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Taking off from Hegel's invocation of philosophy as a painting of 'grey on grey', this collection of essays explores the rich scope of possibilities implicated by the colour and concept of grey. Crossing art history, visual studies, philosophy, anthropology and literary studies, contributions attest to the repetitious insistence of grey on grey in rethinking the ontology of artworks and images; concepts of time, technique and medium; and how its immanent logic of self-differing summons forth deadlocks and blind spots, both past and present.
Engaging with the voices of students and educators and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Mayes crafts an account of what voice can and must do in education. The book works with the textures, tremors and murmurs of voice felt over ten years of ethnographic and participatory research in Australian schools - from research encounters with students and puppets, to school governance council meetings, to school reform evaluation processes, to students' political activism. It offers a timely critique of the liberal humanist and late capitalist logics of student voice in educational reform, entwined with an affirmation of other possibilities for transversal pedagogical relations in and beyond institutional sites of education.
The book addresses the question of the extent to which theological discourse has been and is relevant to the origins of the meanings, symbols, and realities of some instituted political practices. This relevance has historically manifested itself in the hybridisation of theological and political concepts, images, gestures, and rituals. Indeed, some divine traces could be seen as embedded in institutionalised political practices. Theopolitical figures, then, are other names for God - in the sense of negative theology - that we find in instituted practices within the political realm. The book considers five theopolitical figures: scripture, prophecy, oath, charisma, and hospitality. In the symbolic meaning of these figures, we discern some central questions for contemporary societies, among them: the unconditional character of justice, the unfeasibility of historical expectation, the stability of the given word, the idea of power as a gift, and openness to the coming other as an ethical-political imperative.
Since the 1780s, Western philosophy has been largely under the spell of Immanuel Kant's transcendental philosophy. In this book, Maurizio Ferraris offers a number of important criticisms of Kant in a book of two parts, written twenty-one years apart. The first part of the book, 'Observation', originally published in 2001, lays the foundations of Ferraris' New Realism, foreshadowing the realist turn that has become characteristic of 21st century philosophy. The second part, 'Speculation', written in 2021, outlines a complete metaphysical theory of realism. What ties both parts of the book together is the notion of hysteresis, the ability of effects to survive even when their causes have ceased to exist.
Contemporary Screen Ethics focuses on the intertwining of the ethical with the socio-political, considering such topics as: care, decolonial feminism, ecology, histories of political violence, intersectionality, neoliberalism, race, and sexual and gendered violence. The collection advocates looking anew at the global complexity and diversity of such ethical issues across various screen media: from Netflix movies to VR, from Chinese romcoms to Brazilian pornochanchadas, from documentaries to drone warfare, from Jordan Peele movies to Google Earth. The analysis exposes the ethical tension between the inclusions and exclusions of global structural inequality (the identities of the haves, the absences of the have nots), alongside the need to understand our collective belonging to the planet demanded by the climate crisis. Informing the analysis, established thinkers like Deleuze, Irigaray, Jameson and Rancière are joined by an array of different voices - Ferreira da Silva, Gill, Lugones, Milroy, Muñoz, Sheshadri-Crooks, Vergès - to unlock contemporary screen ethics.
Offers a powerful and influential interpretation of Spinoza's conatus - the essential striving that defines each of us - as fundamentally strategic.
Spinozism must be understood as a dynamic ontology that necessarily unfolds on practical terrain. Laurent Bove analyses Spinoza's theory of affects as rooted in Habit, generating the constituent power of human beings, commonwealths, nations and multitudes. By interpreting sovereignty as a power that emerges through the active resistance of the always singular body of the multitude, Bove discovers in Spinoza a radically new approach to the State, to citizenship and to history.
François Zourabichvili wrote two major contributions to Spinoza scholarship. While 'Une physique de la pensée' (PUF, 2002) concerns Spinoza's epistemology and metaphysics of ideas, Spinoza's Paradoxical Conservatism focuses on his political philosophy.
Zourabichvili's interpretation of Spinoza's political philosophy is radically unlike the established tradition. In this book he explores Spinoza's philosophical theory of change across three different studies. First, within ethical transition, secondly within the image of the infant in Spinoza's work and third dealing with absolute monarchy which was dominant during Spinoza's time and provided his polemical writings with a concrete target.
The book's challenging and carefully-argued claims will be of serious interest to anyone working in political theory, early modern philosophy or contemporary French thought.
Jaquet offers a detailed analysis of time, duration, and eternity in Spinoza's works, as well as how these themes relate to each other through the entirety of his corpus. With Spinoza, she asks how it is possible for human beings, as finite modes of existence, to share in God's eternity, as well as how human existence relates to the eternity of God, or Nature.
This translation will allow English readers to closely track the concepts of time, duration, and eternity from the early Spinoza through to the last of his works. It will also situate his thought in relation to the scholastic philosophies that preceded him, all with close attention to the Latin throughout.
What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded?
Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: 'You must choose your bearing'.
Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present - an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility.
