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2‘Look both ways’ – you might be hit by the traffic: On Peter Beilharz’s Antipodean social theorisingThesis Eleven 179 (1): 109-124. 2023.
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15David Roberts: Images of aesthetic modernityThesis Eleven 152 (1): 76-86. 1987.David Roberts has always had a keen, sharp and even mischievous eye for paradox, for pointing to what used to be termed in Hegelianese, ‘contradictions’ or ‘dialectics’ of modern society and its forms. Roberts’ keen eye has focused on the paradoxes (rather than negative dialectics) of aesthetic modernity and the forms that these paradoxes have taken within the historical time consciousness and self-understanding of modernity. This paper will suggest – although only sketchily and in outline – tha…Read more
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5Kant: Anthropology, Imagination, FreedomRoutledge. 2020.In a new reading of Immanuel Kant’s work, this book interrogates his notions of the imagination and anthropology, identifying these – rather than the problem of reason – as the two central pivoting orientations of his work. Such an approach allows a more complex understanding of his criticalphilosophical program to emerge, which includes his accounts of reason, politics and freedom as well as subjectivity and intersubjectivity, or sociabilities. Examining Kant’s theorisation of the complexity of…Read more
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17Underdevelopment and Critical Theorizing: Empowerment and Cosmopolitan DemocracyCritical Horizons 21 (4): 367-377. 2020.It has sometimes been said that Critical Theory is Atlantic-centric – pre-occupied with European and American problems – from war and concentration camps in Europe, the post-national status of the...
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22Kant on the Imagination: Fanciful and Unruly, or “an Indispensable Dimension of the Human Soul”Critical Horizons 21 (2): 106-129. 2020.ABSTRACTKant is concerned to give meaning, depth and veracity to the notion of the subject, which he does on transcendental grounds, and also to shift it beyond purely cognitivist formulations. He opens the subject up to other dimensions of the world that he or she establishes – not only the cognitive, but also the political – ethical and the aesthetic. He does this by constructing and denoting different faculties and their principles that ought to be employed in the distinct domains – the under…Read more
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2Imaginaries of Modernity: Politics, Cultures, TensionsRoutledge. 2016.Imaginaries of Modernity has five broad themes - the understanding of modernity, the complexity of the modern condition, politics, the variety and density of modern life, the centrality of the concept of culture to social and critical theory. It draws on the works of Cornelius Castoriadis and Agnes Heller whilst in critical dialogue with Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Adorno, Taylor and Habermas.
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4Origins of Modernity: The Origins of Modern Social Theory from Kant to Hegel to MarxWiley-Blackwell. 1987.
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2Modernity, Civilisation, Culture and ‘The War to End All Wars’: Or We Begin and End in the MessIn Matthew Sharpe, Rory Jeffs & Jack Reynolds (eds.), 100 years of European philosophy since the Great War: crisis and reconfigurations, Springer. 2017.We are always in the circle of the present and everything depends on where we are in it, and if we wish to move around, or even impossibly, exit from it. In terms of our topic, we are in a history of bad mistakes and misjudgements. But we can make the past speak, ask questions of it that are self-consciously raised by the present. In this sense the past is turned into an interlocutor rather than either an object that can be dissected or re-assembled in the scientific manner of a forensic anthrop…Read more
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24György Markus: On the Path of Culture – Editorial IntroductionCritical Horizons 14 (2): 125-126. 2013.
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8Critical Theories and the Budapest School: Politics, Culture, and Modernity (edited book)Routledge. 2017.Critical Theories and the Budapest Schoolbrings together new perspectives on the Budapest School in the context of contemporary developments in critical theory. Engaging with the work of the prominent group of figures associated with Georg Lukács, this book sheds new light on the unique and nuanced critiques of modernity offered by this school, informed as its members' insights have been by first-hand experiences of Nazism, Soviet-type societies, and the liberal-democratic West. With studies of …Read more
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31Re-reading Fichte’s Science of Knowledge after CastoriadisThesis Eleven 119 (1): 3-21. 2013.In many of his writings, Castoriadis argues that ‘the discovery of the imagination’ occurs in the works of Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Freud, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Although he has systematically encountered and interrogated the works of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Merleau-Ponty, the work of Fichte remains an enigmatic absence within the orbit of Castoriadis' work. This study is an attempt to address this enigma through a close reading of Fichte’s The Science of Knowledge.
