Emma Ingala

This volume brings together an international array of scholars to reconsider the meaning and place of poststructuralism historically and demonstrate some of the ways in which it continues to be relevant, especially for debates in aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The book’s chapters focus on the works of Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard—in combination with those of Agamben, Luhman, Nancy, and Nietzsche—and examine issues including biopolitics, culture, embodiment, epistemology, history, music, temporality, political resistance, psychoanalysis, revolt, and the visual arts. The contributors use poststructuralism as a hermeneutical strategy that rejects the traditional affirmation of unity, totality, transparency, and representation to instead focus on the foundational importance of open-ended becoming, difference, the unknowable, and expression. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of poststructuralism and helps demonstrate how it has contributed to debates across philosophy and other disciplines. 'Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism' will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, aesthetics, feminist theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, psychoanalysis, and sociology.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala

Part I: Historical Traces

1. Nietzsche and the Emergence of Poststructuralism
Alan D. Schrift (Grinnell College, USA)

2. Poststructuralism in America: From Epistemological Relativism to Post-Truth?
Kevin Kennedy (CY Cergy Paris University, France).

3. From Choirboy to Funeral Orator: Foucault’s Complicated Relationship to Structuralism
Guilel Treiber (KU Leuven, Belgium)

4. Haunted by Derrida: Reading Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’ in Constellation
James R. Martel (San Francisco State University, USA).

Part II: Future Pathways: Aesthetics

5. A Poststructuralism for the Visual Arts
Ashley Woodward (University of Dundee, Scotland).

6. What Moves Music?: Poststructuralism, Pulsion, and Musical Ontology
Michael David Székely (Temple University, USA)

Part III: Ethical Openings

7. Not Just a Body: Lacan on Corporeality
Emma Ingala (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)

8. The Ethics and Politics of Temporality: Judith Butler, Embodiment, and Narrativity
Rosine Kelz (Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies—Potsdam, Germany)

Part IV: Political Apertures

9. Re-thinking Poststructuralism with Deleuze and Luhmann: Autopoiesis, Immanence, Politics
Hannah Richter (University of Hertfordshire, England)

10. Kristeva’s Wager on the Future of Revolt
S. K. Keltner (Kennesaw State University, USA)

11. Strategies of Political Resistance: Agamben and Irigaray
Gavin Rae (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain).

Despite, or quite possibly because of, the structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist critiques of subjectivity, master signifiers, and political foundations, contemporary philosophy has been marked by a resurgence in interest in questions of subjectivity and the political. Guided by the contention that different conceptions of the political are, at least implicitly, committed to specific conceptions of subjectivity while different conceptions of subjectivity have different political implications, this collection brings together an international selection of scholars to explore these notions and their connection. Rather than privilege one approach or conception of the subjectivity-political relationship, this volume emphasizes the nature and status of the and in the ‘subjectivity’ and ‘the political’ schema. By thinking from the place between subjectivity and the political, it is able to explore this relationship from a multitude of perspectives, directions, and thinkers to show the heterogeneity, openness, and contested nature of it. While the contributions deal with different themes or thinkers, the themes/thinkers are linked historically and/or conceptually, thereby providing coherence to the volume. Thinkers addressed include Arendt, Butler, Levinas, Agamben, Derrida, Kristeva, Adorno, Gramsci, Mill, Hegel, and Heidegger, while the subjectivity-political relation is engaged with through the mediation of the law-political, ethics-politics, theological-political, inside-outside, subject-person, and individual-institution relationships, as well as through concepts such as genius, happiness, abjection, and ugliness. The original essays in this volume will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, cultural studies, history of ideas, psychology, and sociology.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction: Between Subjectivity and the Political
Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala

PART I: Political Subjectivities

1. The Limits of Nomos: Hannah Arendt on Law, Politics, and the Polis
Liesbeth Schoonheim (KU Leuven, Belgium)

2. From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler: The Conditions of the Political
Emma Ingala (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)

3. Between Failure and Redemption: Emmanuel Levinas on the Political
Gavin Rae (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)

4. The Significant Nothing: Agamben, Theology, and Political Subjectivity
Piotr Sawczyński (Jagiellonian University, Poland)

5. Aporias of Foreignness: Transnational Encounters through Cinema
Katarzyna Marciniak (Ohio University, USA)

PART II: Political Subjectivities

6. The Abject and the Ugly: Kristeva, Adorno, and the Formation of the Subject
Surti Singh (American University in Cairo, Egypt)

7. Antonio Gramsci: Persons, Subjectivity, and the Political
Robert P. Jackson (Manchester Metropolitan University, England)

8. Embodied Consciousness and Political Subjectivity in the work of Merleau-Ponty
Stephen A. Noble (Université de Paris-Est—Créteil , France)

9. John Stuart Mill and the Liberal Genius
Yoel Mitrani (Sciences Po Paris, France)

10. Hegel’s Ethical Life and Heidegger’s ‘They’: How Political is the Self?
Antonio Gómez Ramos (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain).

