bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Catherine Malabou: The Epigenetic Human
Authors: Watkin Christopher
Published: May 2018

Chapter 4 turns to the question of human identity over time in Malabou. After setting out the stakes of her recent work on epigenesis in Before Tomorrow, the chapter points out some shortcomings of her previous accounts of identity over time, particularly in relation to the famous case of Phineas Gage and her experience of her own grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease. Malabou’s account of epigenesis provides us with a powerful way to re-read this earlier work. Prior to Before Tomorrow, Malabou is trapped in a paradigm which forces her to regard cerebral matter as the ‘host substance’ of human identity and personhood: just as rational thought acted as a gatekeeper of humanity for Badiou and Meillassoux, personal memory as it is encoded in the individual’s brain is the gatekeeper of personhood and identity for Malabou. However, in her recent work she elaborates what she calls an ‘epigenesis of the real’ according to which epigenesis and hermeneutics are extensions of each other, breaking down the division between nature and culture. I draw out the implications of this new position, using Paul Ricœur’s account of narrative identity as a sounding board for what I call Malabou’s eco-synaptic selfhood.
Conclusion
Authors: Watkin Christopher
Published: May 2018

Any attempt to draw links between and comparatively evaluate such a diverse range of thinkers as those I have discussed in this volume must necessarily be partial, both in the sense of incomplete and also in the sense of motivated by particular commitments and ideas at the expense of others. The analysis in this book has indeed been partial, although in its defence the main target of its critique has been partiality. The foregoing analysis has sought to expose and remedy the partiality of those accounts of the human which rest, in the final analysis, on a determinate host capacity or host substance. It has been argued that they are too restricted and fail to be able to account adequately for the human, and also fail to address difficult questions which arise in relation to (by these theories’ own lights) liminal humans who lack the requisite host property....
Introduction
Authors: Szmolka Inmaculada
Published: May 2018

The introductory chapter explains the four sections of the book. The first section deals with the theoretical and methodological analysis of changes that have occurred since 2011 as a result of the Arab Spring: in political regimes, from a Comparative Politics approach; and in the MENA region, from an International Relations perspective.
The second section includes an analysis of the transformations in party systems, the elections, the constitutional reforms undertaken, changes in government and power relations within political regimes, advances or deteriorations in governance in the MENA countries, the role of civil society in processes of political change, and the current situation regarding rights and civil liberties, and particularly in media and press freedom in the MENA countries.
Section III analyses the political consequences of the processes of change at both regional and international level. The section thus takes into account the importance of the MENA region on the international scene, the role played by international powers in the processes of political change and in the conflicts that have erupted since the Arab Spring, the configuration of new political interests, regional powers, and alliances, and revised understandings of the threats facing the region and the international community.
Finally, section IV presents the processes of political change undertaken as a consequence of the Arab Spring according to the typology established in chapter 1.
Elections and electoral integrity
Authors: Martínez-Fuentes Guadalupe
Published: May 2018

This chapter presents a comparative contextual analysis of parliamentary and presidential elections held in the MENA countries between 2011 and 2015, in order to clarify the relation between electoral integrity, electoral context and political regime. With this aim in mind, the analysis pursues: (1) identifying the evolution path of these three variables; (2) testing the existence or absence of correlation between them; and 3) classifying the countries in view of their last electoral, contextual and regime model records.
The results suggest three evidences. The first one refers to the heterogeneous behaviour of the variables, including progress, regression, fluctuation and stagnation patterns. The second is that positive correlation between them exists just in three cases, where progress (Tunisia), fluctuation (Egypt) and stagnation (Kuwait) are respectively the common trend. The third is that countries may be classified within two categories, considering if (i) the current level of electoral integrity corresponds with the general level of freedoms, rights and governance that contextualises the holding of elections, and (ii) the level of electoral integrity is either higher or lower than might be expected in relation to the defining characteristics of the electoral context and the regime.
Government and power relations
Authors: Veguilla Victoria
Published: May 2018

