorists in philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience would locate the essential processes of social cognition at the subpersonal level and dismiss phenomenology as likely misleading. In an attempt to respond to these dismissals of phenomenology, I address several questions. First, are all aspects that are relevant to an explanation of social cognition in fact sub-personal? Second, how should such sub-personal processes be cashed out on the experiential level, assuming that we do experience something as we interact with others? Third, what role does folk psychology play in an explanation of social cognition? And finally, is phenomenology limited to introspection?

The Return of SubjectivityAlphonso Lingis (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University)

Phenomenology’s description of the things as they show themselves to be depended on the reality and apodicticity of self-consciousness. Ethical responsibility required the reliability of self-consciousness. Linguistics defined self-consciousness as the speaker who issues a present utterance identifying him- or herself with the grammatical subject of that utterance. But pragmatics exhibits speech acts as social interactions; a speech act is elicited and commanded by an interlocutor. Deleuze and Guattari argue that one says what one has been ordered to say; all statements are quotations. I argue that these positions do not eliminate subjectivity; they engender a new conception of self-consciousness.

It Does Not Have To Be Like ThisCatherine Malabou (Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University)

In this lecture, I will address, discuss and challenge the issue of radical contingency as raised by Quentin Meillassoux in his book After Finitude, opening a new path toward a Kantianism to come.

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PLENARY PANEL

‘New Materialities, Other Deconstructions’Catherine Malabou (Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University)

Martin McQuillan (Professor, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston)Simon Morgan Wortham (Professor, Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston)

If it is true that we are entering an epoch of new materialities for which we as yet have no descriptive framework then philosophy must respond to this situation. The question of matter after all is also a philosophical concept. The empirical and all empiricisms are, as Derrida notes as early as ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, philosophical gestures that embed themselves within the history of philosophy. His reading of Levinas in this essay is to suggest the ways in which Levinas demonstrates that all empiricism is metaphysical, and a constant philosophical thematization ‘of the infinite exteriority of the other’. Levinas in contrast understands the empirical not as a positivism but as an experience of difference and of the other. ‘Empiricism’, claims Derrida, ‘always has been determined by philosophy, from Plato to Husserl as nonphilosophy: as the philosophical pretention to nonphilosophy’. That is as philosophy’s way of affecting to speak in a non-philosophical way. However, nothing can more profoundly conjure the need for philosophy than this denial of philosophy by philosophy. Within the metaphysical schema that is nonphilosophy, the irruption of the wholly other solicits philosophy (i.e. the logos) as its own origin, end, and other. There is no escape from philosophy as far as empiricism is concerned; there will only ever be a thinking about the empirical that is philosophical. It is this radicalization of empiricism that deconstruction proposes as a breathless, inspiring journey for philosophy in the later years of the twentieth century. As Derrida states in the opening paragraphs of the essay on Levinas, it is the closure of philosophy by nonphilosophy that gives thought a future, ‘it may even be that these questions are not philosophical, are not philosophy’s questions. Nevertheless, these should be the only questions today capable of founding the community, within the world, of those who are still called philosophers; and called such in remembrance, at very least, of the fact that these questions must be examined unrelentingly…’

So, the question of the materiality of a post-deconstructive age may not be a question that philosophy has the resources to answer but which must nevertheless be thought about and so determined in a philosophical manner. This panel will address this demand.

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PANEL A: The Limits of Hegel’s Dialectic

This panel is formed around the philosophical question of the ‘limits’ of Hegel’s dialectical process. According to Hegel, the demarcation of a limit immanently suggests its own transgression. If this is one defining feature of Hegel’s dialectic, how today are we to confront the question of limits that at once draw attention to the immanent structure and unfolding of dialectical logic and mark real historical and conceptual limitations? The papers in this panel are situated on ‘two sides of the limit’: on the one hand, the internal limits of the dialectic itself (its terms, categories, structure); and on the other hand, its external limits (its incapacity to grasp and fully account for certain realities and negativities).

Hegel’s Concept of Abstract NegationHammam Aldouri (PhD candidate, CRMEP, Kingston University)

This paper aims to examine the notion of ‘abstract negation’ as it emerges in the unfolding of the concept of determinate negation in the famous fourth chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The aim of the paper is twofold: first I want to bring into relief the place of abstract negation in the formal deployment of the dialectical process as conceived in the concept of determinate negation; second, I want to point toward a potential understanding of abstract negation as the ‘origin’ or source of the dialectical process itself, a claim that, in a certain sense, simultaneously subverts the process itself and vindicates its general logic.

The Role of Dialectic in Marx’s Critique of HegelIan Jakobi (PhD candidate, CRMEP, Kingston University)

My paper will address the development of Marx’s method of critique in his Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1843). My aim will be to show in what ways Marx situates his method of analysis in and through a critique of Hegel’s dialectical presentation of the state. I will thereby seek to problematise the view that Marx conserves Hegel’s method while rejecting his system by suggesting that Marx both demonstrates the limitations of Hegel’s dialectic while at the same time revealing its real content. I will conclude by assessing the ability of Marx’s practical alternative to dialectical thought to move beyond these limits.

PANEL B: The Problem of Use-Value

Contrary to Marx’s claim that there is ‘nothing mysterious about it’, the category of ‘use-value’ in his work raises a number of philosophical ambiguities. These difficulties are in part the consequence of an inconsistent amount of importance afforded to use-value by Marx himself. Use-value explicitly features as an economic category in the Grundrisse and its significance is vigorously defended in an 1881 polemic against Adolph Wagner. On the other hand, it is conceptually reduced to the ‘physical properties of the commodity’ in the first few pages of Capital, and is subsequently rendered superfluous to the systematic development of the value-form. Given such ambiguity, there is the temptation to stabilise the place of use-value within Marx’s work (whether through uncritical acceptance or outright rejection). However, the papers in this panel maintain that such stabilisation neglects the potential philosophical promise of the concept. In short, it forecloses two possibilities: (1) critically situating use-value in relation to other

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philosophical problems in Marx’s work, such as materiality and temporality, and thus (2) enriching the meaning of ‘use’ and ‘use-value’ in Marx more generally.

Use-Value and the Metabolism of Humanity and NatureCas McMenamin (PhD candidate, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

Kingston University)

This paper will situate use-value in relation to the ‘metabolism’ of nature and humanity in Marx’s work. It will explore the following questions: What can use-value teach us about the ‘double relationship’ between the social and natural in Marx? Does the concept of use-value contain metaphysical assumptions about a primary matter external to and causally determining human practice? Does the concept of use-value as a metabolic product retain any meaning beyond its relation to exchange-value (i.e. outside of the commodity form)?

Use-Value and TemporalityGeorge Tomlinson (PhD candidate, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston

University)

This paper critically develops passages in the Grundrisse on the use-value of the commodity labour-capacity/labour-power [Arbeitsvermögen] – that is, labour – doubly characterized as the use-value which ‘confronts’ capital and the use-value ‘of capital itself’. These passages beg a conception of the ‘use’ of the human in relation to self-expanding value (capital). By situating them in the context of Marx’s analysis in Capital of the doubled (concrete and abstract) character of labour (something not present in the Grundrisse), we are also introduced to a number of problems at the level of the philosophy of time. Abstract labour is, of course, a temporal category: homogenous, quantifiable and divisible time which constitutes the measure and substance of value. Yet it is far from clear what temporalities structure concrete labour in Marx, such that this labour (which both produces and exists as use-value for capital) is dialectically intertwined with abstract labour. In other words, concrete labour-time cannot be reduced to various different activities which occur ‘within’ homogenous (clock) time. There needs to be some consideration of concrete labour-time as the ongoing negated ground of the commodification of labour-power and the production of abstract labour.

PANEL C: Contemporary Art/Contemporary Thought

Each of the three papers on this panel addresses different aspects of the conjunction between contemporary works of art and thought; each of them thinks through the silent mark between them, whether in psychoanalytic, phenomenological or post-phenomenological terms. What emerges in the conjunction between the three papers, then, are facets of the world, still human yet always already on the way to a beyond – futurity, pre-figuration, opacity.

The Practice and Production of Addiction in Contemporary ArtChristopher Kul-Want (Course director M.A. Fine Art and Acting course director MRes Art: Theory

& Philosophy School of Art, Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design)

Reportedly more prevalent than ever in society, addictive disorders can migrate into any activity exceeding the laws that govern enjoyment. Not only defined by drug or substance abuse,

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everything today is potentially classifiable as addictive: sex, work, eating, weight control, play, shopping, exercise, relationships, the TV or its latest incarnation, the internet. This paper discusses how recent discourses about addiction can contribute to an understanding of contemporary art and literature engaged in practices of apparent obsession, compulsion and repetition. Artists relevant to this discussion are: Thomas Demand, Margarita Gluzberg, Matthew Hale, Thomas Locher, Sarah Morris and Julian Opie. Alan Ball’s tippex paintings of t.v. listings, and Robert Mabb’s serial spirographs – which convey a sense of distraction and boredom through repetitive acts of apparent adolescent introversion – are also relevant. Through their peculiar blankness and lack of bodily relation these art forms negate Romantic ideas about an obsessive – and individualistic – striving for radical, expressive effect. Rather, the sense of indifference that characterizes this work in combination with an (implausibly) public mode of address, indicates that what is at stake in this work is a phenomenology of modernity as utopian longing: a phenomenology that recalls Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s philosophies regarding time and the practice and production of boredom.

Late in the Night, Perhaps Too Late: The Emergence of Opacity in Anne Carson’s NoxJill Marsden (Assistant Professor Philosophy and English, Faculty of Arts and Media Technologies,

The University of Bolton)

When the brother of the poet Anne Carson died she wrote an elegy for him ‘in the form of an epitaph’. Her 2010 work Nox, an accordion-fold book in a hard edge box, is an art object of profound beauty, a monument of a very precious kind. Part meditation on loss (and on Catullus’s poem 101), part scrapbook of letter fragments, grainy photographs and drawings, Nox is so convincing a replica of Carson’s memory box that its pages give the illusion of texture, inviting the recipient to feel for the imprint of pen strokes and the ragged surfaces of pasted collage.

My paper explores the sensory experience of encountering this work. There is a tactile pleasure in handling the pleated pages, a visual delight in the subtle palette of sepia-tint and monochrome, of brilliant white and occasional dash of colour. More than this, however, Nox appeals to something between vision and touch, a sense in the process of being born. In describing her brother, Carson evokes ‘a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding’. My aim is to try and show how this opacity emerges in the space of encounter with this captivating work, to pursue what it might mean to let ‘night’ appear.

Figuration, Movement, Coming to Presence in the Thought of Nietzsche, Nancy, and RichterAndrea Rehberg (Assistant Professor Philosophy Department, Middle East Technical University)

The two complementary questions motivating this paper are, firstly, how can painting be thought (and written) in the contemporary philosophical constellation and, secondly, how does painting think, what does it think? The starting point here is that painting – even when it is figurative – does not represent an extra-artistic reality, does not imitate nature. Instead, the process of figuration itself, as it happens in a painting, is investigated in its constituent elements, in particular in its temporal and spatial aspects, in the materiality of colour and line.

What emerges in this investigation is that painting – arguably even more so than the more overtly temporal arts – is capable of staging the process of coming to appearance, of differing (from) itself, i.e., the productive process as such.

To give more concrete shape to these reflections, the works of three seminal thinkers of art are addressed, namely those of Nietzsche, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Gerhard Richter.

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PANEL D: The Impersonal Occurrence of Art

The papers on this panel share the conviction that the thinking of art should be liberated from the chains of subjectivity, which has dominated the philosophy of art for centuries. To this purpose, the artist’s, or, in the case of music, the listener’s relation to the work of art is critically rethought in these papers, and understood as an exposure and openness to the impersonal, through which the work of art presences. With the help of Nietzsche’s, Heidegger’s, and Blanchot’s thoughts the papers look at this event of exposure in different ways, by focusing on music, visual art, and literature, respectively, though always in the light of the aforementioned conviction.

Affirmation Through Music: the Transformative Power of Music in Nietzsche’s ThoughtReha Kuldaşlı (Philosophy Department Middle East Technical University)

In this paper I will investigate the relationship between music and affirmation in the context of Nietzsche's thought. According to Nietzsche’s agonistic ontology of life, there is only the “abyss of existence”, by which I mean becoming and the play of forces which strive to take control of phenomena, as Deleuze also explains in his book Nietzsche and Philosophy. Nietzsche understands music as the kind of force that is capable of exposing human being to the groundless nature of existence, especially as Dionysian music. This paper will problematize the shortcomings of discussing music in aesthetic or anthropocentric terms, outline Nietzsche’s account of music and, by elaborating the relationship between music and affirmation, argue that music is able to affect the topology of forces in human physiology through its exposing power and to transform them into a possible affirmation of life. The paper will also investigate the ‘musical’ nature of Nietzsche’s own thinking, which deliberately attunes itself to theagonistic play, rather than pausing, dissecting and grasping it.

From Creation to Responsiveness: the artist as τεχνίτηςAndrea Rehberg (Philosophy Department Middle East Technical University)

With the assertion of the ontological insignificance of the artist vis-à-vis the work of art, it seems that the artist has simply been jettisoned from the space of art. This paper, by contrast, seeks to investigate a possible role for the artist in contemporary philosophy of art. The aim is not to re-introduce obsolete notions of a centralizing, organizing subjectivity through the back door. Instead, this paper attempts to rethink the contribution of the artist from a non-anthropocentric, post-humanist perspective. But how can we speak of the artist without reifying them back into the position of an original, God-like agency? Is it enough to say, as Heidegger does, that “in great art…the artist remains inconsequential…almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge” (“The Origin of the Work of Art”)?

How can we understand the role of the artist, somewhere between these two extremes of the God-like creator and the impersonal, indifferent conduit between potentiality and actuality?

The central claim of this paper is that another of Heidegger’s texts, namely “The Question Concerning Technology” (QCT), allows us to think of the artist in more subtle, differentiated ways, neither in ‘hyper-subjectivist’ nor in merely ‘conductive’ terms. In QCT, Heidegger chisels out the ancient Greek apprehension of the τεχνίτης, whose main contribution to the emergence of the artwork is the knowledge of how to gather (λέγειν) the contributory factors (αἰτία), but who is not herself necessarily or chiefly involved in the physical, material making of the artwork as it finally shows itself. It is this delineation of the contribution of the τεχνίτης to the coming-to presence of the artwork that this paper seeks to mobilize in order to begin to develop a ‘post-metaphysical’

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understanding of the role of the artist in contemporary art. To concretize these reflections, they will be focused on a specific, especially pertinent work of art, namely “Sun Tunnels”, by Nancy Holt.

The Darkness That Resists: Blanchot and the Experience of Radical OthernessRamin Ismayilov (Philosophy Department Middle East Technical University)

Blanchot often – especially in his early writings on Mallarmé – characterizes the essence of the literary work of art as the appearing of “the dissimulation itself” (The Space of Literature, (SL)), which is the origin of the demand posed on the artist/writer. Yet, in his thought this appearing is at the same time understood to be inherently and “infinitely problematic” (SL), even impossible, because the dissimulation itself resists coming to presence. Facing this impersonal resistance lying in “the silent void of the work” (SL), namely the darkness par excellence that precedes any opposition of light and darkness, the writer thus experiences the shattering of the unity of self, an experience which corresponds to the encounter with radical otherness. Focusing on the early Blanchot (Faux Pas, The Work of Fire, The Space of Literature), this paper endeavours to throw light on some of the details of Blanchot’s understanding of the always interrupted movement of the coming to presence of the literary work of art. Moreover, it also traces the emergence of radical otherness in connection with the thinking of literature in Blanchot’s thought, and in this context seeks to locate a possible intertwining of the literary and the ethical even in the early Blanchot’s writings.

PANEL E: Bergson and/or Heidegger

Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger are two pivotal thinkers of the first half of the 20th century, whose ideas structure much of contemporary ‘continental’ philosophy. Although Heidegger was certainly influenced by Bergson’s thinking, their divergent responses to basic issues and problems in the philosophical tradition have shaped different currents within contemporary thought. The renewal of interest in Bergson’s work in the last decades, however, has not been accompanied by sustained analysis of what exactly divides Heidegger from Bergson (or vice versa) on key ontological and metaphysical problems. Our proposed panel at the SEP/FEP annual conference will offer an initial attempt to do precisely this by focusing on three interrelated issues: freedom, nothingness and creation. Understanding how Heidegger can take up Bergson’s conception of freedom whilst criticising both the positivism involved in his critique of nothingness and the subjectivism/voluntarism that underlies his ideas of creation and novelty is an essential prerequisite, we contend, for understanding many debates in contemporary philosophy.

Bergson, Heidegger and the Question of FreedomMatthew Barnard (PhD candidate, Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University)

Begson and Heidegger: Much Ado about NothingChristophe Perrin (Post-Doc, Université catholique de Louvain)

Bergson’s GeniusMark Sinclair (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University)

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PANEL F: Nonhuman Art, Nonhuman Philosophy: François Laruelle and Allan Kaprow

What are the implications of the nonhuman turn in the Arts and Humanities? Specifically, what is the meaning of the ‘non’ in the ‘nonhuman’, and what is the relationship between this ‘non’ and the definition of art and philosophy? If ‘non’ is simply a negation, it could be argued that the assertion that there is something nonhuman in these practices is vacuously broad in that it embraces everything other than human. And, indeed, in the realm of the performing arts, many different kinds of other-than-human things have taken the stage: animals and machines (Societas Raffaello Sanzio), swirling mists and performing robots (Kris Verdonck), sand and paper (Cupola Bobber), tuning forks and tomato ketchup (Zoe Laughlin). As Laughlin says in The Performativity of Matter (2008), ‘materials perform. Stuff is constantly getting up to things.’ But is the removal of the human here still too focused on the human as its opposite? What kind of performances might nonhuman bodies enact beyond a negation of the human?

The same might be said again in the philosophical domain as regards the claim that nonhumans can do philosophy: the idea of philosophy performed by animals (Coetzee’s horse-philosophers), intelligent computers, and even cinema (Frampton’s ‘filmind’) stretches its definition to equally challenging limits. If, as Derrida argued, one can no longer be sure of what ‘is not’ philosophy as much as what is, does that not leave too much of it on the outside, with no starting point of its own at all, no anchor (in propositional content, argumentative logic, questioning, wonder, etc.) by which other, extended meanings might be oriented? Every (human and nonhuman) thing does philosophy, and so nothing does; everything is performance and so nothing is.

Our paper/workshop examines the nonhuman through a different, expansive approach to that of negation combines François Laruelle’s ‘non-standard philosophy’ and Allan Kaprow’s ‘nonart’. For Laruelle, the ‘non’ is not a negation but a performance of expansion, of broadening. It operates in the same way that non-Euclidean geometries do not negate Euclid, but affirm it within a broader paradigm that also explains alternative geometries that are only apparently opposed to it. Non-standard philosophy is a democracy of thought that performatively extends the definition of philosophy beyond the authority of standard philosophical approaches that always humanize it. Form ‘superposes’ content as Laruelle performs what he preaches. As such, we will show how Laruelle’s is a non-human philosophy, not through the negation of the human, but its extension, a ‘human-without-humanism’ that discovers (or ‘decides’) the human, and philosophy, in myriad other realms (yet without either term becoming vacuous). Likewise, the ‘non’ in Kaprow’s ‘nonart’ does not signal a negation of art, but an extension of what counts as ‘art’ (beyond convention and habit) into the terrain of ‘life’ including attending to the life of nonhuman materials. Kaprow’s Activities should be conceived as performing just the kind of ‘extended experimentation’ required to come to know what our body can do in conjunction with the nonhuman: testing what transformations might happen when a particular human body enters into composition with the nonhuman body of ice, or a lightbulb. As we will discuss and show in this combined paper and workshop, Kaprow’s response to the question: ‘What is art?’ will be constituted through a theory of mutation that he shares with Laruelle – a theory in which not every nonhuman thing is, or is not, art or philosophy, but any thing can become art or philosophy (by attention training in Kaprow, performative decision in Laruelle). In the practical element, we will recreate one of Kaprow’s most significant ‘activities’. People who attend this session will be invited to act out Kaprow’s ‘score’ – everyday action rendered unfamiliar in a manner that allows us to encounter nonhuman materials anew as thoughtful/artful in their own right.

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John Mullarkey (Professor in Film and Television Studies Kingston University, Chair of SEP)

Laura Cull (Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies University of Surrey)

PANEL G: Object, Refuse, Reject, Abuse: Cynicism and Nihilism in Foucault’s The Courage of Truth

This panel will comprise of three papers examining related issues raised by Michel Foucault’s revaluation of the importance of Cynicism in The Courage of Truth, his final series of lectures delivered at the Collège de France in 1983 - 1984. Acknowledging that Cynicism has often been presented as a marginal – and perhaps even trivial – figure in ancient philosophy due to its rudimentary theoretical nature, Foucault nevertheless shows that considered as a mode of life – a way of being and doing – Cynicism is in fact central to the history of Western culture. Our intention is to examine three key aspects of Foucault’s account.

Cynicism, Scepticism, NihilismKeith Crome, (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy Manchester Metropolitan University)

In an undelivered passage from the lecture course The Courage of Truth, included by the editors as an extended footnote, Foucault suggests that 19 th century European nihilism should be understood as an historically specific confluence of Scepticism and Cynicism and adds that it is thus an episode of a problem first posed in Ancient Greek culture, namely of the relation between the will to truth and a style of existence. My aim will be to explicate this brief, but provocative remark, and situate it in relation to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean understandings of nihilism.

Cynicism as Anti-PlatonismMaxime Lallement (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy Manchester Metropolitan

University)

At the beginning of his account of Cynicism, Foucault draws attention to the parrhesiastic role attributed to the Cynic in Antiquity. Likened both to an angel (aggelos) and to a dog, the Cynic was seen as someone sent ahead of the political community to warn it against the dangers of life. In this presentation, I will argue that this mode of political action relies on an inverted form of Platonism and, by confronting the Cynic life with the task of the philosopher described in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, I will show that the philosophy of the Cynics is based upon a non-paradigmatic concept of truth.

Cynicism and Literature: The Cynical Life of the Artistic AddictColin Wisely (PhD candidate, Department of Sociology Manchester Metropolitan University)

Michel Foucault proposes in his final lecture series that we can see the influence of Cynicism in the modern age through the bourgeois form of modern art. The principle of the artist living his life as art in a scandalous fashion can be seen clearly as a theme in the treatment of 'drugs' from Thomas De Quincey and William Burroughs. I shall consider the importance of confession in the literary trope and the impact of stoic and Cynic thought upon Confessions of an Opium Eater and Junky.

