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37From 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
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8The future and its enemies: In defense of political hopeContemporary Political Theory 13 (3). 2014.
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6Carl Schmitt and the Risk of the PoliticalTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2005 (132): 5-24. 2005.
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86Phenomenology of Distraction, or Attention in the Fissuring of Time and SpaceResearch in Phenomenology 41 (3): 396-419. 2011.The goal of “Phenomenology of Distraction“ is to explore the imbrication of attention and distraction within existential spatiality and temporality. First, I juxtapose the Heideggerian dispersion of concern (which includes, among other things, the attentive comportment) in everyday life, conceived as a way to get distracted from one's impending mortality, to Fernando Pessoa's embracing of the inauthentic, superficial, and restless existence, where attention necessarily reverts into distraction. …Read more
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22Alexandra Cook. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Botany: The Salutary Science (review)Environmental Philosophy 10 (2): 119-122. 2013.
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14No Title available: DialogueDialogue 51 (1): 170-173. 2012.Book Reviews Michael Marder, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie, FirstView Article
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45What Is Living and What Is Dead in Attention?Research in Phenomenology 39 (1): 29-51. 2009.The goal of this article is to outline a triangular nexus between life, death, and attention. Not only does the act of attending animate or enliven consciousness in the passage from inactional and indeterminate potentiality to the actional determination of a noema but it also coincides with intentionality, itself the form of life proper to consciousness. Upon outlining the “enlivening” element in attention and the overlap between attention and psychic life as such, I will discuss its deadening a…Read more
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32Gianni Vattimo, From Z to ATélos 2011 (154): 164-169. 2011.ExcerptIt is only fitting that the readers of Telos should be introduced to the thought of contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo at a certain “end” marked by the last lesson he gave on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Turin on October 14, 2008. Announced here is the coming to a close of a lecture course and of a long and illustrious university career, though not the end of an active theoretical and political engagement. (As far as the latter is concerned, Vattimo w…Read more
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15To 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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48Existential Phenomenology According to Clarice LispectorPhilosophy and Literature 37 (2): 374-388. 2013.Is love when you don’t give a name to things’ identity? The Passion According to G.H., like much of Clarice Lispector’s writing, hovers on the razor-thin and fragile edge between description and the ineffable, between existence and nonexistence, between the world and its disappearance, between losing and finding oneself. It is no wonder, then, that a plethora of contradictions explode from the very first lines of the narrative that passionately wishes to share an obscure experience, of which the…Read more
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14Review of Simon skempton, Alienation After Derrida (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (11). 2010.
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24The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive RealismUniversity of Toronto. 2009.The Event of the Thing is the most complete examination to date of Derrida's understanding of thinghood and its crucial role in psychoanalysis, ethics, literary ...
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32On the Verge of RespectEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (1): 247-265. 2013.In contrast to the legal, metaphysically laden, and epistemological paradigms, the ontological interpretation of respect concerns not only the relation between the “subject” and the “object” (or, better, the provider and the recipient, of this attitude) but also the being of the respected and the respecting. This paper develops an ontology of respect with regard to the human treatment of plants and teases out the meanings of vegetal life that germinate in this relation. What is at stake, I claim…Read more
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32“Higher than Actuality” – The Possibility of Phenomenology in HeideggerIndo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 5 (2): 1-10. 2005.This paper proceeds from a schematic analysis of Heidegger’s notion of ‘possibility’ to consider the methodological significance of Heidegger’s conception of what is essential in phenomenology as inhering not “in its actuality as a philosophical ‘movement’”, but in the understanding of phenomenology “as a possibility”. In conclusion, the paper points to the efficacy of possibility and its mode of fulfilment as radically different from the actualization of latent potentiality.
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14The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual HerbariumCambridge University Press. 2014.Despite their conceptual allergy to vegetal life, philosophers have used germination, growth, blossoming, fruition, reproduction, and decay as illustrations of abstract concepts; mentioned plants in passing as the natural backdrops for dialogues, letters, and other compositions; spun elaborate allegories out of flowers, trees, and even grass; and recommended appropriate medicinal, dietary, and aesthetic approaches to select species of plants. In this book, Michael Marder illuminates the vegetal …Read more
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25Groundless existence: the political ontology of Carl SchmittContinuum. 2010.Groundless existence is a unique examination of the implicit phenomenological and existential foundations of Schmitt's political philosophy.
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18The future and its enemies: In defense of political hopeContemporary Political Theory 13 (3). 2012.
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54Carl Schmitt's “Cosmopolitan Restaurant”: Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio OppositorumTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2008 (142): 29-47. 2008.Disentangling Complexio OppositorumCarl Schmitt's Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923) features a term, the importance of which political philosophy has yet to fathom. This notion is complexio oppositorum, describing Catholicism as “a complex of opposites”: “There appears to be no antithesis it [Roman Catholicism] does not embrace. It has long and proudly claimed to have united within itself all forms of state and government.…But this complexio oppositorum also holds sway over everything …Read more
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31Political Theology: Four New Chapters on Sovereignty Paul W. Kahn New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, 224 pp., $32.50 cloth, $25.00 paper (review)Dialogue 51 (1): 170-173. 2012.Book Reviews Michael Marder, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie, FirstView Article
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37After the Fire: The Politics of AshesTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2012 (161): 163-180. 2012.Two fires are kindled at the threshold of the metaphysical era, and both are extinguished, almost simultaneously, as soon as metaphysics exhausts itself in its final Nietzschean inversion. The political reality of the twenty-first century is, as a whole, a comet tail of these ancient blazes that, until recently, seemed to be older than time itself, gave the impression of being eternal, undying, inextinguishable. How to find one's bearings among the cinders and ashes of what the flames consumed? …Read more
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79On Adorno's “Subject and Object”Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2003 (126): 41-52. 2003.
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31Hermeneutic Communism: An Interview with Santiago ZabalaTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2012 (161): 188-192. 2012.Michael Marder: Could you summarize the main contributions of your new book, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, co-authored with Gianni Vattimo, to contemporary political philosophy?Santiago Zabala: Well, as the subtitle indicates, we do not demand a return to Marx, as so many philosophers do today, but rather the retrieval of his thought through Heidegger, or, better, through hermeneutics. The problem with contemporary political philosophy is bound to the prejudice people hold towar…Read more
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66For a Phytocentrism to ComeEnvironmental Philosophy 11 (2): 237-252. 2014.The present essay formulates a phytocentric alternative to the biocentric and zoocentric critiques of anthropocentrism. Treating phuton—the Greek for “plant,” also meaning “growing being”—as a concrete entry point into the world of phusis , I situate the intersecting trajectories and communities of growth at the center of environmental theory and praxis. I explore the potential of phytocentrism for the “greening” of human consciousness brought back to its vegetal roots, as well as for tackling i…Read more
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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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42IntroductionTelos: 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
Areas of Interest
20th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |