“Willing the Event”

Abstract

A major problem threatens Deleuze’s project in The Logic of Sense. He makes an ontological distinction between events and substances, but he then collapses a crucial distinction between two kinds of events, namely, actions and mere occurrences. Indeed, whereas actions are commonly differentiated from mere occurrences with reference to their causal dependence on the intentions of their agents, Deleuze asserts a strict ontological distinction between the realm of causes (including psychological causes) and the realm of events, and holds that events of all types are incorporeal happenings which are inseparable from expressed sense. For Deleuze, what counts as one’s action thus does not depend on one’s intention, but rather on a process of “making sense” of that action. Nevertheless, Deleuze continues to speak of the need to “will” the event. In order to resolve this apparent contradiction, I will read a conception of “expressive agency” into The Logic of Sense.     

Sheldon Wolin and Democracy: Seeing Through Loss

This article offers an interpretation of Sheldon Wolin’s political thought and assesses its ongoing significance in the context of a Donald Trump presidency. Given the inegalitarian aspects of Trump’s efforts to “Make America Great Again,” there may now be a temptation to spurn any political narrative rooted in a sense of loss for American democracy’s Golden Age. However, while Sheldon Wolin is a thinker of the Left, the “archaic” vision of decentralized democracy that he advances in the 1980s also warns against the loss of local memories, cultures, and practices. This perspective validates conservative concerns regarding rapid economic and social shifts and yields distinctive insights into the failings of liberalism. The article traces how Wolin’s archaic vision of democracy first develops out of his postwar critique of liberalism and his engagement with student activism of the 1960s. It then examines the limitations of Wolin’s focus on loss and traces shifts in his thought over time. Ultimately, his work urges the Left to be attentive to local traditions and narratives of loss but also suggests that democracy should be understood as “polymorphous.”     

“Meditation is Good for Nothing:” Leisure as a Democratic Practice

Does meditation bring political benefits in the sense of strengthening citizenship or democracy? Taking the Zen phrase “meditation doesn’t work—it’s good for nothing” as my point of departure, and reading Aristotle’s discussion of leisure in relation to citizenship, I argue that meditation can foster significant dimensions of democratic citizenship. This argument focuses particularly on the avowedly anti-instrumental aspect of mindfulness meditation. The connection between meditation and leisure demands a shift in our understanding of leisure, away from relaxation available to the privileged few and toward practices that are open-ended, non-instrumental, and, like democracy and citizenship, due to all. Finally, meditation offers an example of how to appropriate and inhabit excess in ways that support egalitarian citizenship. Meditation needs to be of “no benefit” in order to foster citizenship in these ways.     

“Idealismus不是幻想，而是真理”--马克思“博士论文”解读

“：博士论文”是马克思登上德国思想论坛的“亮相之作”。奠基于扎实的学术训练和哲学史梳理，马克思质疑和推翻了以往原子论研究中贬抑伊壁鸠鲁贡献的流行见解“，用显微镜去发现”和辨析了他与作为其思想先驱的德谟克利特在思维方式上的重大差异，借此表明伊壁鸠鲁代表的自我意识哲学“不是幻想，而是真理”，因为这种思维方式凸显了人的自我意识，在对客体的认识、解释甚至改变中来发挥了作为主体的意志、功能、力量和特质“。幻想”“、真理”云云，不是认识论层面的，而是价值论和人性论意义上的；举凡在观照和理解世界的诸多思维方式中，只有Idealismus在与物的对立和纠结中把人的价值和意义彰显出来了。     

Peter Berger’s “Many Altars” and the Theology of Religions

My notes on Peter Berger’s recent publication (Berger 2014) come in two parts. In part one, I will address a couple of conceptual ambiguities surrounding the so-called “secularization theory”. In part two, I will deal with Berger’s argument that religious diversity undermines religious certainties and in that sense fosters secularization. As I will point out, theologians are not only well aware of this situation, they are discussing it as part of the so-called “theology of religions,” and they have identified a solution that avoids what Berger rightly characterizes as the two impasses of fundamentalism and relativism.     

Social Character: Erich Fromm and the Ideological Glue of Neoliberalism

Several thinkers have expressed the view that the central nostrums of neoliberalism, including self-reliance, personal responsibility and individual risk, have become part of the “common sense” fabric of everyday life. My paper argues that Erich Fromm’s idea of social character offers a comprehensive and persuasive answer to this question. While some have sought the answer to this conundrum in Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue that, by itself, this answer is not sufficient. What is significant about the notion of social character, I claim, is that it manages to unify “top-down” approaches like governmentality focused on ideas and policy, with “bottom-up” approaches focused on how the insights of day to day experience are mediated through culture. Adapting this theory to neoliberalism, I argue, means that the “common sense” nature of neoliberalism, and the lack of a reckoning for its massive economic failure (as evidenced by the 2007 Great Recession), are explicable through the formation of a neoliberal social character, by means of which experiential processes align with cultural meanings and, subsequently, fuse with social expectations.     

“Sexual Assault” and Other Buzz Phrases that Need to Die

Academics nowadays have invented many phrases for which they demand widespread acceptance that do not accurately represent reality, or which make no sense when we consider them closely. Prime among these is the concept of “sexual assault,” which has made its way into state laws and the UCMJ since its coinage in the 1960s and 1970s and is now a mainstay of training on college campuses. This concept is flawed because it includes all sexual actions under the rubric of the noun “assault,” as if we spoke of “driving aggression” rather than “aggressive driving,” to color all driving with the possibility of aggression. It is simply not true that sexuality is nothing but one more form aggression, and that all sex is potentially aggression if it is perceived by one partner as such. Another false coinage we are asked to accept is the notion that men “objectivize” women. In fact few men want to sleep with or get an erotic charge from objects; if anything the issue seems to be focus on physical details. Then there is the widely repeated assertion that “gender is assigned at birth.” Rather than debating whether or not this is so we should ask whether the concept itself makes sense. Assigned? By what entity? Just at birth? These are examples of linguistic over-reach, the attempt to change the world with words rather than letting a change in the way we see the world (Kuhn’s paradigm shift) produce corresponding words in a more gradual way that most of us can accept. Just because we hear these phrases all the time from professional wordsmith academics with axes to grind, we need not feel constrained to accept them if they are not accurate representations of the world.     

Black Disembodiment in the Age of Ferguson

One of the more striking features of the Black Lives Matter movement against racialized police brutality has been the focus on violence inflicted on “black bodies.” On one hand, the language of “black bodies,” as opposed to simply “black people” or “black personhood,” makes the issue of racial violence more visceral and immediate to white audiences otherwise indisposed to perceive black pain as a moral problem. On the other hand, it represents a theoretical challenge to dominant understandings of pain, suffering, and individuality based on liberal subjectivity. Exemplifying both of these aspects, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent work, Between the World and Me, provides a deep philosophical reflection on the moral and political problem of “black disembodiment.” This article tracks the theme of disembodiment in Coates’s book by foregrounding the role that feminist theories of embodiment play in his exploration of the contemporary black condition in America.     

论米歇尔·亨利的生命现象学马克思主义

米歇尔·亨利第一次将他的生命现象学运用于马克思关于“社会现实”的分析。亨利关于马克思的哲学思想是“一种新现象学的马克思主义”。在马克思的文本中,现象学最基本的原则“回到事物自身”被亨利解读为“回到个体现实性生命”,所有社会中显示的关系必须还原到个体生命。“社会总体性”还原到纯粹的“个体主体性”是理解马克思社会批判的有力工具。“彻底的主体性”概念是亨利新现象学的马克思主义的核心概念。马克思的“现实性”应该被理解为个体的主体实践。马克思看到了实践的原初本质:实践恰恰是一种努力的主观体验,简言之即劳动。马克思以“谱系学”开始进行社会批判,这是一种对各种社会结构下的主观现实性的描述方法。     

Alfred Kazin and Poetry

Both memoir and literary criticism, this piece by Alfred Kazin’s daughter describes her father’s relationship to poetry through the lens of musicality. She suggests that what drove Alfred Kazin’s writing on poetry was not argumentation but rather what he himself called a “terrible and pulsating musical sense,” capable of vanquishing lifelong feelings of isolation and loneliness.     