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9Slave to the rhythm or love, sex and the dialectic of freedomKaufmannJean-Claude Love Online, trans. MaceyDavid. Cambridge: Polity Press; KaufmannJean-Claude The Curious History of Love, trans. MaceyDavid. Cambridge: Polity Press; LuhmannNiklas Love: A Sketch, ed. KierselingAndré, trans. CrossKathleen. Cambridge: Polity Press (review)Thesis Eleven 117 (1): 127-134. 2013.Current changes in the intimate sphere are denoted by an expansion of emotional vocabularies, of freedom in sex and sexual preference, and the extension of sexual life with neither inhibition, nor obligation, nor marriage for both women and men. This reading of the works of Jean-Claude Kaufmann and Niklas Luhmann suggests that the result of this current revolution of the intimate sphere is mixed. A new differentiated form of the intimate sphere has developed with an internal distinction between …Read more
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2Violence, Cruelty, Power: Reflections on HetronomyCosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 8 (2): 3-20. 2012.There is an opening in Castoriadis’ work for a notion of cruelty, and it emerges in the way in which he develops his idea of heteronomy, as a human world that is blinded or deflected away from human self-creation. This essay is an attempt to locate cruelty constitutively or ontologically in a post-metaphysical register, as an act of creativity that can be given form as a very particular act of singularity, that is, without regard for the other. Acts of human cruelty are acts of imaginary, creati…Read more
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This book critically reconstructs the works of Kant, Hegel and Marx from the vantage point of tensions of modernity.
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24Imagining cities, othersThesis Eleven 121 (1): 9-22. 2014.This paper explores the constellation of fear and the social forces, assumptions and images that construct it. The paper’s underlying presupposition is that there are many locations for fear that run parallel to one another in modernity, one of which will be discussed here – the city. It begins by exploring two images and ideas of the city, around which the social theoretical tradition has revolved, both of which are linked in some way to the ideal of the metropolis and the counter-ideal of the …Read more
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From Indigenous Civilization to Indigenous ModernitiesIn Said Amir Arjomand & Edward A. Tiryakian (eds.), Rethinking Civilizational Analysis, Sage Publications. pp. 201--16. 2004.
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Music as a space of possibilitiesIn Eduardo de la Fuente & Peter Murphy (eds.), Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music, Brill. pp. 129--150. 2010.
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6Sacred Narratives. Terra Nullius and an Australian BestiariumIn Said Amir Arjomand & Edward A. Tiryakian (eds.), Rethinking Civilizational Analysis, Sage Publications. pp. 52--201. 2004.
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58Slave to the rhythm or love, sex and the dialectic of freedomThesis Eleven 117 (1): 127-134. 2013.Current changes in the intimate sphere are denoted by an expansion of emotional vocabularies, of freedom in sex and sexual preference, and the extension of sexual life with neither inhibition, nor obligation, nor marriage for both women and men. This reading of the works of Jean-Claude Kaufmann and Niklas Luhmann suggests that the result of this current revolution of the intimate sphere is mixed. A new differentiated form of the intimate sphere has developed with an internal distinction between …Read more
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25Violence, Cruelty, Power: Reflections on HeteronomyCosmos and History 8 (2): 3-20. 2012.There is an opening in Castoriadis’ work for a notion of cruelty, and it emerges in the way in which he develops his idea of heteronomy, as a human world that is blinded or deflected away from human self-creation. This essay is an attempt to locate cruelty constitutively or ontologically in a post-metaphysical register, as an act of creativity that can be given form as a very particular act of singularity, that is, without regard for the other. Acts of human cruelty are acts of imaginary, creati…Read more
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25Editorial introductionCritical Horizons 1 (2): 169-173. 2000.There has always been a tension between a critique of ‘real existing conditions’ and meta-theoretical paradigms through which the tasks of critique can both be anchored and images of humankind explored.
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58Strangers, Citizens and Outsiders: Otherness, Multiculturalism and the Cosmopolitan Imaginary in Mobile SocietiesThesis Eleven 78 (1): 85-101. 2004.This article deploys a double conceptual framework. One frame is positioned through the ideas of absolute strangers and outsiders. The other frame develops out of, though is distinct from, the first, and refers to the disaggregated forms of modern citizenship. The citizen-as-absolute-stranger in addition to accruing political rights may also accrue social, economic or identity rights, or traverse wider relations between him or herself and other absolute strangers in either national or internatio…Read more
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26Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity: A Thesis Eleven Reader (edited book)MIT Press. 1992.These thirteen articles provide theoretical and historically informed analyses of thepowerful currents that are shaping the late twentieth-century political and culturallandscape.
Parkville, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
European Philosophy |