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PANEL H: Exposing Dialectics

What is yet to be exposed about dialectics? What has dialectics still to expose about philosophy? A common concern with the status of dialectical thought connects the papers to be presented on this panel. However we seem to be out of fashion, as papers concerned with dialectics seem not to turn up at conferences or in journals with much frequency. If, as Nancy writes, ‘dialectics, in general, is a process that arises from some given’, then where does a concern with and a discussion of dialectics belong in a contemporary philosophical scene built on the rejection of givenness, be it in the form of idea, presence, signification, subjectivity, world or phenomenon? Is it in fact possible to return to dialectics under these conditions? Or is Heidegger correct when he says that the dialectic is a ‘genuine philosophic al embarrassment’? ‘Misconstrued, treated lightly,’ Derrida asserts, ‘Hegelianism only extends its historical domination, finally unfolding its immense enveloping resources without obstacle.’ Can one, as such, hold a position on dialectics without taking up a position within the dialectic? We will not attempt in these three papers to definitively answer the questions we pose, but instead will seek to mobilize the discussion with three approaches to dialectics. The three papers presented will aim to both expose different understandings of the role of dialectical method in philosophy and to consider what dialectics exposes when brought to bear on contemporary thought.

The roles of mimesis and methexis in Nancy’s readings of Socratic dialectic and phenomenological hermeneutics.

Nick Aldridge (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy Manchester Metropolitan University)

Nancy’s critique of dialectics as mobilized in his exposition of love in his 1986 essay L’amour en éclats (Shattered Love)

Leda Channer (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy Manchester Metropolitan University)

Approaches to Hegelian DialecticsAdam Skevington (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy Manchester Metropolitan University

PANEL I: Critical Theory and Ideology Panel

Ideology-critique is one of the central tasks of all strands of Critical Theory and it is necessitated by Critical Theory’s concern for human emancipation. A key aspect of Critical Theory – and that which distinguishes Critical Theory from Traditional theory – is its commitment to a historical approach to knowledge. Knowledge is informed by the specific historical context of its formation and the- possibly non-conscious - interests and prejudices of those whose knowledge it is, as well as by general human limitations. As such knowledge is never objective. There is no Archimedean point from which we discover eternal universal truths and hence knowledge must always be subject to revision. As human beings we have interests and these are reflected in our theories and knowledge – whether we are aware of it or not - so there is no such thing as value neutral knowledge. The rejection of ahistorical, objective, neutral knowledge becomes ideology critique whenever the presumed value neutrality of a theory helps to perpetuate oppressive power structures and thus prevent human emancipation. Ideologies may hinder human

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emancipation by declaring oppressive structures as objectively necessary. Or, they may by falsely assuming the standpoint of neutrality actively contribute to the oppression (especially of minority cultures). Generally, ideology crucially involves two moments: an experience of problematic social conditions and at the same time the idea of justice. These two moments together necessitate the legitimation of the oppressive structures. One example of ideology critique is the stance of many Critical Theorists towards political liberalism, which is regarded as oppressive in its presumed value-neutrality. Rather than achieving (impossible) genuine value neutrality, political liberalism is seen as a bias towards the economic and political interests of those in power, whose social domination is now theoretically justified and preserved. Ideology critique aims to unmask the inherent bias in such value neutrality and destabilize the confidence in proclaimed certainties in order to open up a space for human emancipation.

But, while Critical Theory is united in ideology critique, the conception of ideology differs across the different strands and with it the form of critique and the focus on various aspects of social life. Different conceptions of ideology in turn might reflect changes within ideology itself – so that different strands of critical theory are (possibly) not distinguished by a different view they take on ideology but are themselves reactions to changed ideologies. This panel will look at the different conceptions of “ideology” within the Critical Theory tradition and implications and also – with reference to the last point – examine the relation between the different forms of critique and the nature of ideology.

Stefano Giacchetti (Loyola University Chicago)

Karin Stoegner (University of Vienna)

Dagmar Wilhelm (Teaching Fellow, Department of Philosophy University of Bristol)

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ALPHABETICAL LIST OF SPEAKERS IN PARALLEL SESSIONS

Structure and Intuition in Deleuze’s Renewal of OntologyDavid J. Allen (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy University of Warwick)

In this paper, I will consider language and science as convergent philosophical problems in Deleuze’s early project (culminating in 1968-69) of renewing ontology, and examine Deleuze’s structuralism as the site of the convergence of these two problem.

In his 1954 review of Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, Deleuze makes a decisive commitment to a renewal of ontology orientated around the concept of ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ (sens). This paper is motivated by a problem generated by these notions of ‘sense’, and of an ‘ontology of sense’, given the centrality for Deleuze’s project of the thought of Henri Bergson. In Logic and Existence, Hyppolite sets Bergson up as a counter-figure to his own Hegelian onto-logic of sense. For Hyppolite, Bergson’s emphasis on philosophical ‘intuition’, and consequent scepticism regarding the adequacy of language to grasp metaphysical truth, barred him from grasping the properly ontological significance of the concept of sense. Deleuze, however, sets out to formulate an ontology of sense in terms of a return to Bergson. How does this manoeuvre function?

To answer this question, I explore Deleuze’s philosophical appropriation of structuralism, taking the concept of ‘structure’ as the key to understanding Deleuze’s overcoming of the tension outlined above. In the concept of structure, Deleuze discerns a characterisation of sense which gels with a more adequate characterisation of Bergson’s methodological concept of intuition. By bringing together the concepts of structure and intuition – or, rather, by bringing out the artificiality and falsity of their juxtaposition – Deleuze is able to deploy the concept of sense in an ontological register, without falling prey to the problems he diagnoses in Hyppolite’s attempt at a Hegelian version of the same move.

In both a Bergsonian and a structuralist context, the question of the status and nature of sense cannot be extricated from the question of the status and nature of science – of science’s relation to sense, and to philosophy. ‘Structure’ is the founding concept of a transdisciplinary research programme in the ‘human sciences’ in the 1950s and ’60s in France which attempts to theorise and practice a new science of meaning. Deleuze’s philosophical appropriation of this concept thus has ramifications for the status of philosophy in relation to the sciences; a troubled relation which, I argue, is at the heart of the very need for a renewal of ontology.

Nietzsche in the Light of EliasTom Angier (Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy University of Kent)

Philosophers, especially in the analytic tradition, have tended to accuse Nietzsche of two related, informal fallacies: (a) the genetic fallacy, and (b) the fallacy of ad hominem.

They ground (a) centrally in book one of On the Genealogy of Morality, where Nietzsche traces contemporary European morality to what he calls a ‘slave revolt’. According to his narrative, a set of positive Ur-values, embedded in the life of unnamed ‘nobles’, was overthrown by the collective might of reactive, life-denying, individually weak ‘slaves’. It is this narrative that supposedly instantiates the genetic fallacy: for why suppose that the origin of our moral code determines its present value and function, or (even more implausibly) requires a ‘revaluation of all values’?

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(b) is seen to be more diffusely present in Nietzsche’s work, but no less genuine for all that. Nietzsche often spends time praising or attacking the character and/or behaviour of famous figures, rather than demonstrating how their claims stand up/ fail to stand up to rational scrutiny. He writes, for example, that ‘In origin, Socrates belonged to the lowest class: Socrates was plebs. . . . he was ugly’.1 But, ask Nietzsche’s critics, what bearing can this have on the cogency of Socrates’ arguments and claims? Once again, Nietzsche focuses on a thing’s origins, where this focus seems irrelevant to arriving at a rational assessment of it.2

Putting aside, for the moment, whether these accusations of fallacy have any weight, I want to ask a further question: what if we turn this aspect of Nietzsche’s method against himself? For this is, I shall argue, effectively what Norbert Elias does in his seminal book, The Germans. He does so in two respects.

First, he outlines how Nietzsche’s ethical heuristic of ‘weakness’ versus ‘strength’ finds its proper background in the German practice of duelling, which originated, in turn, from a culture of unforgiving warrior virtue. Secondly, Elias elaborates how the German middle classes – of which Nietzsche was a part – shifted their aspirations from an apolitical, purely artistic ideal of Kultur in the early nineteenth century, to a thoroughly politicised, militarised and nationalistic ideal of the Reich in the late nineteenth century.3 Although Elias does not draw this conclusion himself, there are once again clear implications for understanding Nietzsche’s work. For the two broad ideals between which Nietzsche’s theory of value moves are, I shall argue, precisely those of individual, artistic creativity and military-cum-political heroism.

Do these sociological observations throw any light on Nietzsche’s moral and political philosophy, or is to believe so merely to commit oneself to fallacy? On the one hand, the light shed by Elias’ duelling hypothesis is, I will argue, minimal, since Nietzsche’s categories of ‘weakness’ and ‘strength’ are multiply applicable, being much broader than those embodied in any particular practice. On the other hand, Elias’ study of nineteenth century German middle class ideals is, I will argue, highly relevant, since it points up a deep incoherence within Nietzsche’s own, central ideal of the powerful, all-conquering artist-creator – and thereby underscores a deep incoherence within his political philosophy as a whole.

Having laid out the crucial import of Elias’ work for understanding Nietzsche’s, I shall end by drawing some general conclusions concerning the genetic and ad hominem ‘fallacies’. In fine, I will argue no such generic fallacies exist, since the relevance of the origins of x to an assessment of x depends wholly on what kind of assessment is at stake, what kind of thing x is, and moreover what logical and empirical relations hold between x and its origins.

Twilight of the Idols, ‘The Problem of Socrates’, 3.2 The origin in this case is clearly an individual man, rather than a set of people or practices. But formally the two are very similar, and indeed, one could argue that ad hominem is a species of genetic fallacy (assuming they are fallacies in the first place). 3 This shift occurred, Elias argues, when the middle classes began to be allowed some share in the political life and administration of the Reich.

The Aesthetics of the Between: On Beauty and the Erotic ObjectBabette Babich (Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University)

Beyond Rudolf Arnheim’s reflection on a feature common to architecture and sculpture as frameless works of art, such that the “the figure determines its own fulcrum,” this presentation articulates a phenomenological aesthetics of the subject, including the subject’s observation of and encounter with the museum object and with the experience of the museum or gallery itself in the context of the philosophy of art and beauty. With a particular focus on the contemporary

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sculptures of Jeff Koons and others like Brancusi and Canova as well as Polykleitus, but paintings too like Manet and Bougereau, in addition to the photography of Barbara Morgan and the dance, but also literature and philosophy itself (Plato, Mann, Rilke, Stevens), the erotic dimensionality of the beautiful in art is illuminated by a reading of Alexander Nehamas and Hans-Georg Gadamer on the beauty in philosophical aesthetics and the experienced dimensionality of the art world. This same context includes a discussion of the flâneur/ cyberflaneur, questions of originality in art, and

of capital.

Coercing Autonomy: Free Speech, Symbols, and Kantian CritiqueClover Bachman (PhD in Literary and Cultural Theory, Carnegie Mellon University)

Recent discussions of free speech, secular freedoms and religious censure, religious freedoms and secular censure, have returned us to foundational questions about coercion in interpretive practices. The more subtle varieties of censorship which occur through the coercive norms of cultural debate present us with the task of rearticulating how the individual subject works through problems of autonomy and judgment including the capacity render an assertion of subjective freedom knowable to the self and an other.

Rather than relying on Marx¹s scientifically coded form of critique and or a specifically Foucauldian critical attitude that brackets assertions of normativity, I want return in a more focused manner how the Kantian subject of free speech is bound to a specific intellectual process that seeks, not a state of absolute critical freedom, but an ongoing awareness of the social nature of subjectivity and the coercive contexts that give rise to metaphorical and symbolic accounts of truth. Critique¹s aesthetic dimension its capacity to subject its own encounter with metaphors to self-evaluation rather than hermeneutic acceptance opens up the bifurcated nature of subjectivity allowing us as juridical-political subjects (of limited freedom) to never-the-less view our selves as radically autonomous subjects (of infinite freedom). This point needs to be distinguished from what Talal Asad describes as ³the banal argument that free speech is never totally free because in a liberal society freedom is balanced by responsibility.² What this essay explores is how the concept of critique and the modern subject arises within conflicts of free speech, coercion and censorship.

The fear that critique has become a ³heroic attitude, a particular view of subjectivity and its prime duty² -- little more than one narrative of subjectivity among many possible others, seems to have resurfaced (Asad).

Kantian critique, and the pressure it places on setting aside claims to metaphysical truth can appear problematic in the context of recent debates on religion, secularity and free speech: critique privileges reason but cannot actually demonstrate absolute rational freedom or pure theory, despite its reliance on a logical model which is defined by demonstrability (Butler, Foucault). Using critique as a pragmatic political or moral position (to demystify ideological assumptions) certainly can make it seem like little more than a historical transformation of Christian mythos into logos (Milbank, Asad) or an a-historical assertion of rationality that replicates intellectual absolutism even as it claims to displace it.

However, the goal of critique is not a state of absolute intellectual freedom from which the subject can at-last issue expedient and ³just² judgments. Rather Critique culminates in a more subtle form of praxis -- the subject¹s own recognition of the conflicted conceptual basis of his or her own subjectivity (Goetschel, Balibar). A critical subjectivity relies on interpretive moments of critical reflection on the aesthetic experience of symbolic (rather than scientific) examples to engage in analysis of the contingencies that inform the very sensus communis wherein the intellectual autonomy that authorizes judgment is constituted.

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Philosophy and Photography: The shimmering image: affect and digital technologiesStella Baraklianou (Lecturer, BA (Hons) Photography School of Art, Design and Media University of

Portsmouth)

Photography’s unique relationship with time, the idea of fixing an image in time has been altered with the invasion of digital technology. How revolutionary is the idea of the digital? What essentially differentiates the idea of a stilled moment in time with its (digital) potentiality to reverberate and pulsate within the same frame? From the capturing to the processing and printing, images are subjected to open-ended alterity. However this is not just a question of technological advancement but also of the question of an un-timely present. With reference to Simondon’s L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique and Agamben’s What is an apparatus the notion of diffracted and shimmering time will be explored, one that is conditioned and at the same time, conditions the notion of subjectivity.

A Critical Evaluation of Parfit’s References to Nietzsche in ‘On What Matters'Kit Barton (Pathway Leader, Business Studies Webster Graduate School at Regent's College

London)

The publication in 2011 of Derek Parfit’s book on ethical theory, entitled “On What Matters”, was a much anticipated philosophical event. Once published, a number of prominent philosophers suggested that it might represent the most important step forward in thinking about ethics in over one hundred years. Amongst other ideas, the book delivered the final version of Parfit’s convergence theory, which if true would reconcile the opposing ethical systems of consequentialism and deontology, a divide thought unbridgeable since the work of Henry Sidgwick in 1874. The ramifications this would be immense, affecting both meta-ethics, by offering a powerful new argument for ethical objectivism, and applied ethics, offering a new, unified ethical system to use in moral deliberation and evaluation. From this wide-ranging field of consequences, this paper will focus on Parfit's references to the work of Nietzsche, a philosopher that Parfit writes, “is the most influential and admired moral philosopher of the last two centuries”. Parfit admits that if his convergence claim is to work then it must not be strongly challenged by Nietzsche's claims. Parfit agrees with Nietzsche’s basic insight that morality is an historically-conditioned phenomenon but he disagrees with any relativistic conclusion that could be drawn from this. Parfit argues for progress in moral deliberation and ethical reasoning and so is like Nietzsche insofar as he agrees that morality has a specific history or genealogy. However, Parfit, unlike Nietzsche, does not accept that this history eventually leads to a stage that is ‘beyond good and evil’, where morality would have progressed beyond a concern with human suffering. This paper will critically evaluate Parfit’s references to Nietzsche and, more specifically, determine if Parfit’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s conception of moral history is correct. In addition, it will attempt to show that some of Parfit’s concluding arguments about moral progress in ‘On What Matters’ are to some extent already offered by Nietzsche in Untimely Meditations.

Visual Agnosia, Heidegger and Perceptual ErrorDavid Batho (Graduate Student, Department of Philosophy University of Essex)

I begin the paper by presenting a case study. The example is of a woman, Lillian Kallir, who suffers from visual agnosia, a condition in which one cannot see objects as determinate unities. While those with visual agnosia can make out properties of objects of their immediate environments, they can’t see any unity through the properties such as would allow them to see whatever it is

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that’s in front of them. Nonetheless, however, Kallir could easily navigate her way about her kitchen. As Oliver Sacks writes:

I followed Lilian into the kitchen, where she set about taking the kettle off the stove andpouring boiling water into the teapot. She seemed to navigate her crowded kitchen well, knowing, for instance, that all the skillets and pots were hung on hooks on one wall, various supplies kept in their regular places. When we opened the refrigerator and I quizzed her on the contents, she said, “O.J., milk, butter on the top shelf – and a nice sausage, if you’re interested, one of those Austrian things … cheeses.” (Sacks, pp.12-13)

This is somewhat puzzling. How could it be that Kallir could not see any unified objects and yet, in some sense, retain the capacity to visually navigate her kitchen?

In order to go about answering this problem, I will look to Heidegger’s discussion of two sensory capacities, perception and circumspection, in his elaboration of Plato’s Theaetetus. I will draw attention to Heidegger’s use of the notion of ‘reckoning’, a concept which, I shall argue, Heidegger uses to point to way in which perception is a means of maintaining one’s grip on the world, not simply through correcting local failures but also in checking that one’s grip is fit for purpose so as to prevent failures from occurring. The concept of reckoning thus conceived draws significant distance between Heidegger’s description of perception and that offered by Hubert Dreyfus. Insofar as Dreyfus insists that attentive, focused perception is engaged only given a failure of our ‘absorbed bodily coping’ (for instance, if the hammer head flies off mid-hammering), Heidegger’s suggestion that perception is intimately involved in our everyday activity so as to allow for the continuation of the proper functioning of ‘absorbed coping’ stands at odds with Dreyfus’ portrayal. According to Heidegger, contra Dreyfus, we would struggle to cope without perception.

By focusing on Heidegger’s notion of reckoning we shall also be able to address the problem with which we began, for we shall find a way to make sense of Kallir’s ability to cope in her environment despite being unable to see any unified objects at all.

Silence and Phenomenology in John Cage and Gilles DeleuzeIain Campbell (PhD candidate, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

Kingston University)

In this paper I will look at the role of silence in the musical theory of John Cage and the relation of this concept of silence to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, including his collaborative work with Félix Guattari. While silence is rarely addressed explicitly in Deleuze's writings, I will argue, through engagement with Cage, that it plays a key role in the development of his ontological project. Furthermore, I will deepen this relation by considering opposing interpretations of Cage – namely, the Deleuzian one I offer, and a phenomenologically-oriented one – and consider how the distinctions between these approaches can shed new light on the specificity of Deleuze's relation to and break with phenomenology, and in turn Cage's connections to phenomenological thought.

Cage's conception of silence centres on its impossibility – in even the most supposedly silent of situations, such as Cage's famous example of his visit to an anechoic chamber, sound will still be present – as in the sounds of his own nervous and circulatory systems that Cage heard while in the chamber. Cage's concept of silence, then, stands parallel to the 'blank' canvas of Rauschenberg's white paintings: as a space upon which sound is articulated prior to artistic intention and musical form, always present and exceeding gestures intended to control it, encouraging an emphasis on 'letting sounds be themselves'. While Cage is discussed only briefly in Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, despite the apparent centrality of musical thought through concepts such as the refrain and reference to the musico-theoretical writings of other

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composers such as Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen, I will argue that his articulation of the concept of silence is nevertheless central to the ontology developed therein. For Deleuze & Guattari, Cage “first and most perfectly” deploys the fixed plane of sound that will stand in for what Deleuze & Guattari call smooth space, a space wherein sound is expressed in terms of its processuality, through its singular movement rather than its subordination to transcendent organisation through form and structure. It is from this Cageian conception of a space of sonic heterogeneity, I will argue, that Deleuze & Guattari can construct the theoretical apparatus of paired concepts upon which A Thousand Plateaus sits – smooth-striated, deterritorialization-reterritorialization, and so on.

Following this positioning of Cage's silence as central to Deleuze & Guattari's thought, I will look at an opposing philosophical interpretation of Cage - namely, the phenomenological reading put forward by, for example, Daniel Charles, wherein the impetus of a Cageian philosophy concerns a subject approaching the hidden world of sound in terms of a Heideggerian unconcealment. In comparing and contrasting these approaches with consideration of the kinds of criticisms directed towards Cage when considered phenomenologically, such as those made by the sonic theorist Douglas Kahn, I will look to reach two main conclusions – the first being an analysis of how these critical approaches to Cage are derived from a partial – that is to say, excessively phenomenologically-oriented – reading of Cage, and the second being a framing of the shape Deleuze's break with phenomenology takes, and its import with regards to responding to the limitations of phenomenological thought.

Re-theorising the Individual in a Spinozist way: Towards a Novel Materialist Ontology of Affectivity

Ljuba Castelli (PhD candidate, School of Politics and International Relation Queen Mary, University of London)

This paper examines the paradigm of the individual proposed by Spinoza, and considers the extent to which his theses address contemporary concerns and open novel trajectories in philosophy and politics. It explores Spinoza’s intricate vision of the human being centred on a conative desire of striving and persevering into life, which is constantly enriched by an endless production of affects, ideas and bodily movements. This study of Spinoza’s thought of the individual is situated within the general tendency inaugurated by contemporary continental thought, which has posed the urgency of re-constructing our knowledge of human subjectivity. Contemporary continental philosophy has claimed that the reality of human being follows a non-linear path, which unfolds a variety of heterogeneous elements such as desires, affects and forces (Deleuze, Simondon, Negri, Agamben, among others). Building upon the continental approach, here, the central questions are: What theory of the individual might we draw from continental portrait of humankind as a mixture of various forces? And also, assuming the continental account of the individual, what can we really know of an individual? What is at stake here is the establishment of really new categories of thought, which allow us to emphasise internal dynamics, and to understand what confluence of forces lie underneath and between the individual. These categories of thought should offer the opportunity of analysing the anatomy of the individual by looking at its development and at the experience of its becoming. A consideration of these questions involves a more extensive account of the meaning of life, the re-definition of the notion of otherness; and also the understanding of the multiple ways in which the external world impacts upon the individual and vice versa. An enquiry into these themes is imperative for developing a novel paradigm of the individual of the present, around which contemporary theories of community, mass movements and society might be predicated. Spinoza addresses these issues.