This chapter analyses the change (or continuity) of MENA regimes in a post-Arab Spring context, focusing on governments and power relationships. This chapter firstly analyses the place governments occupy in their respective political systems; how they are perceived by their populations; and the extent to which are they capable of managing violence and imposing their authority across the whole of their national territory. Governments are responsible for the policies carried out in their countries. Thus, many of the social protests - predominantly focused on the high levels of corruption - were directed against governments. However, while governments are perceived to be the institutions responsible for meeting citizens’ welfare needs, there are other non-elected institutions (formal or informal) with significant decision-making powers that are non-accountable, such as the presidents of the republic, the monarchs, and other national (the armed forces in the case of Egypt; armed groups in the cases of Libya, Syria and Yemen) or international actors (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran). On the other hand, this chapter studies changes in the power structure. The author finds evidence of greater power concentration, with the exception of the new democratic regime of Tunisia.
Regional order and regional powers in the Middle East and North Africa
Authors: Quero Jordi , Soler Eduard
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses whether and to what extent the internal political changes unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa since 2011 have triggered a shift in the subsystem’s regional order and its institutions. Drawing on the English School and constructivist theories of International Relations, it firstly discusses the impact of the Arab Spring on the ‘constitutional structure’ of the regional order. Next, it examines if we have witnessed a change in some of the fundamental institutions in place in the MENA region (alliances and amity/enmity cleavages, non-intervention, multilateralism and bilateralism, and great power management). It argues that slight changes in the fundamental institutions since the Arab Spring generally respond to a more fundamental systemic change that took place in the context of the 2003 war in Iraq. However, despite attempts to challenge it, the constitutional structure of the regional order remains intact.
A Trialogue on Revolution and Transformation
Authors: Dvořáková Vladimíra , Hrubec Marek , Keller Jan
Published: May 2018

The text deals with issues of revolution and transformations in the theoretical and empirical ways. The trialogue focuses on the significance and the consequences of social changes after 1989. Prompted by the 25th anniversary of the Soviet collapse in 1991, the text reflects on revolutions around the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, and the following situation and significant transformations in Central Europe and in the world, not least the return to capitalism and the consequences of privatisation. It also proposes also more general conceptual analyses of revolutions and transformations in social, economic and political spheres, and draws attention to revolutionary transformations that may be less striking but in the long run all the more important. Finally, several scenarios for further social development are noted, ranging from positive to dangerously agonistic perspectives.
The Transformation of Capitalism and the Limits of Democracy
Authors: Harris Jerry
Published: May 2018

Capitalism has undergone a number of important transformations and challenges. Within the West, capitalism responded to these problems with Keynesian solutions, creating an expanded social contract and growing middle class. But alongside its triumphalism with the fall of the Soviet Union, capitalism was reaching its own limits of expansion within the Keynesian model. Without an external threat, capitalism was free to focus on the wage structures and social benefits that restricted corporate profitability. The middle class had reached their limits and the working class had overreached theirs. Neoliberalism, led by financialisation, transformed capitalism into an updated model of its pre-Keynesian existence. Capitalism was rapidly transforming from a nation-centric system into a global structure of accumulation and power. Austerity in the developed North and structural adjustment programmes in the developing South resulted from a break with industrial-era national capitalism.
From Civilisational Crisis to Revolutionary Transformation?
Authors: Suša Oleg
Published: May 2018

Strong perceptions of crises have been in the making since the 1970s. The plurality of crises results from dynamic transformations of politico-economic, societal and environmental conditions. Policies adapting to these crises decisively shaped the ‘neoliberal turn’ of Western societies, responding to economic, social and technological changes in ambiguous ways: they combine deregulation with new modes of control and certain civilising efforts. In this context, the global expansion of ostensibly free-market capitalism, accompanied by relocations of industries and new directions of technological innovation, has played a key role. This configuration affects global civilisational dynamics, now headed either towards further degradation of humanity and the planet or to the generation of something new. The question is whether a revolutionary transformation of both capitalism and civilisation could be on the horizon.
Environmental Crisis and Political Revolutions
Authors: Sťahel Richard
Published: May 2018

The chapter argues for a complex inter-regional perspective on the crises of the last decade. In this context, the author revisits Habermas’s theory of crisis, developed in the 1970s primarily in connection with the problem of legitimation crisis in late capitalism, but in principle capable of accounting for a broader spectrum of crisis phenomena. The chapter stresses that the ecological background to political unrest – climatic change, overexploitation of resources, the threat of overpopulation – is very important. This specific constellation interacts with more global trends. It does not seem far-fetched to speak of a global crisis threatening the vey identity of advanced industrial civilisation; the key problem is an escalating conflict between the imperative of growth (pursued across the board from finance to technology) and the imperative of sustainability.
Communists and Social Democrats in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic
Authors: Gángó Gábor
Published: May 2018

The abortive or briefly successful Central European revolutions after World War I have mostly been perceived as efforts to export Bolshevism beyond Russia´s borders. This is particularly misleading in regard to the Hungarian revolution, a much more complex phenomenon than has commonly been assumed. This chapter analyzes the events of 1918-1919 in detail and shows that there was no ready-made model that could be transferred from Russia to Hungary. Moreover, the role of the Social Democrats in the revolution was far too important for it to be labelled a Bolshevik one, and the revolutionary government had to deal with specific problems concerning the survival and retrenchment of the Hungarian state after the downfall of the Habsburg monarchy. The last section briefly analyses one of the most significant twentieth-century works on Marxist theory, Lukács‘s History and Class Consciousness, written as a postscript to the Hungarian revolution.
‘The Coming of the Greeks’ and All That
Authors: Dickinson Oliver
Published: May 2018