House money effects on trust and reciprocity

In a typical laboratory “Investment Game” experiment, participants’ endowments are provided by the experimenter; thus, the worst case for the investor is that she loses all of her “found” money. By contrast, in naturally occurring environments, investment decisions can often lead to a loss of one’s own money. This paper investigates whether “trust” found in one-shot anonymous laboratory interaction is robust to “own money” environments. Our results show that, consistent with previous investment game results, most investors send a positive amount, and most trustees return at least the transfer amount, regardless of whether the investors purchase or are gifted their endowment. However, investments are on average lower when participants use their own money, and the fraction of maximum investments (the most “risky” investment decision) is only half as large under “own money” as it is under gifted endowments. Our results explain why one should exercise caution in placing trust in any government’s ability to spend other people’s money prudently.     

Neoliberalismus, Staat und Selbsttechnologien. Ein kritischer Überblick über die governmentality studies

While the reception of Foucault’s work in Germany is still dominated by highly polarized philosophical and academic debattes, his concepts and ideas inspired many studies in the social and political sciences in the Anglo-Saxon world. Part of this general theoretical interest are the so called governmentality studies refering to the notion of governmentality coined by Foucault. This articles begins with an outline of the theoretical principles underpinning this research framework. Foucault uses the concept of government in a comprehensive sense adumbrating the close link between forms of knowledge, power techniques and processes of subjectivation. In the second part follows a brief presentation of some subsequent work inspired by Foucault’s account. By confronting Ulrich Beck’s notion of risk society with the governmentality approach it will be demonstrated that this kind of theoretical perspective could be very useful for a critical analysis of neo-liberal modes of regulation. It links political rationalities to the micro-techniques of every day life and explores the field of the government which ranges from “governing the self” to “governing others” encompassing the state and civil society. Yet, there still remain unsolved problems and ambiguities, especially the role of the state and the question of resistance in the governmentality studies. These points are taken up in the third part of the text.     

The Perils of Hubris? A Tragic Reading of “Thucydides’ Trap” and China-US Relations

In the last few years, Graham Allison’s “Thucydides’ Trap” has stimulated much discussion within International Relations (IR). Most IR scholars understand Thucydides’ Trap as a shorthand for power transition theory, and view it as highly inadequate for analyzing China-US relations. This article seeks to offer an alternative, tragic, understanding of Thucydides’ Trap that may have more purchase on the analysis of the dynamic of China-US relations. It first argues that while Thucydides’ Trap shares power transition theory’s focus on the shifting balance of power, it is also different from the latter in its emphasis on the emotional implications of changes in the balance of power. This article then explores a tragic understanding of Thucydides’ Trap. Economic success often encourages a rising power to display ambition, confidence and enhanced sense of self (what Allison calls “rising power syndrome”), which leads to loosened restraint, overextension, and strategic blunder; meanwhile, its assertive and ambitious moves spark a ruling power’s fear, insecurity and even paranoia (what Allison calls “ruling power syndrome”), which prompts it to take “preventive” actions in response to the rising power’s assertiveness. This article finally looks at China-US relations through this tragic lens. It suggests that this tragic understanding of Thucydides’ Trap can illuminate the emotional aspect of China-US relations, and also argues that the Thucydides Trap Research Project should henceforth develop an emotional line of inquiry into interaction between the great powers.

     

Waging Lawfare: Law,Environment and Depoliticization in Neoliberal Australia

ABSTRACT

When environmental NGOs in Australia successfully sued the nation’s environment minister in August 2015 to temporarily withhold environmental approval for Australia’s largest coal mine, the ruling Coalition government accused environmentalists of waging “lawfare.” Through a critical discourse analysis of Parliamentary debate and media coverage, this article explores the lawfare battles fought in Australia in 2015, arguing that these were a site of depoliticization, in Mouffe’s (2005, Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. Abingdon: Routledge) sense of the term. By exploring how the question of legal regulation of coal mining was rationalized, moralized, and stripped of significant political or ideological differences, this seeks to add to our understanding of processes of depoliticization by considering metadiscourses concerning “the law.”     

