Gavin Rae

Universidad Complutense de Madrid
  •  5
    All power to the imagination: Sartre and Castoriadis
    Philosophy and Social Criticism. forthcoming.
    Despite Jean-Paul Sartre and Cornelius Castoriadis placing the imagination centre stage in their respective conceptual theories, little work has been done to bring them into conversation on this issue or, indeed, any other. This is perhaps not surprising given Sartre’s early work on this topic has tended to be downplayed in favour of his affirmation of freedom, while Castoriadis not only denigrates Sartre’s thinking generally and his account of the imagination specifically but also posits their …Read more
  •  8
    This article defends Ernesto Laclau against the charge that his work, manifested most clearly in On Populist Reason, affirms an authoritarian politics to account for the genesis of collective identity. To outline this, I read Laclau’s thought through three logics – termed the logics of universal imposition, negation, and symbolic mediation – to argue that he rejects the first but adopts the latter two, with the logic of symbolic mediation being particularly important. Rather than unity resulting…Read more
  •  10
    This chapter explores the ways in which Jacques Lacan and Cornelius Castoriadis understand the role(s) that violence plays in the formation of the individual. While the majority of the literature tends to focus on their accounts of the symbolic and imaginary to highlight the differences between them, this chapter claims that a different and more harmonious relationship appears once we focus on their respective claims regarding the roles that violence plays in relation to the formation of the ind…Read more
  •  26
    Anthropocentrism
    In Henk ten Have (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. pp. 1-12. 2014.
    Anthropocentrism is a concept with a long history. This chapter briefly outlines this history to identify what it entails and show its historical importance. It then engages with its ethical significance by, first, engaging with the ways its proponents have justified it, before, subsequently, examining a number of criticisms that have been made against it.
  •  1
    Sartre on Authentic and Inauthentic Love
    Existential Analysis: Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis 23 (1). 2012.
    This paper shows that while Sartre's account of love relations in Being and Nothingness is famously conflictual, his Notebooks for an Ethics offers a far more positive account. It pays particular attention to the role that each lover's pre-reflective fundamental project plays in shaping the content of their love relationship.
  • Violence, Territorialization, and Signification: The Political from Carl Schmitt and Gilles Deleuze,
    Theoria and Praxis: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought 1 (1): 1-17. 2013.
    While Carl Schmitt is one of the main proponents of the question of the political with the consequence that his thinking on the subject has garnered much attention, not only is the question of the political in Gilles Deleuze relatively underdeveloped, but there has been virtually no work done on the relationship between the two. The orientating contention of this paper is that thinking the question of the political from the works of these two, very different, thinkers will not only start to brin…Read more
  •  1
    The Theology of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology,’
    Political Theology 17 (6). 2016.
    The theological turn in studies of Carl Schmitt is pronounced. This paper does not challenge this turn, but questions what theology means for Schmitt. Specifically, it challenges the assumption that Schmitt's political theology is grounded in divine revelation. By distinguishing between “theology in the sense of divine revelation” and “theology in the sense of epistemic faith,” it argues that Schmitt's political theology is epistemic in origin. Schmitt's political theology is not rooted in faith…Read more
  •  14
    Questioning the Phallus: Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler
    Studies in Gender and Sexuality 21 (1): 12-26. 2020.
    This article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic functio…Read more
  •  17
    Judith Butler and the Politics of Epistemic Frames
    Critical Horizons 23 (2): 172-187. 2022.
    ABSTRACT Judith Butler’s work has tended to be read through two axes: an early gender theory/later ethical theory division, and/or an ethical/political divide. In contrast, I aim to undercut both hermeneutical strategies by turning to her epistemology, as manifested through her analyses of normativity and “frames,” to argue that the latter acts as the hinge uniting her so-called early and later works and the ethical and political dimensions of her thinking. From this premise, I maintain that But…Read more
  •  8
    Gavin Rae offers an original approach to sovereign violence by looking at a wide range of thinkers, which he organises into three models. Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari form the radical-juridical perspective; Foucault and Agamben the biopolitical; Derrida the bio-juridical – which Rae argues produces the most nuanced account.
