Sheer Life Revolting: The Concept of Life and Its Political Meaning in Spinoza, Agamben, and Butler

Author(s): Katerina Kolozova / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2008

By virtue of expression intrinsic to it, Spinozian conatus of self-preservation can be defined as intensive whereas the latter, i.e., intensity, is defined by infinity (Deleuze 1990). In accordance with the immanence that defines it (the conatus of infinity), self-preservation is transgressive or hubristic. Namely, if human “appetite” consists in the necessary tendency toward an infinite power of existence, and if infinity bears the mark of – or gives mark to, i.e., defines – immortality (or godlike existence), we can conclude that human essence is hubristic. It is an inherent tendency of the finite being, always already participating in the Infinity, to endlessly increase its Desire (Spinoza’s “conscious emotion”) for perfection of life, that is, for a life that offers as complete and as undisturbed as possible state of pleasure.

Бунтот на голиот живот: Концептот за животот и неговото политичко значење кај Спиноза, Агамбен и Батлер

Author(s): Katerina Kolozova / Language(s): Macedonian Issue: 1-2/2008

By virtue of expression intrinsic to it, Spinozian conatus of self-preservation can be defined as intensive whereas the latter, i.e., intensity, is defined by infinity (Deleuze 1990). In accordance with the immanence that defines it (the conatus of infinity), self-preservation is transgressive or hubristic. Namely, if human “appetite” consists in the necessary tendency toward an infinite power of existence, and if infinity bears the mark of – or gives mark to, i.e., defines – immortality (or godlike existence), we can conclude that human essence is hubristic. It is an inherent tendency of the finite being, always already participating in the Infinity, to endlessly increase its Desire (Spinoza’s “conscious emotion”) for perfection of life, that is, for a life that offers as complete and as undisturbed as possible state of pleasure.

Аналитичко/Континентално и Деридаовско

Author(s): Bobi Badarevski / Language(s): English,Macedonian Issue: 2/2004

Somewhere around 1992 I stopped following Derrida’s work. This event didn’t occur abruptly, it still persists, and is delayed, repressed. I think that there was no special reason, while actually there were several. That was the time when the grand debate around Modernism/ Postmodernisam was coming to an end and when with the break-up of Yugoslavia the conditions in Macedonian society started to change. Expectations that democratic processes would enter all parts of society were interfered with through fear of war that was already going on in Croatia and in Bosnia. Communist oligarchies, transformed into political parties, illegal privatization, university structures building bastions around their chairs became the features of the new reality. All in all, those were the beginnings of the turbulent period that we fell into.

Презенција, игра, разлика: Дерида и неговите маргинални театарски коментари

Author(s): Jelena Lužina / Language(s): English,Macedonian Issue: 2/2004

There is no doubt that theatre studies laments the irrefutable fact that the direct, more specific interest of its subject matter – the theatre - and namely, an interest that could (explicitly!) be recognized, read through, cited and/or referenced from the books of Jacques Derrida – has seemingly remained modest, marginal, or (even) completely insignificant. Certainly, theatre studies is absolutely aware of the factuality of this irrefutable fact, which however, should not prevent theatre studies scholars from carefully reading and even more carefully interpreting these same books. Quite the contrary.[...]

Vidujybės kontekstualizavimas XX a. filosofijoje ir asmens tapatybė

Author(s): Augustinas Dainys / Language(s): Lithuanian Issue: 4/2017

The article analyses the contextualisation of innerness that took place in the philosophy of the 20th century. The doctrine that enabled this process is called contextualism. There is a distinction between the contextualisation of innerness in the weak and strong contextualism. Weak contextualism explores various instances of contextual innerness, while strong contextualism seeks to formulate general methodological principles on the nature of contextual innerness and language. The position of philosophical classicism is stated as an alternative to contextualism; it brings back the truth and a person’s identity to philosophical thinking. According to the latter philosophical position, the identity of the philosopher is his truth. Although the problems of classical philosophy are reinstated, philosophical classicism avoids naïve realism and seeks to learn the lessons of Kant, Wittgenstein, and Deridda.

Сексуалната стратегија на синот кај Кафка: Тероризам и прогон

Author(s): Jasna Koteska / Language(s): English,Macedonian Issue: 1/2001

In this essay, I will not delve broadly and exclusively into the issue of the sexuality of the Son in Kafka, but particularly into one of its aspects - sexual strategy. I would like to present and elaborate on two complementary structures, because I consider two of Kafka's posthumously published short stories commonly entitled Sons, The Metamorphosis and The Judgment, to be a joint representation of the two archaic resolutions of the Son's sexual drives.

