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32Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal LifeColumbia University Press. 2013.The margins of philosophy are populated by non-human, non-animal living beings, including plants. While contemporary philosophers tend to refrain from raising ontological and ethical concerns with vegetal life, Michael Marder puts this life at the forefront of the current deconstruction of metaphysics. He identifies the existential features of plant behavior and the vegetal heritage of human thought so as to affirm the potential of vegetation to resist the logic of totalization and to exceed the…Read more
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17IntroductionTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2012 (161): 3-7. 2012.ExcerptThis issue of Telos explores the contours of politics after metaphysics as the horizon for an appropriate response to today's unabating politico-economic crisis. Profound challenges to core institutions of modernity—free-market economy, political liberalism, and parliamentary democracy—have emerged: the expansion of the state into civil society, the subordination of rights to security, and the growth of executive authority. Critical Theory developed, historically, in response to what Max …Read more
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18The Sense of Seeds, or Seminal EventsEnvironmental Philosophy 12 (1): 87-97. 2015.In this text, I suggest that we approach the theme of “the event” through vegetal processes, concepts, and metaphors. Mediated through plant life, the event unfolds along three axes: 1) that of excrescence, or the out-growth, which is how plants appear in the world; 2) that of expectation, or the out-look, waiting for germination and ultimately for fruition; and 3) that of the exception, or the out-take, which extracts the seed from the closed circuit of potentiality and actuality, committing it…Read more
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19Given the Right—of Giving (in Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (1): 93-108. 2007.This essay approaches the Hegelian problem of giving and givenness through the marginal figures of the animal, the child, and “superstitious humanity,”representing, in one way or another, the unperturbed relationship with immediacy. I argue that, for Hegel, the process of subjectivization supersedes these figures by learning to reject the immediately given and to accept only what is self-given. Yet, interspersed throughout this process are various imbalances and asymmetries, whereby the subject …Read more
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116The Life of Plants and the Limits of EmpathyDialogue 51 (2): 259-273. 2012.ABSTRACT: This article examines the possibility of an ethical treatment of plants grounded in empathy. Upon considering whether an empathetic approach to vegetal life is compatible with the crucial features of plant ontology, it is concluded that the feeling of empathy with plants disregards their mode of being and projects the constructs and expectations of the human empathizer onto the object of empathy. Vegetal life, thus, reveals the limits of empathy, as well as its anthropocentric and pote…Read more
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18Across the Tradition of PhilosophyEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (1): 137-157. 2004.In this article I begin to explore Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Jacques Derrida’s philosophies of history in terms of the persistence of forgetting within memory. In section I, I shall outline the totalizing production of history understood as an unsuccessful attempt to erase the indifference of animality and the difference of madness. The following two sections are concerned with the particular kinds of non-subjective memories—memorials—that arise in the aftermath of this erasure and include writi…Read more
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11Phenomena-Critique-Logos: The Project of Critical PhenomenologyRowman & Littlefield International. 2014.A highly original reading of the history of phenomenology that offers a new systematic concept of critique
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6Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thought (edited book)Continuum. 2011.Radical political thought of the 20th century was dominated by utopia, but the failure of communism in Eastern Europe and its disavowal in China has brought on the need for a new model of utopian thought. This book thus seeks to redefine the concept of utopia and bring it to bear on today's politics. The original essays, contributed by key thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo and Jean-Luc Nancy, highlight the connection between utopian theory and practice. The book reassesses the legacy of utopia and…Read more
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171History, Memory, and Forgetting in Nietzsche and DerridaEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (1): 137-157. 2004.In this article I begin to explore Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Jacques Derrida’s philosophies of history in terms of the persistence of forgetting within (non-subjective) memory. In section I, I shall outline the totalizing production of history understood as an unsuccessful attempt to erase the indifference of animality and the difference of madness. The following two sections are concerned with the particular kinds of non-subjective memories—memorials—that arise in the aftermath of this erasure …Read more
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32Complexio OppsitorumProceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 50 451-458. 2008.Carl Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923) features a term, the importance of which political philosophy is yet to fathom. This notion is complexio oppositorum, describing Catholicism as “a complex of opposites”. Upon theorizing the complex as a non-dialectical, non-synthetical unity, I will graft its structure onto the concept of culture and its recent political incarnation, multiculturalism. I will argue that in order to remain a viable political concept, multiculturalism has t…Read more
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18IntroductionTélos 2009 (147): 3-13. 2009.Do we face a new rule of lawlessness? On the high seas, in matters of international law and human rights, and even in domestic prosecutorial practices, any grounds to place one's trust in the lawfulness of order seem increasingly elusive. The New World Order appears to be no order at all; the century of secular universalisms leaves us in the state of a general and all-encompassing nihilism. Still, rather than signaling a dead end rife with global despair, the collapse of everything that went und…Read more
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19Political Hermeneutics, or Why Schmitt Is Not the Enemy of GadamerIn Jeff Malpas & Santiago Zabala (eds.), Consequences of hermeneutics: fifty years after Gadamer's Truth and method, Northwestern University Press. pp. 306. 2010.
