•  2
    How do we live at the end of the world? How do we write the story of our species differently and construct a democracy that does not belong to human beings alone? As we face down a new era of climate change, we require nothing short of a philosophy for the end of the world. In this provocative and timely work, the philosopher and poet Travis Holloway proposes a counternarrative for human beings in the Anthropocene. Folding the history of gender, race, colonialism, and capital into geological tim…Read more
  •  18
    Freedom Comes from the Outside
    Philosophy Today 66 (1): 1-11. 2022.
    On the one hand, freedom is said to be the property of a subject. On the other, freedom only happens in the space of being-in-common. Freedom, then, is the place of a conflict between the “self” and the “with,” between independence or autonomy and dependence or sharing. Resolving this apparent antinomy requires showing how the with ontologically constitutes the self. This, in turn, allows for a rethinking of freedom beyond what liberal democracy and political economy have to offer, as the renewe…Read more
  •  138
    Weather
    The Philosopher 1 (110): 62-66. 2022.
    Strange weather is one of the growing ways human beings experience climate change phenomenologically or beyond abstract scientific data. Even those who do not “believe” in climate change experience it. Odd weather is also one of first things human beings talk about with one another or share, today and at least since the great flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This article considers how increasingly violent weather is ushering in a new type of narrative and art and announcing a new political and cl…Read more
  •  22
    Scandalous death
    Angelaki 27 (1): 8-13. 2022.
    Around people who were close to him, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe would sometimes cry out with anger: “Death is a scandal! It is intolerable!” When he died almost fourteen years ago, prematurely and af...
  • This essay presents two strategies for a more democratic future. A debate is underway in continental philosophy between two different types of democratic activity or strategy. The first form of democratic activity, “constituent” power, is widely known for its attempts to confront existing government institutions and transform them in a variety of ways. A second form of political activity, however, labeled “destituent” power, proposes abandoning the constituent project of reforming government ins…Read more
  • Nichts jenseits des Nihilismus
    Philosophy Today. forthcoming.
    Nihilism, as the absence of sense and goal, is the most familiar climate of the world in which we live. While this absence is often denounced, such denunciations remain subject to the logic they seemingly oppose. More than exhibiting the collapse of truth, however, nihilism revives our confrontation with “nothing.” The task is henceforth not to denounce nihilism but to think it. Such thinking is guided by Nietzsche’s highest thought: How does nihilism harbor its own excess?
  • At Any Rate
    Philosophy Today. forthcoming.
    What does the word “value” mean? On the one hand, absolute value is an excellence that is beyond measure. On the other hand, value can also be interpreted as price, as what can be measured and exchanged. In both cases, value lies in relation and is of the same order as sense. But what is the relation between these two senses of value? And why is it so difficult to hold the two apart?
  • Freedom Comes from the Outside
    Philosophy Today. forthcoming.
    On the one hand, freedom is said to be the property of a subject. On the other, freedom only happens in the space of being-in-common. Freedom, then, is the place of a conflict between the “self” and the “with,” between independence or autonomy and dependence or sharing. Resolving this apparent antinomy requires showing how the with ontologically constitutes the self. This, in turn, allows for a rethinking of freedom beyond what liberal democracy and political economy have to offer, as the renewe…Read more
  • A wide-ranging interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Chicago and author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and Provincializing Europe. Dipesh Chakrabarty is one of the leading thinkers on climate change in the humanities. He is responsible for introducing concepts like the "Anthropocene," "geological force," and "species history" into history, philosophy, and literary theory.
  •  1
    Using the resources of genealogy and historical modes of thought in contemporary Continental philosophy, and engaging with the fields of postcolonial theory, black studies, and gender theory, this paper considers the periodization of a new geological timescale, the Anthropocene or “age of man,” and offers a counterhistory of what it is has meant to be a “human being.” Choosing to inherit the name “Anthropocene,” but recognizing the shadow archive of the “inhuman” in the geological strata of the …Read more
  •  14
    The Possibility of a World: Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin
    with Jean-Luc Nancy, Pierre-Philippe Jandin, and Flor Méchain
    Fordham University Press. 2017.
    Jean-Luc Nancy discusses his life's work with Pierre-Philippe Jandin. As Nancy looks back on his philosophical texts, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts.
  • What's These Worlds Coming To?
    Fordham University Press. 2015.
    Our contemporary challenge, according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, is that a new world has stolen up on us. We no longer live in a world, but in worlds. We do not live in a universe anymore, but rather in a multiverse. We no longer create; we appropriate and montage. And we no longer build sovereign, hierarchical political institutions; we form local assemblies and networks of cross-national assemblages— and we do this at the same time as we form multinational corporations that no long…Read more
  •  69
    Neoliberalism and the Future of Democracy
    Philosophy Today 62 (2): 627-650. 2018.
    This paper describes neoliberalism and summarizes new works on democracy in Continental philosophy. Unlike laissez-faire or liberal economic theory—a “leave us alone” strategy in which the state does not interfere with private enterprise—neoliberal governments use the resources of the state to assist the market directly and employ the market to direct or oversee the resources of the state. Alongside neoliberal government, and in its wake, is a society in which the guiding axioms for each human b…Read more
  •  44
    Marc Crépon and Bernard Stiegler, De la démocratie participative: Fondements et limites (review)
    Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 16 (1): 272-276. 2012.
  •  13
    How to Perform a Democracy
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (2): 351-370. 2017.
    This paper explores a type of poetry, music, and theater that is said to be responsible for the birth of participatory democracy. While Aristotle and Nietzsche briefly mention a similar genealogy of democracy in their work, Book III of Plato’s Laws archives a remarkable history of how participatory democracy emerged in Athens’s theater. After connecting Plato's account to a participatory style of music and poetry that is associated initially with the term polyphōnia, I consider a line of philoso…Read more