Zanan Akin

In "Contributions to Philosophy", Heidegger approaches the Gigantic merely “being-historically”, but what if we could break with his narrative and reveal a real lesson about capitalism in our present from this conception? For the Gigantic presupposes a break with the limits of nature that we can only truly understand if we trace it back to a form of laboring activity, which by not "forging" anything "in its boundaries" anymore, breaks with any boundary, and in constantly one-upping its means cannot find any "end" in both senses– a telos and the point of exhaustion– and thus becomes truly unbounded. The paper shows that capital and the Gigantic are conditioned by each other and that we cannot overcome one without considering the other. It provides some insight into why Marx was wrong to expect the overcoming of capital by overbidding the productivity of labor, but also why Heidegger’s privileging of the boundary in a full negligence of capital ends up in the seduction by the fantasy of the original site, which seems to be reflected in a terrible mixture today: The boundlessness of capital mixed with today’s identitarian zeal of saving "borders" from a figure fear, namely “the migrant”.

This article analyzes the condition of possibility for hitherto apolitical phenomena, such as vaccination, to be politicized and articulated as determinants of “belonging” to a worldview. It takes the polarization through symbols during COVID as a symptom of a competition to secure one’s own share of narrowing global resources, appearing as a symbolic clash of belonging to the middle class. Drawing on the popular show of the pandemic period, Squid Game, it shows that the strict logic of equivalence in the show serves as a perfect allegory for modern equality in late capitalist times: an equal validity of the unequal only perfects competition and stiffens indifference toward inequality. The article argues that it is the indifference of commodities that turns apolitical phenomena into a Kampfplatz of competition for self-distinction. Crystallized in the clash of so-called “reactionaries” and “progressives” during the pandemic, both attitudes can be understood as varying means of winning the competition for a narrowing share of global resources, vis-à-vis the fact that none of them counts more than the other.

Once a “heroic” maxim of the distinguished few, Nietzsche’s motif of distinguishing oneself from the herd seems today to have produced its own “herd,” such that the waste form of Nietzsche’s radical authenticity has become the new mainstream. Whereas Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was the distinguished “one,” determined to teach humankind wisdom, today we encounter countless social-media Zarathustras, all unique and distinguished, incessantly dispersing wisdom. Yet precisely here a metaphysically decisive question emerges: if everyone belongs to a “rare breed” today, what has become of the “many”? Guided by this question, the article pursues the metaphysical traces of the relationship between the “many” and the “few” and explores the motif of uniqueness from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to the Instagram Zarathustras of the present.

How can we think the link between Heidegger’s Ereignis and Badiou’s évenement, i.e., the link between event as "à-venir" and event as "er-äugen?" This paper suggests tracing this link back to a diagnosis of modernity shared by Heidegger and Badiou, namely, the indifference which is to be thought as the result of an all-encompassing equivalence of anything with anything else. Consequently, the event is revealed as a figure of “rupture with indifference.” This conception has crucial temporal implications. An event as a break with indifference implies that in the mere presence of the “now” that equates any moment to any other, there is no “present.” A present can only be created in a withdrawal from mere presence, and as such the present in modernity is absent. This idea seems to be challenged by François Hartog’s term “presentism.” According to Hartog, the present, far from being absent, is today omnipresent and it fabricates its own past and future. This omnipresence of the present suspends historical time altogether. Considering that the event as a rupture with indifference departs from a lack of present rather than an omnipresent present, the following question arises: How does the event as a rupture with indifference relate to presentism?

This article takes as its starting point from a paradoxical phenomenon that can be observed since the rise of social media: sharing snapshot pictures of solitary activities and expressing the deep joy found in solitude. A paradox, as the publicity of joy in solitude annihilates the very possibility of solitude. The article analyzes this phenomenon using Arendt’s distinction between solitude and loneliness, linking it to Kierkegaard’s notion of despair. It suggests that the joy of solitude asserted in public is in fact an expression of the despair of loneliness, and that it reflects a tacit aspiration for togetherness. Marketed by the personal development industry as an art of how to be all-one with the universe, solitude in fact does not entail any capacity to build a stable world. Even the “self” in solitude that is presented in the perfect mise-en-scène in fact cannot overcome the equivocity of being some-one and no-one. The article reads this collective phenomenon as a symptom of the absence of a new form of an in-between in the twenty-first century, where we are connected to the whole world and to others more than in any previous phase of modern history, yet where we at the same time have never before been so worldless, thrown back to our wordless subjectivity, of being a “self” that we all want to develop, realize, and enjoy.

