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124 Jacques DerridaIn Adam Kotsko & Carlo Salzani (eds.), Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 230-241. 2017.
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25 Sigmund FreudIn Adam Kotsko & Carlo Salzani (eds.), Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 242-251. 2017.
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Sigmund FreudIn Adam Kotsko & Carlo Salzani (eds.), Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh University Press. 2017.
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Jacques DerridaIn Adam Kotsko & Carlo Salzani (eds.), Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh University Press. 2017.
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23. Biopolitics and Probability: Modifications on Life’s WayIn Marcos Norris & Colby Dickinson (eds.), Agamben and the Existentialists, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 46-64. 2021.
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226Preface to Forenames of God: Enumerations of Ernesto Laclau toward a Political Theology of AlgorithmsInternationales Jahrbuch Für Medienphilosophie 7 (1): 243-251. 2021.Perhaps nowhere better than, "On the Names of God," can readers discern Laclau's appreciation of theology, specifically, negative theology, and the radical potencies of political theology. // It is Laclau's close attention to Eckhart and Dionysius in this essay that reveals a core theological strategy to be learned by populist reasons or social logics and applied in politics or democracies to come. // This mode of algorithmically informed negative political theology is not mathematically inert. …Read more
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20Mediality/theology/religion: Aspects of a Singular EncounterInternationales Jahrbuch Für Medienphilosophie 7 (1): 5-20. 2021.How can the medium be addressed when it is always already saturated in religious over-determinations and ever marked by theological concerns (such as revelation and incarnation) while, at the same time, religion would not be practiced and theology not be done without using some such medium? We encourage methodological and conceptual shifts, first, from medium to mediality; second, from religion to its partial negation (or, perhaps, partial permeation); third, from theology to doing the theologic…Read more
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521Machine-Believers Learning Faiths & Knowledges: The Gospel According to Chat GPTInternationales Jahrbuch Für Medienphilosophie 7 (1): 97-121. 2021.One is occasionally reminded of Foucault's proclamation in a 1970 interview that "perhaps, one day this century will be known as Deleuzian." Less often is one compelled to update and restart with a supplementary counter-proclamation of the mathematician, David Lindley: "the twenty-first century would be a Bayesian era..." The verb tenses of both are conspicuous. // To critically attend to what is today often feared and demonized, but also revered, deployed, and commonly referred to as algorithm(…Read more
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578Biopolitics & Probability: Agamben & KierkegaardIn Antonio Marcos Marcos & Colby Dickinson (eds.), Agamben and the Existentialists. pp. 46-64. 2021.This project retraces activations of Kierkegaard in the development of political theology. It suggests alternative modes of states of exception than those attributed to him by Schmitt, Taubes and Agamben. Several Kierkegaardian themes open themselves to 'something like pure potential' in Agamben, namely: living death, animality, criminality, auto-constitution, modification, liturgy, love and certain articulations of improbabilities. Attention is drawn to a modal ontology and auto-constitution a…Read more
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810Techno-Telepathy & Silent Subvocal Speech-Recognition RoboticsHORIZON. Studies in Phenomenology 10 (1): 232-257. 2021.The primary focus of this project is the silent and subvocal speech-recognition interface unveiled in 2018 as an ambulatory device wearable on the neck that detects a myoelectrical signature by electrodes worn on the surface of the face, throat, and neck. These emerge from an alleged “intending to speak” by the wearer silently-saying-something-to-oneself. This inner voice is believed to occur while one reads in silence or mentally talks to oneself. The artifice does not require spoken sounds…Read more
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664Genealogy of Algorithms: Datafication as Transvaluationle Foucaldien 6 (1): 1-43. 2020.This article investigates religious ideals persistent in the datafication of information society. Its nodal point is Thomas Bayes, after whom Laplace names the primal probability algorithm. It reconsiders their mathematical innovations with Laplace's providential deism and Bayes' singular theological treatise. Conceptions of divine justice one finds among probability theorists play no small part in the algorithmic data-mining and microtargeting of Cambridge Analytica. Theological traces within m…Read more
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275Innards of Ingarden: Physiology of TimeIn Dominika Czakon, Natalia Anna Michna & Leszek Sosnowski (eds.), Roman Ingarden and His Times. pp. 25-42. 2019.This project begins with the selective sensory experience suggested by lngarden followed by an insensitivity he insinuates to digestive processes. This is juxtaposed with an oenological explanation of phenomenal sedimentation offered by Jean-Luc Marion. It compares the dynamics of time in the former with the those of wine in the latter. Emphasis is given to lngarden's insinuation of time as fluid, liquid, or aquatic. It revisits Ingarden's physiological explanations of partially-open systems by …Read more
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727Hyde within the Boundaries of Mere Jekyll: Evil in Kant & StevensonPolish Journal of Aesthetics 56 (1/2020): 63-84. 2020.This essay experiments with Kant’s writings on rational religion distilled through the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as canonical confrontations with primal problems of evil. It suggests boundaries between Stevenson’s characters and their occupations comparable to the those conflicted in the Kantian university, namely, law, medicine, theology, and philosophy (which makes a short anticipatory appearance in his earlier text on rational religion). With various faculties it investigates diff…Read more
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538Advent of Auto-Affection: Givenness & Reception in Jean-Luc MarionActa Universitas Carolinae Theologica 9 (1): 31-44. 2019.Marion obliquely suggests that we return to religion when we think through and struggle with those topics that philosophy excludes or subjugates. This paper investigates a selection of such subjugated motifs. Marion’s recent claim (perhaps even ‘principle’): “auto-affection alone makes possible hetero-affection,” will be examined through piecemeal influences made upon its development through Marion’s return to religious thinking beyond the delimited jurisdiction of philosophy. Although still pro…Read more
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327The Spiritual & Sensuous: Aesthetics of Adorno & ScrutonWassard Elea Rivista 6 (3): 127-139. 2018.
