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This paper tries to provide some clues and red threads through the magisterial work of Eric Santner. The first part takes the point of departure in his book on Schreber (My Own Private Germany) and tries to lay down a basic narrative that subtends most of Santner's work and can be encapsulated by "the secret history of modernity." This narrative is briefly spelled out through the relationship of Schreber the father (the "surplus father" as the continuation of the enlightenment), Doctor Flechsig (the seminal representative of the modern university discourse), and Schreber the son, the embodiment of the symptom of the progress of modernity. The second part of the paper scrutinizes three interrelated concepts proposed by Santner, too muchness, the surplus of immanence, and manatheism, which provide conceptual tools to address the break of modernity. The three concepts are brought into relation with the historical placement of psychoanalysis in modernity, the dialectic of "what remains" and the emergence of the new, and finally with the nature of the exception pertaining to the notion of the surplus. The last part, "the punning of reason," examines Santner's frequent use of puns ("puncepts") as a conceptual strategy to deal with the paradoxes of universality. Punning is taken not as an addition or embellishment but as a poignant way to propose a new status of universality, related to what Lacan named lalangue. The three different perspectives try to show the different ways by which Santner's work addresses the core conundrums of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Childhood & Philosophy is the property of International Council for Philosophical Inquiry with Children and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper considers the riots and protests that irrupted around the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020. It examines the politics of noise and listening in relation to the growing calls for abolition, asking how we can listen to, and for, an abolitionist imperative. The paper contextualizes the riot as a form of struggle that responds to the crises produced by capitalism in its circulatory phase, specifically the production of racialized surplus populations that are subjected to intensive forms of policing. The riot is figured as a politics of immanence that suggests what Ashon T. Crawley calls 'otherwise possibilities'. The paper tracks the historical conditions that give rise to riots and follows the noise in the street into platform media and back again in order to theorize the riot as a distinct form of struggle that is organized as well as contagious. Turning to the sonicity of the riot, the noise of this collective formation is figured in metaphysical terms as that which accounts for transformation and possibility – an originary turbulence with no single point of origin that foregrounds the relationality of the world. The paper then elaborates on listening as a crucial modality for generative collectivity and solidarity, developing an abolitionist conception of listening that attunes to relationality of noise and foregrounds anticipation and possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where does life live? What is alive? In modernist/dualist thinking, we might assume that life lives through cause and effect—an acting of someone onto something. When conceived through an Indigenous-Māori concept of mauri—life vitality— the immanence of living as a relational field is revealed. An ethical imperative to sustain the wellness of the life-field, mauri-ora, is concurrent with the concept of mauri. This paper philosophically probes the immanent and ethical conditions of this life-field and its relational sustenance as the very ground for design thinking. Here, I explore an architectural project, Te Uru Taumatua, as a case for thinking through mauri-ora (life-field)asimmanent ethics in relation to an evocation of ecological vitality. This project becomes a bridge for thinking immanent connections across Indigenous-Maori and contemporary ecological thinking. This paper argues that architecture’s role as an Anthropocenic actor creates the conditions necessary to instantiate socio-ecologically situated immanent ethicsasdesign ethics. What is fundamental to this approach is to reveal howecological designis a thinking manifest here, in this case study,asthe relation of mauri to mauri-ora. Here, Te Uru Taumatua helps to explore an understanding of mauri-ora as an immanent ethics which bridges (design) thinking and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grace Tiffany's debut novel, My Father Had a Daughter, is a vibrant tale of uninhibited desire, revenge and loss in the shape of a fictionalized 'memoir' of Judith, Shakespeare's youngest daughter. The present paper will focus on the diegetic narrator's trajectory of becoming; the theoretical framework will be informed by some of Deleuze and Guattari's most important concepts, such as lines of flight, desiring machine, nomad and body without organs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Eikón / Imago is the property of CAPIRE Research Team at Complutense University of Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The sociologist Bruno Latour has often expressed aversion to immanent critique, framing actor-network theory in terms of focus on visible phenomena. In spite of this, research on financial performativity inspired by Latour’s perspective can still be interpreted in terms of immanent critique and related to Political Economy (a critical discipline), through Kant’s critique of metaphysics as a ‘regulative axiom’. Research on financial performativity has uncovered evidence of the existence of constructive processes that show how an idea (like a financial model) can become something like an ‘object’. This ‘objectivity’ appears to contradict Kant’s critique of metaphysics - that there always remains a gap between our ideas and the world itself. This paper therefore explores financial performativity as a ‘contradiction’, historicizing it to argue that ‘Barnesian performativity’ and ‘financial liquidity’ are ‘immanent’ to one another in the events of recent financial crises. The paper conducts this interpretation to provide a new conceptualization of ‘financial liquidity’ that is more empirically apparent, helping to overcome some of the limits in the discussion of ‘liquidity’ in Political Economy (that Latour might want to highlight), where discussion occurs in metaphysical terms difficult to connect to actual events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts with the premise that the body is the primal media: a "body-worlding". This event folds the world into its becoming-self, and unfolds a qualitative vibration. This is the dance of affect: being affected and affecting in return. Our daily lives are made of affective states. The concepts affective immersion and incorporeal materiality are here articulated in order to think affect embodiment, and embodiment itself, as body-worlding. It creates the conditions to rethink media, interactivity, and participatory art. Affective immersion occurs every time we are totally immersed in a situation's unfolding dynamic relation: we become the unfolding relationality. The paper argues for a materiality real but abstract that has been called "incorporeal". This is the affective territory where affective immersion happens. Deleuze and Guattari would call this territory a "plane of immanence". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to a special issue of Environmental Education Research on New Materialisms and Environmental Education, we begin with a brief overview to this publishing project and to scholarship on new materialisms and environmental education. Against this backdrop, we then discuss various themes of significance arising from the broader tumult of thought that occurs in the 17 papers that bring these areas into conversation. In brief, papers gathered in this collection illustrate a series of engagements with: (1) new empiricism and post-qualitative inquiry; (2) the meeting of politics, ethics, and decolonial theory with new materialisms; (3) conceptions of nature, environment, sustainability and the human subject; and (4) new materialisms as environmental pedagogy. We recognise that readers will imagine, detect and respond in diverse ways to the papers and the thematics on their own terms too, noting that other inclusions in the collection would likely have generated different patterns and affordances for insight, challenge and debate. Thus, we argue that in some senses, the collection must remain open rather than closed, while we also invite further contributions on the topics, that engage with what the collection does and does not offer, and to rework it. In other words, we trust our introduction underscores the immanent performativity expected of many of the new materialisms, and highlights their potential to forge axiological pathways away from dominant onto-epistemologies of environmental education research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gilles Deleuze spends his whole life exploring the question of what philosophy is by unconventional approaches to establish the ontology of Becoming and he collaborates with Félix Guattari, integrating Chinese thought into his philosophical discourse directly to support the Becoming theory. Different from the tendency to associate Deleuze's references to Tao with the philosophy of arts or body aesthetics, this paper argues Tao is introduced because of the consistency with the multiplicity of immanence raised by Deleuze who has updated the connotation of Western philosophical concepts with the help of Tao. Therefore, Tao is no longer defined as the ultimate Being claimed by some French sinologists and philosophers, but as an internal field or the Plane. Accordingly, it can be concluded that the immanence without any certainty (the multiplicity of immanence) itself is a kind of nomadic life, which is also the real meaning of Tao. In this way, Chinese philosophy's function has far more significant than footnotes and evidence in the construction of Deleuze's theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ontological turn in the humanities and social sciences has prompted some scholars of education to shift their focus of inquiry away from questions of epistemology (i.e., knowledge) to metaphysical matters related to being and the nature of existence. In this paper, I turn to ontology and make an argument for integrating and explicitly teaching theories of immanence in teacher education courses. I argue that integrating and explicitly teaching theories of immanence in teacher education courses can radically reorient students' thinking, being, and doing, which can fundamentally change how they are able to see, perceive, and make sense of events that unfold in their classrooms. Using vignettes of two encounters at an Italian preschool, I think with theory (Jackson and Mazzei 2012; St. Pierre, 2008, Ringrose and Renolds 2014) to demonstrate how philosophies of immanence reorient thought and produce "a lively new ontology" in which "the world's radical aliveness comes to light" (Barad 2007, p. 33). The theoretical concepts I use include political theorist Jane Bennett's (2010) concept of thing power, along with physicist Karen Barad's (2007) concepts of entanglement and intra-action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of transcendence and its relation to immanence is not new in the history of philosophy, theology, and political theory. Two positions seem to demarcate post-metaphysical political thought on this issue. On the one hand, there is the radical view of transcendence, a hyper-transcendence that is ever more beyond, unalloyed by any mundane thematization. On the other hand, there is the radical view of immanence emphasizing that we should put transcendence behind us and be content with a profaned immanent world. This paper explores how the Christian idea of incarnation, if approached as a transimmanent hypostatic modality that reveals how the radicalism of transcendence is realized in immanence, may offer insights into the syntagma "creaturely life". Such a perspective is set against Agamben's alternative elaboration of creaturely life as form-of-life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the resonances between Deleuze's theory of subjectivity and the Buddhist view of subjectivity. Although much scholarship has been focused on Deleuze's theory of subjectivity, relatively little has been directed at a comparative study of how his theory of subjectivity resonates with the idea of de-centred subjectivity in Buddhist philosophy. In addition to this, the paper explores the ethical and political implications of such a notion of subjectivity. In the first part, it examines Deleuze's theory of subjectivity and in the second part, it examines the theory of subjectivity in Buddhist philosophy. In the third part, it considers the ethical implications of the Deleuzian and Buddhist theory of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to elucidate Franz Brentano's concept of immanent object through his own words and from his own perspective. The prevalent account of Brentano's revival of intentionality, his initial failure to distinguish between object and content, and his wrong‐headed immanentism, is largely derived from his students. Brentano's objection to it, although well known, is seldom heeded. In fact, plenty of