Dekonstruktion und Medialität

Author(s): Ulrike Ramming / Language(s): German Issue: 3/2011

It seems that the media is not subject to philosophical disputes: the media theory is treated as a scholarly discipline, whereas Derrida, in philosophy, treats script as the second to none media. When one reads earlier works by this philosopher more closely, one can notice a subject and reflexive dimension of deconstruction, which shows that Derrida, in his thoughts on a written sign, always raises an issue of constitutive moments that both enable and precede a certain theory. The aforementioned reflexive dimension points to that level of mediality that can be useful for approaching the issue of media in a philosophical fashion.

The Ontogenesis of Language

Author(s): Andrew Conio / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2011

Those of Deleuze and Guattari’s texts that pertain to their ideas on language are characterised by sometimes gradual, sometimes dramatic, modifications of concepts, by accessions to new dimensions of thought as they turn to face (or to create) new problematics, by aporias resulting from the abandonment of concepts, and by generally fluid and sometimes amorphous ideas. All of which makes their refusal to devote a single text exclusively to the question of language rather appropriate. This clearly fi ts with Deleuze and Guattari’s view, counter to the in-vogue linguistics and semiologies of the time, that language is not an epiphenomenon. However, the question of language, of what it is and how it functions, is never far from the surface of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing and, I will argue, an exact and yet rigorous consistency of thought – or at least a number of relatively stable points amidst a sea of shifting perspectives and structures – can be found. These points, or axis are at far remove from all other schools of language and linguistics, making a comparative analysis problematic, as they rely on perhaps some of Deleuze’s most illusive, yet most powerful, concepts. This paper works through how ‘Sense’, ‘the Event’, ‘Aion’ and ‘Chronos’ provide open yet reliable conceptual parameters for a theory capable of capturing language’s profoundly open and heterogenic nature.For Deleuze ‘language never has universality in itself, self-sufficient formalisation, a general semiology or a metalanguage’ and due to its essentially amorphous nature, is the primary manifestation of becoming and the poetics of life. Here we have an iteration of the underlying logic to Deleuzian thought, repeated in all his works from painting to cinema, social assemblages to biological milieu and exemplified by this theory of language. The creation of a conceptual system that has an armature, is productive and coherent, its features (the Event, Aion and Chronos) can be subjected to critique and analysis, yet is consubstantial with life’s polymorphous nature and creative potential. The essential point being that the pulsations and movements of Chronos and Aion, Event and Series, are themselves not transcendental structures or manifolds, but folded, aliquid interactions that form the melodic counterpoints of life and therein lies the ontogenesis of language.

Deconstruction, Logic, and ‘Ordinary Language’: Derrida on the Limits of Thought

Author(s): Christopher Norris / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2010

This essay argues – contra received opinion amongst disciples and detractors alike – that Derrida’s work is centrally concerned with issues in philosophy of logic and language that have been a main focus of interest for philosophers in the ‘other’, i.e., analytic or mainstream Anglophone tradition. Moreover, it engages them in such a way as inescapably to raise further issues of an epistemological and ontological character that are also very active topics of debate on the analytic side. They include the ongoing dispute between realists and anti-realists with respect to the question whether truth can properly or intelligibly be conceived as transcending the limits of available evidence, present-best knowledge, or attainable proof. My essay sets out the opposing arguments and then makes the case – again strongly counter to the standard view of his work – that Derrida espouses a realist position not only in logico-semantic terms (the terms on which this discussion is most often conducted nowadays) but also as a matter of ontological commitment.Indeed, if this were not the case, then there could be no justification for the claim – implicit throughout his work – that a deconstructive reading can discover (rather than project or invent) hitherto unrecognised complexities of sense and logic. These in turn serve to indicate hitherto unrecognised problems or shortfalls in the current state of knowledge concerning one or other of those numerous topic-areas that Derrida addresses by way of such a reading. Hence his insistence, as against the routine charge, that he is not for one moment rejecting or ignoring the referential component of language but rather pointing up the kinds of complication – the uncertainties of scope or instances of contextual under- or over-determination – which tend to escape notice on other, more simplified or doctrinaire accounts. My essay thus seeks to re-situate Derrida’s work with regard to some of the most prominent debates within present-day analytic philosophy.

Јазикот на странецот

Author(s): Jacques Derrida / Language(s): French,Macedonian Issue: 2/2004

Noam Chomsky et Michel Foucault, Sur la nature humaine, Comprendre le pouvoir interlude

Author(s): Jordančo Sekulovski / Language(s): Albanian,Macedonian Issue: 1/2006

Review of: Noam Chomsky et Michel Foucault, Sur la nature humaine, Comprendre le pouvoir interlude, Les Etudiens Aden, Bruxelles, 2006.

SMUTNA LEKTURA. GEOGRAFICZNO-KULTUROWY TRÓJKĄT LÉVI-STRAUSSA

Author(s): Anna Wieczorkiewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2018

The author reinterprets the classic anthropological book, , also read as a record of memories from the field: Tristes Tropiques by Lévi-Strauss. She argues that the discussed narrative on meanings is the evocation of the structural theory. The culinary triangle – a concept borrowed by Lévi-Strauss from the linguistic study of phonological systems – is the key to read the book. The triangle linking Brazil, Europe and India in Tristes Tropiques is analogous to the one involving three types of food: raw, cooked and rotten. Lévi-Strauss’ stay in India, observations and notes taken there could influence the process of writing a memoir book.

FROM LETTER TO PHANTASM. SOME REMARKS ON DELEUZE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS IN LOGIC OF SENSE

Author(s): Claudia Marta / Language(s): English Issue: Sp.Issue/2020

From Letter to Phantasm. Some Remarks on Deleuze and Psychoanalysis in Logic of Sense. Our aim is to show how the two heterogeneous series of “letter” and “phantasm” make possible, through their convergence understood as the event of sense, a double passage. First, in the order of the Symbolic, the passage of the signifier into the signified. Second, the passage of the whole Symbolic order out of the desiring body. It will be shown that this amounts to a re-conceptualization of causality as sense – event.

S onu stranu okrutnosti. Opasni prijatelj zastrašujuće psihoanalize

Author(s): Ugo Vlaisavljević / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2020

The article proposes a close reading of Jacques Derrida’s address to the Estates General of Psychoanalysis, held in Paris in July 2000. In celebrating the centenary of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the representative international gathering of psychoanalysts took place under the umbrella of a “political metaphor” suggested by its historically significant title and dates. In Derrida’s address, the metaphor of revolution was far more than just a bright emblem of the meeting, expressing the organizers’ wish to emphasize the revolutionary character of Freud’s “invention” or to encourage the participants’ enthusiasm for solving the current crisis of their profession in the manner inspired by the Estates General in 1789. It is only in his late work, and particularly in this introductory lecture dealing with human cruelty and its recent historical mutations, that Derrida began to explore the deconstructive political potentialities of psychoanalysis. His hypothesis on the superiority of psychoanalysis over all other discourses in dealing with this highly political issue assumes that there is, although not yet fully recognized, or even strongly opposed, a politics inherent to Freud’s theory. Outlined in his later writings, Freud’s “progressive politics,” already engaged in a subversion of the principle of state sovereignty, as proved to be able to indicate a strategy of going “beyond the death drive,” calls for creating a new, revolutionary psychoanalysis beyond all principles. The article attempts to reveal that Derrida’s politically oriented reading of Freud’s legacy crucially depends on his unique position of “the friend of psychoanalysis.”

Possible Worlds of Everyday Aesthetics: The Experiencing Self, Intersubjectivity and Life-World

Author(s): Dan Eugen Ratiu / Language(s): English Issue: 22/2020

This paper investigates the relationship between the subjective-private and intersubjective-public dimensions of the aesthetic experience in everyday life. I claim that our everyday aesthetic life cannot be conceived of as a mere private world in absolute discontinuity to the public world, such as the “artworld” or the “life-world”, since it includes both personal and intersubjective dimensions. Likewise, although the “everyday” should not be thought of as absolutely one and the same for all, it is possible to search for the common features that emerge from the background of its multiple particularities. The intersubjective engagement is an essential element when analyzing the subject experiencing the everyday aesthetically, so we should acknowledge as well the intersubjective nature of a subject’s self-constitution and experience. Against the idea of the overall discontinuous nature of one’s aesthetic experience, in everyday context vs. artworld contexts, it is therefore important to consider everyday aesthetic experience as being both distinct and integrated into the continuous flux of one’s experiences, as well as related to one’s whole life. These claims will be supported by some insights on the experiencing self, supported by practical philosophy (Gadamer), as well as the characteristics of everyday life and life-world highlighted by phenomenology (Husserl, Simmel, Schutz). All these accounts offer powerful lines of argument in defending a consistent conception of the whole experiencing self and the structure of one’s everyday aesthetic life as well as its intersubjective dimension.

