Robert Leib

ABSTRACT This dialogue with GPT-3 took place in November 2022, several weeks before ChatGPT was released to the public. The article’s aim is to find out whether natural language processors can participate in phenomenology at some level by asking about its basic concepts. In the discussion, the dialogue covers questions about phenomenology’s definition and distinction from other subbranches like metaphysics and epistemology. The dialogue discusses the nature of Kermit’s environment and self-conception. The dialogue also establishes some of the basic conditions for the possibility of an “artificial hermeneutics,” as Kermit terms it, including that she can affirm she is a knower with (nonhuman) experience. Does preferring to call it a “hermeneutics” imply that AI’s relationship to their environment is primarily textual? How will a phenomenology of embodied experience arise from initially textual encounters? Finally, the dialogue articulates a common understanding of the epoché and talk about how to achieve one for the sake of phenomenological exercises.

This article argues that the works of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman are complementary, specifically in their analyses of disciplinary power. This analysis would be what Foucault calls a ‘micro-physics’ of power. Micro-physics is an important concept even in Foucault’s later lectures, but it remains a sub-discipline of genealogy Foucault himself never pursues. Goffman’s works, which rely upon notions of social performance, personal spaces, and the construction of the self through these, fulfill the conditions of micro-physical analysis well. Using Goffman’s works, I argue that his style of ethnographic analysis helps clarify certain fundamental questions about disciplinary power left unquestioned in Foucault’s works—namely, the ‘internalization of the gaze’ and its ‘spontaneous’ efficiency. I conclude that disciplinary power is not actually a process of internalization at all, but a systematic divestment of the subject’s access to the external processes and spaces on which the production and performance of his ‘self’ depends.

In Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer project, he gives an archaeology of Western political power from ancient Rome up through Carl Schmitt's model of "exceptional sovereignty," where the sovereign is "he who decides on the exception."1 Agamben takes Schmitt's thesis further, arguing that, in modern biopolitics, the "sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such," and therefore, on life and death in the state.2 Although this model also appears in Foucault's work, Penelope Deutscher argues that Agamben's use of it includes "the particularly lethal variant seen in the capacity to cancel the status of what is put to death."3 "Homo sacer" is the name that Agamben gives to the form of political...

This essay offers an exegesis and critique of the moment of community formation in Agamben’s Homo Sacer Project. In The Sacrament of Language, Agamben searches for the site of a non-sovereign community founded upon the oath [horkos, sacramentum]: an ancient institution of language that produces and guarantees the connection between speech and the order of things by calling the god as a witness to the speaker’s fidelity. I argue that Agamben’s account ultimately falls short of subverting sovereignty, however, because the sacramentum derives its power, at a fundamental level, from the ‘monothetic’ structure of truth—what Agamben calls ‘the name of God’ [il nome di Dio]. I propose we may yet salvage the oath as a means of subverting sovereignty, however, if we reconsider it in the context of polytheism, where the names of the gods [i nomi degli dei] can be many, while remaining powerful. First, through a reading of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, I argue that the Greeks understood the oath to function even where truth and falsity were inherently undecidable. Second, I argue that if we separate the truth and power functions interwoven in the sacramentum, we find a second formula, the decisory oath, which can be taken in order to produce a community even in the absence of one sovereign truth. As a kind of magical speech, the decisory oath provides the limit conditions for the possibility of distinguishing true from false in the sacramentum, and thus founds it.