guidelines have been provided by Brentano himself in his writings on how his concept of immanent object is to be understood. I begin with his distinction between two senses of "object," which, I argue, must be clearly set apart from distinction between two modes of object. I then examine three different interpretations of the term "in‐existence": the locative, the inherentist, and the objective interpretation. In the end, after dismissing the first two interpretations, I argue that Brentano is best understood as maintaining an objective and deflationary account of mental in‐existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how one text—the speech of Anchises from Vergil's Aeneid 6—was of great use for two Christian apologists: Minucius Felix and Lactantius. Both authors used Vergil's text to make important arguments regarding monotheism. The problem, however, is that the speech of Anchises not only refers to divine immanence, but Stoic pantheism. This latter idea would be seemingly problematic for Christians to espouse given that their sacred text makes a clear distinction between creator and creation. To deal with this particular difficulty, both Minucius Felix and Lactantius appeal to the doctrine of the powers to explain how God can be both transcendent and immanent. Minucius Felix and Lactantius employ the Mantuan poet not merely for rhetorical flourish, nor to display their erudition, but rather to make important apologetic points. In so doing, the Latin authors under discussion answer, in various ways, the difficult question of how much is too much reliance upon pagan literature and learning. What is at stake is a subject no less important than their own cultural identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the title suggests, this paper looks at the Deleuzian concept of body without organs and compares it with Indian Philosophy. In the Indian context, the concept of moksha/ nirvana comes near to it as both are practices that aim at liberation; here, 'liberation' is never the awaited end of the process but the process itself. The traditional western substantialism rests on things whereas Deleuze, like Indian Philosophy, celebrates 'experience' and the 'incorporeal'. Thus, body without organs plays a role in individuation. It hints at a journey beyond 'the self' which is full of ecstasy or the ananda of the Indian thought system. The question of Being, which not only is conceptual identification, is presented in terms of the virtual and the actual. For Deleuze and Guattari, every actual body has a virtual dimension, a vast reservoir of potentials, and this is the body without organs. The actual emerges from it and carries it with it. Further, the plane of immanence is a field in which concepts are produced. It is neither external to the Self nor forms an external self or a non-self. It is 'an absolute outside', very much like Brahman. The pragmatics of Deleuzian theory is that it explains life to be 'immanence of immanence, absolute immanence' - an utter beatitude - which has a Vedantic counterpart where the essential Brahman is a combination of three attributes - sat (being), chit (mind) and ananda (bliss). Thus, this paper aims at the interesting comparison between Deleuzian theory and Indian Philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic determined a radical restructuring of social and political spaces. This change affected artistic production and reception, influencing individual and collective aesthetic experiences. By losing its physical dimension, art has moved to the digital sphere, engaging with alternative possibilities for display and connectivity. This paper examines the spaces unfolded by emergency aesthetics. Alongside reshaping sense perception, emergency aesthetics inspires political intervention by disclosing new conceptual frameworks that help us recognize and withstand present social, ethical, and existential crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since the late 1960s there has been a resurgence of interest in Spinozism in France: Gilles Deleuze was among the first who gave life to a ‘new Spinoza’ with his seminal book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968). While Deleuze was primarily interested in Spinoza’s ontology and ethics, the contemporary French philosopher Étienne Balibar focuses on the political writings. Despite their common fascination for Spinoza’s relational definition of the individual, both thinkers have drawn very different consequences from the Spinozist inspiration regarding the relevance of his philosophy for a contemporary ethical and political thought. Deleuze draws from Spinoza an ethics of the encounter, an ‘ethology’ that is concerned with the composition of bodies on a plane of immanence. Balibar, on the contrary, deals with the modes of communication that we institute between one another and that are always effectuations on two levels at once: the real and the imaginary. Whereas Deleuze emphasizes the conception of a univocal plane of immanence, Balibar insists on a double expression of the real and the imaginary in any transindividual practice. The aim of this paper is to compare and finally assess their respective contributions to a conception of collective political action: the question of constitution of the ‘free multitude’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nietzsche - Studien is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper considers the politics of tolerance through the lens of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence. The contention is that Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence provides us with a better conceptualization of the relationship between tolerance and power, and that it in so doing reinvigorates a theory of active tolerance that, for the most part, has been lost in contemporary democratic theory. Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence does so because it animates a sensorial orientation to politics, one that heightens our attention to the affective components of political life, enabling us to better theorize how all modes of existence, including the so-called passive ones, harbor a degree of power that can be mobilized for purposes that go beyond the “non-practice” highlighted by advocates and critics of tolerance in contemporary democratic theory. The paper develops this argument with ongoing reference to Marcuse’s critique of tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the pedagogical affordances and limitations of the philosophy of immanence, and by extension, the concepts of multiplicity and the virtual as elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1994) through collage. By elaborating the collage onto-epistemology, and an exercise of looking at collage, I will explore how immanence as well as the virtual are interacting pedagogically to co-create (both forming and informing) the viewer. Thus the paper has three aspects, an interaction with a specific collage and an examination of its onto-epistemic principles. Also I elaborate (with reference to the same piece) on the conceptual level and theorize the salience of the construct of multiplicity as an engagement with the piece. Finally, I offer a teasing out of what the pedagogical implications of understanding collage through this lens might offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century saw an encounter between two high civilizations, the Chinese and the Western. The innumerable discourses of the time reveal that the mutual curiosity of both sides was immense and comparable. The larger impact of European literature is documented by the larger number of translations into Chinese compared to translations from Chinese into Western languages. Hongloumeng was among the first representative literary works to be introduced to Western readers. This paper examines early Western reception and critique at a time when there was no full translation available. It sees a polarization between supporters and opponents of Hongloumeng. The discourse on Hongloumeng was used as a means to interpret Chinese literature or even Chinese culture as a whole. At the beginning of the discourse, a few opinion leaders in both civilizations shaped the key judgment that the other literary culture was inferior to their own. Despite cultural differences, the need for change in Chinese society and the attractiveness of the "modernity" of Western culture lead to a modernization of Chinese society. It took a century to get to know each other better, to change attitudes from ethnocentric to dialectical, to stop exploiting the novel and to come to the insight that Chinese literature with Dream as one of its masterpieces was not only comparable to other world literatures but also could bring value to Western readers. This paper concentrates on the phase between the early reception of Dream in the West since 1815 and the first full translation, which appeared in 1929. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As far as the topic of the present paper is Kcapability/Vermögen for metaphysics I take into account a twofold meaning - the terms facultas and vir. The aim of such a choise is to follow a possible dinamizing of Kant's mathematical cathegories as an spontaneity preseding any further process of devirtualization. Indeed this step is quite risky in order with the pure non-objectivity of the defended here modification of critical metaphysics but it is possible to make a thematical shift toward regulative attitude of our thinking in "as if" modality. According to that modus I try to throw a light on the possibility to be construed supplementary categorical correlations so that to cope successfully with the experience content keeping in mind the critical-methaphysical requirement to avoid the loop of direct category ontologization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a hitherto unexamined issue in the work of Michel Henry, namely, his critical interpretation of Martin Heidegger's analysis of "appearing" and "speaking." throughout his distinguished career, Henry went to great philosophical lengths to distance himself from traditional phenomenology and from the work of Heidegger. However, for the most part, Henry's critical reading of Heidegger has received little attention from phenomenologists and even that has been cursory. Hence, the central aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to show that Henry's critique of the "appearing" and "speaking" of the world remains unanswered; and (2) to show that a proper reading of Heidegger throws light on the shortcomings of Henry's own project. Hence, because the second objective follows necessarily from having achieved the first, this paper submits that what is first needed is a re-assessment of Henry's critique in light of a more accurate understanding of the depth-dimension of "appearing" and "speaking," which is, I argue, evinced in the analysis of the voice of conscience in Being and Time. the paper subsequently offers what I see as a more appropriate interpretation of the call of conscience in terms of a radicalised "transcendence in immanence" which is not reducible to the mere exteriority of inner-worldly beings. the paper concludes by arguing that the voice of conscience underscores the shortfalls of Henry's critique of the "appearing" and "speaking" of the world in Heidegger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper stages an encounter between the philosophical systems of Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze specifically as these relate to the production of subjectivity, or what I call the finite/infinite relation. I attempt to demonstrate that for Badiou a bar of sorts between the finite and the infinite remains determining, whereas for Deleuze – and specifically with his actual/virtual couplet – this bar no longer operates. The paper is at times quite technical in its excavation of the systems in question; however, the introduction and conclusion foreground what is at stake in this confrontation: a certain militant orientation to that which is beyond the world versus an ethical and experimental attitude that is located firmly within the world.Subjectivity (2009) 27, 155–171. doi:10.1057/sub.2009.5 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps the most significant contemporary theory of lawhood is the Best System (/MRL) view on which laws are true generalizations that best systematize knowledge. Our question in this paper will be how best to formulate a theory of this kind. We’ll argue that an acceptable MRL should (i) avoid inter-system comparisons of simplicity, strength, and balance, (ii) make lawhood epistemically accessible, and (iii) allow for laws in the special sciences. Attention to these problems will bring into focus a useful menu of novel MRL theories, some of which solve problems the original MRL theory could not. Hence we conceive of the paper as moving toward a better Best System theory of laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines problems of development in the light of two opposed concepts identified in John Protevi's examination of the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. It is argued that much development practice is informed by the concept of hylomorphism, which is ‘the doctrine that production is the imposition of formal order on chaotic or passive matter’. This approach is contrasted with accounts premised on the concept of complexity, which asserts that complex systems are self-organising. It is argued that top-down development