Daniel J. Smith

In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new concepts of “machine” and “organism.” The problem of the relationship between machines and organisms has a long philosophical history, and this essay treats their work as a contribution to this debate. It is argued that their solution to this problem is found in their difficult concept of the “body without organs,” a concept that is given some much-needed clarification in the essay. The first section details Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machine, examining the ways in which it differs from the traditional concept as described by Canguilhem: their machines do not have predictable movements, but instead produce events; they do not have a purpose; they are able to reproduce themselves. The second section details their conception of the organism through their account of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: organisms are bodies which normalize and which create hierarchies; they also do not have a purpose; they have a “unity of composition.” The final section argues that their concept of the “body without organs” shows us how to understand the relation between the two transformed concepts, and defines the body without organs as the becoming-machine of the organism.

Este ensayo considera la estructura del sujeto ético que se encuentra en los últimos trabajos de Foucault sobre ética, y da cuenta de sus dos conceptos éticos fundamentales: “cuidado de sí” y “estética de la existencia”. El “cuidado de sí”, se argumenta, da a Foucault una manera de conceptualizar la ética que no depende de categorías jurídicas, y que no concibe al sujeto ético en el modelo de la sustancia. “El cuidado de sí” conlleva una comprensión del sujeto ético como un proceso que siempre es relacional, especialmente en relación consigo mismo. Valiéndonos de su ensayo “Qué es un Autor”, se argumenta que al sujeto de la “estética de la existencia”, igual que al autor de un texto, se les entiende como totalmente inmanentes al “objeto”, que usualmente es considerado como opuesto y separado. En lugar de proponer una expresión verdadera de una sustancia interior “auténtica”, la “estética de la existencia” de Foucault se orienta más bien a las prácticas de “creatividad”, cuya forma no puede anticiparse.

The Kurdish movement has revitalised the idea of democracy. Under the most difficult of circumstances – squeezed between ISIS on one side and the Turkish armed forces on the other – a radical form of democracy has been implemented that has inspired many both inside and outside the region. Introducing the special issue “Rethinking Democracy in Kurdistan”, this article explores the ingenious challenge to the nation-state system posed by this new democratic theory and practice, focusing on the prison writings of Abdullah Öcalan. These remarkable texts are read as proposing a new philosophy of world-history which decisively breaks with Marxism, displaces the central place of Europe, and drastically extends the point in time at which philosophies of history typically begin.

This paper considers the structure of the ethical subject found in Foucault’s late works on ethics, and gives an account of his two major ethical concepts: “care of the self” and “aesthetics of existence.” The “care of the self,” it is argued, gives Foucault a way of conceptualising ethics which does not rely on juridical categories, and which does not conceive the ethical subject on the model of substance. The “care of the self” entails an understanding of the ethical subject as a process which is always in a relation, specifically in a relation to itself. Using his essay “What is an Author,” it is argued that the subject of the “aesthetics of existence,” like the author of a text, is understood to be fully immanent to the “object” which it is usually considered to be opposed to and separated from. Rather than aiming at a true expression of an “authentic” inner substance, Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence” leads instead to practices of “creativity,” whose form cannot be given in advance.

This paper compares the later Levinas’ notion of “substitution” with Kant’s account of substitution in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Kant’s account is modelled on the Christian doctrine of the vicarious substitution of Christ, and some recent commentators on Levinas have argued that Levinas’ account is also similar to this Christian doctrine. By bringing out what I see as major differences between the two accounts, I show that Levinas’ notion of substitution should not be understood in this way.

This paper addresses the much-debated question about the fate of Kant's race theory in the 1790s by examining his use of the concepts of “germs” [Keime] and “predispositions” [Anlagen] in the Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason of 1793. Following the well-received “anthropological interpretation” of the essay on radical evil that draws productive analogies with his philosophy of history, it proposes a “new anthropological interpretation” that focuses on concepts borrowed from his philosophy of race. Against those who have argued that Kant changed his mind about his race theory in the 1790s, this interpretation of Religion shows that he continued to use its main concepts well into his late period, even introducing them into his moral philosophy for the first time.

This paper develops a new interpretation of the “table of nothing” that appears at the end of the transcendental aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason. In contrast to previous interpretations, which have taken it to be part of Kant’s account of the failures of reason, this paper argues that it should be understood as proffering Kant’s positive account of the objects he will be concerned with in the transcendental dialectic, namely objects that, properly understood, are nothing. I examine the four nothings in turn, showing how Kant’s concern is to develop a positive account of each one that allows him to determine its object while recognizing that it in some sense is not. I introduce Allison’s distinction between error and illusion and argue that the table of nothing is Kant’s theoretical account of what illusions are as objects, and thereby explains how something like a transcendental dialectic is possible at all.

This essay re-examines Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s Ethics, focusing on the question of method. Are the axioms and definitions unmotivated presuppositions that make the attainment of absolute knowledge impossible in principle, as Hegel charges? This essay develops a new reading of the Ethics to defend it from this critique. I argue that Hegel reads Spinoza as if his system were constructed only according to the mathematical second kind of knowledge, ignoring Spinoza’s clear preference for knowledge of the third kind. The Ethics, I argue, is a book with several layers: it is at once a deductive mathematical system, and a handbook to aid the intuitive power of the active philosophical reader. The letter of each text may be identical, but they have little else in common – Pierre Menard’s rewriting of Don Quixote given systematic philosophical form.

ABSTRACT In a number of his later works, Derrida makes reference to the concept of the “event.” However, unlike for many of the other concepts developed in this phase of his writing, we do not find one “basic” or “primary” text in which he develops the logic of the concept. We find him alluding to it in different contexts and making use of it in certain ways, but, at least with this concept, he leaves much of the philosophical “work” to readers. The aim of this article is to elucidate Derrida's concept of the event, to lay out as clearly as possible the way in which the concept functions. In the first part, I go through the logic, working out step by step what makes an “event worthy of the name”. In the second part, I deal with the paradoxes that arise when we ask how it is possible to say anything about an event, how one might go about constructing a “name worthy of the event.”

Continental philosophy is in crisis. With the last few decades spent mainly on a “great figures” approach, this tradition is having to come to terms with the fact that most of its luminaries have now passed away. Derrida’s death in 2004 sent shockwaves through the community and seems to have functioned as marker for the generation before my own (I was not yet an undergraduate when it happened). For the rest of us, 2021 will have been a huge year as it marked the loss of Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the few remaining giants of this tradition who was engaged in the task of thinking to the very end. A friend of mine recently ran a seminar with the title “contemporary continental philosophy” in which every single author on the reading list was dead. A strange understanding of “contemporary”! The course was well-received and I have no doubt the students learned a lot, but it illustrates the scale of the problem we face. At some point, the great sequence that began in France in the 1960s will have to be thought of as another period in the history of philosophy, but our tradition does not seem ready to make that transition just yet. For this to happen, philosophy may first have to take another step, or make another beginning.