Filozofski vestnik

Un courage sans héroïsme

Antonia Birnbaum — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The comprehension of the tragic in Hegel and Lacan states Antigone’s unconditional desire as heroic. Against this tendency, another hypothesis is explored: The heroic, be it ironic or a sublime brilliance of the sublime, bars the access to the unconditional by attaching it to a transcendence, rather than inquiring into its address. To play down heroism means to reinterpret the capacity of solitude which characterizes heroic courage. What courage then reveals is an ignorance regarding the law of totality, regarding the world that is to be lived in, through a risk taken by a single one. The direct reference to a “conflict of worlds” throws new light on the approaches of Hegel and Lacan.

Une petite pensée : « l’appensée »

Christian Fierens — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Psychoanalytic practice requires articulating three dimensions (imaginary, symbolic, real) in the Borromean Knot. The Freudian symptom articulates these three dimensions with a fourth one, psychic reality. Articulation of the three dimensions in the personality presupposes their fusion or confusion in the trefoil knot. The concatenation of the symbolic dimension with the real one would lead to the loss of the imaginary dimension if the knot of the ego did not retain it within the structure. All these movements support the thinking of psychoanalytical practice: the “appensée.”

Towards an Affective Understanding of Pure Judgments of Taste

Dries Josten, Levi Haeck — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

In this article, we argue that “affect” should be an important notion in political philosophy. We do this, firstly, by tracing the notion of affect through the philosophical system of Immanuel Kant. We find that affect plays a threefold role for Kant, which can be mapped onto Hannah Arendt’s distinction between natural humanity, moral humanity, and political/aesthetic humanity (our rephrasing). Affect clearly plays a role on the level of natural humanity, and it is arguably to be pinpointed from within moral humanity. With regard to political/aesthetic humanity, we argue that in order to understand how pure judgments of taste can vouch for the ‘bridging’ of the gap between natural and moral humanity, an understanding of the role of aesthetic affection is essential. Secondly, we broaden the Kantian scope of affect by discussing how Žižek, in Lacan’s wake, has tried (but failed) to systematically examine the political relevance of pure judgments of taste. To understand how humans are able to come together politically, we need a better understanding of affect as that which allows pure form to effectuate a subjectively but universally shareable proclivity for (dis)pleasure and desire.

Absense, or the Extimate Place of Art

Alexi Kukuljevic — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

In order to think Art in its difference from the arts, I argue, requires that we take seriously its lack of sense. This lack is symptomatic of a historical rupture with the sense of art as technē (know-how), a sense that remains at play when one speaks of the arts. However, if art is not an art, then what is it? In this essay, I argue that art is a thing that makes sense absent. To specify art’s absent sense, its absense, requires both a historical analysis of art’s rupture with technē and the mastery it implies, and an ontological determination of the manner in which it makes of this loss a thing that serves to dumbfound. Art is thus inseparable from stupidity. Through an engagement with the work of Aristotle and Heidegger, Bataille and Balzac, Baudelaire, and Lacan, I suggest that art marks the extimate place of absense.

Interval and Event

Marcus Quent — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Are we living in an “in-between time”? If so, what does it mean to be the “contemporary” of such a time? Starting from its consistent recurrence over different times, this article investigates the temporal-philosophical operation related to the designation of “in-between times.” It examines the function this operation assumes in thinking about time, i.e. the specific construction of time it establishes. By focusing on the functioning of intervalle in Alain Badiou and entre-temps in Gilles Deleuze, two contradictory relations to the present conveyed in the concept of “in-between time” are discussed. The article demonstrates that for both philosophers, in-betweenness occupies a key position in their philosophical construction of time—yet, in reverse form in each case. The discussion of this contrasting mode then leads to the final question of whether there is such a thing as a fundamental in-between character that manifests itself through all times, belonging to time as such.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Alexandra Van Laeken — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Badiou’s philosophy deals with the question of radical change, most prominently in relation to love and emancipatory politics. Yet, he notes that love and politics are not interwoven and must be dealt with separately. In recent literature, Lacan’s theory of sexuation and love has been extensively drawn upon and put into relation with politics (notably by Žižek and Zupančič). It is striking that Badiou, being both a highly political thinker and strongly influenced by Lacan, only discusses sexuation in relation to love, but disconnects the concept from politics. In this paper, I probe Badiou’s concept of love in light of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. I first examine Badiou’s concepts of love and politics in relation to sexuation, then set this against Lacan’s formulas, to eventually illustrate the political relevance of love.