interventions (inclusive of those guided by the Washington Consensus) are informed by the hylomorphic principle, while a complexity-orientated approach is more evident in participatory strategies of development. The paper suggests that these two opposing principles must be combined in a creative tension to maximise the possibilities for developmental effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the idea of critique as an idea, in relation to the problematic fiction of legal foundations. In doing so, it refers to the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy. In particular, Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of the lapsus of right (jus) is explored in relation to the fiction of a Law of law and the notion of the Right to have rights. The paper argues for the conception of an immanent critique of law that seeks to have done with foundational judgments as primary to critique. To have done with judgment as primary is crucial as judgment is the way in which philosophies of law have attempted to establish their own justification while claiming that such a ground or justification comes from an external source. Instead, what is to be reconceived and in a preliminary way is that critique and its concepts are intimate to their problems and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads Deleuze-Guattarian and new materialist theories alongside two landmark works of speculative science fiction by Angela Carter and Octavia Butler that queer normative conceptualisations of gender and sexuality. These theoretical and fictional explorations argue that subjectivity should be reconceptualised as immanent rather than fixed. Utilising uncanny affective registers, they attempt to push rigid ideas about gender/sex toward more fluid configurations that affirm a heterogeneity of lived experiences, situating subjectivity along lines of becoming. To execute such moves, Deleuze and Guattari propose a kind of experimental and experiential rupturing process,a mechanism for accessing what is immanent to everyday experience, rather than governmental. This is particularly useful for exploring transgender and other minoritarian subjectivities. By invoking breaks or ruptures from habituated ways of thinking and feeling, as these philosophers suggest, writers, artists and theorists might succeed in creating points of emergence around which new configurations and relations of gender-fluid identities might coalesce. I will investigate how Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Carter and Butler, who wrote before the emergence of transgender studies during the 1990s, paved the way for nomadic conceptions of sexuality, gender and lived contradiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the new so-called postmodern context really provide an environment for faith? Furthermore, can Tillich provide any resources in order to reflect on faith in such a context? Following a few remarks on sensitive crucial aspects of the postmodern context, this paper underlines several pertinent Tillichian ideas which are in phase with our times. The faith which is of interest here is a transcendent event at the heart of immanence, an irruption of 'God beyond God' at the heart of existence, which gives courage for self-affirmation despite the Nothingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor ties modernity to a secular worldview in which any religion is understood as one possible belief among many. To make this argument, Taylor's primary foil is that of the unbeliever--the individual who regards atheism as the baseline standard for religious commitment and every religion as an unnecessary accretion on this baseline. The atheist, to Taylor, is quintessentially modern, embodying a sense of invulnerability that stems from a misguided attempt to irreparably close off the possibility of transcendence. The unbeliever represents, for Taylor, the best proof that modern society hinges on the binary between immanence and transcendence. However, recent sociological work on the experiences of self-identifying atheists throws a wrench in Taylor's critical treatment of the unbeliever. A small but provocative body of literature on so-called "irreligious experiences" demonstrate that atheists frequently describe experiences which look virtually identical to the kinds of experiences that Taylor regards as openings onto a transcendental plane. In this paper, I briefly adumbrate the contours of irreligious experiences and demonstrate the ways that they complicate Taylor's depiction of unbelief as the attempt to foreclose the possibility of transcendence. I argue that such a view of atheism requires Taylor to inconsistently deploy his crucial conceptual tool, "the background," at times privileging and at other times downplaying the importance of lived experience. Furthermore, I argue that Taylor's reductive portrayal of atheists illustrates a number of problems with Taylor's overall depiction of modernity. As a means to move beyond Taylor's equation of modernity with the dominance of immanence over transcendence, I then turn to the thought of Bruno Latour, whose treatment of modernity provides a more consistent take on how modernity is experienced as opposed to idealized. I argue that, for Latour, the binary between immanence and transcendence is not a reality of modern society but a myth which justifies the continuous blurring of that same binary in lived experience. Thus, Latour maintains Taylor's emphasis on those conceptual categories which have achieved prominence in modern society (immanence, transcendence) but reverses the direction of analysis by which to understand such categories, creating a more nuanced and complex account of modern subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A standard approach to examining Deleuze's concept of difference in Difference and Repetition is to follow his critique of representation through an overturning of Platonism, which Deleuze finds to be the definitive task of philosophy after Nietzsche. While engaging this largely critical project, however, there is a tendency to overlook the dimensions of Platonism that Deleuze rehabilitates in a differential and immanent register. This paper aims to recover the essential dimensions of Platonism at the very heart of Deleuze's philosophy of difference. This recovery is accomplished by distinguishing Nietzsche's overturning of Platonism through his evaluation of the reactive politics of the Idea from Deleuze's own reversal of Platonism through his evaluation of the active politics of simulacra. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his publications since the three-volume Spheres project, Peter Sloterdijk thematizes religion as a now outmoded immunological system. He says it can no longer perform its historical function because humans have lost the protection of a world periphery. The entirety of what was "outside" is now "inside," and this has happened because: (1) spheres are systems, and as Luhmann shows, systems naturally complexify and expand themselves by becoming self-reflective; and (2), as Nietzsche says, humans are driven by a need to surpass themselves. The loss of world periphery is manifest in the climate crisis, which registers as a general sense that we must "change our lives." This gives Sloterdijk the chance (or so I argue) to create a new sphere (in the symbolic mode) that can be shared by all humans, a function no so-called world religion can fulfill. This new solidarity would come about when the earth becomes the completing "other" to every self, and individuals act in accordance with the imperative to assure the existence of human life on earth. The last section of the paper contrasts Sloterdijk's spherology with Latour's actor–network theory, and his later move into political ecology. I argue that, despite their alliance against "globalism," Latour and Sloterdijk are working with very different models of space (spheres vs. networks) and have different agendas vis-à-vis the climate crisis. Sloterdijk is trying to build ethical solidarity among humans, while Latour is concerned with a politics (in the Schmittian sense) between both human and nonhuman actors, including Gaia, which is both the space of action (a network of networks) and an actor in its own right. And finally, I take up Sloterdijk's statement that religions were never anything other than human practices, compared with Latour's call for acting "religiously," which means "respecting what others cling to." I do this by way of showing there are conceptual limitations to the concept of spheres and to Sloterdijk's project overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What might film have to say about global space? This, in essence, is the question which this paper addresses, in relation to Charlie Kaufman'sSynecdoche, New York(2008). I argue that the protagonist's theatre project in the film can be read in relation to prominent conceptions of global space (which relate in particular to telecommunications systems, multinational capitalism, and the urban environment) and the implications these have for subjectivity. Rather than merely representing the global system, however,Synecdoche, New Yorksuggests a novel way in which we might think about this, and it will be one of the aims of this discussion to uncover this. In terms of the film's form, I read this in relation to Gilles Deleuze's notion of the time-image. There is a disjointed flow of time inSynecdoche, New York, I claim, and this forms not only a link with Deleuze's writings on the cinema, but also suggests a counterpoint to the form of space outlined above. I will end by providing a further reading of the time-image, which serves to link this form back to global space, and the contemporary cultural and political situation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Russian philosopher Pyotr Chaadaev (1794–1856) declared Russia to be a non-place in both space and time, a singular nothingness without history, topos, or footing, without relation or attachment to the world-historical tradition culminating in Christian-European modernity. This paper recovers Chaadaev's conception of nothingness as that which, unbound by tradition, constitutes a total, even revolutionary ungrounding of the world-whole. Working with and through Chaadaev's key writings, we trace his articulation of immanent nothingness or the void of the Real as completely emptying out the mechanisms of history and tradition, thereby putting also into question the basic conceptual machinery of modernity. Chaadaev's position appears, as a result, not only as a neglected genealogical element to contemporary critiques of modernity and its logic of reproduction through tradition and futurity but also as a contribution to the ongoing critical rethinking of this logic in contemporary theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gaze contributes to a way of seeing in the exploration of visual art. However, this visual logic often remains within the subjective 'fold', neglecting the 'unthought' arising from the interaction between the observer and subject, and leading to a certain closure. My research investigates Su Shi's bamboo theory and the interpretation of liubai space in Chinese landscape painting. I aim to uncover the 'logic of immanence' that extends the concept of gaze beyond the physical. I achieve this by proposing that vision no longer holds precedence; instead, it is internalized as a motivating factor influencing an artist's movements and behaviors. This perspective sparks a consideration of the 'unthought' aspect of the gaze within art practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers logics which are formally dual to intuitionistic logic in order to investigate a co-constructive logic for proofs and refutations. This is philosophically motivated by a set of problems regarding the nature of constructive truth, and its relation to falsity. It is well known both that intuitionism can not deal constructively with negative information, and that defining falsity by means of intuitionistic negation leads, under widely-held assumptions, to a justification of bivalence. For example, we do not want to equate falsity with the non-existence of a proof since this would render a statement such as "pi is transcendental" false prior to 1882. In addition, the intuitionist account of negation as shorthand for the derivation of absurdity is inadequate, particularly outside of purely mathematical contexts. To deal with these issues, I investigate the dual of intuitionistic logic, co-intuitionistic logic, as a logic of refutation, alongside intuitionistic logic of proofs. Direct proof and refutation are dual to each other, and are constructive, whilst there also exist syntactic, weak, negations within both logics. In this respect, the logic of refutation is weakly paraconsistent in the sense that it allows for statements for which, neither they, nor their negation, are refuted. I provide a proof theory for the co-constructive logic, a formal dualizing map between the logics, and a Kripke-style semantics. This is given an intuitive philosophical rendering in a re-interpretation of Kolmogorov's logic of problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Michael Haneke's film Amour through a conceptual migration: it shifts the accent from disability, lack of autonomy, and absence of self-determination to the idea of misfit. Following Garland-Thomson, I suggest that this concept implies both multiple lived embodiments and a questioning