Georgios Tsagdis

When Derrida admits the example of the Clipper chip into the book version of Politics of Friendship, he intends only to recall that a reflection on the politics of friendship should be indistinguishable from a meditation on the meaning, history and techniques of the secret. However, in doing so, he also admits a discussion of how ‘tele-technologies’ disturb the conditions of the Kantian 'secret', as that which one thinks must remain secret because an engagement has been entered upon and a promise made in certain non-natural conditions. In this way, Derrida alerts us, first, to the role of designs, as 'technologies', within the public realm in allying the contemporary liberal political subject to the humanist educational subject; and, second, to the potential of design education within the university, in advocating a philoxenia that welcomes the invention of the other, to break with the horizon of cosmopolitics as phratrocentrism.

The essay pursues Deleuze's reading of Foucault in order to elicit a fourfold of anarchival virtualities that trouble and destabilise the constitution of every archive. This thematisation of the anarchival is critical in an age that orders life relentlessly, arranging and controlling its every aspect and principally its material-informational conditions as a biological phenomenon. The essay thus affords a new understanding of the Anthropocene as the age of bioarchives. Through a close examination of plant archives such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and animal archives, such as the Frozen Ark, the essay explicates the speculative logic that governs the discursive statements of bioarchives as well as limits of their aspirations. At the intersection of power, knowledge and memory, Deleuze's reading of Foucault accordingly enables not only a critical engagement with the way the present attempts to preserve past life in order to govern its future but opens a space to imagine a future anarchive of life.

A fourth agricultural revolution is pronounced on the strength of new digital technologies entering farming practice. Concerns that, left unchecked, this digital revolution will intensify the problems generated by the third agricultural revolution have led major supranational actors such as the UN and the EU to promote the embedding of state-of-the-art digital technologies within agroecology, a movement that foregrounds the wellbeing of both nature and farmers, drawing on traditional modes of knowledge and practice. The article examines whether this aspiration to combine “the best of both worlds” is feasible at the level of the basic commitments of agroecology and “agromodernism,” a term referring collectively to mainstream modes of agriculture that utilise industrial and digital technologies to maximise productivity. The article shows how agroecology and agromodernism constitute contrasting discursive frames and mindsets. At the same time, the article shows that agroecology and agromodernism share an oft-overlooked common ground. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard and Frédéric Neyrat the article shows that agroecology and agromodernism are constricted by the technoscientific “world-picture,” in which the world is infinitely constructible in the hands of the human. The article argues, accordingly, for an alternative, “inhuman” agroecology. Such an agroecology should welcome any technology that resists the totalising tendency of evermore control over the land and foregrounds what exceeds human values and interests.

_Essays addressing, from various angles, the relationship between Europe and philosophy in today's crisis-ridden contexts such as xenophobia and migration._ _Reimagining Europe_ comprises a series of contributions which address, in various ways, the relationship between Europe and continental philosophy/phenomenology. Europe is in crisis: a crisis that no longer designates a moment of decision, a critical point between a before and an after, but a state, a permanent mode of being, a constant emergency. At this juncture of Europe, the aporia of language confronts the aporia of history. We cannot speak, we must speak, we shall speak. As such, the contributions all engage with the idea that the question "what is Europe?" must measure up a series of questions, namely: what was it to be? What does it mean to initiate and sustain a project, such as Europe, if only at times, after the fact? The questions of internal and external borders, of homogeneity and coherence, identity and equality, legitimacy and rights, democracy and representation can only be raised insofar as the question of Europe, its destiny, and destination, is raised as a whole.

Jan Patočka thought travels on the parallel rails of a-subjective phenomenology and the care of the soul. For the most part, their parallel supportive function remains unproblematic. However, in order to appreciate the significance of Patočka’s contribution to the history of philosophy and the stakes of its undertaking, the alignment of the rails must be tested: how can a phenomenology, which strives to dislocate the subject from its experiential privilege, attempt to bring the soul into both the onto-epistemic as well as the ethico-political epicentre? By revising Platonism, Patočka wagers an ambitious, fragile answer, which opens nothing less than the space of freedom.

The essay thematises the question of care in conditions of total power – not merely _extra muros_, in the everyday life of the Third Reich, but in its most radical articulation, the concentration camp. Drawing inspiration from Todorov’s work, the essay engages with Levinas, Agamben, Derrida and Nancy, to investigate Heidegger’s determination of _Da-sein_’s horizon through a solitary confrontation with death. Drawing extensively on primary testimonies, the essay shows that when the enclosure of the camp became the _Da _of existence, care assumed a radical significance as the link between the death of another and the death of oneself. In the face of an apparatus of total power and its attempt to individuate and isolate death, the sharing of death in the figure of care remained one’s most inalienable act of resistance and the last means to hold on to death as something that could be truly one’s own.

The essay examines the articulation of the figure of the beast in Plato’s thought on the city and soul, in the Republic and other dialogues. The constitutive correspondence or homology of the city and soul comprises Platonic psycho-politics, a space defined by the thērion: monster and animal at once. The thērion operates within the tripartite division of the soul and the tripartite division of the city. Its various figurations, from wolf to hydra, seem to constrict this figure to the margins of metaphor; the trope of this liquid metaphor however guides the Platonic psycho-political project. It is a project of a metamorphosis, an open transformation, undertaken in order not merely to define, but to effectuate justice in the city and soul.

The essay at hand undertakes to think the inception of occidental thought as an event opening for the first time the horizon of the thought of Nothing. Although a study with and from, it is not a study of Heidegger, but a study of the inception of logos, as such an archaeology. The inception is delimited along the proper names of Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides which we approach in reverse order, re-turning ever-closer to the origin that appears as ever-other, ever-distant. In this re-turn we try to understand the beginning, its truth and the task it presents us with, a task of essential thought. This task consists in the attempt of a turn of Being towards Nothing, a tum wherein essence is trans-formed from ex-istence, an existence foreign to every existentialism. In this thematization of the lesion between 'essentia' and 'existentia' comprising itself a distinct history of Being, a change of tone takes effect, a change of tone that cor-responds to the essence of the turn that we come to know as 'tropos'. The tropos of Being, its essence of turning, emerges inceptively thus in the re-turn of Nothing, the jointure and origin of presence and absence, what opens and maintains the field of their oscillation. This Nothing we try to trace across the inception so that a new beginning may be granted to us, a new beginning that is always the first.