Dimitris Vardoulakis

The Doppelgänger or Double presents literature as the “double” of philosophy. There are historical reasons for this. The genesis of the Doppelgänger is literature’s response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity. The Doppelgänger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism’s assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality and human agency. This critique prefigures post-War extrapolations of the subject as decentred. From this perspective, the Doppelgänger has a “family resemblance” to current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It becomes the emblematic subject of modernity. This is the first significant study on the Doppelgänger’s influence on philosophical thought. The Doppelgänger emerges as a hidden and unexplored element both in conceptions of subjectivity and in philosophy’s relation to literature. Vardoulakis demonstrates this by employing the Doppelgänger to read literature philosophically and to read philosophy as literature. The Doppelgänger then appears instrumental in the self-conception of both literature and philosophy.

The Ruse of Techne offers a reappraisal of Heidegger’s entire work by focusing on the forms of activity he regards as separate from instrumentality. Non-instrumental activities like authenticity, poetry, and thinking—in short, the ineffectual—are critical for Heidegger as they offer the only path to the truth of being throughout his work. By unearthing the source of the conception of non-instrumental action in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, Vardoulakis elaborates how it forms part of Heidegger’s response to an old problem, namely, how to account for difference after positing a single and unified being that is not amenable to change. He further demonstrates that an action without ends and effects leads to an ethics and politics rife with difficulties and contradictions that only become starker when compared to other responses to the same problem that we find in the philosophical tradition and which rely on instrumentality. Heidegger’s conception of an action without ends or effect forgets the role of instrumentality in the tradition that posits a single, unified being. And yet, the ineffectual has had a profound influence in how continental philosophy determines the ethical and the political since World War II. The critique of the ineffectual in Heidegger is thus effectively a critique of the conception of praxis in continental philosophy. Vardoulakis proposes that it is urgent to undo the forgetting of instrumentality if we are to conceive of a democratic politics and an ethics fit to respond to the challenges of high capitalism.

This article examines the analysis of action in Division 1 of Being and Time to suggest that Heidegger makes a distinction between different kinds of action depending on their ends. But the ends of action are determined exclusively as the final ends of causality, never as instrumental ends. The article examines the effects of this move. It demonstrates that the concealment of the instrumental ends deprives Heidegger's conception of action of any sociopolitical import, undercuts the distinction between inauthenticity and authenticity, and undermines the determination of theoretical knowledge.

The paper demonstrates how Heidegger constructed his notion of an action without ends, or the ineffectual, through his early readings of Aristotle. Heidegger initially aligns the ineffectual with the notion of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics, and later develops it further in Division 2 of Being and Time. The paper examines some of the implications of the conception of an action without ends. It shows that in fact the notion is absent from Aristotle and it is inconsistent. Finally, the paper briefly explores the profound influence that the ineffectual has had on what came to be called in the United States ‘continental philosophy’.

Ancient monism matters today because it reveals an alternative answer to a problem faced by ontology “after the death of god,” namely, how to distinguish between good and bad actions after the disappearance of transcendence. The modern answer in Continental philosophy was systematized by Heidegger and consists in positing that the everyday is permeated by instrumentality whereas there is a different kind of action that is noninstrumental, such as art or the thinking of being. By contrast, ancient monism holds that all actions are instrumental and employs on a typology of action that relies on the distinction between techne and phronesis. Recognizing a different answer from the dominant Heideggerian one has the potential to renew the conception of the ethical and the political in Continental philosophy.

The paper examines the importance of monism in Heidegger’s thought. Monism is understood here as the supposition of one kind of existence, or a single mode of being. Monism matters for a better understanding of Heidegger’s approach to practical philosophy. The paper explains that monism always faced the question of how to account for action. If there is a single, unified being, then aren’t all actions merely modifications of that being? The paper traces Heidegger’s answer to this question to argue that it faces two problems: Heidegger’s solution is similar to the solution in onto-theo-logy; and, it appears to make action trivial or self-contradictory. Despite that, the paper highlights the importance of Heidegger’s answer for continental philosophy.

The paper interprets Spinoza’s presentation of Moses in the Theological Political Treatise in light of antiquity’s and early modernity’s concept of authority. Moses is the kind of figure who cannot be argued with and whose authority is both theological and political. But what happens when the master of the Hebrew State dies? What happens at the end of authority? And what does this mean for a polity premised on the presence of the master as a figure of authority? These questions are tackled through a close reading of the chapters 17 and 18 of Spinoza’s Treatise.

Oliver Marchart constructs an elaborate ontologization of the political that builds on theories developed by the Essex School while relying on Heideggerianism and Hegelianism. This original thought is a powerful and convincing attempt to think the ontology of the political without lapsing into a celebration of essentialist grounding or complete groundlessness, which are equally metaphysical and mutually supporting positions. Tensions arise within Marchart’s own thought when the notion of instrumentality appears to be inscribed solely on the side of politics or the ontic. I suggest that a theory of practical judgment that is inchoate in Marchart’s own position can resolve the tensions toward constructing a genuinely materialist ontology.

In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams recounts that colleagues often ask why he analyses literary texts – why can’t he use examples from “real life”? He responds that “it is a perfectly good question, and it has a short answer: what philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.” This anecdote contains an argument that would be readily embraced by any proponent of “post-structuralism.” Namely, it suggests that no theory can solely be based on reason. Any rational account needs an – acknowledged or repressed – fictional support. We do not rely on pure concepts but rather on conceptual fictions.

Jacques Rancière’s conception of equality as an axiomatic presupposition of the political is important, because it bypasses the tradition which defines equality in terms of Aristotle’s conception of geometric equality. In this paper, I show that Rancière’s theory both espouses a monism, according to which inequality implies equality, and relies on a concept of the free will, which is incompatible with monism. I highlight this tension by bringing Rancière’s theory into conversation with the great monist of the philosophical tradition, Baruch Spinoza.