This article departs from a diagnosis formulated by the "Future Institute", according to which the differences between “city” and “countryside” are disappearing and lifestyle becomes decisive, so that dwelling is increasingly seen as becoming independent of the place such that the "place" is replaced by "life style". Against this background, the article asks what the condition of possibility for this "re-placement" can be that de-places the "place"? In other words, what constitues the "metropolitan" in a metropole or the "provincial" in the province today, if place becomes trivial and lifestyle decisive? The article approaches this question by identifying lived experience (Erlebnis), or the capacity to generate and enjoy lived experiences, as an underlying dynamic in the trivialization of the place, developed through a critical engagement with Heidegger's conception of "Lived Experience" and its unexplored repercussions in contemporary sociological approaches.

This article analyzes the condition of possibility for hitherto apolitical phenomena, such as vaccination, to be politicized and articulated as determinants of “belonging” to a worldview. It takes the polarization through symbols during COVID as a symptom of a competition to secure one’s own share of narrowing global resources, appearing as a symbolic clash of belonging to the middle class. Drawing on the popular show of the pandemic period, "Squid Game", it shows that the strict logic of equivalence in the show serves as a perfect allegory for modern equality in late capitalist times: an equal validity of the unequal only perfects competition and stiffens indifference toward inequality. The article argues that it is the indifference of commodities that turns apolitical phenomena into a Kampfplatz of competition for self-distinction. Crystallized in the clash of so-called “reactionaries” and “progressives” during the pandemic, both attitudes can be understood as opposing camps of winning the competition for a narrowing share of global resources, vis-à-vis the fact that, just like in the brutal indifference of the "Squid Game", none of them counts more than the other.

Modern equality is not a flat sameness. Rather, it is based on the right to difference, even in economic terms: Both a CEO and a cleaner in a modern rule of law [Rechtsstaat], no matter how radically different they may be in all realms of life, have an equal legal validity and value as legal persons. This means that there is no hierarchy between them. Difference in the modern sense, however, cannot be conceived without modern equality: premodernity knew no differences, but only hierarchies. So, what we take for granted today as our subjective particularities and value under the banner of diversity, is a product of modernity. Yet a crucial question arises here, that is: what is the condition of possibility of stripping individual particularities of any hierarchy and conceiving them as equally valid subjective differences? This paper will work out a crucial condition of possibility of modern equality based on Kant’s comparison between his barber and his wigmaker in a footnote in his essay On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice (1793). There, Kant denies the legal-political equality of the worker (operarius) and the artisan (artifex), with the sole difference that the former only has its labor power of which he allows others to make use, while the latter produces a product that he can sell. This comparison reveals, ex negativo, a crucial condition of the possibility of the modern concept of equality, that is, of thinking differences without hierarchy. This condition concerns the equal validity of human labor as an abstract unified quality which established itself in later modernity and became the mediating instance in the development of modern equality as the right to develop subjective differences. Kant’s comparison of the barber and the wigmaker points out a threshold in modernity: it is quite striking that Kant acknowledges the abstract labor, but does not recognize it as an equally valid quality, that is as a mere quantity and as such, the basis of all production, but puts a clear hierarchy between labor and work. What Kant’s wigmaker and barber will show us is that it is the dissolution of the hierarchy between their activities that is transferred to their political and social existence. The analysis of this hierarchy, as a last remnant of premodernity, can allow us to conceive modern equality as the right to difference. The main aim is then to show that it is the fully established transformation of a conception of human labor from quality to an equivalent [gleich gültig] and indifferent [gleichgültig] quality, i.e. as a mere equivalized quality as quantity in later modernity, that allows the modern concept of equality in the legal sphere to flourish in a far-reaching room for subjective differences without the legal-political hierarchies of premodern times.