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The discussion draws attention to Spinoza’s theory of the affects, conatus and desire and the ways in which these operate within the constitution of the individual. The arguments, I advance through this paper, are that Spinoza’s model of the individual unveils a complex process of collective and psychic individuation. Affectivity grounds psychic life and is also the cornerstone of relationality. Affects, relating individuals to one another, impress changes upon them, which in turn give rise to a really new individual. It is in this context, I claim, that the novelty of Spinoza’s philosophy lies. He forwards the idea of an ontology of and for affectivity. The affective process does not describe the interior life of an individual being, and nor are affects subordinate elements of a more general cognitive system internal to the structure of the mind. Rather, affective movements are intensities, which lie on the interstices between individuals. These function as a collective ground, in which individuals participate and further produce shared conceptions of time, otherness and actions. As a consequence, in Spinoza’s process of psychic individuation the individual is not the principle of individuation, but rather a constitutive element of a more general process of individuation. The peculiarity of a human being is characterised by a relational power (conatus), and his or her life is driven by a form of tendency towards the others (desire). This tendency determines human desire for constructing psychic, social and political communities. The importance of returning to Spinoza’s ontology, I argue, is the re-formulation of a grammar for the individual alternative to theories of lack and conflict; the affirmation of the autonomy of the affects and also a re-consideration of the interconnection between different forms of life. Our awareness of these might open unexplored avenues for materialist conceptions of community, ethics and politics.

Sensation as Participation in Visual ArtClive Cazeaux (Professor of Aesthetics, Cardiff School of Art and Design Cardiff Metropolitan

University)

Can an understanding be formed of how sensory experience might be arranged, presented or manipulated in visual art in order to promote a relational concept of the senses, in opposition to the customary, (and arguably) capitalist notion of sensation as a private possession, as a sensory impression that is mine? I ask the question in the light of recent visual art theory and practice which pursue relational, ecological ambitions. As theories and artworks, they claim to challenge the subject–object or artist–audience division by arguing that works of visual art have the capacity either to affect or to cultivate social, environmental or exchange-based states of being. Key thinkers in this area are Berleant, Bourriaud, Kester and Rancière. As they see it, ecological ambition and artistic form should correspond. But an ontological position is overlooked. Following Marx, our being is already relational in virtue of the fact that sensation is something in which we participate. In reasoning that ambition and form must correspond, Berleant, Bourriaud and Kester fail to recognize sensation as a site where the ecological cause can be fought. And Rancière ’s distribution of the sensible does not address the particularity of sensory experience. I set out the difference between ontological approaches within recent relational or ecological aesthetics and my focus on sensibility, and identify some of the problems involved in referring to the senses. I spend the greater part of the paper articulating concepts that I think are central to the making and viewing of art where the ambition is to cultivate relational sensibility. These are concepts of style, autofiguration, and the mobility of sensory meaning, extrapolated from Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Cézanne. Underlying all three is an argument for positioning the senses ontologically as movements along lines of conceptual-sensory connection and implication, based on the transfer of meanings created artistically through style and autofiguration.

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Dialectic in Process/Progress: Plato, Kant and HegelJoyce Chen (Ph.D candidate/ Part-time Lecturer, National Taiwan University, Dept. of

Foreign Language and Literature)

The revival of ancient Platonic dialectic, as Gadamer asserts, can be traced back to Kantian transcendental dialectic for the analysis of pure reason and the critique of metaphysics. As the founder of dialectic philosophy, Plato regards dialectic as “the highest sort of philosophical reasoning about the Forms or Ideas” (Guyer 126) for the constitution of the conceptual, metaphysical dimension of the world. Thus, Platonic dialectic explicates, or is synonymous with, the highest faulty of reason. Yet, while German idealism attempts to dissolve the philosophical predicament between rationalist dogmatism and empiricist skepticism, Kant as the initiator of idealist movement indicates how the self-contradictory certainty and doubt in Cartesian reason discloses its inner limit, and Platonic Form buttressed by this limited reason is merely “a dream of perfection that can have its place only in the idle thinker’s brain” (Critique of Pure Reason 397). As Kantian transcendental dialectic is concerned with “certain kinds of malfunction of reason,” Hegelian dialectic, having affinity with Platonic dialectic as “the doctrine of the unity of the opposites” (Kaplan 132), aims to dissolve Kantian dichotomy between the noumena and the phenomena for the teleology of absolute, infinite knowing. While Gadamer argues that Hegel is the first to actually “grasp the depth of Plato’s dialectic” (7), Hegelian dialectic rejects Kantian transcendental dialectic and posits itself as “an immanent one of internal necessity” (7). As the principles of “self-movement of concepts” (5), Hegelian dialectic anticipates an alternative idea “not a mental representation of an object [as Platonic Idea], but is actually present in things as the ground of their existence” (Bunnin 320). Driven by the principle of negation of negation, Hegelian dialectic rejects Kantian transcendental dialectic as well as Fichetean a priori triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis but explicates an ongoing and immanent evolution of being-nonbeing-becoming triad for the identity formation from the maximum difference as contradiction to the minimal difference as indifference. As a fundamental principle that regulates the identity formation of individual being, the Hegelian dialectic between the universal in the particular and the particular in the universal leads to the paradoxical parody of radical (in)difference between the squared circle and the round square; in Hegelian teleological dialectic, the noumenal essence of being parallels the phenomenal existence of thing. This paper, interrogating how the Hegelian dialectic inherits from as well as breaks with Platonic and Kantian dialectic for the infinite knowing in epistemology and true identity of being in ontology, outlines the evolution and stylish gesture of dialectical thinking from the ancient to the modern.

A Philosophical Concept of MiltancyMatthew Cole (Recent graduate of Kingston University's Philosophy MA program)

This paper explores a philosophical concept of militancy. Its primary reference points are Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, Ernesto Laclau’s essay “An Ethics of Militant Engagement,” and Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines.’ It attempts to address the following questions: How does militancy form? What is a militant in the contemporary world? What is the temporality of militancy? What is the role of ideology [both for the militant and the liberal state apparatus]?

Militancy forms the primary principle of any revolutionary intervention. As a politics, it necessarily stands outside the State’s legal code of engagement, and by doing so, grounds itself outside the State, while nonetheless remaining within the situation as a whole. By existing outside the State, setting it at a distance, militancy attempts to absolutely other the State, opening an immeasurable gap between the militant and the State. This gap, opened by the antagonism necessary for intervention, lacks a measure. However, in response, the State attempts to assert its

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power and by doing so, it displays a certain measure of that power (this manifests itself through various forms of policing, repression, violence, imprisonment, internment, etc. –all different intensities of an essential war-situation). The real problematic of militancy develops out of the State’s attempts to perpetually recuperate this immeasurability, to map this gap that militancy requires to sustain itself, this space that the militant needs to defend against the State’s war-machine. The militant that allows the State to measure, fails, because this is the mode by which it can be subsumed or recuperated. Militancy thus forms when the quantitative forms of resistance are sublimated into the qualitative perma-war with the State is asserted.

Post-Human Critical TheoryBernard Cosgrave (affiliated with the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin)

Habermas constantly claimed that he does not have a normative moral or political theory, but a Critical Theory of Society. The basis for this distinction is his claim that he is merely making explicit the implicit normative pressuppositions of all language users. Habermas envisaged the task of reconstructing these normative expectations a partially empirical exercise. However no empirical confirmation was forthcoming, as the empirical aspects of his theory were never developed. I argue that this failure causes a Habermas' distinction between his Critical Theory Theory and normative moral and political theories to break down.

This is crucially important as the norms that Habermas endorses are of explicitly Kantian origin. They emphasize reason and impartiality and need for a search for and a consensus around a single right answer. This conception of morality has been criticized as an ethnocentric and biased towards masculine notion of reasoning. Habermas' defence against this claim is that these are universally presupposed norms based as he has shown with the aid of empirical studies. This defence is no longer available to him and thus I will argue that Habermas' theory is deeply marred by ethnocentric and masculine biases about what I means to be human.One approach this problem by those, including Seyla Benhabib, who recognise the force of the objection facing Habermas, but who do not want to abandon his framework is to attempt to broaden his notion moral and political discourse without fundamentally altering it.

I will argue that a more radical approach is necessary. The colonization of the human calls for a posthumanism and investigate whether it has the potential to provide an alternative paradigm for Critical Theory. By posthumanism I do not mean transhumanism the ambition to alter the human through the development of human-machine hybrid. I am interested in the idea that we have always been post-human. The possibilities of new biotechnology only serve to show that the idea of the human is not a static one.

Influenced by Rosi Braidotti, I will focus on Deleuze's notion of the subject as a dynamic process of becoming. Deleuze argues that in Western philosophy, the masculine as term of reference of the dominant view of subjectivity coincides with the exercise of basic symbolic functions, such as reason, self-regulation, self-representation transcendence and its corollary; the power to name and appoint positions of 'otherness' as a set of constitutive outsiders who design by negation the parameters of subjectivity. Deleuze argues that the masculine coincides with the fixity of the centre, which in western philosophy is represented through the notion of Being. As such, the masculine is opposed to the process of becoming, understood as the engendering of creative differences. Being allows for no mutation, no creative becoming, no process: it merely tends towards self-preservation.

Deleuzue advocates processes of becoming, becoming minority, becoming woman, and becoming animal. These are creative process that aim to engender alternative forms of life, ethics and politics other than the dominant eurocentric masculine one. By investigating this notion of becoming I will attempt to show that Benhabib's adaptation of Habermas' programme is not

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sufficient to overcome its shortcomings. I will also question whether Braidotti's use of Deleuze allows us to salvage, what Habermas sees as essential for Critical Theory, a normative basis for social criticism.

Yachts and Chains: Alienation in an Age of TechnologySteven DeLay (PhD Candidate, Philosophy Department Rice University)

On Marx’s view, the state of the present age is a tale of class struggle. It is a story of the haves and the have-nots. There are, on the one hand, the capitalists who control the means of production. And, on the other hand, there is the proletariat whom the capitalists exploit. The relation between capitalist and worker, thus, is one of struggle and exploitation. And all this, so the story goes, has given rise to alienation. And yet, an acknowledgment of alienation invites a further question. While the workers of capitalist society are surely beset by alienation, what about the capitalists themselves? Are they exempt from such existential malaise? I think a telling anecdote suggests otherwise.

Consider a story about Paul Allen and Steve Ellison. Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, and Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp, found themselves embroiled in a competition that epitomizes the age’s capitalist ethos. What was all the fuss about? As Yachting Magazine’s Barry Pickthall reports, Ellison and Allen were in competition to see who could own the longer yacht. As the article observes, “When Allen ordered his latest superyacht, the 416-foot Octopus from the Lürsson yard in Germany, Ellison was soon to follow with an order for the monster 452-foot Rising Sun, which became the second-largest private yacht when he had the hull extended from 387 feet during construction.” Do Allen and Ellison typify something telling about the contemporary age? I would say so. They are, as any Marxist is sure to exclaim, living archetypes of the exploitative capitalist. Yet, are they not also brothers in alienation? For despite the apparent grandeur of their lifestyles, Allen’s and Ellison’s yacht imbroglio suggests that both are as alienated as the rest of us—if not more so.

With the wager in mind that everyone, not just workers, is alienated, I wish to critically evaluate Marx’s notion of alienation. In §2, I explain Marx’s claim that alienation is ultimately due to the material conditions of capitalist society. In reply, I articulate an alternative understanding of alienation. On this alternate view which I call the “onto-existential” interpretation of alienation, alienation is not to be understood as something that emerges on the basis of economic labor conditions alone. It is, rather, a condition that reveals something essential about the nature of being a human subject.

Having framed alienation in this existential register, I turn in §3 to Marx’s claim that homo faber is the essence of human subjectivity. I argue that, once we recognize that alienation is due to something about the very structure of human existence, and not merely a contingent historical fact about economic conditions, we have equal reason to reconsider Marx’s conception of what it means to be a human subject. Specifically, we come to see that Marx—though rightfully critical of capitalist labor conditions, principles, and values—overlooks the fact that such labor conditions are not self-grounded. Economic conditions, that is to say, are not the “base” that determines the “superstructure” of society. Instead, it is the background understanding of what it means for something to be—what Heidegger calls an “epoch” of being—that determines these economic conditions themselves. In §4, then, I conclude with some remarks about how we might best deal with alienation. My suggestion, informed by my “existential” reading of alienation and Heidegger’s critique of technology, is that alienation is not something to be overcome by social revolution, but rather is a task that falls squarely upon the shoulders of each individual to confront alone. The only “antidote” to such alienation, thus, is that we “let-things-be” rather than attempt to master, dominate, and control them.

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Nancy and the Impasse of CommunityProfessor Ignaas Devisch (Professor of Philosophy Ghent University and Artevelde University)

Which problems are we dealing with when we talk about community? The most basic and tautological answer is: the problem that we no longer know what we are talking about when we speak about community. The triviality of this answer speaks volumes. The fact that we no longer know whether and how we can still speak about community, this is the fundamental problem of community today. All the foundations out of which we have thought community until now have gone bankrupt, they are past their expiration-date. But since this is a fundamental problem, one

must investigate it in an equally fundamental manner .To my mind, Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontological inquiry therefore is and continues to be most promising when articulating the regularly occurring impasse of community in the most radical manner. It is not that ontology can solve the all-encompassing problem of community. As I said, the problem can no longer be grasped in all-encompassing terms, and this is a good thing, for the problem concerns precisely a societal model in which community no longer poses any problem. This is just as true for the ‘solution’ that, out of fear of falling into totalitarianism or social

immanentism, tries to flee from all attempts at a solution to the problem.My unpacking of social immanentism will be led in the first instance by Nancy, but in order to address a number of questions concerning social identity or the return to an original community we will also need to take a careful look at Derridean deconstruction. Only through this detour can we properly analyze the call for a return to an original community and gain insight into the

philosophical stakes of Nancy’s call for a social ontology.

Matter of Life: Ecology in Spinoza, Deleuze and MeillassouxRick Dolphijn (Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Cultural Studies Utrecht University)

For over the past decade, radical thinkers, most of them combining several disciplines in their analysis, and then I think of people such as Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Bryan Rotman, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Tim Morton, Slavoj Zizek, Manuel DeLanda and Quentin Meillassoux, increasingly show us that the type of thinking that has been dominating the ecological debates for so long now, are ill-conceptualized in a fundamental way. Often influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze, it is now all across academia (from architecture (think Lars Spuybroek) to musicology (think Steve Goodman)), that scholars and scientists are mapping that the current state of the earth, of life, demands us to change our thinking about nature, about matter, about technology, and about our role in it, radically.

Crucial here is to tackle this anthropocentrism which lies deeply embedded not only in the dominant ideas about ecology, but in our thinking as a whole. Especially the writings of Immanuel Kant, as they had a major impact upon (German) Idealism, phenomenology and critical thinking, have established this central role of man in thought. Foucault already noted this in the early 1960's, yet "the end of man", as he indeed defined man a 19th century invention which we have to get rid of as soon as possible, still stirs the debate, today more than anywhere, in terms of ecology. Quentin Meillassoux most recently caused an uproar in academia, claiming that Kant’s thoughts, and especially his Subject (the I-think), functioning as the necessary point of departure for anything to come into existence, turned out to be the very “catastrophe” for thinking. This human self centeredness, this arrogance even, has removed us from the earth we live, alienating us from each other and even from ourselves.

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In this paper my goal is to reread this ecological tradition central to European thought, starting with Spinoza with special attention to Deleuze and Quentin Meillassoux (who writes important contributions) as a means to realize that the human being is just another form of life that is nothing but a “fungal growth of which the planet is completely unaware”. To realize this deeply Spinozist position, in thought, we cannot be interested in objects, but we cannot be interested in subjects either. Contrary to how the ecological debate goes today, this tradition cannot but conclude that we are not entitled to save the world; we should allow the world to save the world. We should not open ourselves up to the world, as Derrida would have it. We should allow the world to open us up. We should become a target if we truly want to get rid of anthropocentrism and all of its devastations that keep on haunting us.

Ontology and (non)-Ontology in the Philosophy of Gilles DeleuzeVladimir Dukic (Recent Graduate, MA program in Theory, Culture and Politics Trent University)

Ontology has been solved—once and for all. When in Difference and Repetition Deleuze writes that “there has only ever been one ontological proposition,” this statement is to be taken literally: from Parmenides to Heidegger, the response to every imperative question and the solution to every problem incarnated in the domain of ontology is the same—the one and only ontological proposition, “being is univocal.” The question, then, concerns the sense of this unique proposition, but, more to the point, it concerns the very task of thinking: if philosophy has solved and re-solved its fundamental ontological problems, what remains to be thought?

By returning to Difference and Repetition and related texts of the same period, this paper articulates an understanding of “(non)-ontology” as that which continues to give us thought. To this end, Deleuze’s notion of “(non)-being,” the being of questions/ problems, is examined in the context of Martin Heidegger’s inquiry into non-being, the nothing, as well as Henri Bergson’s own investigations into the idea of nothingness. For Deleuze, it is argued, (non)-being must be understood as a “form” of being that refers not to existence—the “to exist” of particular entities—instead, it refers to the “to subsist,” or “to insist” of perfectly positive, differential, and dialectical problematic fields and questions engendered by those fields. To be sure, insofar as (non)-being is understood as a form of being, (non)-ontology remains a form of ontology; nevertheless, it is a superior form, concerned not with the propositions of consciousness, but with problems-Ideas and questions/ imperatives that impose themselves on the unconscious.

Gauging Proximities: An inquiry into a possible nexus between Middle Eastern and Western Painting

Evrim Emir (PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam)

The blind and the seeing are not equal.––– The Koran, “The Creator”, 19

There is nothing more going on between the things and the eyes, and the eyes and vision, than between the things and the blind man’s hands, and between his hands and thoughts.––– Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”, 302

Nobel-Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk stages an exploration of the art and philosophy of Ottoman miniature painting in his 2001 novel, Benim Adım Kırmızı (My Name Is Red). Pamuk’s work clearly suggests parallels between the Middle Eastern miniature tradition and 20 th-century Western philosophy of art. Why would a contemporary reader with a Western education

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find My Name Is Red appealing? Why do Middle Eastern paintings themselves, or Islamic philosophy, seem to lack the proximity to the West that is suggested by the novel? The response to these questions may perhaps be found in another set of questions: What could be the inspiration for a 20th-century author who writes about Ottoman miniaturists? Ottoman history, perhaps. Islamic philosophy, indeed. But what about 20th-century Western philosophy?

This paper aims to examine whether the proximity between Islamic painting and modern Western philosophy of art implied by Pamuk is really possible, or whether what Pamuk has to say about Islamic art is instead influenced by 20th-century Western philosophy of art, especially the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida. I believe that the philosophy of art portrayed in My Name is Red is at the very least unconsciously conditioned by the philosophy of art of recent times. One might push the argument to the limit and claim that Pamuk is consciously creating a view of Islamic art according to 20th-century philosophy of art. Nonetheless, the novel opens up a space for inquiry into a possible nexus between two art forms, specifically miniature paintings and 20th century western abstract paintings, which seem to be not only historically but philosophically radically apart from each other.

A Grey Zone between Republicanism, Liberalism, and Nationalism: On the Concept of Constitutional Patriotism

Erdinç Erdem (Graduate student, MA Political Science, Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey)

This paper explores one of the proposed principles of “living together” within political philosophy, “constitutional patriotism”, which has gained its name and prominence through various writings of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas offers this concept first as a remedy for the pathologies of nation state, second as a new ground for political allegiance beyond nation state. Since the times of Roman res publica, various forms of patriotism as a sentiment have been discussed by various thinkers either as a virtue or a vice. On the one hand, civic republicanism considers patriotism as a civic value, a moral potential, for citizens to fight against injustices in their homelands. In this respect, contemporary republican writings on patriotism aim to bring back and emphasize this old meaning of the concept. On the other hand, other thinkers, largely from a liberal cosmopolitan standpoint, undermine the importance of patriotism, and argue that it is a variant of nationalism. Between these two perspectives, there is a growing literature focusing on how to reconcile republicans’ emphasis on civic virtues and liberals’ emphasis on rights. Hence, a constitutional patriotism is suggested by Jürgen Habermas as a principle that claims to solve the tension between these two traditions.

Constitutional patriotism is developed not for the purpose of bringing back pre-nation state form of patriotism. Nor it is analogous to any sort of nationalism. Therefore, in this paper I ask what makes constitutional patriotism different from civic republican patriotism and nationalism. To this end, firstly I will trace the origins of modern patriotism where the concept is gradually subsumed within the boundaries of nation state. In this respect, I argue that one must turn to Hegel in order to pinpoint the most elaborate form of patriotism as allegiance to political institutions of a nation-state. Secondly, I ask whether constitutional patriotism has such a contradictory nature that contains nationalism just as the one embraced by Hegel. This question leads us to compare constitutional patriotism with nationalism, particularly civic and liberal nationalism. Hence, in this part, I will dwell on how to conceptualize patriotism as detached from nationalism. In the final part of the paper, I will discuss whether constitutional patriotism is a right answer for the question of how to live together.

Living Knowledge? Deleuze, Canguilhem and the Problem of Life

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Tom Eyers (Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Humanities,Washington University in St. Louis)

French philosophy of the 20th Century is often understood as being organized into two broad streams. The first, associated with Bergson through Deleuze, privileges the lived experience of the subject, while the second, associated with Foucault, Lacan and Derrida and encompassing the epistemology of Canguilhem and Bachelard, centers on an anti-humanist account of the primacy of concepts and structures. In providing a critical reading of the work of the philosopher of biology Georges Canguilhem and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, two thinkers ostensibly at different ends of this bifurcation of French intellectual history, I will contest this narrative, arguing that it is around the problem of ‘life’ that a concern for the vitality of experience and the constitutivity of

concepts and structures might be brought together .Canguilhem, I argue, insists on thinking ‘life’ as encompassing both the immanent negotiations of organisms within their milieu and the equally immanent emergence of knowledge from such movements. Deleuze, in turn, evinces a comparable, if distinct, concern for the inextricability of language and logic from the immanent potentiality of life. While the latter, I argue, risks falling back into an understanding of life as an incorporeal energy unmoored from material conditions, an interposition of Canguilhem’s materialist understanding of the interaction of organisms and milieu may help to retrospectively highlight those elements in Deleuze’s work that resist the temptations

of a weightless vitalism.Both thinkers, when read critically together, point towards a thinking of language that resists its cleavage from the singularity of life, and an understanding of lived experience that circumvents the vitalist urge to ascribe a fundamentally extra- or non-material status on life. The contemporary relevance of my paper lies in its return to the ‘source’ of much current thinking in European philosophy around the problem of life as it intersects with political theory, most influentially incarnated in the concept of ‘biopolitics’. How might an attention to the more general philosophical conditions for thinking life in its immanent relation with language and logic shed new

light on the post-Foucauldian attempt to think life and politics together?

Ephectic Phenomenology and the Pathological ImperativeRichard Fitch (Independent Scholar, PhD Birkbeck, University of London)

`This paper first explores what would be required for a phenomenological practice to be non-dogmatic, and then asks if the categorical imperative could have a place in such a practice. Although modern phenomenology often professes noble anti-dogmatic intentions, in practice these soon seem to fall by the wayside. The turn, from vulgar metaphysical or positivist dogma, towards ‘the things themselves’, soon turns full circle to return to dogma, as appears to be the case with recent phenomenological returns to religion or to the philosophy of mind. Dogmatism renders reasoning arbitrary and rationally indistinct. So a dogmatic phenomenology renders the careful description of ‘what appears’, arbitrary and indistinct. Instead of bringing phenomenological light, a thick dogmatic fog obscures. To succeed philosophically, phenomenology must remain non-dogmatic. A properly non-dogmatic phenomenological practice would suspend judgement on matters beyond what appears to appear. This practice, given the focus on suspension, might be described as an ephectic phenomenology. Essential to such a practice would be the discipline to resist the siren calls of the more seductive styles of dogmatising, such as, for example, transcendental thought. But what of the categorical imperative? Even thinkers such as Derrida and Nancy, more sensitive than most to the perils of dogmatism in phenomenology, have remained wedded to imperatives. Do imperative forms of thought elude dogmatism, and thus have a place in an ephectic phenomenology? The paper

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explores this question by examining the place of the imperative in the work of Alphonso Lingis, as well as Kant’s original formulation. Lingis is examined because of his sensitivity to the libidinal. In conclusion, a concept of a pathological imperative is articulated. Not so much in the sense of a diseased imperative, but more in the wake of the archaic sense of pathē as describing what we must undergo regardless of our desire; an imperative torn between the pathological and the passionate.

Violence and Translation in the Work of Emmanuel LevinasLisa Foran (PhD candidate, School of Philosophy, University College Dublin)

This paper seeks to explore the relation between being and otherwise than being in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. I argue that this relation takes the form of translation; a translation which is violent but one that is also the possibility of limiting that necessary violence.

In Otherwise than Being (1974) Levinas argues, against Heidegger, for a subject who is more than a being questioning in the direction of the meaning of Being. His account of the otherwise than being calls for another type of consciousness: a non-intentional consciousness whose modality is affectivity and exposure against the intentional ego of Husserl whose modality was representation and objectification. Seeking to explain the subject as substitution for the Other, Levinas argues for a subject understood as a null-site, a u-topos who occupies the non-space between being and otherwise than being. This paper argues that this null-site is to be understood as a site of translation. It is here that the Levinasian subject on the one hand ties being to the otherwise than being while at the same time being the ‘breaking point’ of that relation. I suggest that this double modality creates a subject who passively enacts an infinite translating between essence and beyond essence.

Separate to, even prior to, the intentional ego is a subject who responds to the face of the Other, a response which is an infinite responsibility for the Other. This response, which is responsibility, is for Levinas to be understood as Saying – ‘forward of languages’ – found beyond being. However, saying is betrayed on the plane of ontology in the said, in language understood as a system of signs. It is the responsibility of philosophy to reduce this betrayal, to reduce the violence of the translation of saying to said, of otherwise than being to being. The manner in which this reduction is to take place is through an ‘incessant unsaying’ of the said. In the second part of this paper I contend that this unsaying is also a translating – a stepping back from the treason of manifestation.

Finally this paper argues that the violence of manifestation, the treason of the saying by the said, is a necessary violence; what Levinas calls a ‘good violence’. ‘Traduttore, traditore’: translation might always be treason but it is also the ‘price that manifestation demands’. Wihtout this translation, I argue, the subject is powerless to act.

Romanticism and Inaesthetics: Alain Badiou’s Reading of HölderlinMoritz Gansen (Postgraduate student in philosophy, Free University of Berlin and Kingston

University)

‘Hölderlin’s word’, Martin Heidegger writes in one of his Elucidations, ‘says the holy [dasHeilige], and thereby names the singular time-space of the original decision for the essencearrangement [Wesensgefüge] of the future history of gods and humanities’. This is, according to Heidegger, the task of the poets in destitute times, in times of the threshold, in which the ancient gods have withdrawn and the mortals must await their return: to be the messengers of the gods, the witnesses of truth as the disclosure, or opening, of being. Poetry becomes

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ontology – if language is the ‘house of being’, and if only by traversing language we can reach that which is, who but the poets, who venture further into language, could speak of being? Who but the poets could truly think?

Such is, in brief, not only Heidegger’s theory of poetry, but also the fundamental disposition of what Alain Badiou has called ‘the age of poets’. This philosophical category, in many ways associated with romanticism, identifies a period, stretching from Friedrich Hölderlin to Paul Celan, in which philosophy developed a tendency to delegate its functions to poetry. Where due to certain methodological constraints philosophy seemed wanting, Badiou argues, poets felt compelled to step in, producing work ‘immediately recognizable as a work of thought’. But as the poets become thinkers, as the stakes and objects of the formerly distinct activities of poetry and philosophy are increasingly identified, the result is a new relationship of rivalry between the two – philosophers aspire to be poets. The age of poets means the ‘suturing’ of philosophy to poetry. However, Badiou asserts, this age is over: Celan was its last poet. And yet, the poetic suture subsists; the advocates of poetic ontology still appear as our contemporaries. However, Badiou argues, they are not, since, caught in the impasse of neo-romanticism, they in fact deprive philosophy of its potential to be genuinely contemporary. The great task is hence the renewal of philosophy in the overcoming of the poetic suture. One must establish a new relationship between philosophy and poetry – precisely this is the purpose of Badiou’s notion of ‘inaesthetics’.

The proposed paper will hence analyse the concept as a direct response to Heideggerian hermeneutics. After a short recapitulation of Badiou’s general understanding of the term, we will more specifically consider it as an explicit intervention in the field of theneo-romantic tendencies of Heideggerianism, as a programme designed to overcome what Badiou believes to be the latter’s impasse. Finally, we will examine Badiou’s counterappropriation of Hölderlin, the poet whom he tends to designate as the ‘distant prophet’ of the age of poets, and whom Heidegger calls ‘the pre-cursor of poets in destitute time’. We will, by means of a close reading of Badiou’s meditation on the romantic poet in Being and Event, understand that the attempt to show a Hölderlin beyond Heidegger becomes a touchstone of inaesthetics that also ultimately betrays its inadequacies.

Apprehension and Deception: Hegel and the Farce of ThinkingTziovanis Georgakis (Teaching Staff, Department of English Studies, University of Cyprus)

In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argues that the sophistry of perception seeks to lay hold on the truth and save it from contradiction by distinguishing the “unessential” aspects of understanding from an “essence” which is opposed to it. However, as he crucially notes, these expedients do not ward off deception in the process of apprehension (Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Miller, A. V. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 77). In this paper, I argue that an underlying discourse of a farcical modality effects the Hegelian dialectic. For Hegel, the singular being of sense vanishes in the dialectical movement of immediate certainty and emerges in the object as pure universality, the in-itself of the One. But this immediacy is still a conditioned being-for-self alongside which appears another being-for-self. In other words, the universal and truthful object of sense—which is both the act and object of apprehension—is the one and the same respect of the excessive opposite of itself. It is for itself so far as it is for a multiple other, and it is for a multiple other so far as it is for itself. This determinacy of the universal one as an excessive other and the excessive other as universal one is pure negation, an indeterminacy par excellence, and it allows (a) a determined universal one to be deceivably perceived as a undetermined excess and (b) the determined excess to be deceivably perceived as an undetermined universal. However, as I claim, this Hegelian deceptive play of contradictions is authorized by another more primary game of deceptions which is farcical in its essence. This farce

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plots the Hegelian dialectic as a ridicule of contradictions that remain eternally unresolved. Hegel’s concept of apprehension is a result of a derision of reason because the universal one, as the essential product of apprehension, has never been allowed to be originally determined by apprehension itself in the first place. Originally and primordially, there is a playful sham that is beyond the deceptive play of dictions and contradictions, simulations and dissimulations, or identifications and differentiations. The farce as such is a mockery of thinking, dialectical or not, in the sense that (a) it authorizes the unresolved and ambiguous play of the contained one and its excessive other, a play that is essentially inherent in every thinking while, and at the same time, (b) mocks the unresolved ambiguity by mimicking it as a deformation that is empty of any comfort or expectation of reason—discernible, ambiguous, or other. I trickily mark, thus, belittlement/boastfulness and mimicry/deformation as farcical modalities, as puns, as double entendres that produce a deceptive reason that is so ridiculously deceptive that is beyond any reason.

Extending the Homogenous Presence, Comprising the Duration and Succession of the Manifold: Husserl on the Temporality of Melodies and Tones, Adorno on Pregnant Moments of the Musical

WorkIlias Giannopoulos (PhD National University of Athens, Independent Scholar)

The notion of a qualitative, subjectively experienced time as opposed to the objective time, the idea of temporal extension (of the presence) as appears in the work of Husserl and the subjective ability of reflective perception of an extended “temporal object…which exposes its material on a time interval” (Husserl), gave rise –in the field of music aesthetics– to phenomenological approaches to the temporality of the complete musical work. These are based on the idea that it also constitutes, though extensive in duration, a temporal and homogeneous object which, actually only (!), ideally could coincide with a temporal level of consciousness. Dahlhaus for instance, states that the “experienced time […] is the fundamental, while the countable time, […] is of secondary importance and remains for the music an external fact” and in addition that ‘the claims that music is an expression of experienced time are quite common”. However, in his extended lectures On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), Husserl demonstrates his phenomenological analysis of the perception of temporal objects on the basis of small units, like melodies and even single tones, where the “continuity of identity” is presupposed; as he claims, in the latter case there is unity of the tone in the temporal succession while the temporal succession confirms and constitutes this unity. Is this possible for the complete and manifold musical work? Adorno on the other hand, refers often in his Musical Writings to the paradoxical claim that “The great classicistic symphonic movements of Beethoven […] can be ideally so heard as lasting just a moment”. Considering different passages of his writings, above all the axiomatic formulation in his Aesthetic Theory, “Every artwork is an instant”, it becomes evident that the notion of the “instant/moment” constitutes a cardinal issue in his theory of art. This notion is not only a metaphor but tends to become a time differential. In order to support this paradoxicality and to transcend the immanent contradiction between work-wholeness and successive display of a temporal art par excellence (music), Adorno develops a dialectical theory of musical time that culminates, as it will be stated, in a temporalization of Hegelian logical principles. The author will try to juxtapose Husserl’s phenomenological temporal analysis of the perception of small musical units and Adorno's time dialectics and demonstrate their opposite directions: the former aims to extend the perception, but also phenomenal display, of an ideally identical –since small and homogeneous– presence of a content in temporal succession, including past and future through “retention” and “protention”; the latter to comprise the diversity of a temporal extended and manifold content in the moment, on the basis of Hegel’s

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idea of mediation between whole and part. The author will also try to scrutinize the appropriateness of both approaches, pointing out however, that Adorno’s idealistic attempt to comprise the manifold, successive given and temporal extended content in the musically objective instant, can be supported (“without violence”) by concrete musical phenomena.

Ostrich Nominalism, Peacock Realism, and Liberal NaturalismPaul Giladi (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield

One of the most undeveloped areas of research on Hegel’s theoretical philosophy is Hegel’s complex relationship with philosophical (scientific) naturalism. By ‘philosophical naturalism’ here, I mean the idea that the realm of nature exhausts reality, and that reality does not contain any supernatural/supersensible/spooky entities. This is, of course, not meant to be a ‘definition’ of the theory in any official sense, because, as Papineau argues, such a definition is almost impossible to be found given how so many philosophers define the term ‘natural’ differently.1 However, all philosophers will at least agree that philosophical naturalism rejects the supernatural. The main reason for this lack of scholarship is that many philosophers in the analytic tradition have regarded Hegel’s absolute idealism and in particular his Naturphilosophie to be so obscure that it seems hopeless to take seriously Hegel’s opinion on nature and empirical science let alone consider Hegel a naturalist. If one were to adopt the traditional interpretation of Hegel as a spirit monist (see Taylor, 1975), it is clear that a quick scan of Hegel’s idiosyncratic terms, such as ‘Spirit’, suggests that Hegel’s metaphysics and philosophy of nature is hardly compatible with philosophical naturalism, given its apparent affection for the supernatural and the occult.

My aim in this paper is to suggest that Hegel’s realism about universals can be used as (i) a critique of Quine’s nominalism about universals in ‘On What There Is’,2 and (ii) as both a critique of a conservative naturalism, and a defence of a liberal-McDowellian conception of naturalism. What this means is that Hegel should not be read as opposed to naturalism per se, but only to a very conservative/positivistic naturalism. If this is correct, then Hegel can be judged as occupying a middle-ground position between what McDowell calls ‘bald’ naturalism and ‘rampant Platonism’. Of course, I readily admit that Hegel’s liberal naturalism, which will endear him to philosophers like Davidson, Rorty, and McDowell, may still be regarded as anti-naturalist by those who prefer to define naturalism conservatively. However, I think that such a problem is not something to worry Hegelians, because it reveals something deeply problematic about scientism and those who refuse to concede that it is perfectly intelligible to conceive of nature in non-positivistic ways without having some commitment to the supernatural.

I Forgive YouSimon Glendinning (Reader in European Philosophy, European Institute, London School of

Economics and Political Science, Director of FEP)

1 Papineau, D, "Naturalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/naturalism/>. 2 The important point to always keep in mind when talking about Quine’s nominalism about universals is that despite dismissing universals from his ontology, Quine maintains a strict form of Platonism about mathematical entities and sets, and so is anti-nominalist with regard to abstract objects. Given this, one should be careful when calling Quine a nominalist. Throughout this paper, ‘nominalism’ and ‘realism’ will be used solely in relation to the debate between those who posit universals and those who reject universals – i.e. the original, metaphysical uses of realism and anti-realism.

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There are two classic accounts of forgiveness, and both are based on intuitive but problematically metaphysical conceptions of human nature.

The first suggests that we always have a reason to forgive others because human beings are, in their inherent natures if not in all their typical conduct, good. When I say “I forgive you” it means that I recognise that there is in you something better.

The second suggests that we always have a reason to forgive others because human beings are, in their inherent natures if not in all their typical conduct, bad. When I say “I forgive you” it means that I recognise that I could have found myself derailed by circumstances too.

In this paper I will explore whether reasons of this sort can ever warrant an act of forgiveness. Drawing on work by Jacques Derrida I will argue that forgiveness draws on an appreciation of human finitude and not of human nature.

The Political Theory of Recognition in Axel HonnethÖzgür Emrah Gürel (PhD Candidate, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis University of

Amsterdam)

This paper aims to critically explore and analyze the different aspects of Honneth’s mature model of political philosophy. By mainly focusing on Honneth’s investigations in The Struggle for Recognition and Das Recht der Freiheit, my work is organized in three sections, each dedicated to a specific issue. The first section particularly deals with Honneth’s account of the liberalism/communitarianism debate. Since the writings that Honneth specifically dedicated to political philosophy first centered on this important debate, this initial problem allows me to schematically present his official response. This section, however, must also briefly show in what sense the theory of recognition is neither a liberal, nor a communitarian position. The second section addresses one of the most serious objections raised by Nancy Fraser against Honneth’s theory of recognition: its alleged weakness in dealing with problems arising from economic injustice. Critically elaborating on this problem enables me to present another one of Honneth’s explicit proposals in political philosophy, with a focus, this time, on the critique of political economy. The third and final section deals with the question of identity politics. This is probably the area that is most often targeted by critiques of recognition, and mostly in direct connection with problems of political philosophy. In overall, aiming to situate Honneth’s critical theory in the tradition of Left-Hegelian liberalism, this paper will critically examine an alternative approach by offering three axioms: First, a quest for an understanding of society fully normative not in a merely liberal procedural sense, yet independent of given communitarian forms of ethical life. Second, an attempt to develop a post-metaphysical social ontology true to the idea that every society is characterized by structures of shared meanings and practices, the violation of which cannot be perpetrated for long without engendering empirically observable pathologies. Third, an effort to develop a critical theory of contemporary society anchored both in the reconstruction of the normative infrastructure of a post-conventional democratic ethical life and in the analysis of the social pathologies generated by the neglect or outright violation of that normative infrastructure or “grammar.”

Ravaisson and SchellingEllie Harper (Graduate Student in Philosophy, University of the West of England)

This paper will demonstrate the fundamental parallels between the ideas of French philosopher Félix Ravaisson in his text Of Habit and those of German Idealist F.W.J. Schelling. It is regrettable that the explicit similarities between the two philosophers have been overlooked.

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Ravaisson’s link to Schelling is often passed over in a single paragraph often comprising a note that Ravaisson attended Schelling’s lectures and that Schelling hoped Ravaisson would translate his Philosophy of Mythology. It will be argued that far more than this binds them together. Not simply a matter of general ideas common to both, which may or may not be attributable to their crossed paths or the climate of thought circulating at the time, rather specific terms, ideas and concepts used by both that demonstrate how tightly interwoven their philosophies are, both in depth and scope. A reading of Ravaisson’s short text Of Habit brings to light its inherent Schellingian nature, and reveals his indebtedness to Schelling. This does not detract from or override Ravaisson’s thought, but adds to a more complete understanding of his work. It also helps to rectify the lack of work focusing upon Ravaisson’s in the English speaking philosophical community, departing from the usual focus upon the concept ‘habit’ and instead focusing upon his Schellingian transcendental realist philosophy of nature.

I aim to link key concepts and terms found in Ravaisson to Schelling. Concepts such: as the idea of a polarity of forces; potency; Ravaisson’s frequent references to the middle term or ground (indifference or zero point in Schelling); asymmetry throughout the production of nature and within the individual; will and desire in nature and the concept of quantity (multiplicity) which is conceived as extended nature, or to use Schelling’s terms identity self-differentiating itself. The broader theme that unites both is a thorough grounding of everything/the all in nature, including the individual and freedom, which is both productive and generative.This paper will primarily focus upon their conceptions of the dark Ungrund and their near identical conceptions cosmogony of Absolute identity fracturing into finite differences – phenomenal nature – through the physical explanation of potency or force. It will be argued that it is the mobile indifference point present in both of their philosophies that is of central importance as it is form forming or morphogenetic, both in nature and the individual. From it issues matter’s self-constructing movement between antithetical potencies, increasing in complexity and variation as the hierarchical scale of life is generated. Continuity from the Ungrund, is carried forward as potency from the active movement originating in nature’s primordial beginning which is recapitulated and immanent within the whole of nature as it unfolds in expansive becoming. This movement is spontaneous and immediate: where cause and effect merge, lending the appearance of necessity. For Ravaisson the movement present in the inorganic realm carried forward into the freedom exercised by the highest form of life, the individual. Nature thus becomes ethically determining. In this way Ravaisson implies a cyclical return to primordial nature or a return to a prime idea of motion itself. By giving a vitalistic nature that unfolds through the logic of potency, they remove the view that it is at all mechanical or deterministic. Nature is given priority, placed before and productive of thinking. In thought nature becomes ideal, embodying intelligence within the human individual.

The contemporary relevance of these two philosophers brought together adds to the body of work in European philosophy, showing thought cutting across countries can be entirely similar and united. It also will add to the current debates in emerging speculative realist positions, highlighting the importance of nature and at the same time opening up new lines of debate through the inclusion, of Ravaisson, as such a neglected thinker in the European community.

Kant’s Philosophy of HopeDaniel Herbert (Independent Scholar, PhD in Philosophy, University of Sheffield)

My intention in this paper is to examine Kant’s philosophical treatment of matters relating to the a priori grounds of our entitlement to hope for certain kinds of valuable outcomes to be realised in some future state of affairs, as distinct from considerations pertaining to the possibility of knowledge and the demands of moral law upon our practical agency. Of the three questions

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Kant presents in the Critique of Pure Reason as jointly exhaustive of the problems with which pure reason must concern itself, namely, (1) ‘What can I know?’, (2) ‘What should I do?’ and (3) ‘What may I hope?’, the third remains, although by no means entirely overlooked, certainly the least discussed amongst scholars writing on the Critical philosophy. While there are both interpretative and philosophical reasons for the comparative neglect of this feature of Kant’s thought, even amongst devotees of the Critical philosophy, an examination of how Kant addresses issues concerning our right to faith, or epistemically unsupported optimism with respect to the future realisation of matters of personal and universal significance, has the potential to cast light on his views concerning religious commitment, political organisation and historical change.

Perhaps the central concept in Kant’s discussion of our right to hope is that of the summum bonum or ‘highest good’, a topic to which Kant turns his attention at some point in each of the three Critiques. Although his deontological moral theory requires that moral value attaches only to the will of an agent for whom respect of the moral law is a sufficient incentive to action, Kant nonetheless maintains that the human predicament is such that the pursuit of happiness will remain a motivating factor behind our activities and allows that we each possess a legitimate claim to as much happiness as our virtue merits, the complete realisation of such a desert-based state of affairs amounting to the ultimate achievement of what the Critical philosophy presents as the highest good. All the same, Kant admits that we have insufficient a posteriori evidence or a priori grounds to expect the achievement of the highest good, since we cannot infer either from our experience or from its transcendental conditions that there is any great likelihood of the highest good’s being realised in nature or in human society, even while we must acknowledge a personal stake and moral interest in its realisation. As such, the Critical philosophy permits us to hope that each agent will receive as much happiness as their virtue makes them worthy of, and also for whatever conditions are necessary for the possible realisation of the highest good.

Kant’s thinking about hope informs several elements of his wider system of transcendental idealism and raises a number of fascinating questions which merit our further attention. In the religious domain, what Kant has to say about hope reinforces his fideistic defence of a moral faith compatible with the limits of human knowledge by permitting us to hope for the existence of a God who will act as guarantor of the realisation of the highest good, and for the reality of an afterlife in which the wages of virtue may be enjoyed. In the sphere of society and culture meanwhile, Kant’s thoughts about hope connect with his discussions of history as being on a progressive and purposive course towards greater freedom and human well-being. I shall examine what is distinctive in Kant’s Critical system about his treatment of questions pertaining to our right to hope and discuss the role of hope in his handling of issues in religion, politics and history.

On the Expressive Dimension of Language in Cassirer and Wittgenstein

Christian Herzog (PhD Candidate, University of Klagenfurt)

The focus of this proposal is what I call the 'expressive dimension' of language: the potential of language use to bear new shades of sense irreducible to mere linguistic convention, but dependent on the situational context and the manner of speech, especially as a bodily expression. This emerges eminently in cases, when speakers transgress habitual ways of speaking towards uncommon expressions – enrooted in their performative context – and understanding comes close to take words 'as if they were gestures'.