Moderate Liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment responds to a perennial problem in political theory: how to balance commercial considerations with the public good. It investigates this dilemma through the lenses of Enlightenment thinkers whose liberal theories responded to the hazards of commercial innovation during capitalism's nascent stages. Vassiliou argues that Montesquieu, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson represent a moderate perspective in foundational liberal thought, which emphasizes the critical importance of honour. He compares how their liberal theories uniquely channel human beings' desire for honour to nourish a sense of interpersonal magnanimity within an inward-looking, liberal commercial world. In an age of polarized extremes, we have witnessed restive democracies flirting with populist, illiberal responses for managing the hazards of capitalist innovation. Montesquieu and his Scottish counterparts' foundational liberal theories offer us more viable, middle-ground prescriptions which are sensitive to the emotional constitution of a liberal society.
What is violence - what is an image? How does violence relate to the image, and how do violence and the image implicate and define the victim? These questions underpin the thinking of Bataille, Agamben and Girard - thinkers of the moment in as much as they each aim to explain the basis of society and culture in the context of power and the sacred. To study power and the sacred, the book shows, is to reveal the connection between violence and the image, a connection that shows what it means to be a victim.
Separate chapters are devoted to the study of violence and the image as these appear in the work of Bataille, Agamben and Girard.
The book concludes that no study of violence and the image can avoid engaging with the issue of the injustice of being a victim.
Discussing different aspects of the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, Raymond Ruyer, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and including some contemporary thinkers, such as Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, Bruno Latour, and Donna J. Haraway, Audronė Žukauskaitė argues that all these threads can be seen as precursors to organism-oriented ontology.
Rather than concentrating on individuals and identities, contemporary philosophy is increasingly interested in processes, multiplicities and potential for change, that is, in those features that define living beings. Žukauskaitė argues that the capacity of living beings for self-organisation, creativity and contingency can act as an antidote to biopolitical power and control in the times of the Anthropocene.
Spinoza and Marx would seem to be two very opposed philosophers. Spinoza was interested in contemplating eternal truths of nature while Marx was interested in the history of capital.
Franck Fischbach suggests that by reading the two together we may better understand both history and nature, as well as ourselves, making possible a new understanding of human nature. Rather than see history and nature as opposed, history is nothing but the constant transformation of nature.
Central to this transformation is a new understanding of alienation not as loss of the self in a world of objects, but as loss of objects in a world that disconnects us from nature and social relations, leaving us isolated as a subject. The isolated individual, the kingdom within a kingdom, as Spinoza put it, is not the condition of our liberation but the basis of our subjection.
The Eye of the Cinematograph investigates the ethical and aesthetic implications of the automatic formation of the body's image by the camera. Drawing on Emmanuel Lévinas' thought, Manafi asks what happens when the other makes their body available to the gaze of the camera to be automatically recorded, and this giving of the body is preserved within the image, juxtaposed with other images to allude to a story that might otherwise remain untold.
To locate the ethical at this intersection of the body and the aesthetic, this book articulates an ethical account of a diverse range of film theories to demonstrate alternative encounters with the other that realisms of the body offer. Manafi discusses works by Chantal Akerman, Bruno Dumont, Pedro Costa, Gus Van Sant, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Abbas Kiarostami, Amir Naderi, Jafar Panahi, Carlos Reygadas and Andy Warhol to make a case for the ethics and aesthetics of incompleteness and performative failure.
Can wisdom and power, philosophy and politics be combined to secure justice? Or are there formidable tensions, even antagonism between them? Socrates presented the philosopher king as an aspiration, a remedy for the ills of the world. He also called it a paradox, a challenging and perplexing innovation. Ever since, the philosopher king has been an enduring and fascinating question as well as a political aspiration. Modern Philosopher Kings examines the philosopher king as a paradox and an ambitious modern project. Through a series of diverse studies ranging from the prophet, intellectual, artist, advisor, scientist and 'the people' it examines modern attempts to unite wisdom and power. In doing so it reveals the different ways and the extent to which wisdom can be empowered and power ennobled.
This collection of essays explores how the Shakespearean drama enacts ancient virtues and conceptualises new ones in complex fictional scenarios that test virtues for their continuing value. Contributors approach the virtues as a source of imaginative, affective and intellectual nourishment and consider how Shakespeare's art increases our capacity for new pursuits of the good. Examining Shakespeare's virtuous theatre in tragic, comic and romance modes and from ethical, theatrical and political perspectives, this volume establishes virtue as a framework for a socially, environmentally and spiritually renewed literary criticism. Contributors balance historical depth and philosophical insight with the art of close reading as they contemplate the dynamic field of virtue - embodied, responsive, energetic and dynamic - as it ebbs and flows across time, among multiple wisdom traditions, and in the entangled lives and troubled circumstances of Shakespeare's characters.
Twenty-five essays showcase Malabou's rounded philosophical project: seventeen previously published and eight brand new. In them, Malabou carves a philosophical space between structuralism, deconstruction, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and speculative realism.
Requiring no prior knowledge of the series, Colby Dickinson explains why Agamben's Homer Sacer series is one of the most significant philosophical texts of the past century. He unpacks key concepts including sovereignty, potentiality, form-of-life, the state of exception, inoperativity, glory and the messianic as they appear and reappear.