This contribution departs from a latent social-ontological diagnosis in Heidegger’s "Contributions to Philosophy" concerning machination in modernity: Gleichgültigkeit, that is, the equivalence of beings turning into an indifference of Being. The paper argues that the notions of “the gigantic” (das Riesenhafte) and “lived experience” (Erlebnis), which Heidegger develops in this context, should be understood as unfolding phenomena of this diagnosis. The main claim is that both “the gigantic” and “lived experience” acquire a new significance in today’s regime of one-upmanship under the imperative of “creating a difference” to distinguish oneself from others. A "gigantic success" is defined today not only by achieving what has never been done before, but also by accomplishing what is considered impossible. In its present form, the gigantic is nothing but about the success of producing the most “impressive” lived experiences that are one-upped almost on a daily basis. The paper takes Elon Musk as an emblem of the fusion between the gigantic and lived experience as the culminating figures of Gleichgültigkeit in the twenty-first century: the one-upmanship of “impressive” achievements, the breaking of records of the imaginable, the production of never-before-seen lived experiences and unimaginable wealth accumulation are all contemporary appearances of what Heidegger once called the gigantic that only seals the disappearance of any true greatness.

What happens when worldly reality is no longer constituted by the durable presence of things, but by the projected impact of the self? This article takes the popular slogan of charitable entrepreneurship, “Make an impact!”, as a symptom of the privatization of what Arendt once called the 'worldly reality' in everyday social media interactions. It juxtaposes two caricatured social-media ideal types—the Poetry-Slam Personality and the Big-Picture Personality—and traces, in the identity of their apparent opposition, the disappearance of the world as a political space of reliable appearances.

Confused between their insatiable hunger for ‘self-realization,’ their enjoyment of petit bonheurs of life and an aggressive will to preserve their welfare position, for not going downhill and joining the 50% of the world population who own nothing, today’s middle-class individual seems to choose one of two ‘fronts of worldviews,’ of which the attitude toward ‘refugees’ constitutes a new ‘battlefield.’ So, with the flow of Ukrainian refugees after the Russian aggression against Ukraine, one of the most worrying questions in Germany has been if the experience of the ‘welcome culture’ of 2015, that is a severe shift from hospitality to hostility, would repeat. Statistics show that so far, it has not been the case. This paper addresses the question of what might differ in the experience of ‘the Ukrainian refugee wave’ from the ‘welcome culture’ of 2015. Tracing both hospitality and then the shift to hostility in 2015 back to its middle-class dynamics, the paper tries to conceptualize a difference in attitudes within the middle-class toward both ‘refugee crises.

This article approaches a seemingly self-evident concept of our present: “creative labor,” which appears as the establishment of a previously unimaginable connection between technology, art, and “play.” The notion of creative labor promises meaning and the dissolution of wage labor into play, while at the same time attributing to one’s income-generating activity a heroic “mission to save the world.” In this way, a life in which (wage) labor unites meaning, enjoyment, uniqueness, and income becomes a contemporary model of a fulfilled life, a life that was not lived in vain. In the present, one author in particular has examined not only the concept of creative labor but also the broader social framework that conditions this form of activity, including the emergence and rise of the “new middle class” that sustains it: Andreas Reckwitz. His Society of Singularities can, in a certain sense, be read as a manifesto of the rise—and perhaps the fall—of this new middle class. The article moves within Reckwitz’s framework and asks: how do we think notions such as “creative labor” and “singularity” with Marx?

This paper reflects on the transformation of what Arendt calls the “in-between”, i.e. the world of things in the age of digitalization and its consequences for the distinction between public and private. Drawing on Arendt and Heidegger, it argues that digital everydayness challenges the traditional experience of a shared world mediated by things. The loss of such worldly mediation produces new forms of loneliness, distrust, and political disorientation. The article suggests that the crisis of reality and contemporary polarization are symptoms of this transition and explores the possibility of new forms of relationality and a digital common world that could serve as a new “in-between.”

Can we think of different appearances of oneness in our existential experience of being one single person, such as when we are alone, or in the presence of our loved one, or of a friend? The present paper claims that oneness can appear and be experienced variously and tries to elaborate on this claim by analyzing the appearances of oneness in loneliness, solitude, love and friendship. It begins with Hannah Arendt’s distinction between solitude as “two in one” and loneliness as “deserted one” as two distinct appearances of oneness and builds upon this a conceptualization of oneness in love (inspired by Alain Badiou’s work) by linking it to loneliness, and a conceptualization of oneness in friendship (inspired by Hannah Arendt’s work) by linking it to solitude. It aims to show how different modalities of being-together can change the way how we experience a world and the self in that world.