of the notion of singularized disabled body. Viewed from the perspective of Deleuzian disability studies, Anne's strokes and her return to the defenseless state of childhood do not allow for any affirmative account. The immanence of life (Deleuze) appears in this case as a degraded state of being, as a disruption of the parameters that constitute selfhood. The paper argues that a new, materialist, aesthetico-political approach to Haneke's film, centering on the concept of misfit on the one hand, and foregrounding the film's surreal aesthetic on the other hand, allows for an affirmative, non-dualist reading of this work. The protagonists' closed environment -- cinematically enhanced through a stifling and oppressive atmosphere -- seems to blur distinctions between death and life. A key notion here is that of "intra-active becoming" as defined by Karen Barad, a concept that allows us to situate the materiality of the misfit, as well as vulnerability and dependence in the materiality of the world. Anne and Georges may thus be seen as misfits who are made and unmade through, and with the world's topological becoming (including its reconfiguring of injustice and discrimination). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outdoor environmental education has long postulated a link between experiences outdoors in ‘natural’ environments and environmental concern. This paper suggests a straightforward relationship is problematic due to its implicit assumption of a nature/culture divide. Critical outdoor education has sought to overcome this dualism by describing a relational understanding of the world emphasizing ecological systems and highlighting humanity’s ‘connection’ to the environment. This relational approach aims to tackle the ‘crisis of perception’, argued to be the root cause of anthropogenic planetary degradation. We draw from the philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari to suggest that relational ontologies, as currently conceived, may reinforce a static conception of the world by emphasizing ‘points of being’ (subject and object). Deleuze and Guattari proffer immanent materiality, where points of being are dispelled by movement and ‘becoming’. We then describe ‘animism’ as a mode of living where the world is understood to be immanent and constantly becoming. The consequences of animism are explored with regards to conceptions of ‘nature’, ‘place’ and ‘outdoor’ learning for sustainability. Creative practices to tackle the ‘crisis of perception’ are suggested as approaches that circumvent static conceptions of the world implied by points in relations and prevailing conceptions of nature as ‘other’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ortega y Gasset's old lament that no one had so far attempted a rigorous phenomenology of pain no longer holds since the appearance of Christian Grüny's recent monograph Zerstörte Erfahrung. Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes. Grüny argues for the use of phenomenological categories from Merleau-Ponty in order to understand physical pain as a "blocked escape- movement" ("blockierte Fluchtbewegung"), concluding that corporeal suffering makes impossible boTha clean distinction and a pure identification between the lived body and the physical body that I am. In my paper, I would like to suggest some improvements to Grüny's approach through the utilization of the category of self-affection, as the material phenomenology of Michel Henry has developed it. In addition to the radical immanence in which hyle, noesis, and noema are unified into a "carnal cogito," however, I argue that it is necessary to describe the painful self-affection not only in terms of any sensitive excess whatever (überhaupt), as Grüny posits, but also in terms of a mutation of the sensitive excess into the intra-tactile sphere of sensibility. Thus I endorse the Husserlian insight that makes tactility the primordial structure of sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critical engagement with immanentist approaches to cities. Geographers approaching the urban through an immanentist lens-primarily inspired by Gilles Deleuze's work-have called into question transcendent determination, namely the determination of material reality by an external and ontologically distinct substance. This has been an implicit assumption in approaches that reduce contemporary urban developments to 'effects of globalization' or 'impacts of neoliberalism'. I identify two major shortcomings within the recent immanentist critique: first, their rejection of the notion of a structure in toto, and second, their noticeable silence on Louis Althusser despite his unique contribution to the question of complex causality and his shared trajectories with and influence on Deleuze. By using illustrations from the ongoing urban renewal program in Istanbul, I speculate on the ways in which an Althusserian notion of 'immanent structure' could contribute to a better understanding of cities as multiplicities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a reconstruction of the methodological tools pioneered by the first generation of the Frankfurt School (FS) and how they have been adapted in the contemporary project of emancipation in Critical International Relations Theory (CIRT). It is argued that the praxeological and methodological commitments of the early FS are of continuing utility in the post-positivist turn in IR theory. The paper also argues that CIRT has made significant advances on the original programme of CT developed by Horkheimer in the early 1930s. In particular, it is contended that the alleged pessimism typically associated with the later work of the early FS can be overcome if critical analysis looks beyond the state to those possibilities of emancipation pregnant within the global processes of world politics. Here the work of CIRT is argued to offer a number of advances on the sociology of the early FS, which was problematically confined to the examination of Euro- and state-centric possibilities for emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines connections between concepts of space and extension on the one hand and immaterial spirits on the other, specifically the immanentist concept of spirits as present in rerum natura. Those holding an immanentist concept, such as Thomas Aquinas, typically understood spirits non-dimensionally as present by essence and power; and that concept was historically linked to holenmerism, the doctrine that the spirit is whole in every part. Yet as Aristotelian ideas about extension were challenged and an actual, infinite, dimensional space readmitted, Henry More defended a dimensionalist concept of spirit. Despite More's intentions, his dimensionalist concept opens the door to materialism, for