This spontaneous and performative aspect of speech, its interplay with language as a social institution and the concept of the embodiment of the latter are taken to account for the flexibility and creativity of language use, while maintaining a concept of linguistic meaning as essentially socially constituted.

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I will approach this phenomenon by a discussion of three philosophers: Ernst Cassirer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein. While those belong to different strains of philosophical tradition (although Merleau-Ponty read Cassirer and commented on him), the expression of emotions and aesthetic experience as well as the expressive use of language are a common interest in their writings. Furthermore the influence of 'Gestalttheorie' is an important link between the two continental philosophers and Wittgenstein. Although Wittgenstein declares his discussion of psychological concepts (where gestalt psychologist Köhler is mentioned explicitely) to be merely therapeutic, concepts resembling those found in Cassirer and Merleau-Ponty (and influenced by Neo-Kantian, phenomenological thinking and gestaltism) are used to support the alternative picture Wittgenstein sketches of expressive behaviour in his attempt of clarification.

The notion of an 'expressive dimension' of language alludes to Ernst Cassirer. Although in Cassirer's dedicated writings on language expression (Ausdruck) and gesture could be understood as belonging to early stages of its development, I will argue, to take Ausdruck not as a particular manner of symbolization fulfilled by myth and a marginal part of language, but as a persistent dimension of cultural symbolization and language.

This aspect in Cassirer's philosophy of culture shares important aspects with the concept of expression in Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While his earlier work emphasizes the ties between linguistic expression and the body, later writings (La Prose du monde) explore the relation between individual expression and language as a social system (in a rather peculiar account of Saussure). This tension between expressive speech as a creation of sense, hence constituting meaning and the dependence of language on social institutions allows an interesting comparison with Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein's emphasis on the importance of rules and the social character of language nevertheless goes along with a great sensitivity for aesthetic differences in speech and fine shades of meaning.

Contrasting those different perspectives allows to approach language without either neglecting its dependence on conventions or ignoring the relevance of expressive speech and bodily expression for the constitution of meaning.

Writing [in] FinitudeJulia Hölzl (PhD candidate, Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen)

“Ruin of words, demise writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains (the fragmentary)”… 3

Finitude cannot be said, but can it be written? For how to write the end as end (as singular ending of that which is ending), how to write the limit (as and at the limit)? Such writing of finitude must be (a) writing in finitude, and such writing, it will be argued, must be a(s) fragmentary writing.

The fragment: not merely another format. A(s) finite fissure, always, it cannot and must not be reduced to its fragmentary “form”; the finite fragment does not have to be written in fragments, but is to be written as fragment, in both form and content. The fragment is to be fragmented, always.

The fragment: always at the end, always as the end, but where does it begin, where does it end?

3 Maurice Blanchot., The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p. 33.

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Such questions must reside outside the finite fragmentthere is no end to it, and yet endings are all there is, each time. Undone rather than unfinished, it does not know a system; eventuating rather than becoming, it does not speak the language of continuity (the official language of philosophy since Aristotle, as Blanchot has shown).

The fragment must, then, be written differently, always. Eluding the unifying concept of (in)completion, the finite fragment does not relate to an infinite and endless fragmentariness, but remains in the sphere of the on(c)e: the fragment is to be written singularly, never in the plural.

Neither n/or, sur-passing every passage, neither auto-poietic nor depending on completion by others, self-contained, yet open, the fragment lacks nothing, but lacks a locale; neither modern, nor post-modern, nor trans-modern, but outside such isms, always outside (the traditional language of opposition), neither ambiguous nor contrary, neither complete, nor shattered, neither part nor whole, it cannot be subordinated to either of themunlike its infinitely Romantic counterpart, totalities apply very badly to the finite fragment.

Finitudenot endless, but ending, each time cannot be said, but it must be written, each time.

Remaining without remains, always as and at the end, always elsewhere, it is the finite fragment that might be able to touch such end: as end.

Between the fingers of Mnemosyne: Levinas' variations on proximityTim Huntley (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy University of Sussex)

This paper revisits the philosophical concept of proximity given by Emmanuel Levinas in Otherwise than Being [1974]. In Levinas' thought nearness is differentiated from direct physical or spatial contact and we see that, as a consequence, proximity is kept apart from contiguity. This paper sets out to consider how Levinas relates the idea of proximity to that of touch and quite why he does so by way of a particular notion of forgetting.

In Levinas' phrase, proximity occurs 'like the diachrony of time that flows between the fingers of Mnemosyne.' [Otherwise: 84] Proximity, as we are told elsewhere in Otherwise than Being, does not belong to the movement of cognition, and this would follow from Levinas' earlier thought, concluding in Totality and Infinity [1961]. Here Levinas advances an ethical primacy against the predominant understanding of a cognition that grasps its object. In advancing this approach his argument contests the ontological scope of phenomenological enquiry while nonetheless retaining an engagement with phenomenological modes of appearance.

By the time of Otherwise than Being Levinas implies that a way 'leads back from the proximity of the other to the appearing of being'. [Otherwise: 140] In turning to the idea of nearness or closeness we might therefore see an attempt to approach the question of being – a question which, in Heidegger's well-voiced admonition,we have forgotten.

In Chapter three of Otherwise than Being Levinas conducts six brief discussions through which he offers various approaches to proximity, using these discussions to orientate proximity in respect of space, subjectivity, obsession, the face, infinity and signification. I will argue that as a result of these discussions Levinas attunes us to the concept of a foundational nearness.

In this paper I will draw specific attention to the notion of touch which works across Levinas' six variations. The 1974 text differentiates touch from the notion of the caress that is given in Totality and Infinity. Throughout these passages Levinas uses the tones of the six variations to build up a feeling for proximity. As a consequence, he claims that it is nearness that comes to us first - rather than an experience of nearness - and it comes as sensation. One could claim that, for Levinas, this is indicative of an otherwise of signification, in that proximity subsists independently of intelligibility or sense.

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Crucially, this paper will ask why the radical alternative that proximity offers to signification and representation is thus figured in relation to memory, through the reference Levinas makes to 'Mnemosyne's fingers'. I will argue that Levinas' point is that to speak of proximity is to speak of an arrangement that eschews spatiality and designation as an ordered multiplicity. Although reminiscence or memory bear upon the truth of being for Levinas, I will argue that his analysis puts memory at a remove from the reasoned model of anamnesis.

Derrida and the Idea in a Kantian SenseSeferin James (PhD candidate, School of Philosophy University College Dublin)

Martin Hägglund argues in Radical Atheism that Jacques Derrida consistently opposes the Idea in a Kantian sense. For Hägglund, the idea in a Kantian sense stands for an infinite and timeless ideality. It is essentially theological. It is Derrida's orientation against this theological thinking of time that Hägglund terms his radical atheism. In this paper I will argue that Hägglund's book lacks what Joshua Kates has termed a developmental approach to Derrida's work. It is therefore at risk of reifying a notion of the mature Derrida of which one should only be suspicious. Hägglund's Radical Atheism departs from a discussion of Derrida and Kant on time but this schematisation of the materials can only fail to properly recognise the role that Husserl plays in mediating this relation with Kant. Hägglund's book barely mentions Derrida's 1954 MA thesis, Le Problême de la Genèse, but it is there that Derrida first encounters the idea in a Kantian sense in Husserl's Ideas I. Husserl's account of eidetic cognition and the apprehension of the unity of experience is clearly influenced by the idea in the Kantian sense. Without close attention to Derrida's interpretation of Husserl on this point in Le Problême de la Genèse it is impossible for Hägglund to accurately relate Derrida to the idea in a Kantian sense. Derrida does criticise phenomenology for a non-phenomenological reliance on an idea in the Kantian sense for the definition of experience and this appears to support Hägglund's thesis. However, Derrida explicitly denies the possibility of an intuition of the infinite in Husserl being understood in any way other than an intuition of the indefinite. This may be a mistake in Derrida's reading of Husserl but this equivocation is nevertheless hugely influential on the development of his thinking. For Derrida, the idea in a Kantian sense is an opening of a temporal horizon towards the indefinite. It would therefore be impossible to separate the idea in a Kantian sense from Derrida's thinking of the future yet to come. One might say in theological terms that it is not thegiveness of god to a mortal intuition but the experience of prayer.

Critical Reasons and Justification of Aesthetic JudgmentsMonika Jovanović (Teaching Assistant, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy,

Belgrade Universit)

Unless we equate genuine aesthetic judgments with statements about what we find pleasant or unpleasant, the question of objectivity arises as a demand for justification. If we assert that Chekhovʼs Ward no.6 or Picassoʼs Guernica is excellent, we are expected to give relevant reasons for our assertion. This is so because real aesthetic judgments, unlike mere opinions have a claim to objectivity. In this paper I will primarily attempt to answer the question: which conditions critical reasons must satisfy in order to constitute justification for aesthetic judgments. It seems fairly obvious that critical reasons have to be relevant, i.e. concern a work of art itself (its inherent or precisely defined relational properties) rather than, say, some psychological state we are in

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(independently of specific experience regarding the artwork) or some other fact of a similar sort. But, that is still not sufficient. I think that we will come closer to our end if we say that an adequate critical reason must also be true. Thus, for the proposition: ”Anna Karenina or Lost Illusions are exemplary novels because of their magnificent epic comprehensiveness“ to be adequately justified, it must be true that these works have the stated property. The same, I will argue, holds for art interpretations in general. Nevertheless, if we hold that critical reasons have to be true, we are faced with an uncomfortable epistemological problem: how can we know whether our ascriptions of certainaesthetic properties are true or false? That question has taken different forms from Humeʼs ”Of the Standard of Taste“ to contemporary debates on objectivity in aesthetics. I will seek to give my own answer using an analogy between colours and aesthetic properties, emphasizing the role of the subjectʼs taste and sensitivity in formulating a criterion which can be used to discern whether we are right or wrong in our appreciation of art. Finally, I will introduce the question as to whether critical reasons must be suitable for generalization in order to constitute justification for aesthetic judgements. I think it is obvious that some aesthetic properties that figure in critical reasons – individualization of characters, for example – being often advantage, could sometimes (in Kafkaʼs novels or Beckettʼs drama) represent a flaw. Therefore, I will argue against generalism and for particularism concearning aesthetic canons.

Where Does Music Fit into the ‘Naturalizing Phenomenology’ Project?Jenny Judge (PhD Candidate, Centre for Music and Science, Faculty of Music, University of

Cambridge)

Shaun Gallagher’s How the Body Shapes the Mind is an important step forward for the ‘naturalising phenomenology’ project, putting consciousness and embodiment squarely on the agenda of cognitive science. For Gallagher, cognitive science must take account of both phenomenality and embodiment in order to arrive at a holistic understanding of human cognition. Likewise, philosophy of mind must engage with developments in neuroscience and psychology. Gallagher’s work represents an influential attempt to formulate common vocabularies for such interdisciplinary work. However, in discussing the interplay between consciousness, perception and embodiment, Gallagher tends to focus on visual perception. Most of the empirical studies that he cites seek to discover common foundations across visual perception, embodiment and motor schemas; other modalities besides vision are largely sidelined. This reflects a general ‘visuocentric’ tendency in philosophy , which tends to ignore the contribution to perception and consciousness made by other modalities such as hearing. Music psychology also, I argue, fails to engage with philosophy. Even though much of the psychology of hearing, and of music in particular, is fundamentally concerned with embodiment and phenomenal experience, the ‘naturalising phenomenology’ literature is seldom referenced in studies, reflecting a general lack of communication between philosophers and psychologists of auditory cognition. Much research in music psychology, I suggest, relies upon behavioristic, ‘cognitivist’ experimental designs, which tend to eliminate consciousness from the scope of inquiry. In this paper, I suggest two main reasons for this lack of communication between philosophers of mind and music scholars: on the side of music, the post-Hanslickian formalist assumption that subjectivity has no place in a rigorous study of the significance of music; and on the side of philosophy, a general tendency to ignore studies in modalities other than vision.

Ultimately, I claim that more needs to be done in order to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers and scientists of auditory cognition, along the lines of

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Gallagher’s work. Considering that musical engagement, in particular, fundamentally involves motor behaviour and auditory perception, I will argue that there is much scope for philosophers of mind who are concerned with the role of embodiment to weigh in on debates in music cognition. Moreover, I will argue that music psychologists have much to learn from philosophy, in particular from the ‘naturalizing phenomenology’ project, in order to incorporate phenomenality more centrally into their experimental designs and move away from experimental designs that sideline consciousness.

In conclusion, this paper will argue that philosophers of mind need to pay more attention to auditory perception and musical listening in order to formulate a more complete picture of perception and consciousness; and that cognitive scientists of music (and musicologists more generally) need to pay more attention to the philosophers in order to confront the explanatory gap.

Vicissitudes of Abandonment in Heidegger, Nancy, and Malabou: the potential for plasticity in the deconstruction of Christianity

Alexander Karolis (PhD Candidate, School of Philosophy Research School of Social Science Australian National University)

The notion of abandonment appears in Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1981 essay Abandoned Being; in which Nancy describes the necessity of an ontology in which abandonment must be thought as the “predicament of being”, and beyond that as the sole “transcendental”, such that abandonment is the very possibility of thinking being in the world (Birth to Presence 1993, 36). This speaks of Nancy’s concern to tirelessly interrogate the manner in which existence must be thought as a “here and now”, a radically material here and now, in which each material mode of existence is no more or less than that finite here and now in which being is to be. In Homo Sacer Giorgio Agamben takes up Nancy’s notion of abandonment, in particular Nancy’s reference to the ban in the old Germanic sense of prohibition. Here Agamben refers to Law’s potential to be in force without application, arguing that the “originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment” (1998, 29). There is a sense in which both Agamben and Nancy are facing the predicament of abandonment described by Martin Heidegger in Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, (albeit, I might add, in considerably different ways), in which Heidegger argues that the “lived-experience” of existence must be understood as the “abandonment of beings by be-ing” (1999, 77). Indeed Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity traces the manner in which the Christianity has shown itself to be the religion that enabled the surpassing of religion, reinforcing Heidegger’s notion that Christian dogma worked to hide the distress of the abandonment of being, while simultaneously undoing Christianity itself by grounding being in a creator that had itself been abandoned. Thus, as Nancy describes in his essay Noli me tangere on the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the arisen Jesus (Jesus being not of this world and not yet with the Father); when Jesus commands Mary to not touch Him, this prohibition may be understood as indicative of the manner in which the presentation of truth through Christ (the logos made flesh) is its own revelation, “the truth and the interpretation being made identical to each other and by each other” (2008, 5). In this paper I will argue that it is precisely this point, at the enclosure of truth and revelation, that allows a departure from the originary relation of law to life. In uncovering this point of departure through Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity I draw upon the work of Catherine Malabou in her work on The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic in which she describes the affirmative role abandonment plays in Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung and the “plastic materiality of being” (2005, 193). Through the work of Nancy and Malabou I will explore the manner in which abandonment reveals a way of thinking what Nancy describes as the trans-immanence of existence, the potential for an outside of a world to open within the world.

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Discontinuity in Twentieth Century French philosophyMark Kelly (Lecturer in Philosophy, Middlesex University)

In this paper, I will provocatively suggest that twentieth century French philosophy can be divided broadly into two camps. The starting point for this assertion is a similar assertion made by Michel Foucault in the last article he ever wrote for publication, for a Festschrift on Georges Canguilhem. Here, Foucault asserts that the influence of French philosophy of science, Canguilhem in particular, divides French philosophy in twain, between those who are influenced crucially by it, and those who are influenced primarily by phenomenology.

This is for Foucault simply another division, to be added to the well-worn and explicit divisions between Marxists and non-Marxists, Freudians and non-Freudians. I wish to add to this melange yet another division, which partly overlaps with Foucault’s Canguilhemian division, but which is ultimately distinct.

The discontinuity I posit in twentieth century itself has discontinuity as its major determinant. That is, I will argue, the two camps in twentieth century French philosophy are, on the one side, philosophies of continuity and, on the other, philosophies of discontinuity. In particular, I argue that this division cuts through the often-invoked unity called ‘poststructuralism’.

Philosophies of continuity suggest that reality is continuous, without major necessary cleavage, in particular within any inherent division between subject and world, or language and reality. Advocates of such a position may argue that serious cleavages appear to exist, or even that they do exist, but if this is so it is because of contingent historical effects that may be overcome. In this camp, I number Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, to name but a few.

The contrary position, that of discontinuity, involves holding that there is some dehiscence within existence itself as such, which can never be healed entirely. The clearest exponent of such a position is Jacque Lacan, but I will also include in this second camp Foucault, Alain Badiou, and Jean-Paul Sartre, for example.

I will argue that the continuist position is inherently contradictory and self-undermining, insofar as it is ultimately incapable of explaining the historical effects that obscure continuity within its own ontologies. Effectively, such thinkers appeal fallaciously to nature to demand the suppression of the unnatural, though of course not in such crude terms. More commonly, the terms in which this is demanded are those of difference and staticity . As Badiou has pointed out, the demand to honour difference in effect becomes a demand to suppress that which is genuinely different, which is to say anything that stands out in the face of an assumed continuity of difference. Though difference is discontinuous by definition, the thought of alterity, I will argue, is ultimately a thought of continuity, which is to say one that in effect makes everything the same.

Reflection, Mirrors, and Idols: the Reflective Act as Inherently WorldlyDimitri Kladiskakis (PhD Candidate in Social and Political Thought, University of Sussex)

Reflection is traditionally seen as the internalised process by which the mind folds within itself and studies its own contents or operations. From Hobbes to Locke and from Hegel to Sartre, the reflective act, notwithstanding the variation given to it by these thinkers, has always been seen as an introspective exercise. One, in a sense, negates oneself from the world when reflecting, one withdraws in the solitude of their own mind, folding it so it comes face-to-face with its own impressions. The idea of reflection being a purely self-enclosed, personal and ultimately subjective process will be what will be asserted and assessed in this paper.

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We will try to emphasise this claim by providing an analogy afforded to us by the fortunate use of the word 'reflection' as a descriptor both of the cognitive process and the optical phenomenon. We will therefore suggest a world where reflection, in the latter sense, is impossible, where mirrors bring back no idol, or a world where one is essentially idol-less. This world, we will claim, perfectly parallels the problems one is confronted with when taking cognitive reflection to be a pure internalisation. Without reflection one would have to rely on others to know what one looks like—the other would become their mirror, and their outward appearance would be irreducibly inter-subjective. The same applies, we argue, to cognitive reflection. Just as one needs an other to realise the existence of their appearance, so does one need an other to realise their existence as such. In cognitive reflection, we will claim, the mind does not mirror itself on itself as an ultimate introspection, but rather the world folds and localises itself in the self that is reflecting. In this sense and from a subjective perspective, the act of reflection is an extrospective act mediated by the world, where by consciousness receives back a worldly reflection of itself in the form of an idol—an idol mirrored by the world as such. We therefore have our final claim: that reflection, rather than being an enclosed cognitive process is truly an act that shows the worldly character of consciousness; a claim that might even support the idea of a consciousness that is irreducibly worldly.

Schelling and Futurism: between Reconciling and Dividing Organic and MechanicalAngela Kun (PhD. Candidate, Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca)

My purpose in this paper is to submit one example of how a highly speculative and traditional aesthetics as Schelling’s can provide an interpretive access to one form of avant-garde aesthetics, namely futurism.

One of the major issues subjected to debate within German idealism was teleology. That was supposed to reconcile the traditional organic view of the world with the emerging scientific mechanical representation. The result of this was to combine both purpose and blind mechanical action. In Schelling´s formulation, nature looks as if the natural product is conscious and purposeful whereas the production itself is unconscious and purposeless. Kant´s formula of finality without purpose is emblematic of this synthesis. We must not neglect that these reflections heavily influenced Bergson, who one-sidedly radicalized intuition over intellect, quality over quantity, as a counterweight to a contemporary resurgence of scientist materialism in his days.

It is a strange but very telling development that, although profoundly inspired by Bergson, futurism achieved results that deeply contrasted with this vitalist and neo-romantic philosophy. It was a macchinolatria eulogizing metal, speed, force and the mechanization of humanity as an epochal overcoming of natural limits. If in Bergson´s work, we have an indictment of the artificial and mechanic in the name of the authentic and organic, futurists achieve quite the reverse. They try to surmount organic limitations and weaknesses with the aid of the machine, as a prolonging of human natural powers.

The aim of our paper will be to explain this strange attraction and repulsion between Bergson and futurists as the perverted consequence of the bergsonian disruption of the equilibrium between organic and mechanic that the teleology of German idealism achieved. If we unilaterally oppose one against the other, such extreme positions are certain to surface precisely by mirroring each other.

Georges Bataille on Marquis de Sade: Enjoyment and TransgressionLode Lauwaert (PhD Candidate, Catholic University of Louvain)

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Philosophers are still interested in the writings of Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade. They often stress that the Sadean universe breaks with our daily life radically. The incestuous scenes and tortures belong to a world which we strictly forbid. In short, the Sadean universe is primarily understood as a transgression of our moral categories. The same philosophers also argue that sadistic enjoyment is related directly to this transgression. As it is often said, the libertine enjoys the crossing of the moral boundary. This paper challenges this thesis by referring to Georges Bataille who was one of the leading interpreters of Sade in continental, French philosophy. Like the other interpreters of his time, Bataille stresses the sadist’s apathy. The true Sadean hero is not the murderous Juliette, the main character in Sade’s Juliette. Indeed, when she kills, her eyes twinkle and her cheeks flush red. According to Bataille, she is too enthusiastic to be considered as a truly Sadean character. The real libertine is apathetic and murders without emotions. The sadist’s enjoyment, Bataille argues, is not related to transgression of moral categories but is associated with apathy. How should we understand this remarkable thesis? And what are the implications of this thesis with regard to the link between sadistic enjoyment and transgression? In the paper it is argued that Bataille’s conception of the apathetic sadist is related directly to Sade’s philosophical background. This will make clear that for a good understanding of sadistic enjoyment transgression of the moral law is only of secondary importance. Sadistic enjoyment is in first place related to a ‘deeper’ metaphysical transgression.

