Matteo Johannes Stettler

Recent scholarship has repeatedly highlighted a significant flaw in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz : its inability to account for acts of resistance in the Lager, or its aprioristic closure to the very possibility of such acts. As a result, instead of clarifying ‘the sense and reasons’ behind the behaviour of both executioners and victims of the Shoah, as his work initially sets out to do, Agamben’s analysis ends up rendering their conduct even more enigmatic and unintelligible. To address this lacuna in Agamben’s work, I draw on Foucault’s later studies on antiquity – precisely the so-called ‘ethical’ Foucault whom Agamben dismissed in favour of the ‘biopolitical’ Foucault. In doing so, I aim to bring to light a particular form of resistance described by Primo Levi in If This Is a Man : what he calls ‘moral survival’. Through this framework, I seek to partially reconstruct the rationality behind the conduct of those Häftlinge who, like Levi himself, attempted to resist the immanentizing pressure of the lex of the camp (i.e., the process of Muselmannization ) by constituting themselves as the ethical subjects of their own moral acts.

The reception of Hadot’s work on the tradition of spiritual exercises among historians of medieval philosophy has rarely produced the results one might reasonably have expected. In this revisitation of the historiography on the notion of “intellectual felicity,” I thus hope to be able first to provide a corrective to the faulty understanding that some medievalists still seem to have of Hadot’s contribution to the study of philosophy as a way of life in the Middle Ages, and second, to show how ongoing debates in medievalist circles might point us toward the possible limitations with Hadot’s own understanding of philosophy as a way of life and its history in and beyond the Middle Ages.

In the present contribution, the author contends, first, that “the perfect piece of Stoicism” that Emerson wanted to make out of Thoreau’s philosophical correspondence with his disciple Harrison Blake in Letters to Various Persons (1865) was neither concerned with a personality stereotype, as Sophia Thoreau feared, nor with the specifically Stoic way of living, as Richardson and Risinger have claimed in response. This first edition of Thoreau’s correspondence was in fact meant to be representative of that generally philosophical “art of living well” to which Thoreau was entirely committed. Second, the author provides a comparative analysis of Thoreau’s philosophical letters to his pupil and Seneca’s epistolary with Lucilius, in order to ascertain precisely how Thoreau’s letter-writing itself, apart from Emerson’s framing of it, might have been informed by his knowledge and interest in Stoic epistolary practices.

Chapter II of Foucault’s The Care of the Self, ‘The Cultivation of the Self,’ is arguably one of the most controversial sections of the entire History of Sexuality. The diatribe over this chapter was initially mounted by Pierre Hadot’s critical essay ‘Reflections on the Idea of the ‘Cultivation of the Self.” Therein, Hadot objects to Foucault’s dissolution of the Stoic doctrinal antinomy between voluptas (‘pleasure’) and gaudium (‘joy’) and, thereby, to the relegation of the latter notion to the subordinate status of ‘another form of pleasure’, on the one side, and of Seneca himself to the problematic rank of a sort of Epicurean on the other. The present investigation aims to unveil this aspect of the Foucault-Hadot querelle as only a pseudo-controversy engendered by Seneca recurring to two different terminological registers throughout his writings: the so-called verbum publicum and the significatio Stoica.

This article challenges the recurrent critique that Pierre Hadot’s identification of ancient philosophy with the practice of spiritual exercises introduces a non- or irrational dimension into metaphilosophy. The occasion to do this is provided by Kerem Eksen’s recent reading of Descartes’s Meditations as consisting of solely intellectual, rather than spiritual, exercises—since the latter, Eksen claims, involve extrarational means and ends. Part 2 presents an alternative account of the role of cognition in the ancient meditatio at issue in understanding Descartes’s antecedents. This account is indebted to Michel Foucault’s characterization of ancient meditation as involving two cognitive mechanisms: an appropriation of thought, and an experiment in identification. Part 3 argues that attempts such as Eksen’s to depict spiritual exercises as wholly noncognitive themselves are the product of an “unexamined Cartesianism” that is fundamentally at odds with the monistic psychology of ancient Stoics like Marcus Aurelius as discussed in Hadot’s studies.