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434Speech & Oral Phenomena: Memory, Mouth, Writing, Life-DeathFrench Literature Series 38 209-230. 2011.Following one of Jacques Derrida’s early questions — namely, How is writing involved in speech? — this essay reconsiders the role of the tongue and the sense of taste in the oral phenomena of speaking and saying. The contact the tongue makes with the mouth or teeth is just as much a materialization of language as what is commonly called “writing.” The tongue acts as a pen and the mouth, as a blank page (or palimpsest). Mouthed writing is accompanied by sense experiences. There are various selfta…Read more
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372The Taste to Come: The Lick of FaithPostscripts 3 (2-3): 238-262. 2007.This article exploits a core defect in the phenomenology of sensation and self. Although phenomenology has made great strides in redeeming the body from cognitive solipisisms that often follow short-sighted readings of Descartes and Kant, it has not grappled with the specific kind of self-reflexivity that emerges in the sense of taste with the thoroughness it deserves. This path is illuminated by the works of Martin Luther, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida as they attempt to think through th…Read more
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389Ethics is a Gustics: Phenomenology, Gender & Oral SexAssuming Gender 2 (1): 18-45. 2011.The 'traditional philosophical prestige' of seeing and touching, as analyzed by Emmanuel Levinas, comes to dominate the qualities of the other three senses. An investigation of the roles of these prestigious senses, along with the resultant privileged sense-organs of the hand and the eye, within phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and gender- or queer-theory suggests that the part of the prestige of touch will have been related to its function in the phenomenality of feeling. Yet the sense of taste s…Read more
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33The Immersion Method II (Logic & Malcolm X)Inside Higher Ed, May 3. 2012.Virgil W. Brower writes that courses based on intense discussions of great works of literature need not be limited to elite institutions
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Religion & Repugnance: Empiricism, Political Theology, Projective DisgustIn Lars Aagaard-Mogensen & Jane Forsey (eds.), On Taste: Aesthetic Exchanges, Cambridge Scholars Press. pp. 53-68. 2018."[O]ther contributors argue that taste has a clear epistemic function. Brower cites Agamben as claiming that taste is a priveleged locus for knowledge...A phenomenology of taste, then, is no mere trivial or personal matter, but one with wide-ranging consequences. And some of these conseqences are ethical...[D]oes the debasement of taste indeed breed xenophobic oppression, as Brower is sure that it does? [sic:)] These are contentious claims. Surely a person of exemplary aesthetics and gustatory t…Read more
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413Beeing & Time: Kiss of Chemoreception & the Bug in Dasein's MouthIn Laurence Talairach-Vielmas & Marie Bouchet (eds.), Insects in Literature & the Arts, . pp. 197-217. 2014."Brower explores the way philosophers were inspired by entomological social systems and communication to reflect on human psyche, social behavior, community organization, communication, and inter-individual relationships. His essay rehearses the swarms of insects embedded in contemporary philosophy and literary theory, not only showing how many of the major concepts (or philosophemes) in continental philosophy – sexuality, politics, thinking, time, interdependence, and language – draw lessons fr…Read more
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621Sigmund Freud in Agamben's PhilosophyIn Adam Kotsko & Carlo Salzani (eds.), Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 242-251. 2017.
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746Jacques Derrida in Agamben's PhilosophyIn Adam Kotsko & Carlo Salzani (eds.), Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 252-261. 2017.
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Loyola University, ChicagoDepartment of Philosophy
Department of TheologyRegular Faculty (Part-time)
Prague, Czechia
Areas of Specialization
Continental Philosophy |
European Philosophy |