Does Dasein Sleep?Patrick Levy (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy University of Sussex)

The fact that moods can deteriorate and change over means simply that in every case Dasein always has some mood. – Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, pp. 173 [H134]

One of Heidegger’s most interesting and celebrated achievements in Being and Time is a return to the affective side of phenomenological life as part of a reversing of, what he saw as, the inaccurate prioritising of the cognitive and conscious sides of life in previous philosophical accounts – itself part of his famous destruction of the history of the metaphysics of subjectivity. This return to affective life is achieved through his use of the paired concepts Befindlichkeit (affectedness or [ontological] disposition) and Stimmung (mood or attunement) and is essential to understanding his key thesis that Dasein (that “entity which each of us is himself” – SZ, pp. 27 [H7]) is “thrown” into its world. The world we find ourselves in is given as there for us just as we, too, are given as there – present – for us.

From such basic levels of givenness the question of sleep and sleep’s relationship to affectivity emerges. We are thrown into a world of cyclical phases – day and night, and, correspondingly, sleeping and waking. Phenomenological life includes, even if in an ambiguous manner, sleep and waking. Thus we might ask ‘what can Heidegger’s intriguing phenomenology of affective life tell us about sleep?’ Yet, in Being and Time at least, Heidegger tells us nothing about sleep in relation Dasein – the ‘how’ which he examines so fruitfully in other aspects of life is missing in the case of sleep.

Given this absence of an explicit account of sleep and Heidegger’s insistence that “Dasein always has some mood” (my emphasis) it will be the goal of this paper to consider one possible manner in which we might consider the relationship between sleep and Heidegger’s early, Dasein orientated, philosophy. Specifically the relationship between sleep and the passive, factical and affective side of Dasein will be considered. Or more simply: ‘what is the mood of sleep?’

It would seem that Heidegger, due to his strong claim cited at the opening of this abstract, would be required to answer in one of two ways. Firstly, one might on Heidegger’s behalf,

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accepting that sleep can be considered within the rubric of Befindlichkeit, attempt to sketch out what it would mean for sleep to have a mood or, indeed, moods. Alternatively, the loyal Heideggerian might insist that there is no mood of sleep and thus deny that Dasein sleeps. Or, to put it another way, that the sleeper does not qualify as Dasein. The majority of this paper will be concerned with attempting an elaboration of the first of these potential responses – a consideration of to what degree sleep is compatible with the concepts of Befindlichkeit and Stimmung as we find them in Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Though there are reasons in support of such compatibility it will, in the end, be argued that Heidegger would have been bound, by his other commitments, to deny that the sleeper can be in a mood in the requisite manner. Towards the end of the paper the alternative course – that the sleeper is not Dasein – will be briefly outlined and a few key ensuing concerns will be brought into view.

Along this forked path questions about the unity of the waking and sleeping self, the privacy, or otherwise, of sleep, and its relationship to the Heideggerian conception of death will be considered. It is through this clearing of a different path, between the work of the early Heidegger and our own, that new insights into the phenomenological status of sleep and the sleeper will begin to come to light.

Beyond Essence, The Given and Determinacy… In Fact, Beyond the Philosophy of Music!Jonathan Lewis (PhD Candidate in German (Philosophy and Musicology), School of Modern

Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Royal Holloway, University of London)

In the hands of some key thinkers in the philosophy of music, the meaning of a work is something to be ‘grasped’, a ‘presence’ model of meaning nurtured by determinacy, essentialism and the giveness of intrinsic and isolable abstract entities we call ‘meanings’. This essenceful approach to musical meaning is, arguably, a symptom of the philosophy of music’s general preoccupation with conceptual analysis, which aims to produce analytic definitions for what Peter Kivy calls the ‘precepts and propositions’ associated with music. For much philosophy of music, therefore, meaning is viewed from a linguistic standpoint, and, consequently, as Willard Quine argued, becomes identified with essence. Music’s meaningfulness is the new ‘thing-in-itself’. However, continental aesthetics, precisely because it is not restricted by a hardheaded linguistic conception of meaning, is able to move beyond the ‘presence’ model by turning discussions of meaning into discussions of truth built upon the foundations of Life and the unconcealment of the world. If we move beyond the paradigm of philosophy that has taken for its starting point the purely assertive, fact-establishing dimension of language-games and its associated ‘presence’ model of meaning, and, instead, acknowledge that musical works, as culturally, historically and socially embedded, are what Hans-Georg Gadamer called ‘unfinished events’, we come to realise that the philosophy of music, in its current guise, is in need of an update. This paper will aim to suggest why it is that we need a revision and, by discussing how we might go about it, what the consequences will be for current musicology, music analysis and, indeed, modern philosophy.

Heidegger’s Phenomenological Method: Laying Bare the Horizon and the GroundOren Magid (PhD Candidate, Deptartment of Philosophy Georgetown University)

In this paper I aim to illuminate the methodological role of the concept of ‘horizon’ [Horizont] in Being and Time. This concept functions centrally in Heidegger’s investigation, and in efforts to interpret or philosophically engage with it, without this function having been fully appreciated or sufficiently explicated. Of particular importance is the nature of the relation

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between ‘horizons’ and ‘grounds.’One indication of the methodological role of this concept is given by Heidegger’s

introductory discussion of the fundamental ontological analysis of Dasein as “the laying bare of the horizon for an Interpretation of the meaning of being in general” (H15). This exemplary methodological statement, among many others, makes it evident that a central aim of Being and Time is the laying bare of horizons. Yet Heidegger also characterizes his attempt to answer the question of the meaning of being as “not a matter of a deductive grounding, but rather of laying bare and exhibiting the ground” (H8). This exemplary methodological statement, among many others, makes it evident that a central aim of Being and Time is the laying bare of grounds. What is the connection, if indeed there is one, between these two methodological statements? What does the laying bare of horizons have to do with the laying bare of grounds?

The most fruitful way to answer this question is by taking note of the following: a horizon is the apparent line that separates the earth, or ground, from the sky. Those whose everyday engagements depend upon an explicit recognition of the horizon – such as explorers or navigators – distinguish between two types of horizon: the true horizon and the apparent horizon. In most cases, the visibility of the true horizon – where one would see the sky meet the ground in the distance – is obscured by trees, buildings, mountains, and other structures. What is essential for understanding Heidegger’s methodology in Being and Time is that insofar as the true horizon is obscured, the ground that lies beyond the apparent horizon is also obscured. Laying bare the true horizon, and thus rendering visible what was formerly obscured by the apparent horizon, is a laying bare and rendering visible formerly obscured and invisible grounds. Even more telling, this laying bare of the horizon opens up the possibility of recognizing that what one formerly took to be a ground or foundation, is itself founded upon a ground that was obscured along with the true horizon. An ‘investigation’ [»Untersuchen«] such as Being and Time is a searching [Suchen] below or under [Unter] (H5)– an attempt to ‘get to the bottom of things,’ the ground, by laying bare the horizon that is obscured along with it.

In this paper, I will show this methdological relationship between horizons and grounds at play in Being and Time along with how this understanding illuminates some of the most unyielding interpretive conundrums to which the treatise has given rise. I will also indicate a related and central methodological distinction that has been obscured by translations, overlooked by interpreters, and led to deep misunderstandings of the text. The concepts of ‘Grund’ and ‘Boden’ – and all related terminological constructions – are rendered by both Macquarrie and Robinson and Stambaugh as ‘ground,’ ‘basis,’ ‘foundation,’ bottom,’ ‘footing,’ and ‘reason,’ among other translations, in a way that obscures Heidegger’s meticulous methodological distinction between these concepts. A close look at Heidegger’s German reveals that ‘Boden’ functions to indicate the visible ground that lies within, and is unobscured, by the apparent horizon. It is the ground on which we stand, find and lose our footing, and have already ‘appropriated.’ ‘Grund’ functions to indicate the ground which is obscured by, and lies beyond, the apparent horizon – the ground that is to be laid bare along with the true horizon. It is the ground which, unbeknownst to average everyday Dasein, supports its goings about, remains as yet to be appropriated, and which it sets out in search of upon asking the question of the meaning of being.

Nietzsche’s Historicist Account of PityWill Meakins (Independent Scholar, PhD in Philosophy, University of Essex)

That Nietzsche is a vehement critic of pity is well known, but his arguments against it are numerous and varied. Attempts so far to account for the breadth of his criticisms of pity have overlooked a major component of his thought on the subject: his explicit historicization of emotional phenomena. This has led many commentators to over-emphasize his attack on pity as a

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universal criticism of all its manifestations. The result of such ahistoricist universalism is either that commentators are unable to appropriately understand Nietzsche’s positive estimation of certain formations of pity (as is the case for Robert Solomon), or else they ignore the issue entirely (as Martha Nussbaum does). Nietzsche’s historicist criticism of particular formations of pity distinguishes him from predecessors that shared his prejudice (Plato, Spinoza, Kant), as well as from those who universally embrace the emotion as the source of morality (Schopenhauer). In staking out this position Nietzsche challenges the philosophical tradition with a new model for evaluating our emotional experiences, one that is contextual and sensitive to subtle variation in complex phenomena.

The aim of this paper is firstly to outline the basis for Nietzsche’s historicization of emotional phenomena and to detail the numerous forms of pity that he locates in particular cultural settings: in our primitive past, in ancient India, in ancient Greece, in Medieval Christendom. The second aim of this paper is to sketch the features which mark out more positive manifestations of our capacity for pity and the suggestions that Nietzsche gives for how to discern and realize them. Finally, I will offer some suggestions for identifying the underlying evaluative model that Nietzsche is employing here, which I take to be located in his account of the decadence of our instincts.

Philosophy, Science, and the Possibility of Thinking: Some possibilities for a Heideggerian Philosophy of Science

Christopher Merwin (Graduate Student, Philosophy, The New School University)

While Heidegger’s work often appears critical of science and scientific thinking, especially in light of its connection to technology and its inability to arrive at its own essence, it is notable that in the Country Path Conversations (GA 77, Feldweg-Gespräche ) it is the Scientist who both leads the force of investigation and simultaneously is first to recognize the character of releasement (Gelassenheit) and the understanding of the open-region associated with meditative thinking. While Heidegger is deeply critical of the dangers and effects of modern science and representational, or technological and scientific, thinking, the question remains what a Heideggerian philosophy of science might look like and whether or not there can be a positive account of science within Heidegger’s thought. The purpose of my paper is to examine those positive assertions of science in light of the possibility of thinking, particularly with regards to Heidegger’s later work that could be drawn from his work. In order to demonstrate this, I will examine both what Heidegger understands by authentic thinking (meditative or essential thinking) as well as how the scientist, rather than modern science itself, might properly understand in genuine thinking. While it is clear that for Heidegger, modern science is characterized by calculative, measuring, and conceptualizing thinking which is juxtaposed to the thinking accomplished by ‘releasement’ and ‘heartfelt’ thinking, which Heidegger takes to be more authentic and essential. In order to explore an authentic Heideggerian philosophy of science I will draw not only from Heidegger’s work in the Country Path Conversations but also from his important later reflections on thinking in the Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (GA 79, Grundsätze des Denkens) as well as What is Called Thinking? (GA 8, Was Heisst Denken?). The aim of my paper will be to not only situate the importance that science plays for Heidegger’s thought but to also offer up the possibility of a positive account of a Heideggerian philosophy of science in light of his central project of authentic thinking.

Understanding our Drives: Solitude and Dialogue in Nietzsche and Freud

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Katrina Mitcheson (Associate Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University)

This paper contrasts a solitary and a dialogical model of achieving self-knowledge in Nietzsche and Freud respectively, in order to highlight limitations in both approaches and clarify the inherent difficulty in understanding a self that is formed in interaction with others. I will show how Nietzsche and Freud are particularly helpful in exploring this problematic because of the affinities as well as differences in their approaches. Both Nietzsche and Freud allege that human self-understanding involves a great deal of delusion, and in particular the denial of the activity of our drives in shaping our actions and beliefs. In both thinkers a recognition of the activity of the drives is seen to be challenging but also potentially therapeutic, and transformative. I will demonstrate that for Nietzsche, solitude and distance from ‘the herd’ is essential to this process, it is by entering into an intellectual desert that we are sufficiently emancipated from herd mentality to achieve transformative self-knowledge (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Human all Too Human). I will contrast Nietzsche’s solitary technique for achieving transformative self-knowledge with Freud’s methodology. Freud transplants the process of uncovering the activity of the drives from the loneliness and isolation of a metaphorical desert to the therapeutic relationship in the consulting room. Interaction becomes key to self-knowledge through the significance of transference in the relationship between analyst and analysand (Freud, 1963). The insights of psychoanalytic practice show that drives are inherently relational. To understand their activity involves working through these relationships, rather than trying to escape their influence as Nietzsche advocates. I will argue, however, that Nietzsche’s understanding of the particular character of drives as contingently and historically formed, according to the activity of competing wills to powers, complicates this process. On a Nietzschean understanding social activity, including psychoanalysis itself, can be viewed in terms of power strategies that shape rather than simply reveal the activity of our drives. We have to ask, as Foucault has, what the power strategies of the analyst are. By using Nietzsche and Freud to criticise each other in this way, this paper clarifies the problem of trying to understand ourselves, given that we are influenced by our interactions with others. We need to be able to explore these interactions, which implies we must engage in them, but at the

same time achieve sufficient autonomy from them to question the interpretations they promote.

Berkeley and German IdealismVlad Muresan (Lecturer, Faculty of European Studies Babes-Bolyai University)

Berkeley’s philosophy is associated with a strikingly counter-intuitive and simply unbelievable. Still, why should philosophy be intuitive, since most contemporary scientific achievements are explicitly counter-intuitive (to mention quantum mechanics only).

Berkeley’s subjective idealism is highly anticipative of many issues debated within what we call German idealism, although nobody fully followed him. Schopenhauer reputedly asserted that the principle of subjective representation was first introduced by Berkeley, which is enough not only to count him as a founding figure of German idealism, but also to inquire into what has become of his philosophy into the hands of other idealists.

We set ourselves the task of inquiring into this posterity. Early reception of the Critique of Pure Reason criticizes “subjective idealism” hastily

confusing Kant and Berkeley. That challenged Kant’s famous delimitation Rejection of idealism in the second edition of his work. He criticizes Berkeley’s dogmatic idealism together with Descartes problematic idealism. Essentially, he maintains that subjective idealism in unavoidable if we consider space as an intrinsic property of things-in-themselves. But this was just eliminated by the revolution brought about in the Transcendental Aesthetics.

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Fichte and Schelling are surprisingly harsher on Berkeley. They both consider him dogmatic and objectivist, along with Kant himself. In what Kant is concerned, the admission of a numenon as a limit for the transcendental subjectivity is itself an act of the subject, therefore objectifying it is dogmatic. Berkeley is not to be forgiven for having betrayed his coherence in his admission of God in order to provide the representation with continuity to back up perception’s discontinuities.

Hegel calls this “formal idealism” and deplores the fact that mental habitudes are preserved; nothing is essentially changed in the way we comprehend things. There is one single formal difference: that instead of things we call them perceptions.

Within the limits of our abilities, we shall also try to provide an assessment of these assessments and advocate in Berkeley’s favor if and when this seems to be the case.

Non Identity and Becoming– Deleuze and Leibniz: Difference?Rauli Nykanen (MA-student, European Philosophy The University of the West of England)

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze formulates the ultimate metaphysical conundrum of both mind and body; ‘The shortcoming of the ground is to remain relative to what it grounds, to borrow the characteristics of what it grounds, and to be proved by these.’ (Deleuze 2004, 110 11)‐ This is the very locus of what we wish to concentrate upon in this paper. It is precisely this form of identity as an absolute which constitutes what Christian Kerslake has called a ‘distortion’ by which Kant turns the ‘old problem’ of identity conceived of as that between being and beings, or logic and real, to that of one between form and logic, thus formalising existence as such. It is, indeed, upon this metaphysical ultimatum that both positions, the formal and the real, or substantial, hinge. As such, the transcendental sceptic is reliant upon the very same metaphysics which it seeks to undermine. It was Leibniz who so clearly saw this state of affairs and upon which he mounted the most astonishing critique, namely that of the indiscernibles in the form of differential calculus. Contrary to some readings which thought that Leibniz was using differential calculus as proof of identity, but in a way which would then have provided identity with an indefinite sense, it is clearly argued by Leibniz that far from being an infinitisation of terms, or identities, it is precisely this form of logic, i.e. differential calculus, which undermines any identity structure as such. This is to‐ say that Leibniz turned the tables in relation to the question of identity such that what is not problematic is that there is Nature, or an outside, but rather that there exists phenomena for which it seems there is an outside. This is in stark opposition to the Kantian formulation which maintains that it is precisely the outside which is problematic concerning the subjectivity of the individual. The Latter formulation fundamentally misses its mark on what it seeks to criticise by enforcing a structure of identity and absolutising it. The mistake, as we see it, consists in Kant’s misunderstanding the problem of space and relativity which occupied Newton and Leibniz. While Leibniz, along with Newton’s considerations, realized that identity was an impossibility and that as such the real problem of philosophy is to conceive of how identity is constituted, a problem which is seemingly very paradoxical since from it the human being can in no way be exempt and as such it involves the fact that, like quoted above, it is the subject itself that is explaining itself. However, Leibniz’s ingenious insight was then to discern between logic and real. For there to be existence at all, argued Leibniz, that which appears as real for us cannot be but a phenomenal illusion and that this being the case, there cannot be anything whatsoever for which the real appears as relational either. This is to say that in the philosophy of Leibniz there are no essential identities. However, this is not to make the claim that Leibniz has escaped the problem of identity once and for all, and the problem still remains; how exactly is identity constituted?

Although it is not in the scope of this paper to consider the problem of constitution of identity as such, we nonetheless think there is value to be had from presenting this problematic as

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we see it in order to clarify and concentrate the locus of the problematic, and consequently to provide a renewed opportunity for reopening the case of Leibniz in relation to Kant, as well as proposing a study of Deleuze’s Leibniz. The further aim of such enquiries would then be to see whether Deleuze really differs from Leibniz in any fundamental way despite his seeming conviction, at least at the time of Difference and Repetition, that Leibniz is still fundamentally subject to the very identity that he sought to refute. Initially, at least, we wager that no such difference will be found, and that as such it will be the case rather that Leibniz and Deleuze will have to join forces to become Leibniz Deleuze in the face of the transcendental ‘monster’. It is‐ precisely in view of such considerations that we must first start by asking what the distinction between the two might be.

Foucault, Feminism and Neoliberal GovernmentalityJohanna Oksala (Senior Research Fellow Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art

Studies, University of Helsinki)

The paper argues that Foucault’s thought provides an important theoretical framework for analysing the new challenges that face feminist politics due to the hegemony of neoliberalism. It identifies the distinctive strengths of the Foucauldian approach for a critical study of neoliberalism, and analyzes its consequences for feminist theory and politics.

Feminist scholars have recently analysed the political changes in the situation of women that have been brought about by neoliberalism, but their assessments of its consequences for feminist theory and politics vary. Several feminist thinkers have argued that feminism must now return its focus to socialist politics and foreground economic questions of redistribution in order to combat the hegemony of neoliberalism. Some have further identified poststructuralism and its dominance in feminist scholarship as responsible for the debilitating move away from socialist or Marxist paradigms.

I share their diagnosis to the extent that it is my contention that the rapid neoliberalization characterizing the last thirty years has put women and feminist thought in a completely new political situation. However, in contrast to the feminist thinkers who want to put the blame for the current impasse on the rise of poststructuralist modes of thought in feminist theory and advocate a return to Marxist or neo-Marxist political paradigms, I contend that such return represents dangerous nostalgia that would rob feminist theory of its remaining political relevance. It is my contention that the poststructuralist turn in feminist theory in the 1980s and 1990s continues to represent an important theoretical advance, only now its theoretical and political force has to be redirected to new issues in order to get a better handle on the impact of neoliberalism and economic globalization on the lives of women.

I will discuss Foucault’s philosophical analysis of neoliberalism in order to assess the ways it can contribute to this task. His lectures on neoliberalism delivered at the Collège de France in 1979 provide a novel conceptual and theoretical framework for the critical analysis of neoliberalism (in French in 2004, Naissance de la Biopolitique, and in English in 2008, The Birth of Biopolitics). I will argue that this framework is vital for the feminist diagnosis of our contemporary political reality. I foreground two distinctive features that in my view characterize the Foucauldian approach. First, a significant strength of his approach lies in its radical departure from purely empirical analyses and in its attempt to provide a systematic, philosophical study of the constitution of the neoliberal subject. Another advantage of the Foucauldian approach concerns its distinctive treatment of the contested relationship between the cultural and the economic. I return to Nancy Fraser’s and Judith’s Butler’s important exchange on the philosophical status of this distinction. I suggest that the Foucauldian approach can clarify some of the key issues in this debate as well as opening up new feminist responses to neoliberalism.

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Heidegger on the Time of RevolutionFelix Ó Murchadha (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, School of Humanities, NUI)

The 1920s was a time in Europe in which revolution seemed imminent. The preconditions appeared to be in place: the old regime wounded beyond all survival by the First World War, the Russian Czar already disposed of and the possible bearers of revolution – the working class, the nation – ready and apparently eager to take up the burden. In art the Expressionists and the Futurists brought to the fore – in very different registers - both the despair and pain of the death knells of the old order and the possibilities of a new world.

Being and Time and Heidegger’s writings of the late 1920s and 1930s can be understood as a response to this situation. To say this is not to simply give a political reading of his work: Heidegger’s uniqueness is precisely to have thought the question of revolution in ontological terms.

This ontological reading of revolution is attempted first in terms of the possibilities of action and their temporality (Being and Time) and increasingly through what became known as the Kehre, in terms of being and its Ereignis. This paper will present a reading of temporality in Being and Time as a temporality of practice in which the difference of fundamental and derivative temporality is one between time kairologically and chronologically understood. The account of kairos, which is taken up in the notion of the moment of vision (Augenblick), is shown to relate to the accounts of resolutedness and birth.

The paper will then chart a transformation in Heidegger’s account in which revolutionary time is centred on the work – the political as well as the artistic work. It will show the manner in which Heidegger’s understanding of politics as work was rooted in his account of historical temporality and is implicated in his Nazi engagement.

The paper will close with a brief discussion of the manner in which these themes relate to the rethinking of freedom and ground in the pivotal years after the publication of Being and Time and led to the motif of the new beginning in the Contributions to Philosophy (1936-38). It will be argued that the latter motif is a rethinking of the kairological account of temporality in Being and Time.

Image-Body-Thought: The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic PedestrianismAsli Özgen-Tuncer (PhD Candidate, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA),

University of Amsterdam)

“Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind (…) One naturally goes from philosophy to cinema, but also from cinema to philosophy.”Gilles Deleuze, from Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze.