Both Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou refer to a ‘disorientation of the world’ in different moments of their oeuvre. For Arendt, a disorientation emerges if the common sense dissolves; for Badiou, if there is an absolute primacy of negation and an inability to affirm anything universal. This paper takes current protest movements as a serious symptom of a disorientation in the sense of both thinkers. For it seems that today far from affirming any universal point, ‘protests’ seem to turn into ‘contests’ of ‘being against’. Conceptualized as a dialogue of thought between Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou, the paper aims to reveal a profound crisis behind this symptom, that is a critical tension between two concurrent promises of modern democracy, namely ‘equality’ and ‘right to difference’. In that frame, the paper tries to think a renewed politics of equality which can affirm plurality and difference without falling either into indifference of being the same species or into the cult of ‘me’ that is a fantasy of absolute difference.

By determining sensus communis as the “sensation of reality,” Hannah Arendt invites us to take its sense character literally. If it is a sense, like the other senses, sensus communis must be vulnerable to blockage, disturbance, and even loss. This article argues that this vulnerability cannot be captured within an epistemological framework of “objective knowledge”, because what is today at stake is the object itself, namely the world as an in-between. The question thus is whether there is a common world at all—i.e. whether the world appears as a political space. To pursue this question, I mobilize the speculative potential of the prefix Ge- in German Gemeinsinn: the word’s internal tension between two poles, namely gemein as “common” and as “mean”, points to a passing over of common into the privatized Ge-mein (“mine”) that turns mistrust into the only––perverted––common sense today. The title “The World is (Ge-)Mine” names this dynamic: the world is shared, yet it becomes deceptive and unhomely where it is gathered as the mere availability of what each ‘I’ appropriates as its own. Reading Arendt along a diagonal to Hegel, I show that the realness of the world is neither a natural faculty nor a transcendental guarantee but an affirmative creation—ultimately bound to what Arendt calls the “supreme capacity of men”: the capacity for beginning.

This contribution presents an early stage of my research of "thinking trust with Hannah Arendt". It departs from the German term for credibility, "glaubwürdig", which literally means “worthy of belief” By highlihting a conceptual split between belief (Glauben) and what is considered worthy of belief (glaub-würdig) it aims to manifest the narrowness of debates on trust that reduces it to "credibility". The contribution develops the argument that judging something as credible(zum-Glauben-würdig) always-already presupposes a mediation between the object of judgment and the self. Such mediation introduces a distance from the immediacy of belief and turns it into an object of selection and utility. The article further claims that this logic of belief-worthiness dissolves knowledge in belief and contributes to the fetishization of expertise today (whose 'expertise' lay people cannot just comprehend but "believe") and to the pluralization and politicization of "facts" (facts vs. alternative facts). Against both dogmatic foundations and purely empirical skepticism, it develops, with Arendt a conception of trust grounded in the experience of the same appearing world in the plurality of human experience. It concludes that the possibility of recognizing facts as facts ultimately depends on trust (and not on belief-worthiness) in a common experience of the world, and that overcoming contemporary distrust is primarily a political question concerning the appearance of a common world, rather than being a mere epistemological problem of objectivity.

This paper examines identitarianism through a reconstruction of Hegel’s concept of concrete universality. It basically argues that identity, in its social-philosophical sense, is a specifically modern phenomenon that emerges as a byproduct of the modern right to difference. This right dissolves hierarchical distinctions and grants equal validity to subjective particularities. Paradoxically, however, precisely the universalization of this 'right' creates the conditions under which identity becomes a problem, especially in late modernity, where the following question asserts itself for many: "how can I assume my particularity when my difference is as valid as that of any other legal subject?" The article shows that, strikingly, this question is not entirely new. It traces its philosophical origins to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s critique of Spinoza and to the responses of German Idealism. By reconstructing this debate, the article reverses the view on the relation between identity and difference, by arguing that contemporary identitarianism expresses primarily a fear of the loss of difference rather than a longing for dominance. Under today's imperative of "making a difference", the longing for identity appears in an empty form and shifts toward a longing for any difference whatsoever. The article traces this specific form of the demand for identity back to a crisis in the mediation between the universal and the particular.