My title is deliberately chosen to reflect that of the comic account of British history 1066 and All That (Sellar and Yeatman 1930), for the same reason that I entitled a previous paper ‘The Catalogue of Ships and All That’ (Dickinson 1999a). In both cases I used it to indicate how an idea has become so embedded in the general consciousness of the educated as to be readily accepted as ‘what everyone thinks’ – or rather ‘remembers’, since, as the authors of 1066 and All That point out in their Compulsory Preface, ‘History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember’ (Sellar and Yeatman 1930: vii).
Archaeology and the Archaeology of the Greek Language: On the Origin of the Greek Nouns in-εύς‎
Authors: Meissner Torsten
Published: May 2018

One of the most striking features of the ancient Greek lexicon is that numerous nouns in -εύς‎ are attested both in personal names such as Ἀχιλλεύς‎ or Ὀδυσσεύς‎ and in common nouns like βασιλεύς‎ ‘king’, ἱερεύς‎ ‘priest’; the latter type denotes, in historical times, mostly humans in professional or habitual roles, and the nouns in -εύς‎ are thus commonly classed as agent nouns. Attested from, as we now know, the Mycenaean period onwards, the history and prehistory of the formations in -εύς‎ have occupied scholars’ minds ever since the inception of the systematic study of the history of the Greek language in the nineteenth century, and it can be said without exaggeration that the nouns in -εύς‎ were and still are the cause célèbre of Greek word formation.
Modelling the Territories of Attic Demes: A Computational Approach
Authors: Fachard Sylvian
Published: May 2018

The territoriality of Attic demes has been a matter of dispute, but the evidence for the existence of territorial limits now seems overwhelming – regardless of how concretely they were marked on the ground. Some of the deme limits, perhaps contested ones, were fixed precisely by rupestral horoi. The majority of them, however – like most borders separating city-states – consisted of sight lines linking natural features such as summits, ridges and gullies. Locating more deme limits in the future is important for the progress of Attic topography. Deme boundaries are also valuable for assessing the potential agricultural catchment of demes, and for studying the rural economies of Attica at the level of individual demes and larger regions.
Coins in a ‘Home Away from Home’: The Case of Sicily
Authors: Rutter Keith
Published: May 2018

Coins are part of a culture and they should be able to provide significant information about the peoples who made and used them. The early coinages of Sicily provide an ideal field in which to pursue such wider questions, of the sort that have engaged you from the outset of your career: I mention just one example (Snodgrass 1994: 1), where you referred to the ‘robust independence’ of the new settlements, their ‘challenge [to] the attainments of the Aegean cities by a wide range of criteria’, their ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the ‘degree of integration of indige
The Idea of an Archetype in Texts Stemming from the Empire Founded by Cyrus the Great
Authors: Nagy Gregory
Published: May 2018

The text of the so-called Cyrus Cylinder, as well as other writings that stem from the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great, is based on the idea of an archetype. When I say archetype here, I have in mind a text that is meant as a model for other texts that serve as copies of this model. As we will see, the idea of such a model text does not necessarily match the reality of an original text that is copied. What I just said seems at first to be self-evident, since the act of copying something does not require the copying of an original. What you are copying may already be a copy. But the very idea of an archetype is not self-evident. As I will argue, this idea goes beyond the reality of some text that someone copies for the first time in order to make another text, which can then be copied again to make still another text, and so on. When I say idea here, I will try to keep in mind the Theory
Context Matters: Pliny’s Phryges and the Basilica Paulli in Rome
Authors: Schneider Rolf Michael
Published: May 2018

In the nineteenth century, remains on the north-eastern side of the Forum Romanum were identified as belonging to the Basilica Paulli (Chioffi 1996 4–5; Fig. 17.18 below), which had been situated opposite the Basilica Iulia. This identification had been based on ancient texts which are, however, ambiguous in their reading. They attest in the Forum Romanum either a single Basilica Fulvia-Aemilia-Paulli (communis opinio) or two separate basilicas, namely an archaeologically unverifi ed Basilica Aemilia and the verified Basilica Fulvia-Paulli. The latter is here called the Basilica Paulli and not the Basilica Aemilia, which is what, confusingly, most scholars have called it.2 In 1993 Eva Margareta Steinby scrutinised the opposing statements again and concluded that only the assumption of two separate basilicas, set up in the Forum Romanum in two different areas, would resolve the contradictions in the texts.
Why Direct Realism?
Authors: Shrock Christopher A.
Published: May 2018

As the common sense view of perception, Direct Realism rightly stands in a privileged position in relation to rival perceptual theories, Idealism and Indirect Realism. For most thinkers, rejecting Direct Realism would require extensive and unwelcome revisions to many other views. Furthermore, Indirect Realism and Idealism fall short of accomplishing their oft-assigned task of solving the Problem of Illusion.
Primary and Secondary Qualities in Reid’s Theory of Perception
Authors: Shrock Christopher A.
Published: May 2018