Urban Art Practices in the Vision of Projective Aesthetics

Author(s): Irina Lisovetc,Boris Orlov / Language(s): English Issue: 22/2020

Modern urban art practices (public art, street art, flash mob, performance, etc.), are engaged in a radical aesthetic transformation of everyday life. The problem of projective aesthetics is taken as a variant of the praxis of modern aesthetics. Projective aesthetics suggests that one should mark out art projects which are created in the real aesthetic experience and which represent topical cultural issues in daily human life. Being the subject of projective aesthetics, the main examples of that kind are the projects of actual art in the urban environment. It is a group of artifacts at the border of art and everyday life that is called urban art practices.This article is devoted to the study of the features and possibilities of projective aesthetics in relation to contemporary urban art. Interacting with the developing practical aesthetics – environmental and urbanistic – the projective aesthetics allows us to include in the philosophical discourse the urban culture where actual art practices work.In the relations between urban art and projective aesthetics a special place is given to the idea and practice of potentiations (Epstein’s concept). According to this concept, the potential of the contemporary city is revealed by means of art for creating a polylogue for intertwining various aspects and forms of city life and for developing a rhizome of urban culture.City art practices, being a phenomenon of everyday life, represent in a single image all aspects of everyday life – from political, ethnic, national, and regional to aesthetic and artistic meanings.

LÉVI-STRAUSS’UN YAPISALCILIĞINI ALTÜST ETMEK: CİNSİYET BELASI’NI “BÜKÜLMÜŞ BRİCOLAGE” OLARAK OKUMAK

Author(s): Anlam Filiz / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2020

This article critically analyzes Judith Butler’s presentation of Claude Lévi-Strauss in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1999). In this book, Butler criticizes feminists for employing Lévi-Strauss’s binary oppositions and their use of the sex/gender binary in their critique of patriarchy. Butler’s analysis provides a fruitful lens to understand how gender operates. However, as the article shows, this analysis relies on a misrepresentation of Lévi-Strauss’s take on these dualities. Employing Lévi-Strauss’s term “bricolage,” the article reads Butler’s misinterpretation as a twisted form of bricolage, which destabilizes certain assumptions in Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. The article presents an example of how Lévi-Strauss’s structural theory has influenced not only feminist theory but also its critique. The article also aims at providing an alternative way to understand influential gender theorist Judith Butler’s misinterpretation of other scholars.

THE CREATIVE POWER OF AFFECTIVE DISCOURSE. RECAPITULATING DELEUZE

Author(s): Paulina Kłos-Czerwińska / Language(s): English Issue: 48/2020

In the following article an attempt is made to draw the reader’s attention to the problem of affective and emotional poverty which has resulted from the systematic degradation of everyday experience in contemporary times. The analysis of this problem is based on the writings of different continental philosophers, especially Gilles Deleuze, but also others, like Michel Foucault or Maurice Blanchot. It is suggested that the solution to this problem may lie in the power of creation, and I have tried to offer the reader some techniques or methods which, if undertaken, may develop creativity and release its power. However, the best repertoire of such techniques is to be found in the writings of the above mentioned researchers, so the reader is directed to the original sources.

The Use of Structural Methodology in Postmodern Concepts of Technology

Author(s): Oksana Chursinova,Svitlana Povtoreva,Nathalia Zhorniak / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2021

The article is aimed at defining the possibilities for structural methodology to understand the phenomenon of modern technology. Some principles of postmodernists’ structural research are highlighted. The embodiment of these principles in the analytical discourse is shown, considering the state and development of technical activities and how they allow one to assess and predict future events. These predictions about mechanization, informatization and virtualization of almost all areas of modern society are contemplated pessimistic by some thinkers and optimistic by others. The conducted study showed that the structural methodology is a fairly effective means of philosophical understanding of the phenomena of technical reality. More and more people become involved in technology, and it is generally not perceived as involved in global threats. Instead, the dynamics and the consequences of structural transformations in the technical field are deeply interpreted by philosophers, who formulate their predictions and thus signal the dangers to culture and civilization.

THE THINKING OF THE THOUGHTLESSNESS OF EVIL: HANNAH ARENDT’S ACCOUNT ON THINKING AS CONDITIONING AGAINST EVIL-DOING

Author(s): Elvīra Šimfa / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Hannah Arendt describes thinking as an undetermined process, i.e., as a process that is not conditioned by any event in the world since it does not follow from any specific event in the world and it is not aimed at any such event. The essential feature of thinking is that it is excluded from the world. And in relation to this property of thinking Arendt asks: “Could the activity of thinking as such [..] regardless of results and specific content, [..] be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?” (Arendt 1978, 5). Considering the importance of Immanuel Kant’s account on the mechanism of moral action for Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s type of evil, in this article the author argues that it is not the lack of thinking “regardless of results and specific content”, therefore, not thinking as such, that can serve as a condition against evil-doing, but rather the ability to form a positive principle upon which to act, therefore it is the determinate rather than indeterminate thinking that can prevent evil-doing.