  •  20
    In this book, Gavin Rae analyses the foundations of political life by undertaking a critical comparative analysis of the political theologies of Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas. In so doing, Rae contributes to key debates in contemporary political philosophy, specifically those relating to the nature of, and the relationship between, the theological, the political, and the ethical, as well as those questioning the existence of ahistoric metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological foundation…Read more
  •  39
    Long neglected, Schelling’s 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom has been the subject of renewed contemporary interest with scholars linking it to debates in ontology, psychology, and social philosophy. This paper argues, however, that its fundamental importance lies in bringing to our attention the way in which our moral categories are grounded in conceptions of metaphysics. To do so, it suggests that Schelling focuses on two questions: first, does evil have posit…Read more
  •  92
    The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the main philosophical roots of Donna Haraway’s thinking, an issue she rarely discusses and which is frequently ignored in the literature, but which will allow us to not only better understand her thinking, but also locate it within the philosophical tradition. In particular, it suggests that Haraway’s thinking emanates from a Cartesian and Heideggerian heritage whereby it, implicitly, emanates from Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysical anthrop…Read more
  •  40
    This article defends Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler against the long-standing but recently reiterated charge that they affirm a linguistic idealism or foundationalism. First outlining the parameters of Lacan’s thinking on this topic through his comments on the materiality inherent in the imaginary, symbolic, real schema to show that he offers an account built around the tension between the real and symbolic, I then move to Butler to argue that she more coherently identifies the parameters of th…Read more
  •  16
    The politics of justice: Levinas, violence, and the ethical–political relation
    Contemporary Political Theory 17 (1): 49-68. 2018.
    In the early and often ignored 1934 essay ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’, Levinas identifies a historically dominant form of politics rooted in the ontological reduction of the other to the same that provides intellectual justification for physical violence against the other. The ethical relation aims to overcome this political violence by thinking from the alterity of the other. The turn away from the political to the ethical does, however, lead to a problem – the third – that can…Read more
  •  58
    Traces of Identity In Deleuze’s Differential Ontology
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (1): 86-105. 2014.
    Deleuze’s differential ontology is a sustained attempt to think and affirm difference as opposed to the unity of identity he insists philosophical thought has tended to privilege. However, by distinguishing between three senses of identity, termed identity of the identical, same, and common, I show that, while Deleuze’s differential ontology offers a powerful critique of identity in the senses of the identical and same, at numerous points in his analysis, such as the virtual-actual movement, the…Read more
  •  27
    The Political Significance of the Face: Deleuze's Critique of Levinas
    Critical Horizons 17 (3-4): 279-303. 2016.
    While Levinas famously claims that ethics precedes ontology and emanates from the concrete experience of the other's face, it is often forgotten that Deleuze also discusses the face in numerous writings. The purpose of this paper is to briefly outline Levinas's arguments regarding the constitution of the face to chart its ethical importance, before engaging with Deleuze's critique of Levinas's position. I show that, by distinguishing between two systems of signification – the head-body system an…Read more
  •  62
    Sartre, Group Formations, and Practical Freedom: The Other in the Critique of Dialectical Reason
    Comparative and Continental Philosophy 3 (2): 183-206. 2011.
    In this essay, I attempt to remedy the relative neglect that has befallen Sartre’s analysis of social relations in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. I show that, contrary to the interpretation of certain commentators, Sartre’s analysis of social relations in this text does not contradict his earlier works. While his early work focuses on individual-to-individual social relations, the Critique of Dialectical Reason complements this by focusing on the way various group formations constrain or en…Read more
  •  22
    Merleau-Ponty on the Sexed Body
    Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 51 (2): 162-183. 2020.
    This paper engages with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of the sexed body in the Phenomenology of Perception. I focus on his notion of the sexual schema to show that, contrary to a number of feminist critiques, it does not posit a neutral body overcoded by culturally-contingent sexual determinations or erase the feminine body, but is informed by Merleau-Ponty particular version of the phenomenological reduction whereby factic determinations are “bracketed” to permit the object under study to rev…Read more
  •  14
    Violence has long been noted to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Traditionally, however, philosophical discussions have tended to approach it through the lens of warfare and/or limit it to physical forms. This changed in the twentieth century as the nature and meaning of 'violence' itself became a conceptual problem. Guided by the contention that Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 'Critique of Violence' essay inaugurated this turn to an explicit questioning of violence, this collection…Read more
  •  17
    A first in English, this book engages with the ways in which Hegel and Sartre answer the difficult questions: What is it to be human? What place do we have in the world? How should we live? What can we be?
  •  95
    Sartre the Other: Conflict, Conversion, Language the We
    Sartre Studies International 15 (2): 54-77. 2009.
    Sartre's phenomenological ontology discloses that understanding consciousness and its mode of being requires an analysis of its relation with other consciousnesses. The primordial manner in which the Other relates to consciousness is through the look. Sartre claims that consciousness tends to adopt a pre-reflective fundamental project that leads it to view the Other as a threat to its pure subjective freedom. This creates a conflictual social relation in which each consciousness tries to objecti…Read more