Reid distinguishes primary and secondary qualities according to their roles in his theory of perception. According to Reid, perceptions are rightly caused conceptions of and beliefs in their objects. Sensations serve as "natural signs" or triggers for perceptions but are in no way constitutive of perceptions. This chapter explains the place of primary and secondary qualities in Reid's scheme, focusing on their role as natural signs, Reid's summary accounts of primary and secondary qualities, and Reid's treatments of various primary and secondary species. Contrary to other interpretations, this chapter shows that Reid regards secondary qualities as objective properties of physical bodies.
Understanding Reid’s Distinction
Authors: Shrock Christopher A.
Published: May 2018

This chapter defends the interpretation of Reid put forth in Chapter 4. Reid's primary/secondary quality distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical, conceptual rather than phenomenological, and causal in a loose and lawlike sense. Since such a reading is at odds with every other reading of Reid on this matter, rival interpretations receive extensive treatment as well.
Scientific Objections
Authors: Shrock Christopher A.
Published: May 2018

Objections to treating secondary qualities as objective, causally relevant, physical properties often focus on a few key cases. This chapter considers and answers five such cases, including the perceived heat of lukewarm water, perceived taste of PTC, colour appearances of bees and pigeons, variability of colour appearances due to environmental factors, and metamerism. In each case, the objection receives an answer that challenges a presupposed correlation between sensations and perceived properties. Curiously, this defense involves a rejection of the traditional Western colour taxonomy.
A Priori Objections
Authors: Shrock Christopher A.
Published: May 2018

Howard Robinson and Bertrand Russell challenge the treatment of secondary qualities as objective, causally relevant, physical properties on non-empirical grounds. Robinson says that no combination of physical properties can account for the phenomenological aspects of secondary qualities. Russell, similarly, sees secondary qualities as knowable through acquainence, unlike scientific properties. Again, the answer involves a sharp distinction between perceived properties and sensations.
A Historical Objection
Authors: Shrock Christopher A.
Published: May 2018

A final objection to the treatment of secondary qualities as objective, causally relevant, physical properties says that perceived physical properties must resemble the ideas they cause in the perceiver. This approach assumes Indirect Realism (and therefore the falsity of Direct Realism), but it was ubiquitous in Reid’s day. This chapter traces Reid’s rejection of the Way of Ideas as it bears on his defense of Direct Realism and theory of secondary qualities. Although this objection would not be likely to get traction among contemporary philosophers, this chapter presents Reid’s case for historical interest and consistency.
Secularism as Proto-Multiculturalism: The Case of Australia
Authors: Levey Geoffrey Brahm
Published: May 2018

Political secularism was the West’s first attempt at multiculturalism. It was a political innovation that responded to pluralism by making room for it. Historically, the origins of secularism lie in a pragmatic response to the bloody religious wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The aim was to fi nd away in which different faith communities could co-exist amicably (Hunter 2008). Of course, applying the late-twentieth-century development of ‘multiculturalism’ to the advent of secularism is anachronistic and there are two features associated with the latter that distinguish it from the former. First, secularism developed from the idea of religious toleration, specifically, from a change in attitude to heresy and heretics (Zagorin 2003). Freedom of conscience then progressively became associated with a principle of equal respect towards citizens and state neutrality (Maclure and Taylor 2011). Multiculturalism typically entails a more respectful posture towards difference than mere forbearance or toleration and an affirmatively interventionist state rather than ‘hands-off’ neutrality or benign neglect. Second, as Locke (1963) made clear, religious toleration implied a certain separation between religious and political authority for the sake of both. Each could best execute its respective mission if it did not trespass on the other.
The Monopoly of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel and Its Effects on the Governance of Religious Diversity
Authors: Cohen-Almagor Raphael
Published: May 2018

Israel is a Jewish democracy. The differences between Judaism and liberal democracy are not easily reconcilable. This chapter outlines the difference between liberal and illiberal societies. It argues that the lack of separation between state and religion leads to discrimination against non-Orthodox Jews in the private sphere, in conducting their most personal issues of marriage and divorce. It further argues that lack of separation between state and religion contributes to the discrimination against Israeli-Palestinian citizens in the public sphere. The majority of Israeli-Jews feel a strong sense of belonging and affinity to the State of Israel and for Judaism. For most of them it is important to live in Israel and to be part of Israeli society and the Jewish people (Arian and Keissar-Sugarmen 2012: 12). The majority of Israeli-Jews deeply appreciate religion yet they see it as a matter of personal choice, not as an overwhelming dictate from above.
Secularism as a Double-Edged Sword? State Regulation of Religion in Turkey
Authors: Gülalp Haldun
Published: May 2018

Briefly defined, secularism is a political principle that aims to guarantee citizens the right to freedom of ‘conscience and religion’, as spelled out in international human rights documents (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18; European Convention on Human Rights, Article 9). Although only implicit in these documents, this right also includes freedom from religion. Secularism, then, entails the existence of a political space separate from and independent of religions for the purpose of negotiating common issues and areas of concern, so that the social and political needs of all religious and irreligious members of society may be met. This is a normative definition of a principle designed to maintain and promote peace in a diverse society. A variety of institutional arrangements may protect this principle. Within Europe alone we see several different models, as we do in other parts of the world (Madeley and Enyedi 2003; Bhargava 2005).
Alongside this definition there is also another one, in which secularism indicates religion’s subordination to the temporal power of the state.
Palestine Song: Mahmoud Darwish and Mourid Barghouti
Authors: Nasser Tahia Abdel
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores a new form of poetic autobiography by Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Mourid Barghouti. The chapter explores the relationship of the poets to Palestine and its effects on autobiographical form in Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, his 1986 memoir of the Israeli siege of Beirut, and Mural, his 1999 autobiographical epic focusing on mortality and Palestine. Barghouti’s memoirs I Saw Ramallah and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here explore the poet’s return to Palestine. Darwish and Barghouti rework the genre to explore the life of the poet in relation to Palestine and the tension between the poet’s solitude and his public role.
Revolutionary Solitude: Edward Said and Najla Said
Authors: Nasser Tahia Abdel
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines Arab Anglophone memoirs by focusing on Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999) and Najla Said’s Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (2013). Out of Place traces Edward Said’s cultural and literary journey from Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt to his education in the US. Edward Said’s self-representation rests on the dichotomy of his solitude during his formation within a history of dispossession and his career. The chapter rethinks Out of Place through the burgeoning of the Palestinian national movement and Said’s lifework. The chapter also compares Edward
Said’s youth in the Arab world and Najla Said’s Arab-American background, Said’s journey to the US and his daughter’s return to her roots, to arrive at a rethinking of the genre that migrates across languages and cultures.
Introduction
Authors: van Tuinen Sjoerd
Published: May 2018

THIS BOOK EXPLORES some of the implications of and opportunities within the speculative turn in continental philosophy from the perspective of art history. Speculation? Besides its only legitimate domain today, that of finance, is this not a thing of the past, when metaphysicians were used to making unverifiable claims about the nature of God, the World and the Self? From Kant to Wittgenstein, critical philosophy has taught us to remain silent on that of which we cannot speak. Likewise, art history has come a long way in establishing itself as a positive human science independent from its metaphysical beginnings. In both cases, enlightened, self-critical and self-reflective thought has worked hard on closing the door to ontology, on reducing the Ideas of reason to ideology and on limiting the domain of knowledge to phenomenal objects. Speculation, it seems, has not been ...
(Dis)enchanted Taiwanese Cinema, Schizoanalytic Belief and the Actuality of Animism
Authors: Bordeleau Érik
Published: May 2018

Taiwanese films abound with religious rites, spirits, specters, ghosts, gods, and other “supernatural” forces. How should we conceive of our involvement in this complex web of dissiminated and animated agencies that populate East-Asian cinema in general, and Taiwanese cinema in particular? Can the essential liminality and heterogeneity of spiritual matters be thought of in terms of active assemblages and transformative becomings? Or, to put it in blunter and somehow naive materialist terms: what does it actually mean to believe in gods, ghosts and spirits?
This article aims at outlining a schizoanalytic approach to the complex dynamic of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment at work in Taiwanese cinema. It takes as a starting point the speculative pragmatist question of how to inhabit and activate a sense of the possible in a given, situated, situation, that is: how we conceive of our participation to the ever-going process of (re)animation of our world(s).
This investigation into enchantment and disenchantment in contemporary Taiwanese Cinema articulates around three general lines of thought: 1. Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of what it means to believe (in the world); 2. the animist turn in recent post-Deleuzian thought, as put forth in the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Maurizio Lazzarato, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett and many others; 3. a more detailed characterization of the spirits’ virtual presence in terms of metamorphic power, surexistence and propositional efficacy. These three axis ultimately relate to the pragmatist speculative question of how to inhabit and activate a sense of the possible in a given, localized situation – or how do we conceive of our participation to the ever-going process of animation of our world(s).
The Plasticity of the Real: Speculative Architecture
Authors: Samsonow Elisabeth von
Published: May 2018

