Robert Sinnerbrink

From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower

Abstract This paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault and Agamben. It shows how Heideggers reflections on Machenschaft or machination prefigure the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucaults account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism, and a critique of Agambens presentation of biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality. Foucaults ethical turn within biopolitical govern-mentality, along with Agambens messianic gesture towards a utopian community to come, are questioned as political responses to biopower regimes.

A Post-Humanist Moralist: michael haneke's cinematic critique

The films of Michael Haneke, so some critics argue, exploit the nihilism of a media-saturated culture, indulging in a dubious manipulation of audience expectations and our fascination with violence. Such criticisms, however, misunderstand or distort the complex moral, political, and aesthetic purpose of Haneke’s work. Indeed, his films are better understood as examining the socially disorienting and subjectively disintegrating effects of our post-humanist world of mass-mediatised experience. At the same time, they are highly reflexive cinematic works that force us to reflect – both morally and aesthetically – upon our relationship with cinematic and media images. These two strands of Haneke’s work comprise a sustained meditation on what we might call the “post-humanist condition”: a cinematic critique of the disintegration and fragmentation of affect and subjectivity, a disintegration closely linked with contemporary forms of mediatised spectacle and the cynical consumption of images of violence. Given the mediatised nature of contemporary social experience, the only effective way to engage in cinematic critique is by means of the very images that capture and captivate us.

Deconstructive Justice and the “Critique of Violence”: On Derrida and Benjamin

This essay presents a critical interpretation of Derridas deconstructive reading of Walter Benjamins text, “Critique of Violence.” It examines the relationship between deconstruction and justice, and the parallel Derrida draws between deconstructive reading and Benjamins account of pure violence. I argue that Derrida blurs Benjamins distinction between the political general strike (which simply inverts state power relations) and the proletarian general strike (which non-violently disrupts such power relations). As a consequence, Derrida criticises Benjamins metaphysical complicity with the violence that lead to the Holocaust. Derridas deconstructive reading of Benjamin, I conclude, underplays its Marxist dimensions, privileging the theological and textual dimensions of Benjamins thought over the political and historical.

Critique hope, power: Challenges of contemporary critical theory

In one of the final texts written before his death, an essay devoted to Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” Michel Foucault defined the ethos of modernity as a “permanent critique of ourselves.” By this Foucault meant a critical social ontology, an attitude of critical experimentation with the established limits of knowledge and social practice. Such a model of critique, Foucault argued, must be understood as an ethos, a “historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.”1 The later Foucault’s qualified affiliation with the critical Enlightenment tradition can be fruitfully compared with the model of philosophical and social critique developed within the critical theory tradition. According to the latter tradition, a critical theory of society not only diagnoses the pathologies of modernity, reflecting upon the experiences of injustice motivating various social movements, but also attempts to offer a positive alternative to prevailing forms of

Re-enfranchising Film: Towards a Romantic Film-Philosophy

The relationship between philosophy and film has attracted intensive speculation in recent years. Indeed we can now speak of the ‘ philosophy of film’ as an independent area of inquiry with its own journals, monographs, and conferences (see Wartenberg, 2008). Despite this welcome flourishing of approaches, I shall ask whether Arthur Danto’s thesis concerning the ‘philosophical disenfranchisement of art’ (1986) might apply to (some) contemporary theoretical approaches to film. Philosophers of film repeat the gesture of philosophical disenfranchisement, for example, when they argue that philosophy’s primary task in relation to cinema is, say, to clarify theoretically problems of perception, representation, or understanding; or to show the underlying conceptual or moral significance of various kinds of film narrative; or to translate cinematic presentation into recognizable forms of philosophical argumentation; or to analyse conceptually the aesthetic ‘source material’ provided by various films or film genres, and so on. In such approaches, film is taken to be an inferior form of knowing, and is subsumed within a theoretical framework that typically reduces its aesthetic complexity.

Recognitive Freedom: Hegel and the Problem of Recognition

Abstract This paper examines the theme of recognition in Hegels account of self-consciousness, suggesting that there are unresolved difficulties with the relationship between the normative sense of mutual recognition and phenomenological cases of unequal recognition. Recent readings of Hegel deal with this problem by positing an implicit distinction between an ‘ontological’ sense of recognition as a precondition for autonomous subjectivity, and a ‘normative’ sense of recognition as embodied in rational social and political institutions. Drawing on recent work by Robert Pippin and Axel Honneth, I argue that Hegels conception of rational freedom provides the key to grasping the relationship between the ontological and normative senses of recognition. Recognitive freedom provides a way of appropriating Hegels theory of recognition for contemporary social philosophy.

ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLIA

Abstract: This article analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars von Triers Melancholia, focusing in particular on the films remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique of rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-italictic allegory of world-destruction. At the same time, I suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds – cinematic but also cultural and natural – that characterises our historical mood, one that might be described as a deflationary apocalypticism or melancholy modernity. From this perspective, Melancholia belongs to a genealogical lineage that links it with two earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar Bergmans Shame [Skammen] (1968) and Andrei Tarkovskys The Sacrifice (1986). All three films share a concern with apocalypticism, world-sacrifice, and historical melancholia; but they also explore different responses to the imagined experience of a catastrophic loss of world. By examining these films in relation to Melancholia we can trace the logic of this loss, culminating in Melancholias radical gesture of world-sacrifice; this aestheticisation of world-destruction has the paradoxical ethical meaning, I suggest, of preparing for a post-humanist beginning.

Neo-Anarchism or Neo-Liberalism? Yes, Please! A Response to Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding

Abstract Simon Critchleys Infinitely Demanding makes a timely contribution to contemporary debates in ethics and political philosophy. For all its originality, however, one can raise critical questions concerning Critchleys account of the forms of resistance possible within liberal democratic polities. In this article I question the adequacy of Critchleys ethically based neo-anarchism as a response to neo-liberalism, critically analysing the role of ideology in his account of the motivational deficit afflicting capitalist liberal democracies.

Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement recently, George Steiner notes the astonishing flowering of a ‘Heidegger industry.’ In Germany, the editing of Heidegger’s works continues with an expectation that the final version of the collected works will exceed eighty volumes. Eminent French critics such as Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have drawn Heidegger into deconstructivist philosophy. He is a growing presence in the writings of influential Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Massimo Cacciari. And Heidegger’s impact extends beyond formal philosophical studies and cultural criticism to poetry (Paul Celan and René Char) and to art (Anselm Kiefer). Indeed, Steiner comments, the designation of the twentieth century as ‘“the century of Martin Heidegger” has become almost a cliché.’ At the same time, Heidegger’s legacy is haunted by his disheartening and offensive associations with anti-Semitism and Nazism. Appointed as rector of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger acquiesced in National Socialist policies for universities, including the firing of Jewish colleagues. More importantly, he saw in the new German state an opportunity to concretize issues to which he had repeatedly returned in his philosophical writings: a necessity for a renewal of national spirituality and honour, an opportunity to challenge the brutalizing effects of industrialization, and a revitalizing of the state sustained by the language of Being. No scholar writing on Heidegger in the twenty-first century can fail to engage the problematic questions raised by his legacies. Nikolas Kompridis’s Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future negotiates with admirable attention to details and nuances, both the socio-cultural resources within Heidegger’s thought and the troubling political complications. The overall project of Critique and Disclosure is a retrieval of what is valuable in Heidegger, specifically the act of disclosure and what it can bring to both cognition and ethics in the act of thinking towards the future. As Kompridis writes, ‘We are the ones who must selfconsciously renew and correct our forms of life, who must repair what is broken, or break with what seems irreparable.’ Such a process certainly has roots in the Enlightenment and in Immanuel Kant’s conception of critique, a process of rethinking that challenges individuals and societies to interrogate deeply held assumptions and to be willing to reconsider the foundations of cultural and political traditions. Kompridis is well aware of the sheer difficulty of Kantian-inspired critique: such questioning necessarily takes place within the very institutions that are put in question, within an intricate tension between involvement and distance. In his words, ‘[B]ecause they shape and sustain our identity and self-understanding, 338 letters in canada 2007

Pleasure, Art, Culture: Remarks on Mohan Matthen's ‘The Pleasure of Art’

ABSTRACT In response to Mohan Matthens ‘The Pleasure of Art’, I identify three issues that deserve further critical engagement: the scope of his definition of aesthetic pleasure, the role of culture in shoring up its communal and communicable character, and the need to include an account of aesthetic properties in his psychologically grounded approach to aesthetic pleasure. Without due acknowledgment of both aesthetic properties and the intersubjective role of culture, Matthens activity-based theory of aesthetic pleasure risks lapsing into subjectivism, thereby losing the ‘communal and communicative’ character of art upon which he rightly insists.