Violence has long been noted to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Traditionally, however, philosophical discussions have tended to approach it through the lens of warfare and/or limit it to physical forms. This changed in the twentieth century as the nature and meaning of ‘violence’ itself became a conceptual problem. Guided by the contention that Walter Benjamin’s famous 1921 ‘Critique of Violence’ essay inaugurated this turn to an explicit questioning of violence, this collection brings together an international array of scholars to engage with how subsequent thinkers—Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin, Butler, Castoriadis, Derrida, Fanon, Gramsci, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Schmitt—grappled with the meaning and place of violence. The aim is not to reduce these multiple responses to a singular one, but to highlight the heterogeneous ways in which the concept has been inquired into and the manifold meanings of it that have resulted. To this end, each chapter focuses on a different approach or thinker within twentieth and twenty-first century European philosophy, with many of them tackling the issue through the mediation of other topics and disciplines, including biopolitics, epistemology, ethics, culture, law, politics, and psychoanalysis. As such, the volume will be an invaluable resource for those interested in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, History of Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Political Theory, Psychology, and Sociology.

Table of Contents

The Meanings of Violence: Introduction
Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala

Part I: Political Myth and Social Transformation

1. Walter Benjamin and the General Strike: Non-Violence and the Archeon
James Martel (San Francisco State University, USA)

2. Violence, Divine or Otherwise: Myth and Violence in the Benjamin-Schmitt Constellation
Hjalmar Falk (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)

3. Violence and Civilization: Gramsci, Machiavelli, and Sorel
Robert P. Jackson (Manchester Metropolitan University, England)

4. The Violence of Oblivion: Hannah Arendt and the Tragic Loss of Revolutionary Politics
Liesbeth Schoonheim (KU Leuven, Belgium,)

Part II: Sociality and Meaning

5. The World and the Embodied Subject: Humanism, Terror, and Violence
Stephen A. Noble (Universite de Paris X (Paris—Nanterre), France)

6. Dialectics got the Upper Hand: Fanon, Violence, and the Quest[ion] of Liberation
Nigel C. Gibson (Emerson College, USA)

7. Sartre’s Later Work: Towards a Notion of Institutional Violence
Marieke Mueller (King’s College London, England)

8. The Original Polemos: Phenomenology and Violence in Jacques Derrida
Valeria Campos-Salvaterra (Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Chile)

Part III: From Subjectivity to Biopolitics

9. Taming the Little Screaming Monster: Castoriadis, Violence, and the Creation of the Individual
Gavin Rae (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)

10. Judith Butler: From a Formative Violence to an Ethics of Non-Violence
Emma Ingala (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)

11. Biopolitics and Resistance: The Meaning of Violence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben
German Primera (University of Brighton, England).

Los escritos de Aristóteles que nos han llegado reciben el nombre de acroamáticos, por ser apuntes de clases. Pero la akróasis no sugiere solo un texto de importancia secundaria, al no pertenecer la mano que lo escribe a quien lo dicta, sino, más bien, alude a un momento único, irremplazable en el aprendizaje: a la enseñanza oral, a la escucha atenta, al trato amigable de profesor y discípulo. Esta colección se dedica a la exploración de las vías para mejorar este proceso. Nunca ha sido fácil enseñar filosofía. El mayor filósofo de todos los tiempos, de acuerdo con una tradición muy venerable, Sócrates, experimentó en su propia persona la complejidad de adentrarse en el saber filosófico. Si hemos de creer a Platón, el inquieto Sócrates, conversador infatigable con unos y otros, y que se reclamaba ignorante de todo conocimiento salvo de su propia nesciencia, en realidad conocía muchas verdades filosóficas; pero no las había aprendido por sí mismo ni tampoco en un diálogo con sus semejantes en la inopia filosófica. Como muchos de nosotros, las aprendió de un profesor. En el Banquete, el propio Sócrates cuenta que lo que sabe del amor, ingrediente esencial de la actividad filosófica hasta el punto de constituir la mitad de su nombre, lo llegó a saber como dócil y no muy avispado alumno de boca de un verdadero maestro. Maestra, más bien, Diotima, la extraña mujer de Mantinea.

La Casa Encendida presenta las exposiciones de Inéditos 2019 que reúne los proyectos de tres jóvenes comisarios menores de 35 años. El programa Inéditos fomenta la inserción de los jóvenes comisarios en los circuitos profesionales, facilitando a los seleccionados la posibilidad de producir su primera exposición y editar un catálogo del conjunto de la muestra.

"Un amor salvaje que arruina nuestra paz" es una propuesta curatorial que investiga las posibilidades de introducir, a través de la práctica artística, aquello que el discurso capitalista rechaza en todo momento y que el psicoanalista Jacques Lacan detectó y nombró como “las cosas del amor”. En el discurso capitalista, donde todo es aparentemente posible y en el que desaparecen los límites, un cierto amor puede irrumpir como el desestabilizador de un totalitarismo imperante.

Diseño de José Duarte.