Philosophy Archives - Page 6 of 23

Philosophy, Coloniality and the Politics of Remembrance

Analytic or Continental Philosophy?

February 27, 2020 • by Chiara Bottici

Prima facie, it would seem that so-called “continental philosophy,” that is, the practice of doing philosophy by engaging in a conversation with authors of the past in the humanities style, is much better situated to convey an accurate image of the past than so-called analytic philosophy, which focuses instead on ...

Philosophy, Coloniality and the Politics of Remembrance

Imaginal Politics

Philosophy, the Greeks, and U.S. Settler-colonialism

The Myth of an American Arcadia

February 26, 2020 • by Chiara Bottici

As I read more commentaries about the symbolic impact of such a choice for neo-classical architecture and the way in which it has been embraced by white supremacists to purports a view of the US past as “white only,” I am reminded of a striking fact that impressed me ever since I ...

Philosophy

Black Socrates (1995)

February 25, 2020 • by Simon Critchley

It was a moment in my life when music and politics and philosophy converged in a kind of contrapuntal harmony. The black modernism of funk, soul, and reggae, went hand in hand with an anti-essentialist, anti-metaphysical idea of socialist strategy that was particularly indebted to the work of figures like Ernesto Laclau. My friends ...

Psyche

Trauma and Race

A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

January 16, 2020 • by Sheldon George

On November 23, 2012, a seventeen-year-old African American boy named Jordan Davis was shot and killed at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. During a verbal exchange with Davis over loud music being played by Davis and three friends, the shooter, a forty-seven-year-old white male named Michael Dunn, pulled out ...

North America

Impeachment and Rousseau’s General Will

Insight from the Past on the Politics of the Present

January 15, 2020 • by David Lay Williams

The article encapsulates many of the debates leading up to the president’s impeachment -- that it is grossly inappropriate for presidents (but presumably any government officials) to prioritize their own personal or private interests above the national interest. In impeaching Trump on this count the House emphasizes that while a ...

Imaginal Politics

Anarchafeminism

Towards an ontology of the transindividual

December 2, 2019 • by Chiara Bottici

Yet, strikingly enough, in all the literature engaging with intersectionality, there is barely any mention of the feminist tradition of the past that has been claiming exactly the same point for a very long time: anarchist feminism, or as I prefer to call it “anarchAfeminism.” The latter term has been ...

Sex & Gender

The Sun is the Size of a Human Foot

An Interview with Andrea Long Chu

October 29, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

But I think the more proper question is: “Whose foot?” It’s not about the foot not “actually” being the size of the sun. It's the fact that there's necessarily a subjective relation that changes from person to person. So I think the place where truth becomes important is not actually ...

Feature

Trump Is America’s Father, and Dad is Sick

America’s Toxic Parent

September 30, 2019 • by Susanna Lee

The parent-child analogy does not presume that the state leader acts as parent, but that the state itself does. There has always been some overlap between state and individual when it comes to acting as parent to the people. Many heads of state are described in fatherly terms. It is ...

Feature

The Political and Intellectual Entanglements of Post-Truth

A review of Steve Fuller’s Post-Truth: Knowledge as Power Game

September 18, 2019 • by Pietro Daniel Omodeo

Three years after the Oxford English Dictionary made the term "post-truth" the word of the year, we still live in a time in which, according to the definition, “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” As both Nicholas Baer and Maggie ...

Feature

The Demons of Neoliberalism

Adam Kotsko’s Political Theology

September 11, 2019 • by Luke Mergner

This critique was left tantalizingly underdeveloped in The Prince of this World. How could more freedom make us less free? Neoliberalism's Demons answers this question by reading neoliberalism through the lens of political theology. The result is not a new history of neoliberalism but a refocusing on how such an economic system makes ...

Feature

Commitment to the Bit

On Andrea Long Chu

September 3, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

The way to have the most fun with the writings of Andrea Long Chu is to read them as satire. Most of her texts work by taking some familiar habits of thought and pressing them to extremes, to the point where they disintegrate. Their virtue, as texts, is what Chu ...

Art & Design

Silenus’ Cup, Drained by AI

A Review of The Dead Walk into a Bar

August 30, 2019 • by Kanad Chakrabarti

Set within an ‘orbital facility’ in an un-specified future, the film opens inside a cavernous hall. The scene carries a strange echo for visitors to Steyerl’s show: a musty provincial gallery, sepulchrally lit, clad in dark wood -- that is, much like the Armory, where the entire work was filmed. ...