Von Samsonow argues that architecture can play an important role in the framework of contemporary speculative philosophy as it is founded on geology. Speculative philosophy might engage architecture to rediscover and reintegrate the geo-historical foundations of being as well as of architecture. Contemporary architecture is critizised being largely driven by a feeling of resentment towards the earth.  Architecture is of ontological interest because it borrows its key function from geology; from the arrangement of various materials, offering spaces or biotopes. In contemporary architecture however, this function got lost. Whereas old architecture seeks to ground dwelling in the earth and invites our bodies to understand what the earth can be to it, contemporary architecture disregards the body and is fixated on the eye, making architecture an issue of vision. Contemporary architecture is pure pornography; it simulates sensations and affirms the logic of capitalism. It degenerates the original earth to dirt and replaces it with an artificial earth, that is erected upwards in the form of an overground, which forms the anti-thesis to the earth. Von Samsonow calls this the 'takeoff strategy' of contemporary architecture.
Because it is driven by a theoretical pre-oedipalization, speculative philosophy may play an important role in the regrounding of contemporary architectures takeoff strategy. To understand this we have to look at Meillassouxs concept of the ancestral object, that gives us the existence of the earth prior to thought and knowledge. Von Samsonow interprets this ancestral object as a symbolic mother, in order to open up the possiblity of thinking the earth in terms of universal generation. From the point of view of the earth itself, it is filled up with objects generated by her; there is no distinction between organic and inorganic or between (natural) generation and (technical) production. Von Samsonow calls the quest for ancestrality the gaia-istic turn in speculative philosophy. This turn has revolutionary potential.
Gothic Ontology and Sympathy: Moving Away from the Fold
Authors: Spuybroek Lars
Published: May 2018

Lars Spuybroek proposes an ‘ill-disciplined’ reading of John Ruskin’s vitalist, anti-classicist theory of Gothic architecture. By discussing three of the six characteristics that Ruskin uses to define the nature of Gothic architecture, namely savageness (a form of rough variation), changefulness (a form of smooth variation), and rigidity (a form of structural activity), Spuybroek develops a Gothic ontology. At the heart of this ontology lies the relation between figures and configurations in which figures are variable and active parts that relate to each other in order to form collaborative entities. The figure-configuration relation transcends the aesthetic opposition between structure and ornament, an opposition that is upheld by Classicism and its varieties. In Gothic architecture, ornament is not ‘added on’ to structure, but rather generates structure by configurational behaviour such as bundling, weaving, and webbing. This flexible form of agency allows the fundamental element of the Gothic, the rib, to create an enormous variety of patterns. As an entity the Gothic rib takes position between the classical atom and the baroque fold, adhering to the discreteness of the former and the flexibility of the latter. Subsequently, Gothic ontology does not differentiate between beauty and workings, conflating both in a realm of sympathy, a concept of interiority based on readings which connect the work of Ruskin to that of Worringer, Lipps and Whitehead.
Space Always Comes After: It Is Good When It Comes After; It Is Good Only When It Comes After
Authors: Radman Andrej
Published: May 2018

The chapter suggests that the dominant architectural history is too logocentric and not speculative enough. As such, its only merit is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession of neat logically necessary types. The case will be made for the role of topology as the antidote to the pernicious typological essentialism. Architecture needs to be free from the ideas of epoch and destiny. Following Brian Massumi’s lead, the speculative aspect relates to the contingently obligatory becoming, an event: “intrepidly future-facing, far-rangingly foretracing.” While it would appear logical that space should precede affordance, in fact the inverse holds true. The degree zero of spatial experience occurs at the level of the unconscious and is proto-subjective and sub-representational. As Hayles put it, consciousness is overrated. In terms of architectural thinking everything begins from the sensible. However, the task of speculative thinking is to go beyond the sensible to the potentials that make sensibility possible. After all, the basic medium of the discipline of architecture, as we see it, is the ‘space of experience’. This spatium, which is not to be confused with the ‘experience of space’, does not pre-exist but subsists as a virtuality. According to Deleuze, the plane of composition - as a work of sensation - is aesthetic: "it is the material that passes into the sensation." Once aesthetics is drawn into the context of production its realm expands to become a dimension of being itself. Both subjects and objects come to be seen as derivative. Consequently, the mereological relationship - which is perfectly suitable for the realm of the extensive - needs to be radically revamped in order to become capable of capturing topological transformations. But what we are advocating is not a formalisable model. Quite the contrary, any technological determinism needs to be kept at bay. What is needed instead is heuristics as a practice of material inference. However disadvantageous this may seem to the architect, it will prove not to be so once we fully grasp the Affective Turn and its implications for the discipline. It might become apparent that it is through habit, rather than attention, and collectivity, rather than individualism, that we find the (royal) road to the understanding of ‘space’, or better still, that we take a (minor) apprenticeship in spatialisation.
The Potentiality of Art, the Force of Images and Aesthetic Intensities
Authors: Prévost Bertrand
Published: May 2018