The invention of cinema goes hand in hand with a widespread enthusiasm to understand the nature of movement. Whereas Muybridge needed static shots to understand the anatomy of movement, Marey concentrated on tracking, tracing, and recording movement in a single shot. 1 While Muybridge’s technique was built on the succession and an extensive understanding of movement extracting the privileged instants, Marey’s approach was more concerned with the intensive aspect of movement by recording its fluidity in one shot, also revealing the any-instants-whatever of any movement. Building up in this genealogy of the image of movement in cinema, my research analyses the cinematographic image of walking with an aim to probe into the ways cinema produces an aesthetics and politics of movement.

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Cinematic pedestrianism concerns movement on four levels: technology, aesthetics, politics, and thought. Firstly, the filmstrip gives us a human figure in motion by virtue of a certain technological clockwork that reproduces movement. Secondly, the cinematic aesthetics deployed to present a figure of walker – such as the pace of montage, the rhythm of footsteps, and the proximity between the body-in-motion and the camera – is laden with political and philosophical implications. The former, which brings us to the third level, points to the politics of this aesthetics with a focus on the nomadic movements across the striated and/or smooth spaces.2 Finally, the fourth level traces the link between the movement and thought in cinema in the light of all aspects suggested above. In my presentation, I aim to discuss very briefly all these four levels via film-clips and to open up the floor for a more general discussion about the notion of “cinematic pedestrianism”, which is the focus of my doctoral research.

Raising the Stakes of the ‘Critical’ Relation to MetaphysicsRebeca Pérez León (PhD in Philosophy, University of Essex)

This paper offers a critical response to De Vriese’s essay “The Myth of the Metaphysical Circle: An analysis of the Contemporary Crisis of the Critique of Metaphysics”4. In his essay, De Vriese advances three arguments to show that the assumption of the metaphysical circle -the idea that the critique of metaphysics is essentially metaphysical, produces an alternative metaphysics or starts from metaphysical premises- is indeed a myth. First, he affirms that the assumption of the metaphysical circle is not logically justified with argumentation. Second, the tradition of critique of metaphysics in the history of philosophy describes itself as detaching from rather than continuing with metaphysics, which evinces the falsity of the inescapability of metaphysics. Third, there are at least three forms of critique of metaphysics that cannot be reappropriated by metaphysics, which demonstrates the possibility of critique that remains external to the metaphysical enterprise. I challenge these three arguments from the perspective of Derrida’s deconstruction.

First, I outline the relationship between the concept of metaphysics and the concept of language in the tradition of philosophy. This relation reveals the language of philosophy as intrinsically intertwined with the concept of metaphysics. In this way, the realm of what can be thought of as metaphysics does not pertain only or exclusively to the discipline of philosophy but rather extends to the realm of language –Indo-European languages. Second, I outline the general features of the concept of philosophical ‘critique’ and, then, draw the common assumptions of this concept and the concept of metaphysics. This reveals that the concept of critique of metaphysics requires crediting metaphysical assumptions for its effectiveness. Third, the forms of critique that De Vriese affirms cannot be appropriated by metaphysics are not strictu sensu critiques of metaphysics if we circumscribe ourselves to the concept of critique given in the previous section. This is revealed in the dismissals of these alleged critiques by not only the metaphysical tradition but also by the philosophical tradition more generally.

I advance, instead, an understanding of the metaphysical circle as a problem that raises the stakes of any philosophical movement that aims at ‘avoiding’ metaphysics. In other words, the assumption that any form of critique of metaphysics is metaphysical has, pace De Vriese, launched other forms of ‘relation’ to metaphysics, language and critique that require a critical discourse about the critical discourse.

Certainty, Contingency and Improvisation: With Constant Reference to Kant and HegelGary Peters (Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, York St John University)

4 Cf. De Vriese, H. “The Myth of the Metaphysical Circle: An Analysis of the Contemporary Crisis of the Critique of Metaphysics” Inquiry. Vol. 51, No. 3, June 2008, 312-341.

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Famously, improvisers speak of being ‘in the moment’ as the moment of all moments when the improvisation comes into its own as the expression of…what exactly? Unfortunately, the discourses surrounding improvisation, so often written by improvisers themselves, are not particularly helpful in trying to respond to this question, most of them remain too bound up inside a humanistic language of emotion, expression, communication and dialogue to fully engage with the cold severity being considered here. If we could put all of this to one side for a while, along with all of the wide-eyed celebration of surprise, shock and awe, it might be possible to re-evaluate the value of improvisation not as the wondrous enactment of human freedom but, more soberly, as the performative site where the rigours of aesthetic judgement, locked up in the intensive dialogue of the ‘two in one’, (Arendt) transforms the (sometimes) desperate confrontation with contingency into art. Thought thus, the ‘in the moment’ moment is no longer conceived as an ecstatic oneness where self meets self, meets other, meets all, within the warm glow of utopic togetherness, but as the icy region where the necessary rigidity of judgement arrives at a method of proceeding that places all of the emphasis on discipline, control and a sureness of touch that, while having the appearance of spontaneity, is the product of endless drill and rote. Indeed, a spontaneity that is inconceivable without such drill and rote. Utterly deaf to the aesthetic pleasures of others, the ‘severe’ improviser does, nevertheless, provide pleasure to those who witness the unfolding of a work, where it is not passion but precision that is offered, not as something to be shared but, rather, as the radically singular and solitary exemplification of aesthetic judgement in action here and now.

Kierkegaard and Hegel on Truth and CorrectionPaniel Reyes Cárdenas (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy University of Sheffield)

Kierkegaard opposed Hegel in many respects, but we could actually be surprised in the manifold of aspects in which he seems to follow and push forward a number of Hegelian hints. It seems to me that one interesting case is represented by his conception of subjective truth, developed initially in the Philosophical Fragments and profoundly explored in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) to the Philosophical Fragments. Hegel advanced these kinds of ideas by redefining the concept of truth and distinguishing it from correction. In the case of correction we have a relationship of statements and the contents that make them part of a true proposition, but singular cases are not the whole story for truth, for grasping truth means achieving knowledge of a thing with respect to its essence, a state of consistency between something as it is and as how rationally it should be, and then foster absolute knowledge that renders thinking forward possible.

Kierkegaard alleged that we could distinguish, similarly, between an objective and subjective sense of truth. On the one hand the objective sense is the correspondence or attachment of a proposition to its object, being the object of an independent reality. The subjective sense, on the other hand, stresses the right attitude that makes an inquirer have an appropriate relation with the object, in order to enable the knower the achievement of a relation that expands in the quest for deeper aspects of the truth. Thus, for example, Christianity, for Kierkegaard is one of many religions that one can objectively accept in the same manner, though subjectively it is an attitude that demands our complete devotion and sincerity. Truths, in these authors’ interpretations, unleashed themselves as regulative attitudes of the inquirer towards the achievement of a relation with the objects of knowledge that grows towards their comprehension in a whole. A sort of epistemic attitude of openness is thus needed, and consequently both authors sought for a nuanced concept of truth that goes beyond correctness and objectivity in the senses explained. My aim in this presentation will be to explain why the

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concept of regulative truth might be a good candidate to catch these senses as both authors desired in their philosophies.

Species Self-Perception: A Therapeutic MethodologyStephen Riley (Senior Lecturer in Law Sheffield Hallam University)

Discussions concerning the role and intelligibility of 'human dignity' depend upon perception, and valuation, of our species. When systematised, such self-perception takes the form of ‘philosophical anthropology’, ‘existence philosophy’, or analysis of ‘species being’. However, in each case, knowledge of our species is conditioned by contentious epistemological commitments. This paper, informed by Wittgenstein’s ‘therapeutic epistemology’, considers possible conditions

for methodological agreement in species self-perception.The ontology of our species can be approached as a unique, or as a familiar, question. It is a unique question encompassing knowledge, cosmology, and the human condition. It is, equally, a familiar question concerning knowledge, ontology, and the relationship between fact and value. This combination of the familiar and the unique has meant that positive, analytical, and critical methodologies jostle for ascendency. The methods of the human sciences are apparently trumped by the cosmological or existential scope of the enquiry. Unique questions about human existence

are deflated by the substantive enquiries of the human sciences .In an attempt to dissolve this impasse, three possible foundations of knowledge are considered and a common methodological theme posited. The three foundations are: human self-perception through phenomenology, analysis of the limits of self-perception in the structure or grammar of discourse, and critical analysis of the functions of self-perception in genealogical analysis. This

affords equal hearing to, inter alia, Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.It is suggested that, cutting through these discussions, there is a recurrent division between saying and showing. Drawing upon Wittgenstein’s ‘therapeutic’ dissolution of epistemology into forms of life, we can distinguish what has sense in language games of self-perception from what is shown, relied upon, or implicit, in self-perception. On this basis we can find an ecumenical point of reference in the difference between describing human practices and acknowledging what is shown in human forms of life. This difference (explaining and dissolving the epistemological distinction between appearance and reality) is one point in agreement in a

domain where epistemological plurality is the norm.

Jazz Improvisation, Collective Intelligence, and a Morphogenesis from Embodied to Distributed Cognition

Martin E. Rosenberg (Independent Scholar)

A question concerning the ontological status of individual and embodied human consciousness that has framed our understanding of subjectivity since The Enlightenment brings to mind a question I have been asking for some time: Is it possible for human beings to be both embodied and distributed at the same time? Jazz improvisation provides a very rich context for pursuing this as a thought question. How can one say that the behavior of jazz ensembles exhibits many of the features of neuronal ensembles, especially in the ways that these ensembles can exist non-locally, and yet perform in a coordinated way, in the sense of parallel processing? Researchers from both cognitive science and computer science have used jazz as a metaphor to capture the simultaneously emergent and distributed nature of cognition, but neither field can entertain at this point the possibility of human beings becoming simultaneously embodied and

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distributed. One can draw on two forms of parallel processing, by contrast, in order to frame this claim (simultaneously embodied and distributed human cognition) to test through this thought question. For the first form of parallel processing, I refer to primitive, serial computation often called "time sharing." I would like to briefly compare it by analogy to the passive cognition of multiple points of view on a single event through time enabled by montage in cinema, as discussed by Gilles Deleuze in the Cinema books, especially with respect to the shift from "liquid" to "gaseous perception" across the axes of time and movement images.

For the second form of parallel processing, I refer to true parallel processing enabled by the networking of autonomous hardware architectures and software processes, and capable of generating computing power greater than the sum of the computational components in an illustration of a true emergent property. I would like to compare this form of parallel processing with the spontaneous and parallel processing across N-dimensions of affect enabled by contemporary jazz musicians during moments of advanced improvisational technique. By N-dimensions I limit myself for the sake of brevity to the four axes of aural, proprio-ceptive, emotional and intellectual responses underlying the substantial body of anecdotal reportage by jazz musicians of a collective intelligence at work during privileged moments of heightened awareness and creativity (a sixth sense of “being inside each other’s heads” during peak moments). The question of aurality is problematized by the fact of what Varela refers to as the 1/10 second gap between sensory imput and the registration of that imput on conscious awareness. That gap makes conscious intention with respect to proprioceptive response to such sensory imput in the form of musical communicative responses in real time seemingly impossible, and current neuroscience research comparing classical and jazz musicians seems to confirm this. Yet, jazz musicians respond conceptually and emotionally to a collective performance seemingly without conscious intent, involving a highly sophisticated aural sign system that can evoke a wide spectrum of recognizable emotions in a consistent and systematic way. And any member of the ensemble can transform the conceptual and emotional trajectories under way at any moment during the performance. Thus we find emerging a palpable consensual domain that remains rooted in embodied affect (involving feeling as well as iterative re-cognition at the level of intellect), which can be mapped, as can the "gaseous perception" of the distributed points of view of the passive aesthetic cognition enabled by cinema, by reference to phase space. A review of scientific literature, personal anecdotes from a range of performers, and conceptual constructs from philosopher Gilles Deleuze and others, will nuance the issues at stake in this thought problem.

Rethinking Derrida and the Political: The relationship between ethics and politicsDanielle Sands (Independent Scholar, PhD, Royal Holloway)

Since the publication of Richard Beardsworth’s seminal text Derrida and the Political in 1996, Derrida’s commentators and critics have increasingly focused on the significance of deconstruction for the study of politics and the political. Such a focus reflects the broader context in continental or ‘post-continental’ philosophy, in which thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and those associated with ‘speculative realism’, assert the need for a sharpened political perspective. Some of these thinkers look to distance themselves from Derrida’s work, particularly from its associations with textuality or the ‘linguistic turn’, and with the reassessment of ethics, religion, or the relationship between philosophy and other disciplines.

In this paper, I shall claim that this changing attitude to Derrida from without has strengthened the emphasis on politics within Derrida studies. Writers such as Alex Thomson, Martin Hägglund and Patrick O’Connor stress the ‘transgressive’, ‘radical’ and ‘political’ elements of deconstruction whilst downplaying the ethical, religious, and even literary, considerations which

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preoccupied Derrida’s work and his critics and the 1990s and early 2000s. Although this is an important response both to earlier trends and to current criticism, I shall argue that, in search of a straightforwardly political deconstruction, some of this work oversimplifies Derrida’s understanding of the political, and, in severing it from ethics and stressing its pre-eminence, mirrors the error made by Simon Critchley and others in the 1990s, thus overlooking the co-constitution of ethics and politics. Referring to later texts such as Rogues and Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, I shall demonstrate this co-constitution of, and sustained tension between, ethics and politics in Derrida’s work, arguing that it underpins Derrida’s reconfiguration of the political, and, in undermining orthodox accounts of ethics and politics, enables a rethinking of politics and the political.

Relating Benjamin’s Messianic Power, the Sacred and Profane, and The Messianic KingdomPanagiota Schoina (MA in Political Philosophy, Panteion University, Athens, Greece)

Using as a text of reference Walter Benjamin’s “Theologico-political fragment5”, I will try to draw the lines of affinity in Benjamin’s thought, concerning the following notions 1: Messianic Power, 2: The internal relation between the Sacred and the Profane, under the representative enclosure of the sacred, 3: The Messianic Kingdom.

Starting from the relation, implied by Benjamin, between the notions of the sacred and the profane, I would like to point out an analogy to the Hegelian relation between the notions of being-in-itself and being-for-other6. The intrinsic encounter of the later notions could be seen as the constitutional relation between absolute and relative, subject and object, truth and a counterpart of that truth. If in the context of an ontic truth, in the realm of the Sacred, the Profane is that being-for-other which renders it (the context, and the realm) meaningful, then simultaneously this being-for-other points towards two different directions: 1) towards the mutual constitution of meaning of the Sacred and the Profane (as both notions and realities), 2) towards the immediate alterity as being conceived in its concept and this would be the Messianic.

“The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness. The relation of this order to the Messianic is one of the essential teachings of the philosophy of history.”7 Freedom and Happiness are conceptions that reflect the relation of opposition between the Sacred and the Profane, on the part of the later. At the same time these conceptions of Freedom and Happiness are immediate and abstract alterities, so their index points to the direction of the messianic. It seams that Benjamin constructs two different relations of opposition. One external: the messianic index shows the opposition to the relation of the Sacred/Profane as a unity. And one internal that points to that abstract exteriority: when the Profane negates the relation of subjugation to the unity of the Sacred, it points towards the abstract other, it points to the Messianic. These two opposed forces collide, as messianic power opposes to the unity of the Sacred and The Profane and to all its products. However, the Profane can increase the power of the Messianic.

«If one arrow points to the goal toward which the profane dynamic acts, and another marks the direction of Messianic intesity, then certainly the quest of free humanity for happiness runs counter to the Messianic direction; but just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom8».

5 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, New York, 1978. (312-313).6 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010.7 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, New York, 1978. (312-313).

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It could shed light to the whole problematic, seeing into the relation between the following notions: Messianic power-the Messiah-the Messianic Kingdom. The negative work of the historical subject, profaning the realm of the Sacred, increases messianic power. The reflection of the possible outcome of messianic power would be the radical rupture that separates conceptually and materially the unity of the Sacred and the Profane from the Messianic Kingdom. Here we find the manifestation of the concept of conversion, a concept that we could indentify as that of the Messiah or that of the classless society.

“Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, creates its relation to the Messianic. For this reason nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic. Therefore the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it can not be set as a goal. From the standpoint of history it is not the goal, but the end.”9

From the above it could be derived that Messianic power, increased by the acting profane, constitutes a possibility of decisive and radical rupture. Messianic power has its tradition of manifestations in historical time as the manifestation of the possibility of absolute rapture. But the rupture it self, once the Messiah has come, would constitute the end of all historical material and conceptual contents. So the Messianic Kingdom doesn’t constitute the realization of the Profane, neither could it manifest its self as an on. It stands as a spatial subject of differentiation. It constitutes a subject that stands as the “Two” of negation opposed to that, which it negated. Its positivity lies on that negation against subjugation to unity, to the “One”. The spatiotemporal subject of the Messianic Kingdom, as a notion, constitutes the “Two” of negation in its negation to become “One”.

There is no one traceTimothy Secret (PhD Candidate in Philosophy, University of Essex)

Derrida’s long publishing career is particularly notable for the constant shifts that take place in his vocabulary, where each term is chosen strategically for its potential power to intervene in a local textual field. However, while famous terms like différance and supplement will wax and wane as major focuses of attention, “trace” stands out as by far the most ubiquitous piece of terminology. Yet despite this compelling every commentator who writes on Derrida to offer some kind of an account of the trace, it is only relatively recently that this has become the site of polemical debate. In particular, Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism is notable for making the direct claim that specific past commentators have simply failed to appreciate the dynamic of the trace, or temporal deconstructive logic, and have therefore misinterpreted Derrida’s entire oeuvre. Many have seen in this the hints of a new Derridean revival, yet in this paper we will argue that if there is to be a revival and if it is to take place around the notion of the trace, a radically different approach is called for. Rather than being the key to a logic of temporal finitude, “trace” should be recognised as an exemplary sheaf for the transdisciplinary articulation of discourses.

After briefly introducing the role of Derrida’s shifting vocabulary in terms of a general graphematics, we will turn to addressing the limited horizons of a Hägglundian reading of the trace that we will treat as only one possibility in the open sheaf of the usage of “trace” across Derrida’s work. We will then offer a new transdisciplinary suggestion for what we can “do” with Derrida,

8 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, New York, 1978. (312-313).9 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, New York, 1978. (312-313).

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taking as our example the way in which Levinas and Freud can be articulated through the hinge-word of the “trace”. This will suggestively lead to the hints of a third discourse, neither ethical nor psychoanalytic, that though it is never actually constituted takes place as the opening of a politics of singularity in certain textual works, particularly Derrida’s eulogies. We will argue that it is this kind of approach that in collapsing discourses simultaneously opens up unforeseeable chances that should form the centre of any revival of interest in Derrida’s works, rather than an attempt to distil a singular deconstructive logic or quasi-phenomenology.

On Technological Ground: Bringing the Philosophy of Technology to Life through the Art of Torsten Lauschmann

Dominic Smith (Lecturer in Philosophy School of Humanities, The University of Dundee)

This aim of this paper is to conduct a creative exploration of the relationship between the work of emerging German/Scottish artist Torsten Lauschmann and themes in Continental philosophy of technology. The paper comprises three main parts, each focused on relating Lauschmann’s art to reflections from a canonical figure in the philosophy of technology. In part one, Lauschmann’s art is related to concepts developed late in Marshall McLuhan’s work, those of ‘figure’, ‘ground’ and the ‘anti-environment.’ In part two, his work is related to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s critique of photography in terms of movement. In part three, Lauschmann’s art is related to Heidegger’s early and late period reflections on technology, and the claim is made that it points beyond Heidegger in important ways. Throughout the paper, a consistent argument is developed: that Lauschmann’s art, like the philosophical reflections to which it is related, is engaged in a paradoxical practice of challenging settled common sense notions regarding technology. The paper concludes by summarising why this practice is important for enhancing our capacity to think both critically and creatively about the technological environments we inhabit in the contemporary

world.

Feuerbach and the Image of ThoughtHenry Somers-Hall (Lecturer in Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London)

In this paper, I want to focus on some of the central themes of an essay by Feuerbach, Towards a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy, and its influence on Deleuze’s philosophical development. In particular, I want to show that this paper, translated by Althusser into French in 1960 and cited by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, anticipates much of Deleuze’s work on the Image of Thought, and in the process allows us to clarify the grounds for Deleuze’s rejection of classical philosophy. First, I want to explore the grounds for Feuerbach’s claim that “every system is only an image of reason,” focusing on his characterisation of systematic thought as paralogistic. Second, I want to draw out three implications of Feuerbach’s analysis. The first of these is that philosophy as traditionally understood is simply the explication of reason’s implicit assumptions. The second, that philosophy is incapable of creating concepts. The third, that philosophy requires an encounter with that which is non-philosophy in order to open the possibility of thinking. In drawing out these implications, I will show that for Deleuze as well as Feuerbach, what is essential is the recognition of a paralogism at the heart of thinking, rather than the rejection of the image of thought as such. Finally, I want to conclude by examining Feuerbach’s notion of the encounter, and, by bringing in material from Nietzsche and Philosophy, show that Feuerbach’s understanding of it as grounded in sensibility is still thoroughly implicated in the structure of representation it is hoped in to overturn.

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Critical Theory Versus Critical AttitudeRuth Sonderegger (Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetic Theory, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

In his seminal essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937) Max Horkheimer at some point contends that critical theory is not defined by its object but, rather, by a specific critical attitude or activity (“kritisches Verhalten”). To my mind, this emphasis on critical attitude is hard to reconcile with his later claim (in the same essay) that critical theory of society begins with abstract determinations – if not completely irreconcilable with the idea of theory as such.

In order to clarify the tension between critical theory and critical attitude I will then turn to Foucault. In various essays, most notably in “What is critique” (1978), and above all in his last lecture courses on parrhesia i.e. free speech (1982-1984) Foucault attempted to clarify the relations between two traditions of critical intellectual activity that had been struggling with each other ever since Plato: critical attitude and critical (scientific) theory. My aim is to reconstruct Foucault’s lecture courses on parrhesia as a manifestation of the critical attitude Foucault advocates to the disadvantage of critique as theory. Against the backdrop of this reconstruction, Horkheimer and Adorno’s manifesto Dialectic of Enlightenment (amongst other writings by Adorno and Horkheimer) can be defended as a perfect and sound expression of the critical attitude despite every objection of the manifesto’s alleged self-contradictions. My conclusion will be that critical theory is best understood as critical attitude. However, I will also argue that the philosophical tradition of critique as attitude is no less occidentally biased than its scientific rival.