Rough Cuts

Cindy Zeiher — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Vladimir Jankélévitch allows us to rethink the relation between negation and refusal as a rift where one is confronted by the repetition of givenness and where refusal upends negation by turning the object being refused into an ineffable question. Here we turn to Freud as a reader of Jankélévitch’s refusal of German culture in order to consider his procedure of radical exclusion as a matter of idealistic temperament marking a transition from knowledge as “knowing how things are” to a different proposition which cultivates knowing “how things should be.”

Notes on Wealth as a Real Abstraction and the Critique of Suffering

Werner Bonefeld — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The object of a critical theory of society is Man [Menschen] in her historically specific forms of life. The article argues against ontological conceptions of social labour and of economy. Instead it insists that historical materialism far from being a materialism of nature and history, is fundamentally a critique of the objectivity of the capitalist economic categories. For a critical theory of society, the economic concept, capital as a process of the valorisation of value, is not a natural thing but a social relationship between persons that is mediated through things. The fetishism of commodities is real. In the mediated world the social individuals appear as personifications of the economic object; and yet there would be nothing without their social practices—of self-preservation. Human suffering is objectively mediated. The article concludes that suffering is the non-conceptual content of the concept of society as a process of valorisation. The sheer unrest of life is the social constituent of the economic object.

Badiou/Lacan-Badiou

Lorenzo Chiesa — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200

For Badiou, Lacan is not a philosopher. He is instead a sui generis anti-philosopher. Anti-philosophy is, in a complex manner but eventually by definition, against philosophy. I intend to dispute this reading of Lacan while also profoundly sympathising with Badiou’s understanding of philosophy and acknowledging his extensive engagement with Lacan.

Radical Theology and the “Weakening” of Bourgeois Institutions

Michael Grimshaw — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Radical theology offers a different way to interrogate and critique bourgeois capitalist society and its institutions. Almost always institutional in location and focus, radical theology recognizes that the traditional religious underpinnings of liberal bourgeois society and its institutions no longer continue to operate nor offer a workable foundational basis. We could say, contra Habermas, that there is more than “the awareness” of what is missing; rather, what is missing is what is necessarily missing because “the what” of God is dead. The crisis of contemporary institutions is that, founded implicitly or explicitly on bourgeois religion and its God, they now find themselves with an ontological crisis most do not even recognize. Or rather, they recognize there is a crisis of meaning and purpose but are unsure or unwilling or even unable to engage with its foundational causes. Drawing on the weak thought of Gianni Vattimo, radical theology is empoyed as a way of rethinking institutions from within, against both their foundations and their current expressions, articulating a set of “weak possibilities” for ways forward.

Institutions, History, Subjects

Uroš Kranjc — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Recent years have seen an immense upsurge in developing the notion of institution with the aim of updating and reconfiguring its conceptualisation to make it correspond to present times. The stakes are high as the current Western institutional framework struggles to ensure its historical continuation—conceived broadly as political, economic, social, scientific, artistic, and other institutions—as the predominant global dispositive. In the article, we first review the current most significant orientations and disciplines that focus on institutions and proceed with a critical assessment of relevant events. In the second part, we question the subjective process and subjectivation of an institutional framework. If we reject the linguistic, empirical, or hermeneutic approaches, how can we capture the dynamics of change in a framework? What indicates that a subjective process is taking place? We draw on the cases of St. Paul and Giordano Bruno to illuminate the Law’s historical repetition through cumulative cultural growth in re-inscribing the subjectivization of faithful and enduring—i.e. universalist—operations of rupture and dispute leading to a Decision against reigning particularisms of institutional setups.

Is Economic Power an Institution?

Tomaž Mastnak — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The article deals with August Ludwig von Rochauʼs reformulation of Liberal politics after the defeat of the 1848 revolution. In response to the widely perceived crisis of Liberalism, von Rochau developed a realistic view of politics (he is credited with the invention of the concept of Realpolitik) as the basis for a renewed Liberalism. His realism with regard to politics, however, did not extend to a critical view of economic power. Economic power was exempted from political reflection and control.