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31“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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10The 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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24Groundless 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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53Carl 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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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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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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78On 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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64For 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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31Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal LifeColumbia University Press. 2013.In his formulation, "plant-thinking" is the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants, as much as the process of bringing human thought itself back to its roots and rendering it plantlike.
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41IntroductionTelos: 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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16The 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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111The 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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17Across 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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169History, 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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46IntroductionTélos 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
Areas of Interest
20th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |