What is it to take ourselves as natural? This paper clarifies this question by drawing on resources from Marx and from some contemporary naturalist and humanist philosophy. I argue that for Marx our task is to account for our being one animal among others, part of nature and wholly material, but without eliding our characteristic capacities qua self-conscious beings. Unlike other naturalists, however, Marx understands this to be a social project as well as a philosophical one. A Marxian account of self-consciousness in nature must therefore ground a critique of “modern society” and its law of motion. This paper carries out some preparatory work for such an account by connecting Marx’s notions of species-being and self-consciousness with work by Phillipa Foot and Michael Thompson on species and normativity, before concluding with remarks on Capital’s account of labour’s domination by capital.

This paper is a study of part 2 of Maurice Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death.” Having discussed the speculative identity of literature and revolution in the first half, Blanchot elaborates a theory of meaning as the sacrifice of matter, both of the thing named and language’s own, proposing that certain kinds of literary language are the impossible pursuit of it. Such language is not simply identical to revolution, but a refusal of both its result (the modern state) and the abyssal negativity at its origin, which Hegel considers history’s motive force. I discuss the impossibility of death in this context as a quasi-idea that deranges discourse and parasitizes spirit. The irresolvable (non-)relation between the impossibility of death and the dialectic forms what Blanchot calls ambiguity, the fact that neither language nor history can be resolved into a unified sense. This amounts to a kind of perverse resurrection of the alienated culture Hegel had buried; it demonstrates that both literary language and the socio-political world are not void of ambiguity, deception, and perversion, thereby falsifying the dialectical account of the end of history and the formation of the modern state.

In light of the recent publication of two new histories of a minor and radical Christian tradition – namely Anabaptism, which begins in the sixteenth century and finds a complex reception in contemporary Mennonite pacifism and political resistance – this article fields critical mediations between descriptive and normative approaches to the writing of history, and against the contrasting political forces of neutrality and polarization, through a comparative reading of Troy Osborne’s Radicals and Reformers: A Survey of Global Anabaptist History and Astrid von Schlachta’s Anabaptists: From the Reformation to the 21st Century. Refusing capture by both the fantasy of apolitical description or the ideological trappings of normative ideal-types, and critiquing the tendencies to polarize and neutralize difference when interpreting the past and intervening in the present, this article provides a case study for a pacifist and antiviolent approach to the writing and reading of history in our time.

We tend to associate intimacy with the familiar, the reassuring, the personal, the private, the like-minded, and the comfortable. This article argues instead for a more expanded – perhaps even “cosmic” or “elemental” – form of intimacy; one in which all sorts of strange encounters and entities can be conceivably included in a dynamic constellation of concern. This argument begins by revisiting John Ruskin’s famous critique of the romantic projection of poetic sentiments onto an unfeeling, insentient world. And it does so in order to ask what Ruskin may have missed, in dismissing more-than-human pathos altogether. What if, in other words, the pathetic fallacy is not a fallacy? This article offers the counter-concept of “pathetic facticity,” as a less anthropocentric approach the distributed presence of affects, moods, and even passions. From this revised perspective, intimacy is less an exclusive circle of human proximity and belonging, and more a vast and punctuated space of uncanny recognitions and unexpected epiphanies.

This article explores evolving posthumanist representations of eros, technology, and the human condition through two body horror films: David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021). Popular depictions of eros and technology can lean towards a hypermasculine, obsessive, paranoid reading of the machine, usually resulting in the disintegration of desire and with it the human body. These accounts highlight the contested figure of the “transhuman,” an excessive, technologically enhanced version of the human capable of conquering death. Emerging from postmodern critiques against grand narratives of technological progress and neoliberalist development, the critique of the transhuman underscores the impossibility of a harmonious relationship between the human and the technical. While Videodrome depicts technology as an external force intervening in human body enhancement – destroying the essence of the human and its romanticized “humanity” – Titane speculates about nature/artifice and human/technology binaries, situating technology as inherent to the human condition. This paper traces the move from the transhuman character who seeks to dominate technology and encounters human destruction, to a posthuman who is able to integrate the mediation of technology as a fundamental aspect for thinking its humanness. Drawing on the reappraisal of “originary technicity,” the body in Titane becomes with technics and environment, offering a new framework for rethinking desire and eros beyond the body. In doing so, it resists earlier theories of desire as contained, and perhaps, repressed, in the subject. Ultimately, the film embodies the possibility of moving away from the all-too human theories of eros and machine to challenge some posthumanist limitations around essentialist oppositions between nature and technology. Posthumanist frameworks must envision a future where the entanglement of technology and the human serves as a starting point for rethinking the human condition, rather than a nostalgic excess it needs to overcome.