The Limits of Recognition: Hegel on Reflexion and the Sublation of symmetrical RecognitionMartin Sticker (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy, University of St Andrews)

Hegel is in contemporary debates regarded as a philosopher who strongly emphasizes the significance of Recognition for a conception of self-consciousness, as well as for an understanding of interpersonal relations, and the social sphere as a whole. The thesis I will argue for is that, in his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel shows not only the importance of recognition, but also its one-sidedness. Hegel, therefore, has a more critical and balanced attitude towards recognition than is acknowledged in contemporary exegetical and systematical debates (e.g. Honneth, Frazer, Taylor).

In the first section, I will analyse Hegel’s characterisation of the pure concept of recognition, which can be found in three dense paragraphs at the beginning of Phenomenology IV.A. The analysis will provide a conceptual framework for my following investigation and clarify the meaning of the term “recognition”. The pure concept of recognition is depicted by Hegel as a mutual process of usurpation [Vereinnahmung] and release [Entlassung]. The mutuality of such a process is the foundation for an ideal of symmetry which inheres in Hegel’s conception of recognition. This ideal is actualised when the act of release is performed by all agents involved, to the same degree and freely [freies Entlassen].

In the second section, I will, based on my analysis of the pure concept of recognition, show that recognition is not only relevant for the Self-Consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology. The structure of mutual usurpation and release underlies many constellations of the Geist chapter. This becomes especially clear in Hegel’s treatment of the structure of the ethical life of the polis, at the very beginning of the chapter, and the dialectic of the consciences, at its very end. In the Geist chapter Hegel discusses the structure of conflicts in the social sphere. At the end of the chapter – in the forgiveness of the consciences – the ideal of symmetry is actualized in the process of recognition between the consciences. The Geist chapter, however, only contains the development of rational subjectivity. The state of forgiveness between the consciences is still deficient, because

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the consciences lack what Hegel calls “substance”. Substance, for Hegel, is what unites different consciences in an ethical community. The development of substance is the subject matter of the Religion chapter. Only subjectivity mediated with substance constitutes the non-deficient state of absolute knowledge.

In the third section, I will argue that this shows that Hegel is aware that recognition alone, even if symmetrical, is an insufficient solution for conflicts in the social sphere. A philosophy of recognition based on Hegel should therefore ask: what does the development of the religion chapter add to the structure of recognition in the Geist chapter? The answer to this is that it adds the structure of reflexion, understood as a communal reflexion on the ethical substance of a society. Reflexion presupposes recognition, but cannot itself be described as a process of recognition, since it does not exhibit the structure of usurpation, and release, and lacks an ideal of symmetry.

I will conclude that recognition, at the end of the Geist chapter, is sublated [aufgehoben] by reflection. The one-sidedness of symmetrical recognition shows, according to Hegel, that an account of recognition has to be supplemented by an account of reflection in order to come to terms with conflicts in the social sphere. I will close with some indications how this discovery can enrich contemporary conceptions of recognition and the social sphere, and argue that a critical reflection, even on ideal processes of recognition, is a necessary component of a philosophy, which accords a prominent role to recognition.

Was Deleuze a Materialist?Kenneth Surin (Professor of Literature and Professor of Religion and Critical Theory

Literature Program, Duke University)

Gilles Deleuze said repeatedly that he was an empiricist, empiricism being for him the one philosophical standpoint that was resolutely non-dialectical and immanentist, thereby avoiding what was him the whole sad drama of dialectics and transcendence). However, Deleuze never made the same repeated and unambiguous claims about his philosophical relation to materialism. How are we to understand this seeming discrepancy between Deleuze’s respective attitudes

towards empiricism and materialism (understanding both of these as philosophical topoi)?At one level, it is clear that empiricism, in avowing that reality can only be approached through our senses, belongs to the theory of the subject, whereas materialism, in maintaining that only matter exists, belongs to the theory of the object. Is Deleuze’s philosophy therefore in danger of being undermined by the age-old dichotomy between subject (‘subject’ being the underlying constitutive basis of our putative empiricism) and object (‘object’ being the concomitant

underlying basis of our presumed materialism) ?My paper will address this question, by arguing that Deleuze’s key category of the ‘event’

bridges the ontological gap represented by this seeming dichotomy .

Samuel Beckett and Schopenhauer’s Systematic PhilosophyMartin Thomas (PhD Candidate, School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences,

Australian National University)

Focussing on three of Samuel Beckett’s so-called major theatrical works – Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days – I seek to position Beckett as a significant interpreter of Arthur Schopenhauer’s entire philosophical system.

I’m particularly interested in the way that a better appreciation of this engagement with Schopenhauer helps to shed new light on a number of Beckettian motifs, namely the

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pseudocouple, uncertainty, boredom, and suicide. Read in the light of Schopenhauer’s system, we begin to see that each one of these Beckettian motifs plays its part in an overall Beckettian system of thought: that is, Beckettian philosophy, though philosophy presented poetically.

At the same time, a better understanding of Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer compels us to revisit Schopenhauer’s work and to read it with Beckett’s work in mind. I believe Beckett’s reading of Schopenhauer provides a presently unacknowledged contribution to the field of Schopenhauerian studies.

I want to suggest that Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer is an attempt on Beckett’s part to resolve a number of problems that Schopenhauer comes up against, mainly because of the rigidity of his own system, and in doing so attempts to correct, and build upon Schopenhauerian thought. This is done as part of Beckett’s much broader interest in the wholesale destruction of one’s own drives.

Building upon Schopenhauerian philosophy – the endgame of which is ascetic practice – Beckett finds new ways to annihilate the world, and to be rid of oneself for good. It’s because of this that I believe the three aforementioned plays – Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days – when read together combine to form Beckett’s Theatre of Asceticism.

My overall argument, then, is that Samuel Beckett is a poet-philosopher, but unlike the Nietzschean model of poet-philosopher – one whose art affirms life – I argue that the philosophical aspect of Beckett’s work is a productive engagement with Schopenhauerian thought, and a serious interpretive endeavour regarding the most life-denying aspects of that thought. The Beckettian model of poet-philosopher is, therefore, very different to the Nietzschean model.

Whereas Nietzsche sees art as a means to help us to endure the suffering of life, Beckett employs tragic theatre as a vehicle to convey the means of escaping suffering. Beckettian theatre is theatre of release not endurance.

Michel Foucault 1970-71: Written Law and Introduction of Money in Ancient GreeceSanna Tirkkonen (University of Helsinki)

Michel Foucault’s 2011 published lecture series Lessons on the Will to Know (Leçons sur la

volonté de savoir) from 1970‒71 forces one to rethink the systematization of Foucault’s work, its normative and ontological aspects, and it provides a context to rethink Foucault’s methodology ‒ to reflect on the relationship between archaeology and genealogy. I will seek an approach which treats the methodologies as mutually supportive. After the publication of the Collège de France lectures, it becomes rather obvious that there is no turn to antiquity in the 80’s as long was thought. In the 1970−71 lectures Foucault already studies a shift in truth paradigm in antiquity. Foucault is also sketching out several themes he will later develop in his career, such as law and sovereignty, penalties and their subjects, daily practices and decentralized power. In fact, Foucault thematizes the question of power for the first time.

Lessons on the Will to Know begins with a critical analysis of Aristotle’s concept of truth and exclusion of sophisms. Through this reading, Foucault makes a contrast between truth that is negotiated in a verbal process and truth, which is verified by measure. Thematically the lecture series 1970−71 deals in most length with formation of judicial systems and the introduction of money in ancient Greece, which are examples of practices the new truth paradigm reinforces in the Greek society. These will be the focus of my attention in this paper. Etymological similarity of the words law (nomos) and money (nomisma) is glaring for example in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics: “In virtue of a voluntary convention, money (nomisma) has become the medium of exchange. We say nomisma, because it is not so by nature, but by law (nomos), and because it is in our power to change it and to render it useless.” (EN, 1133a 30.) Written law, understood as nomos, is visible to all and related to the expansion of power now understood to be exercised

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through all citizens (Behrent, Foucault Studies Vol 3, 2012). The connection between Foucault’s studies of antiquity in the 1970’s and 1980’s deserves to be researched further. In my paper I’ll study Foucault’s lectures together with the classics, contemporary thinkers, who influenced his work at the time, and historians of money and law. I propose that in the very last two lecture series Foucault studies the historicity of his own concepts in a critical manner, which is methodologically the strongest link between these courses.

The Body as Fossilized Duration: Merleau-Ponty and the Prehistory of the SubjectDylan Trigg (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée)

Research on Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body has tended to focus on the distinction between the lived body and the objective body. If the former refers to the subjective experience of the body as a perceiving organ, then the latter can be understood as the object being perceived. But what has been overlooked in this division is the more enigmatic idea of what Merleau-Ponty terms a “captive or natural spirit [that is] the continuation of a prehistory” (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 296). The importance of this bodily spirit is that it draws our attention to the role of the body as holding, what Bachelard would term, the “fossilized duration” of an ancestral past (Bachelard 1994, 9). In this paper, I will argue the body’s prehistory engineers an uncanny dynamic at the heart of the human body, rendering the subject both self and other simultaneously. By way of conclusion, I will pose two speculative questions, each of which is implicit in the paper as a whole. One, if my body is foreshadowed at all times by a prehistoric subjectivity, then can it be said that I “possess” my body? Two, if possession of my body evades me, then who—or perhaps more pertinently what—am I? Such questions will force us to consider the relationship between

materiality and uncanniness, and thus the idea of an alien self.

Indifference to Questioning in the Postfoundational Questioning of the PoliticalDr Nick Turnbull (School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester)

Postfoundational political theorists have taken the philosophical critique of metaphysics to express the general openness of the political. I develop an original critique of postfoundational political theory using Michel Meyer’s philosophy of questioning, problematology. Indifference to questioning in postfoundational theory produces inadequate definitions of the political. This critique comprises two parts. First, the rejection of foundations via the ontological questioning of Being is inadequate because it is indifferent to questioning. The questioning of questioning reveals a more primary principle. Second, postfoundational political theory is indifferent to questioning in assimilating generalized indeterminacy with the political. This overstates the reach of the political while also expressing it in terms of paradoxical and negative formulations. I give two examples. In the case of Laclau, it leads to a negative definition of the political which exaggerates conflict. In the case of Lefort, it produces a paradoxical definition and extends the concept beyond its scope. The philosophy of questioning enables us to distinguish the philosophical from the political and show

that the political is but one modality of questioning.

Différance and EreignisRozemund Uljée (PhD candidate, School of Philosophy, University College Dublin)

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In this paper, I seek to show how Différance emerges from a Heideggerian space or place, most specifically that of Ereignis and the “letting-be” inherent to the temporality of Being. I shall mark how Derrida’s Différance manifests itself within the same modality of thought as the Ereignis understood as the importance of the “letting presence” of temporality, and thus the dimension of nearness. This dimension is as crucial to Derrida’s project as to Heidegger’s. As is the case with Heidegger’s attempt to think the appropriation of Being and beings, there is in Derrida the necessity to think Différance as a certain co-belonging of that which is irreducible to and corrupting of presence and that which asserts its identity in presence.

Derrida thinks the dynamic of nearness through what he terms trace – a thinking of that which is other-than-present as other-than-present. It is in and within this challenge in thinking to preserve distance and thus nearness as trace of other as other that Derrida introduces Différance. The strategy of thought employed in Différance could be perceived of as a movement of doubling of thought similar to Ereignis. Both Heidegger’s Destruktion and Derrida’s Deconstruction can be understood a questioning of the prominence of logocentrism and presentification in the history of western metaphysics and serve as modes of ‘reading’ the history of metaphysics which involve reversing metaphysics upon itself to reveal its unthought – its other. However, in Destruktion, being riveted to the thought of Being, this unthought is precisely the being of Being. This means that there is a clear telos to Destruktion; that of the revelation of Being whose destiny is its concealment which opens the originary possibility for being revealed. The radicality of Deconstruction lies in that there exists no such possibility. Deconstruction can never be ‘undertaken’ as such since it is that which is always and already happening and the nature of Différance is such that ‘reading’ in the Derridean sense leads to aporia.

Thus, the theme of the impossible marks a radical break in Derrida’s thinking from that of Heidegger. My task here will be to examine most particularly Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s discussion of Being in terms of its Offenbarheit and to examine whether this can be thought in tandem with the structure of “letting–be” proper to the primordial temporality of Being. In arguing that the history of Being is one of its own necessary concealment Heidegger can be accused of reducing the ‘other’ of the history of metaphysics to a structure of possible revelation. However, if we are to understand Différance as a perpetually corruptive force and the trace as something which always leads to what is other-than-present, then how is it possible to ever conceive of Offenbarheit in Being? The focus here will be set on the possibility of this revelation as ‘event’ in Heidegger, and Derrida’s counter-argument that the event is always impossible.

From the Sublime to the Event; the Heuristic Value of the AestheticConnell Vaughan (PhD in Philosophy, University College Dublin)

This paper considers the development of political and heuristic conceptions of aesthetic experience in European Philosophy. This is be done by focusing on two related types of aesthetic experience; the sublime and the event. The 18th and 19th Century aesthetic concept of the sublime is understood an experience that, in revealing our freedom, enables, prepares and encourages us to be moral agents. The 20th Century aesthetic concept of the event is an experience that signals a means for political emancipation through aesthetic education.

Specifically I will concentrate on On the Aesthetic Education of Man; In a Series of Letters by Friedrich Schiller and The Ignorant Schoolmaster; Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation by Jacques Rancière. In these texts both philosophers propose alternative approaches to education inspired by their own particular approach to the philosophy of art. Schiller, for example, sees the aesthetic experience of the sublime as a vital educational tool toward political emancipation on an individual basis. Rancière, on the other hand, regards aesthetic experience and non hierarchical

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learning, on certain occasions, as providing a way to break from instituted political regimes and the Platonic conception of learning, on collective terms.

I argue that the educational and heuristic import of these approaches can be seen in art practices that challenge our received conceptions of what an aesthetic experience can be. In relation to contemporary art practice I consider the increased institutional recognition of installation art. Central to the notion of installation art is the distinction between it and the installation of art. In the latter the arrangement and context of the aesthetic experience is secondary to the works contained therein. By opening the curatorial space to potential aesthetic experience (as witnessed in works that encourage interaction), installation art shows that inherited epistemological explanations of knowledge can be subject to change. In the realm of education this change is of significant political import for it confirms the approach of both Schiller and Rancière whereby the peculiarity of aesthetic experience is seen as a way toward knowledge.

An Approach to Being and Time: the Ontology of the SonataJoseph Ward (IRCHSS Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University College

Dublin)

One of the most fundamental issues for the ontology of Heidegger’s Being and Time is encapsulated in statements such as the claim that when a true assertion is made “[t]he entity itself which one has in mind shows itself just as it is in itself”. In such claims Heidegger makes a radical departure from Husserlian phenomenology, for which one of the decisive foundations was the epoche (bracketing) of this question of the in itself. But students of the text often struggle not only with what can justify Heidegger’s claim about the manifestation of the thing as it is in itself, but also with how to even conceive of a coherent ontology along these lines, because of persistent post-Kantian worries about the idea that our perceptions and cognitions of the world could ever do justice to the intrinsic nature of reality. In this paper I will leave aside the first of these issues, focusing instead on the latter by means of an analogy with a particular mode of performative art, exemplified by the classical tradition of Western music.

I will use the example of a Beethoven piano sonata: this is to be seen as analogous to a being in the most general sense, an “entity” (“Seiende”). My argument is that performances (which I will prefer to call “interpretations”) of this sonata should be taken as analogous to manifestations or appearances of an entity. (There are some disanalogies to be noted, such as the existence of scores as alternative means of access to the sonata, but these will be shown to be irrelevant to the central claims.) To me it seems undeniable that to hear just one of these performances, under conditions of adequacy regarding both the performance itself and how the listener is “placed”, is to encounter the sonata as it is in itself. Of course this is not to deny that we may come to know the sonata better through hearing other interpretations, a process akin to viewing an object from different perspectives, by means of different senses, by means of artistic representation or any number of different modes of appearance. But nevertheless, someone who has listened attentively to a single adequate performance of the sonata and who is asked whether they know this sonata can truthfully answer: “Yes”. (In the same way I may be said to know the house in the street next to mine if I have seen it on just one occasion and from one angle, although I could of course get to know it better.)

To insist that however many performances I hear I will never really know the sonata is, taken as a denial of the possibility of knowledge, to insist that there must be some “real” sonata behind the performances of it, an exact parallel to the Kantian noumenon, at least on one traditional reading of Kant. The natural response in the case of the Beethoven sonata is to say that, while the sonata is not reducible to its interpretations or even to an infinite series of interpretations, neither does its “true” existence hover somewhere behind these interpretations

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in some ultimate, inaccessible form. Rather the sonata shows itself as it is in itself through its interpretations. Like Being in Heidegger’s ontology it manifests itself through them, although it is not dependent on them for its existence. This is why Beethoven would never have conceived a notion that no-one could ultimately come to know his sonata “as it was in itself”; all composers ever generally want is for their works to be given performances that allow their musical structure and textures to be revealed.

My claim then is that if a general ontology is conceived according to this analogy we lose any motivation for the belief that there must be a radical separation between appearances and things in themselves: we can quite coherently conceive of how manifestations (phenomena) of an entity can nevertheless qualify as encounters with that entity as it is in itself.

The Role of the Encounter and the Place of the Subject in Deleuzian MicropoliticsNathan Widder (Reader in Political Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London)

In this paper, I would like to explore two fundamental conditions that make possible a Deleuzian micropolitics: the encounter with something embedded within the sensible that cannot be recognized or represented but can only be sensed; and the place of the subject or ego as a semblance that makes possible an experimental ethos. It is through the first that thinking is engendered in thought, without which, Deleuze maintains, creativity in any area – from philosophy to art to politics and more – is impossible. The second allows Deleuzian micropolitics to break free from a model of politics in which the constitution of a political subject is taken as a sine qua non. Both of these conditions speak to a multiplicity that is at once the condition and the result of both thought and action, and that, crucially, shows the upshot of Deleuze’s thesis on micropolitics to be that it indicates the location where ethics and politics intersect. Developing this last theme, I hope to show how Deleuze offers a political ethos of experimentation and self-creation analogous to the ethic of the care of the self presented by Foucault. Whereas Foucault’s thesis of the care of the self examines the way we form ourselves into a self able to take up a position of subjectivity in relation to a moral code, Deleuze’s micropolitics examines the way individuals and collectives can create themselves as political animals, and particularly as political animals that are something different than political subjects.

Clear, Distinct and Obscure in Deleuze’s Ideal Synthesis of DifferenceJames Williams (Professor of Philosophy, University of Dundee)

This paper returns to Deleuze’s work on Ideas from Difference and Repetition. The paper addresses the question ‘What is the correct interpretation of Deleuze’s novel appeal to a difference between clear and distinct, and distinct and obscure in his definition of virtual Ideas?’ The argument contrasts different approaches taken by Daniel Smith in his Essays on Deleuze and by Anne Sauvagnargues in her Deleuze: l’empirisme transcendental. The paper also returns to Descartes and to Leibniz, and to Cartesian and Leibnizian scholarship in order to set Deleuze’s innovations in historical context. The paper will argue that the status of clear, distinct and obscure is problematic when taken in conjunction with Deleuze’s work on images of thought and his later work in aesthetics, for instance, on the diagram in Bacon’s painting. It also argues that there is a tension in Deleuze’s philosophy between definitions of continuity and intensity and definitions of clear, distinct and obscure. This leads to a conjecture that any reading of Difference and Repetition is forced to make a series of difficult and uncertain decisions around the centrality and exact meaning of Deleuze’s terms, as well as their function in his system. These decisions then shape the

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subsequent characterisation of any interpretation around the purported materialism or idealism of his philosophy, and around the exact meaning of ‘transcendental’ when attached to Deleuze’s philosophy.

Chaos and Philosophy: Figures of Aleatory SpaceYogev Zusman (PhD candidate, School of Philosophy, University of Tel-Aviv)

From Parmenides to Kant, the apparition of 'material' figures presupposed for Western philosophy an a priori space of deployment, a principle of multiplicity whose contours would be delineated by their progressive distribution - an inherently intelligible apeiron (as Plato's khora would make explicit). The finite cosmos is the geometrical manifestation of this distributive principle. Whence the fundamental distinction we inherited from the ancients: the minimal interval between the apeiron, or the 'determinable indeterminate', and chaos, the notorious undeterminable. This distinction still plays a decisive role in the Kantian division of sensibility into space as a 'pure intuition' and the 'sensuous manifold', and eventually enables one to explain why perfectly "blind intuitions", or chaotic figures, are in effect impossible. With this important difference, an inheritance of the 17 th

century: chaos is now understood epistemically, as the mark of a limited point of view, a measure of ignorance, and hence as the inner signature of finitude.

Chaos, then, we are now told, and here is the beginning of symbolism, cannot but be thought negatively, i.e. as perfect disorder, as "a-cosmos", a 'negative concept'. It is but the reflected image of the absolute absence of order, the strange image of the possible destruction of all determined things at one and the same time. Yet, the paradox is that, just like 'chance', it cannot, in fact, be imagined, let alone thought, as the 'absolute' ("absolute disorder") it supposedly is - for chaos "as such" would always be relative to a certain order of things as the reflection of the coherence and consistency proper to another kind of order (mechanism and finality, or the "detensively" spatial and the intensively vital, in Bergson). Or: in truth, chaos is but a representation of the fact that the real does not consist of a single order or of a single level of being. And if the chaotic is made into some sort of a 'universal operator' it can then only mean: the essentially non-real. Thus, it is rapidly concluded: in itself chaos is nothing real, it only exists in the anxious imagination of a limited subjectivity as the mere obstruction of any figure or image, including its own. (And in this way it would become the mere "vacuous" sign of 'pure exteriority'.)

But, does 'chaos' necessarily mean 'disorder'? Is it not possible to follow the dispersion of the real into a multiplicity of 'orders' or divergent levels which defy any cosmic totalization, without thereby relativizing and reducing chaos to the paradox of its negative image? How could chaos, in other words, still be thought positively?

In my lecture I would propose a response in the form of three lines of inquiry that would be articulated together and thus make a short presentation of a more general project (a doctoral thesis I am currently working on) which traces the irreducible relation between the aleatory existence of things, the originary diffraction of space, and a positive notion of chaos as an in itself after all.

The first part would hence consist in drawing the outlines of a chaosmogony, and the inherent fractal folding of chaos and cosmos would be presented. In this inner-folding, the second line of inquiry would follow the refraction of the real into a multiplicity of divergent levels of being which form the 'non-smooth' texture of an originarily diffracted space. The third line would follow the way these divergent levels are knotted together, here and there; how they are more or less caught up in each other within the circumstantial constellations of beings, and the way a thing in itself might be defined just as such a knot.

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