supposing that spirits have parts outside parts implies that those parts could in principle be mapped onto the parts of divisible bodies. The spectre of materialism broadens our interest in More's unconventional ideas, for the question of whether other early modern thinkers, including Isaac Newton, followed More becomes a question of whether they too unwittingly helped usher in materialism. In fact, More's attack upon holenmerism fails, because he illegitimately injects his dimensionalist concept of spirit into the doctrine, failing to recognize it as a consequence of the non-dimensionalist concept of spirit, which in itself secures indivisibility. The interpretive consequence for Newton is that there is no prima facie reason to suppose that the charitable interpretation takes him to deny holenmerism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Michael Ondaatje's most acclaimed fictional work The English Patient (1992) is characterized by intertwined issues like identity, masculinity and, femininity, and some political implications as well. This paper seeks to illustrate how this work of fiction through its many aspects manifests and promotes a deconstructionist view of nationhood thereby giving us a sense that nations are being increasingly viewed as volatile structures. There are various theories on nationalism, and they can be grouped into two types: those emphasizing the positive influence of nationalism, and those focusing on the destructive force contained in nationalism. The notion "nationalism" itself is a double-edged sword: colonizing, injustice, and anti-colonizing, justice - both can be under its name. It is what it is used for that exactly gives nationalism a positive or negative connotation. Then what is nationalism like in The English Patient? Is Ondaatje for or against this nationalism? Can this kind of nationalism, in his opinion, be transcended? What is the significance of this transcendence? Through a detailed analysis of the novel mainly from the perspectives of the protagonist's profession as a cartographer, the transnational community established in the villa, and the discussion on the seemingly abrupt ending, I come to conclusion that nationalism in this novel is indeed a narrow nationalism, or the negative aspect of nationalism. By associating it with war, trauma and great damage, Ondaatje severely criticizes and condemns the practice of such a narrow nationalism. That's why, he, as an optimistic writer, still depicts an inseverable relationship between the characters of the villa, which definitely reveals his yearning for and belief in its transcendence. Actually, transcending nationalism, in its real sense, should first and foremost respect rather than efface different nationalities. It may well be said, to some extent, that the more national a discourse is, the more likely that transcendence can be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through Deleuze's conception of truth as becoming the paper discusses his relationship to Platonism. In his analysis Deleuze focuses on Plato's Sophistes, in which Plato unwillingly subverts the very hierarchy of the world order, which he himself created. Deleuze sees the Platonic search for truth as taking place in the sphere of immanence. In the person of a sophist he goes after the simulacrum, i.e. an appearance, which subverts the rigorous hierarchy of the Platonic world. In his Logique du sens Deleuze suggests that following Plato the other searchers for truth are also traveling in the sphere of immanence. Thus the truth found in the "logic of surface" is their becoming others. The paper examines the reasons, why Deleuze attaches importance to this becoming, which subverts the hierarchy of the "logic of depth" inaugurated by Platonism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari make the claim that '[i]t may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion.' What are we to make of such a calling? The paper explicates why and in what sense this statement is of exemplary significance both for an appropriate understanding of Deleuze's political thought and for a most timely conceptualisation of politics in a world so clearly defined by immanence, and nothing but immanence. I argue that Deleuze's rigorously constructive approach to the world is not beyond politics, as some recent readings have declared (e.g. those of Badiou and Hallward). Rather, we have to appreciate that in Deleuze and Guattari's demand for a 'belief in this world' the political intersects with the dimension of the ethical in such a way that our understanding of both is transformed. Only after this 'empiricist conversion' can we truly think of a Deleuzian politics that does justice to a plane of immanence 'immanent only to itself'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of its long history under the weight of political, economical, and cultural imperialism, Latin America still suffers in many ways from West-centric cultural colonization. This influence is notably strong in the academic milieu. Following Shi-xu's suggestion that new and more inclusive Eastern paradigms should be constructed out of the dialogue between Eastern and Western thought, this paper aims to elaborate a paradigmatic co-existence, stressing its philosophical aspect. For this purpose I use Chinese Daoism and Afro-Brazilian danza de orixas as 'conceptual tools' to visualize some of the dominant Western patterns that shape our present academic procedures and general standpoints. I argue in favor of a philosophy of immanence as the proper frame for paradigmatic dialogue and construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucault: metaphysical itinerary? Departing from a Heideggerian standpoint, the present article aims at discussing the contra-Foucauldian hypothesis of a metaphysics present in the immanentist discourse of archaeogenealogy. With a view to achieving the goal proposed, the paper builds a brief itinerary of what is considered "Foucauldian romanticism". Initially, it draws on the Derridian critique of a transcendental categorization of 'madness' and opposes it to accounts of madness as absence of labor. Then, the paper offers a brief account of debates on literalness and their abandoning, following the renewed take-over of the enkrateia discourse. Finally, based on the concept of parrêsia, the article establishes some comparisons between the initial findings of archaeology and the issue of subjectivization present in the last courses. Thus, what is fundamental is to render noticeable a permanent relationship with Heideggerian metaphysics, in what concerns both the destruction project and the requirement for questioning that transcends the borders of immanence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]