The history of philosophy is scored with crossroads, from the anecdotic to the foundational. Understanding the crossroads as a mise-en-scène of personal and intellectual crisis, this article scans the encounters of some of the most significant figures in twentieth-century philosophy with the canonical texts of Western mysticism. In such encounters, it is argued, the intimate testimony of spiritual crisis produces a duplicate crisis or countermovement inside the philosophical tradition, with strong, perhaps unexpected, consequences for its written modes of discourse.

This paper charts the story of Karst, a sea cave which is exploited by the human sex hormone industry for the secretions that emerge upon its walls, whilst adumbrating some of the ways in which caves have been perceived in the history of philosophy, from Plato to Irigaray to the Xenofeminist Manifesto and beyond. The etymology of the “endocrine” produces some surprising overtones: the Proto-Indo-European root *krei- meaning “to sieve” and thus “discriminate, distinguish,” is hypothetically derived from the Greek krinein (to separate/decide/judge), krinesthai (to explain), Latin cribrum (sieve), crimen (judgement, crime), cernere (to sift, distinguish, separate), Old Irish criathar, Old Welsh cruitr (sieve), Middle Irish crich (border, boundary), Old English hriddel (sieve). Rather than prisoners eternally fixed in one position, what if we were to imagine a meeting of two or several mercurial characters inside a sea cave conceived not only as the hystera as in Luce Irigaray’s formulation, but as the swirling of a thousand chemical entities orchestrating the “hundred sexes” that bloom from Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminist Manifesto? What would the spatial quality of this sea cave be like? We know that the synthetic procuration of certain hormonal levels to procure certain physiological states is fundamental not only to processes of gender modification (both sanctioned and unsanctioned by legal and medical professions) but the entire “pharmacopornographic regime,” in the words of Paul Preciado. The machinations of the hormone industry and the symbolic overdetermination of the cave as the maternal feminine point to the possibility of what I suggest here could be called “endocrine feminism.” The connection between endocrinology as the study of hormones as chemical messengers in the body and a process of separation, decision or discretion leads us to a new conception of the “staging” of the cave. Through several stages of karst development, this paper dramatizes the cavern of the “endo-crine” and the internal rumble of discussion perceptible within its depths.

This paper focuses on the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser’s notion of telematic society, arguing that it implies a media-theoretical revision of Friedrich Schiller’s project for an aesthetic model of civic education, according to which aesthetic effectivity is reconsidered in light of a history of media based on a technological alternation of images and texts. After a brief overview of Schiller’s aesthetic letters, it examines the ways in which Flusser repositions and expands upon Schiller’s vision of an aesthetic education (most importantly, the aesthetic condition or middle disposition), highlighting the role that Flusser assigns to the evolution of codes inherent in the most important cultural and media techniques, namely, images, texts, and technical images. It then shows how this modification results in a forecasting of a telematic model of aesthetic education, before concluding by addressing the prospects of such a model in a post-digital world of automated media bias.

The final paragraph of the original 1971 edition of Stanley Cavell’s book The World Viewed has often been read too hastily; it is, as a result, frequently misunderstood. This article consists of a close reading of this one paragraph, correcting some of these misrepresentations and arguing that the juxtapositions of ideas that it presents express persistent themes in Cavell’s work in ways that are worthy of minute attention. The article attempts to show how examining the paragraph’s form and content can illuminate and clarify our understanding of Cavell’s treatment of privacy, fantasy, modernism, mortality, and ontology – in film as well as much more generally.