Can we think of a principle that has historically made democracy possible but also caused its current crisis? The present book claims to find this principle in modern equality and calls it Gleich-Gültigkeit. This word has a double meaning in German, denoting both equal validity and indifference, and the principle of modern equality is grounded precisely in this room of tension between equal validity and indifference. Modern democracy abolishes all pre-modern hierarchies and aims for equality, not for the sake of sameness, but for the equal validity of differences. Precisely here lies the tension. Elevating differences to equal validity simultaneously involves the indifferentiation of inequalities. Paradoxically, then, modern equality systematically produces inequality and creates indifference. Does this mean that we should abandon the idea of equality? What if today is the perfect time to rethink equality—an equality without indifference? ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-––––––––––––––––––––––(German) Was ist der Grund für die Krise der Gleichheit und damit der modernen Demokratie? Das vorliegende Buch geht systematisch dieser Frage nach. Die moderne Demokratie hebt alle vormodernen Hierarchien auf und zielt auf Gleichheit, jedoch nicht im Sinne einer bloßen Gleichmachung; es geht um eine Bewahrung der subjektiven Besonderheiten bei gleichzeitiger Erhebung derselben zur _gleichen Gültigkeit_. In diesem Prinzip der Gleich-Gültigkeit liegt jedoch ein Spannungsverhältnis: Indem subjektive Besonderheiten zur _gleichen Gültigkeit_ erhoben werden, werden sie immer auch _vergleichgültigt_. Die moderne Gleichheit nivelliert also Differenzen und produziert dadurch systematisch Ungleichheit. Dieses Spannungsverhältnis verspiegelt sich in unserer Gegenwart in äußerster Schärfe: Ökonomisch sind wir ungleicher denn je, zugleich vereint dennoch nur eine Sehnsucht nach Differenz alle politischen Richtungen. Diese Sehnsucht gründet in der Einheit des entgegengesetzten Empfindens, dass alle Differenzen gleichgültig geworden sind; für manche heißt Gleichgültigkeit ein Verlust der Identität, für andere Verlust der Vielfalt; geteilt ist nun die Sehnsucht, die Gleichgültigkeit zu überwinden. Muss aber die Idee der Gleichheit preisgegeben werden, um die Gleichgültigkeit zu überwinden? Dieses Buch plädiert dafür, dass es gerade heute Zeit und höchste Zeit ist, die Gleichheit neu zu denken, und arbeitet die Idee einer Gleichheit ohne Gleichgültigkeit heraus.

In his essay "The Ethical Life", Axel Honneth distinguishes between two forms of social normativity: mere social validity (Geltung) and normative validity (Gültigkeit). According to Honneth, the objective validity of social norms must be distinguished from the mere validity of social conventions, insofar as validity designates the morally universal form of normativity, whereas mere validity emerges only through individual and communicative self-determination within a concrete social situation. Although Honneth explicitly formulates this distinction, he does not pursue the enigmatic difference between these two terms. Yet this difference, which contains an implicit philosophical implication, becomes palpable when one attempts to translate the following sentence into another language: “Das gleich Gültige genießt nicht immer die gleiche Geltung.” In English, this formulation risks sounding like a cliché of postmodern pseudo-depth: “What is equally valid does not always enjoy equal validity.” This paper therefore asks a simple question: how can we understand the relation between Geltung and Gültigkeit? It seeks to draw from this relation several consequences for the legal principle of modern equality.

A Communaristocratic Response to the Call of Gaia: Formation of a Noble Indifference Towards Religious Narratives of Nature. This paper takes its starting point from Badiou’s recent diagnosis of “religiosity” in the “dominant current of ecology.” Insofar that this dominant current shies away from considering the real cause of the catastrophic phenomena - which lies according to Badiou in globalized capitalism - its calls for taking necessary measures to save the planet not only end up in feebleness but also strengthen the regime that it allegedly criticizes. The paper traces Nietzschean motifs in Badiou’s diagnosis and suggests linking it to what Nietzsche calls moral-religious humanization of nature. Insofar as today’s religiosity does not refer to any concrete religion, the popularization of the “Gaia Theory” constitutes a prominent expression of a religious conception of nature. What the paper shows is that this kind of conception of nature catalyzes today a capitalist re-articulation of economy and religion which leads to an expansion of circulation of commodity exchange. In other words, capitalism in its latemodern face, is conserved in a sustainable fashion. The objective of the paper is forming a noble indifference vis-à-vis the frame of what we can call moral consumption as the product of such a conception of nature, that is an orientation which affirms the infinite egalitarian power of creativity, instead of being content with the “happiness of the smallest moral superiority” in sustainable consumption. By thinking Badiou’s new communism and Nietzsche’s new aristocracy together, the paper articulates a position that reflects a disjunctive synthesis of Badiou’s radical egalitarian and Nietzsche’s radical aristocratic orientations, which it suggests coining communaristocracy.