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24La política del fuego: El desplazamiento contemporáneo del paradigma geopolíticoIsegoría 49 599-613. 2013.Este artículo teoriza la transición del régimen global geopolítico (es decir, la política de la tierra) a régimen piropolítico, o la política del fuego. En base a filosofía política de Carl Schmitt, la tesis es que la certidumbre, estabilidad y orden arraigados en la tierra están desplazados por la anomia del fuego, como un símbolo y dominio concreto de lo político hoy
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124Vegetal anti-metaphysics: Learning from plantsContinental Philosophy Review 44 (4): 469-489. 2011.By denying to vegetal life the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality, traditional philosophy not only marginalizes plants but, inadvertently, confers on them a crucial role in the current transvaluation of metaphysical value systems. From the position of absolute exteriority and heteronomy, vegetation accomplishes a living reversal of metaphysical values and points toward the collapse of hierarchical dualisms
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1Given the Right—of GivingEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (1): 93-108. 2007.This essay approaches the Hegelian problem of giving and givenness through the marginal figures of the animal, the child, and “superstitious humanity,”representing, in one way or another, the unperturbed relationship with immediacy. I argue that, for Hegel, the process of subjectivization supersedes these figures by learning to reject the immediately given and to accept only what is self-given. Yet, interspersed throughout this process are various imbalances and asymmetries, whereby the subject …Read more
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7To Open a Site (with Heidegger)Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (1): 197-217. 2016.Drawing on the texts of Martin Heidegger, at times interpreted against the grain, I tackle the relation between ecology and economy in our era of rampant economism. I begin by outlining the ecological and economic variations on ethics and politics, with the view to the logos and nomos of dwelling (oikos). Thereafter, I consider the rise of a worldless, homeless world from the undue emphasis placed on nomos, which is but the active (actively gathering) dimension of logos. This lopsidedness, I arg…Read more
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12Emmanuel Levinas and the Limits to Ethics: A Critique and a Re-Appropriation by Aryeh Botwinick (review)Review of Metaphysics 68 (3): 642-644. 2015.
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Beyond History in History: Historiographic Threads in Foucault and LévinasClio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 34 (4): 419-442. 2005.
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2Pyropolitics: When the World is AblazeRowman & Littlefield International. 2014.A highly original theory of the political, the book explores the literal and metaphorical flare-ups in political theology, revolutionary thought, radical protests, and global energy production
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63Plant-Soul: The Elusive Meanings of Vegetative LifeEnvironmental Philosophy 8 (1): 83-99. 2011.In this paper, I propose an ontological-hermeneutical approach to the question of vegetative life. I argue that, though it is a product of the metaphysical traditionthat from Aristotle to Nietzsche ascribes to the life of plants but a single function, the notion of plant-soul is useful for the formulation of a post-metaphysicalphilosophy of vegetation. Offered as a prolegomenon to such thinking about plants, this paper focuses on the multiplicity of meanings, the obscurity, and thepotentialities…Read more
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278On the Mountains, or The Aristocracies of SpaceEnvironment, Space, Place 4 (2): 63-74. 2012.Mountain peaks, like all uninhabitable and barely accessible environments, stand in the way of a clear-cut distinction between “place” and “space.” Building on the environmental thought of Aldo Leopold, as well as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth-century phenomenology, I draw attention to this obscure in-between region and argue that the conceptual distinction must be subject to careful adumbration, depending on the concrete place where it is employed. Subsequently, mountains …Read more
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16The Phenomenology of Ontico-Ontological DifferenceBulletin d'Analyse Phénoménologique (2): 1-20. 2012.Le présent article interprète la lecture heideggerienne de la phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel comme une critique voilée de la phénoménologie de la conscience de Husserl. Je défends l'idée qu'en dernier ressort, Heidegger affirme l'insuffisance des deux phénoménologies, exclusivement préoccupées par l'être ou les étants, et montre la voie pour une troisième phénoménologie, celle de la différence ontico-ontologique
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21From the Concept of the Political to the Event of PoliticsTélos 2009 (147): 55-76. 2009.“From the concept of the political to the event of politics”: as always, the title is a promise and a contract. In keeping with this titular undertaking, which outlines a certain itinerary or trajectory, the reader might expect to be guided from the abstract sterility of the concept to the concrete level of political events as they unfold in history, from a higher to a lower level of analysis, from the general to the singular, from the speculative (in the Hegelian sense) to the positively demons…Read more
Areas of Interest
20th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |