Alessandra Campo

This article discusses the affinity between Henri Bergson’s complete mysticism in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion and Kitaro Nishida’s energetistm in An Inquiry into the Good. Complete mysticism is action rather than contemplation, and energetism is the ethics centred on an action which is very similar to the one which is at stake in Bergson’s completed mysticism. Moreover, both energetism and complete mysticism are experiences of freedom. The principle of the universe (Bergson’s élan; Nishida’s ri) is the same as the self’s and intuition is the way to enjoy it.

This book brings together papers from a conference that took place in the city of L'Aquila, 4–6 April 2019, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the earthquake that struck on 6 April 2009. Philosophers and scientists from diverse fields of research debated the problem that, on 6 April 1922, divided Einstein and Bergson: the nature of time. For Einstein, scientific time is the only time that matters and the only time we can rely on. Bergson, however, believes that scientific time is derived by abstraction, even in the sense of extraction, from a more fundamental time. The plurality of times envisaged by the theory of Relativity does not, for him, contradict the philosophical intuition of the existence of a single time. But how do things stand today? What can we say about the relationship between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of time in the light of contemporary science? What do quantum mechanics, biology and neuroscience teach us about the nature of time? The essays collected here take up the question that pitted Einstein against Bergson, science against philosophy, in an attempt to reverse the outcome of their monologue in two voices, with a multilogue in several voices.

Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency, which Michel Foucault called ‘the greatest book of our time’, takes its title from a parody of a classical utopia that appears at the end of the book. Klossowski imagines a phase in industrial production where producers are able to demand objects of sensation, i.e. pleasure, from consumers as a form of payment. These objects would be living beings. Human beings, in other words, would be traded as currency: employers would pay their male workers in women, female workers would be paid in boys, and so on. This is neither prostitution nor slavery, where humans are bought and sold using monetary currency. Rather, it is humans themselves that are used as currency, a living currency, and they can function as currency because they are sources of sensation, emotion and pleasure. Far from being imaginary or ideal, Klossowski insists that this counter-utopia already exists in contemporary capitalism. Our article will describe it, emphasising the importance that adhering to it can have from a psychic, libidic and social point of view.

For Bergson, Special Relativity affirms the unity of real Time more rigorously than either Newtonian mechanics or common sense. Yet, time and unity describe different realities in the metaphysics of Einstein’s theory and the metaphysics of Bergson’s creative duration. The time Einstein adopts as the fourth dimension of space is only a ‘mobile image of eternity’, and the unity it preaches is an abstract unity, synonymous with mathematical invariance. This is why, according to Bergson, Einstein’s Relativity is not completely relative. It admits a unique real Time in the sense that it admits only one: that of the physicist engaged in measuring the world. The so-called twins’ paradox is exemplary in this respect.

Recently the literature dedicated to the Kantian reception of Spinoza has experienced a significant increase. There are several studies dedicated to mapping the presence of the latter in both pre-critical and critical writings of the former, and different are the results achieved by each. Yet, with the exception of a few references to the section in which Spinozism is presented as the only alternative to transcendental idealism, the Critique of Practical Reason is almost never mentioned nor, even less, is it customary to look at it in an attempt to find something that attenuates the contrast between the two philosophies. The aim of this essay is to show how it is precisely in the second Critic, and in particular by introducing the Fact of Reason, that Kant thinks, so to speak, together with Spinoza. Indeed, in 1788 the moral law works as an adequate idea that makes us active causes, and the experience of the freedom procured by the conscience that we have of it is, therefore, very similar to the experience of eternity illustrated by the fifth book of the Ethics.

This paper aims to desublimate the Kantian sublime starting with the mitigation of the enthusiasm with which some French philosophers have woven its praise. Contrary to what Lyotard and Deleuze argue in their works, in the _Analytics of the Sublime_ Kant does not go beyond himself, nor it is hard to set up a philosophy of the subject after reading these pages. Sublime, for these two clever readers of Kant, is any excessive use of the faculties. But Kant is less interested in excess than in its regulation. Thus, while harmonising with other 80-90s French readings of the Kantian sublime, the faith placed by Lyotard and Deleuze in its potentialities seems unfounded. It is fuelled by a lack of consideration of what happens in the second stage of this complex feeling. Unlike the encounter with the moral law introduced as a ‘fact of reason’ in the _Critique of Practical Reason_, in the _Analytic of the Sublime_ reason makes itself heard not at the expense of the ego but in support of it. And the ego thus elevated is not only an ego ‘super’. It is a (Freudian) super-ego.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze defines his transcendental empiricism as an “apodictic” aesthetics, by which he means a science not simply of the sensible, but of the being of the sensible. Yet, to the extent that the sensibility which is at stake in the Transcendental Aesthetics is a sensibility without sensation, Kantian aesthetics is not apodictic. Sensation is the only contact we have with the being of the sensible, namely that which is exterior with respect to the interior of representation. But transcendental idealism is a subjectivism. Indeed, if one connects what Heidegger considers to be the greatest achievement of Kant’s Copernican revolution with the achievement that Kant held highest in this regard, then the two main precepts of Kant’s subjective phenomenalism fall into place. The first is that we cannot feel outside of us – this amounts to non-sensuous sensibility as transcendental idealism; the second is that we can feel inside – this amounts to non-sensuous sensibility as empirical realism. The aim of this article is to show how Kant's treatment of sensation prevented him from refuting Berkeley’s idealism.

Is it possible to witness our own birth or be lucid while dreaming? Is it possible, Husserl questions since the 1920s, to describe the self-constitution of transcendental subjectivity? And if so, under what conditions? The same conditions that make the description of intentional acts possible? The Analyses concerning Passive Synthesis are lessons in which the transcendental sense of phenomenology is reformulated from the notions of passivity, sensation, matter, genesis, and receptivity. And yet, although “affection”, “life” and “unconscious” are terms to indicate the “other of consciousness”, the latter seems to come out strengthened, or élargie, even from the exploration of its subsoil. Husserl, in fact, recedes before the possibility of thinking a truly original passivity, that is, irrecoverable in any further activity. But is this inhibition dissolvable? And is the outcome, in many ways similar to a déjà-vu, in which the analyses of passivity are resolved, avoidable by remaining within the phenomenological horizon? The purpose of this paper is to answer these questions by illustrating what, for convenience, can be called aporia, diaporia and euporia of the Analysen Zur Passiven Synthesis, i.e. 1. the paradoxality of the challenge; 2. its crossing mediated by the passage into something different; 3. its solution.

Whitehead è un matematico che conferisce pieni poteri al sentimento. La cosmologia speculativa che elabora in Processo e realtà è un’estetica trascendentale in cui il sentire è elevato a condizione reale di ogni esperienza. Non, quindi, un’estetica trascendentale in senso kantiano. La filosofia dell’organismo si propone di invertire il procedimento con cui Kant deriva il mondo dal soggetto, e ‘sentimento’ è proprio il nome del processo con cui il soggetto emerge dall’oggetto. Kant era andato vicino a scoprirlo quando ha fatto della sensazione la porta della percezione. Ma la sua imprevedibilità – sinonimo di variabilità, soggettività e aposteriorità – lo costringe a lasciarla fuori dall’analisi trascendentale. Whitehead, al contrario, ridefinendo lo statuto della soggettività in termini di sentire, la recupera e, scopo di quest’articolo, è mostrare in che modo vi riesca, ossia in che modo si passi dalla causa come categoria alla causa come sentimento.

The paper investigates whether it is possible to testify to the Nazi atrocities and give voice to its victims, without exploiting the testimonies and turning them into a show, thereby betraying their aim. The paper puts forward the concept of “negative testimony” through an analysis by Didi-Huberman of certain pictures from hell that have been taken by inmates of Auschwitz, and the Diary of Etty Hillesum. Negative testimony is not the affirmation that something cannot be represented; it is the testimony that does not want to consolidate an awareness, rather it aims at break it, thereby ransoming what has become too obvious, advertised and, in fact, spoiled.