We are no doubt still far from having done with the humanist aesthetic regime, which has lead us to install the image in the element of natural light. As Alberti wrote in his De pictura of 1435, ‘The painter is only interested in that which is capable of being seen in light’. Such a regime of evidence prevents capturing the problematic nature of the image on a fundamental level. It still inhabits us nowadays, in our deepest, both spontaneous and erudite aesthetic reflexes. Notably it is in this regime that the discipline of the history of art develops, perpetuating thus the anti-philosophy practiced by re-born humanism, precisely in the name of the evidence of painting. Re-introducing a problematic dimension is not conceived here epistemologically (making a problem for a subject of consciousness, spectator, historian, art-theoretician…), but rather ontologically, that is to say, in itself. In other words, how to think a problematic sensibility? This presupposes giving up the clarity of the image, even if it is not certain that invoking an ‘obscure clarity’ would suffice for thinking a light-problem. More adequately, intensity seems to be situated before the light, as it modalizes the manners of appearing. The decisive problem is how not to dissolve intensity into qualitative evidences (the aspects, the colours) and extensive evidences (visible forms), while still recognizing that intensity cannot be given without them. These problematic and intensive conditions may rather enable a thought which would no longer be the prerogative-privilege of concepts, and furthermore may enable the rising of plastic ideas.
Introduction: Continental Realism – Picking Up the Pieces
Authors: Dukić Vladimir , Morin Marie-Eve
Published: May 2018

This introductory chapter provides a historical overview of the emergence of new realist movements in contemporary continental philosophy, focusing in particular on speculative realism and materialism, object-oriented ontology, and transcendental nihilism. Provided also is a conceptual introduction to recent realist critiques of the correlationism of post-Kantian philosophy as well as its supposed fideism, anthropocentrism, and anti-scientific bias. This introduction also contains an overview of the volume and the included chapters.
Before Infinitude: A Levinasian Response to Meillassoux’s Speculative Realism
Authors: Braver Lee
Published: May 2018

This chapter argues that like Meillassoux, Levinas opposes correlationism—a term encompassing both idealism and anti-realism in philosophy. However, Levinas’s attempt to overcome correlationism differs markedly from that of Meillassoux. Whereas Meillassoux argues that mathematizable, scientific discourse can determine facts about reality independent of human thought or awareness, Levinas appeals to an ethical experience of the other that remains correlated with awareness but transcend human rationality. Their attempts to overcome correlationism are thus reverse images of each other: whereas Meillassoux uses reason to transcend experience, Levinas appeals to experience to transcend reason. Taken together, these disparate approaches point to a more nuanced understanding of correlationism and its possible overcoming.
Creativity as Ultimate Principle
Authors: Debaise Didier
Published: May 2018

Whitehead writes that ‘[i]n all philosophic theory there is an ultimate’ It would be difficult to find a case study in Process and Reality, a description of the functioning of a philosophy’s ultimate principle. The only example that can be found is a succession of terms: ‘In monistic philosophies, Spinoza’s or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed “The Absolute”’. Whitehead says no more of it. But how does this ultimate work? Why has he been able to identify it with the ‘absolute’ or with ‘God’? These questions remain unanswered. It is possible, however, to reconstruct a discourse of the absolute by taking a detour to connect a few separate elements.
What is a Process of Individuation?
Authors: Debaise Didier
Published: May 2018

This chapter poses the question of “reality”. In opposition to a substantialist vision that has notably characterized modernity, Whitehead develops a processual conception of the real which is made of becomings and individuations. This vision of the real is envisaged starting from three distinct questions: First of all, how to exactly define a process of individuation? This question is treated in its historical aspects (Aristotle and Leibniz) and with respect to contemporary philosophy (Simondon and Deleuze). Secondly, where do the forms, the puissances, the virtualities derive from which accompany any individuation? Starting from this question it is most notably the relation with Platonism and its heritage that is elaborated. And third, which vision of time is implied in a theory of individuation? Even though close to Bergson, Whitehead’s philosophy profoundly differs from it with respect to the status of time and builds up new links with contemporary science.
A Universe of Societies
Authors: Debaise Didier
Published: May 2018

Which kind of relation exists between a stone, a cloud, a dog, and a human? Is nature made of distinct domains and layers or does it form a vast unity from which all beings emerge? Refusing at once a reductionist, physicalist approach as well as a vitalistic one, Whitehead affirms that « everything is a society » This chapter consequently questions the status of different domains which together compose nature by employing the concept of society. The first part traces the history of this notion notably with reference to the two thinkers fundamental to Whitehead: Leibniz and Locke; the second part defines the temporal and spatial relations of societies; and the third explores the differences between physical, biological, and psychical forms of existence as well as their respective ways of relating to environments. The chapter thus tackles the status of nature and its domains.
Nature and Societies
Authors: Debaise Didier
Published: May 2018

What is nature? So far, it has not been necessary to step outside of Process and Reality’s speculative project. Nature is fully deployed within the theory of existence and, in the theory of societies, it takes on the form of a singular type of empiricism. Doesn’t this new question of nature, of what composes it, of its relations to existences, require, for the first time, stepping outside of speculative philosophy? Doesn’t the question ‘what is nature?’ necessarily fall within a philosophy of nature of the kind that interests Whitehead in his earlier works and to which he returns in Modesof Thought? Several commentators on Process and Reality have embarked on this path by transporting, with differing degrees of obliqueness, the theory of actual entities on to a different plane from that of speculative philosophy. This approach, however, risks diminishing the final character of actual entities, reducing the importance and restricting the field of application of the ontological principle itself. Remember: there is nothing beyond actual entities; ‘the rest is silence’. Neither a superior form of existence nor a nature qua principle of movement, becoming or creation can ever explain actual entities. The terms usually employed to characterise nature, however, tend to presuppose an ontological precedence of nature over the existences that compose it.
Guy Debord
Authors: Mesing Dave
Published: May 2018

Posing the question of the Debord–Agamben relation immediately presents us with a series of problems, particular to Debord as well as Agamben. In terms of Debord, we must decide how to position ourselves towards his work in order to understand its place on Agamben’s philosophical path. Such a decision has to be taken in several senses. As Agamben himself reports in a lecture on Debord’s films, ‘Once, when I was tempted (as I still am) to consider Guy Debord a philosopher,he told me: I’m not a philosopher, I’m a strategist.’1 Bracketing the Holzweg of the disciplinary specificity of philosophy, what this quote opens up is the occasional rather than systematic character of Debord’s interventions, insofar as the stakes for Debord, and with them the marshalling of his own philosophical lineage, are bound up with a certain political and aesthetic practice and not the production of thoughts that will stand the test of time.
Martin Heidegger
Authors: Abbott Mathew
Published: May 2018

It would be hard to overstate the importance of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy for Giorgio Agamben’s thinking. It is not simply that the Italian philosopher turns at various points in his work to texts and
themes from early and later Heidegger, as important as this obviously is. As well as abiding interests in problems of ontology, finitude, facticity and authenticity, Agamben inherits from Heidegger a philosophical programme. That programme is the critique of Western metaphysics: the tradition founded on the neglect, forgetting and oblivion of being, and which – for Agamben as for Heidegger – has reached a point of crisis in modernity after a long historical genesis. Understanding Agamben’s debt to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics is important for grasping the basic problematic of the Homo Sacer project, for comprehending its grounds and ultimate stakes, and for getting a clearer sense of the positive political philosophy to which he gestures at crucial moments in the series.
Carl Schmitt
Authors: Prozorov Sergei
Published: May 2018

The work of Carl Schmitt has been a key influence on Agamben’s work, particularly his more political writings. Especially in the Anglo-American context, the discovery of Agamben’s work after the publication of the first volume of Homo Sacer coincided with a major revival of interest in Schmitt, both of which were partly motivated by the exceptionalist tendencies in US domestic and foreign policy in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. At least in the first wave of reception of Agamben’s writings,1 his reinterpretation of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty in the Foucauldian biopolitical key was the best-known and most controversial aspect of his work. And yet Schmitt has been a strange kind of influence. His work hardly influenced Agamben philosophically, as Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s did on the level of ontology or method. Agamben did not try to ‘correct or complete’ Schmitt the way he did with Foucault’s work on biopolitics and government. Finally, Agamben did not really debate with or criticise Schmitt’s theories the way he did with Derrida. While Schmitt’s political thought was certainly employed in a variety of ways after Homo Sacer, Schmitt was not really engaged with as a philosophical interlocutor.
Gilles Deleuze
Authors: Colebrook Claire
Published: May 2018

Perhaps the best way to approach the relationship between Deleuze and Agamben is to adopt a method from Deleuze and Guattari’s late philosophy: the conceptual persona.1 Here philosophical proper names do not stand for biographies or persons but for orientations or maps of thinking. Descartes, for example, enables a whole tradition of Cartesian dualism, even for those who neither read nor reference his work. There are some occasions when Agamben’s history of thought also considers proper names less as labels for specific historical individuals, and more as markers of a certain style or distribution of thinking. His recent The Use of Bodies, for example, sees Spinoza as a way of coming to terms with the relation between essence and existence (between what a being is, and that a being is) (UB 160). The names Agamben draws upon are not so much focused upon for their singular greatness, but because they provide a way for thinking about what Agamben sees as the ongoing problem of the singular existence of an individuated being, and then the way that being is identified in language. One might also think of this as the difference between the simple event that something is, and then the identifiable what of the thing. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari treat proper names as conceptual personae, suggesting – as Agamben does – that philosophical problems (and the names that attach to them) are not academic exercises of a specific discipline, but have to do with the very possibility of thinking (in domains well beyond philosophy).