Secularism vs. Post-Secularism: A Critical Examination of Cooke’s Post-Secular Alternative

In recent work, Maeve Cooke has criticised Jürgen Habermas’s post-metaphysical model in order to motivate an alternative “post-secular” conception of the state, which involves the replacement of the “institutional translation proviso” with the “nonauthoritarian reasoning requirement”. I provide a qualified defence of the Habermasian model by arguing that it does not lead to the kind of negative consequences regarding legitimacy and solidarity Cooke attributes to it. This, in turn, means that Cooke’s proposal for the secular foundation of political authority on a post-secular basis is insufficiently motivated. In the process, I argue that the point of departure for the debate about religion in the public sphere shared by both Habermas and Cooke – the picture of the “total” religious citizen – should be rejected because it presupposes an overly simplistic view of religions and religious identities.     

马克思“哲学革命”与其“哲学立新”的共时性

深刻理解马克思“哲学革命”与其“哲学立新”的关系,对于澄清马克思“哲学革命”的真实性质,正确界定其起点,有重大学术意义。通过深入思考、辨析,可以确认：马克思的“哲学革命”与其“哲学立新”是相互关联、相互依存、互为条件的,二者在时间上一致,将它们认定为先后发生或进行的两个事件或两个过程是不妥的。他的“哲学革命”的历程,绝不是在其“哲学立新”完成后才真正开启,而是与后者同时开启、同步进行和深化。马克思的“哲学立新”是一个过程,其“哲学革命”同样是一个过程,二者的起点完全相同。澄清这些事实,有助于深刻认识马克思所发动的“哲学革命”及其特征,消除学界长期以来流行的所谓“马克思‘哲学革命’一次完成论”的消极影响,恢复马克思思想史的本来面目,推进学界的马克思主义哲学史研究。     

The Place of Sovereignty

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between sovereignty, biopolitics and governmentality in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault. By unpacking Foucault’s genealogy of modern governmentality, it responds to a criticism leveled against Foucauldian accounts of power for their alleged abandonment of the traditional model of power in juridico-institutional terms in favor of an understanding of power as purely productive. This claim has most significantly been developed by Agamben in “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”. I argue that Judith Butler’s analysis of power, in particular in her essay “Indefinite Detention”, presents a more differentiated account of power that registers the significance of practices of sovereignty and resonates with Foucault’s lectures on “Security, Territory, Population”.     

全面准确地理解马克思早年的“跨越”思想

马克思早年的“跨越”思想和晚年的“跨越”思想一样,指的都是“跨越”资本主义的经济制度,而不是指“跨越”政治革命和政治解放,直接实现社会革命和人类解放。马克思早年“跨越”思想的理论基础是“共同胜利论”和“发达国家带动论”。19世纪40年代,德国的社会性质是半封建半资本主义社会,德国的资本主义制度已经存在并正在发展。马克思、恩格斯把此时代的德国看作是“支配着世界市场”,并能首先进行无产阶级革命,建立共产主义社会的国家,因此认为德国能把前资本主义国家或非资本主义国家带到共产主义新社会中去,因而也不存在跨越“资本主义制度的卡夫丁峡谷”问题。     

“Plug into Choice”? The Trouble with Common-Sense Participation in a Smart Electric Grid

Smart electric grids add digital technologies to the grid. While some suggest that they offer many environmental and social benefits, others remain critical and call them a neoliberal project. Considering smart grids a boundary object [Star, Susan L., and James R. Griesemer. 1989. “Institutional Ecology, Translations and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.” Social Studies of Science 19 (3): 387–420], I examine how multiple social groups come together in cooperation and conflict in the installation of one smart grid. In what follows, I first argue that participation is Gramscian common sense (1971), a taken-for-granted good in producing a smart grid. Gramsci points out that common sense can be used to reinforce oppressive ideologies of a hegemonic status quo, but that it also contains “good sense” that can be developed into counter-hegemonic narratives and movements. Second, I argue that in the course of cooperation and conflict, the smart grid indeed becomes more neoliberal, and this occurs through participation. While the utility often seeks or accepts public participation, the meaning of participation gradually becomes limited to individualistic and financially motivated “choice.” In the discussed case, many of the (less neoliberal) social and environmental benefits of the grid and more collectivist forms of participation were precluded. This article offers a grounded examination of a smart grid and a sympathetic critique of common-sense participation.