726 research outputs found
Sort by
Cunning Embodied: On Capability in Geo Maher’s Anticolonial Eruptions
Full text linkCritical remarks on Geo Maher\u27s Anticolonial Eruption
After the Eruption: A Reply to My Interlocutors
Full text linkGood interlocutors are a blessing, and needless to say, I’m feeling very blessed today. This is especially true for a project in which vision figures so centrally, since we often see most clearly through the parallax of another’s eyes. Contributors to this conversation have cast distinct lines of sight onto Anticolonial Eruptions that have allowed me to see both otherwise and better, to recognize which elements of my original argument remain incomplete or unclear, to glimpse what was overlooked or taken for granted, and to realize other moments where I might have been wrong entirely. They have revealed how my book, despite diagnosing colonial hubris, might reproduce blindspots that are more or less hubristic in their own right. This apparent irony is anything but. Any book, especially one this short, slices into and across history and theory ways that are inescapably partial, leaving a generative remainder to be dealt with. But more than this, I find nothing but encouragement in how my comrade-readers have taken up the lenses provided—the colonial blindspot, the second sight of the colonized, and the decolonial ambush—to excavate and cultivate a radical second sight from the depths of the colonial blindspot. Whether diagnosing the paradoxical unseeing of ocular-centrism, my own blindness toward the revolutionary nature of care as community resistance, or the ways that tropes of inevitability might refract my political judgment, each of the critiques printed above offers, in Kevin Bruyneel’s words, “more ammo for the canon/cannon” (88)
On Geo Maher\u27s Anticolonial Eruptions
Full text linkGeo Maher’s Anticolonial Eruptions is a force to be reckoned with. As a reading experience, it’s a bloody delight, even as – and maybe because – Maher guides us down in to the depths of the volcanoes stoking the explosive fires of rebellion. We also get to follow the moles below and high above ground as they wait for their moment to emerge, shock, and rebel. These moles are blind in one sense, while in another sense they can tell time, or more accurately they create time in the form of political time; marking the potential beginning of a new era. This political time is created in the moment of the emergence of these moles from the shadows in order to ambush and take advantage of the “hubris” of colonizers who are comfortable in their own blindness, in not-seeing what they cannot grapple with, that which is right before their eyes; colonization and all it has wrought upon the colonized. A new political moment is then birthed, time starts anew, and this is a result of the colonizer’s limitations in grasping the depths and heights of their oppression of the colonized
The More-Than-Human Other of Levinas’s Totality & Infinity
Full text linkEmmanuel Levinas’s writings militate against an ontological way of thinking that he claims dominates the history of European philosophy. In their drive towards truth and knowledge, Levinas argues that thinkers like Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger efface the alterity of the Other, the Other’s “otherness,” by appropriating alterity as a moment of self-consciousness or Being. This ontological thinking, Levinas argues, attempts to violently reduce the unthematizable excess of the Other by systematically assimilating the Other in the concepts of totalizing thought. Levinas articulates his opposition to this tradition at length in Totality & Infinity by insisting upon an irreducible heteronomy: an Other who remains radically outside of any relationship that I might have with them
Erupting Out of the “Zone of Non-Being”: The Cunning of Solidarity
Full text linkCritical remarks on Geo Maher\u27s Anticolonial Eruptions (2022
One Badiou? Parodies of Philosophy
Full text linkAlain Badiou’s Seminar: The One – Descartes, Plato, Kant (1983-1984) inaugurates "The Seminar," the collection of transcribed and edited seminars that Badiou chose for publication from the sessions he held over his career. To its place opening "The Seminar" other, perhaps more important functions should be added, however. The Seminar: The One serves, with the companion seminar on the Infinite (1984-1985), as a bridge between Badiou’s Theory of the Subject (1982) and the work for which he is best known, Being and Event (L\u27Être et l\u27Événement, 1988; English translation, 2005).1 (His play Incident at Antioch, whose first drafts are written during the years that Badiou holds the seminars on The One and The Infinite, builds another, rather different, bridge.) At once quite technical and rather chatty, The One – Descartes, Plato, Kant offers a genealogy for two decisive steps in Badiou’s thought: his description and his axiomatization of the operation “counts-as-one.” It also – rather against the grain of these two steps; inchoately, controversially – offers a tentative engagement with the dangerous mode of parody
Between Hospitality and Hostility: A Derridean Reflection on “the Refugee”
Full text linkEvery philosopher who is concerned with practical rationality and the public import of philosophy assumes a politico-philosophical responsibility for his or her words, thoughts, and deeds. More often than not, this is a function of his or her place and time in history as well as the press of current events that claim the philosopher’s solicitude so as to intervene at least with the force of thought and words, if not with deeds. Yet, as philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Albert Camus have argued, thinking is itself always the essential action that is needed in times of momentous decision, despite the seeming absurdity of events
Visions of Resistance: Violent Eruptions, Care, and the Everyday
Full text linkCritical remarks on Geo Maher\u27s Anticolonial Eruption
Book Review: Martin Ritter, Into the World: The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019)
Full text linkA review of Martin Ritter, Into the World: The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019)
The Life-Idealism of Michel Henry
Full text linkThe purpose of the present essay is to exposit and interpret the principal contours of the phenomenology of Christianity proposed by Michel Henry in dialog with his theological critics. Against the claims commonly made about him, Henry is not a Gnostic of any sort: neither a monist, nor a dualist, nor a pantheist, nor a denier of faith, nor a world- or creation-denier or anything of the sort. He rather proposes a form of “life-idealism” according to which (i) life is the foundation of the possibility of the world, (ii) life assumes a visible, external representation (viz., the empirical body) in its activities in the world, and (iii) the meaning of the world is that it is the arena in which life pursues the goal of its own perfection and growth. Interpreted in this light, his thought is not Gnostic