Calendar

I defend a contextual reconstruction of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. My contextualist reconstruction contrasts with the rationalist reconstruction predominant in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship. After discussing the differences between the two approaches, I show how the rationalist reconstruction has distorted our understanding of Nietzsche in at least two respects. First, in trying to extract theories from Nietzsche’s corpus that will be attractive to contemporary philosophers, it has caused scholars largely to neglect the nature, structure, and argument of Nietzsche’s published works. Here, I make my case by focusing on common misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s free spirit works. Second, it has caused scholars to tame Nietzsche’s project by dismissing Thus Spoke Zarathustra as mere poetry and distancing Nietzsche from controversial ideas such as the will to power and the eternal recurrence. In contrast, I argue that by reading Nietzsche as a naturalist through the lens of a historical influence like Schopenhauer, rather than anachronistically through Quine, we can begin to make sense of these essential features of his project. I close with some remarks about why a contextual reconstruction may not only be truer to Nietzsche, but also more philosophically satisfying than the rationally reconstructed Nietzsche currently on offer.

Sjoerd van Tuinen and Jürgen Schaflechner will present their film “Toxic Reigns of Resentment” featuring Wendy Brown, Grayson Hunt, Rahel Jaeggi, Alexander Nehamas, Robert Pfaller, Gyan Prakash, Peter Sloterdijk, and Sjoerd van Tuinen. NSSR philosopher Jay Bernstein will respond after the screening.

After the fall of the Soviet empire and the triumph of global capitalism, modernity appeared to keep its dual promise of liberty and equality. The spreading of human rights and democratic forms of government were intrinsically linked to free flows of global capital and free markets. Supported by technological developments and an ever-increasing digitalization of daily life, the future contained the promise of abundance and recognition for all.

Only a few decades later, however, we witness an oppositional trend: A revival of nationalism paired with xenophobia, an increasing tribalization of politics, a public sphere oscillating between cruelty and sentimentality, and a Left caught up in wounded attachments. Social media, once the promise to give voice to the disempowered, link cognitive capitalism with a culture of trolling and hyper moralization. Algorithms programmed to monetarize outrage feed isolated information bubbles and produce what many call the era of post-truth politics.

How did we enter this toxic climate? Are these developments a response to the ubiquity of neoliberal market structures eroding the basic solidarities in our society? Has the spread of social media limited our ability to soberly deal with conflicting life worlds? And have both the left and the right given in to a form of politics where moralization and cynical mockery outdo collective visions of the future?

Recently, Rebecca Kukla – among others – has argued that consent language is too narrow to adequately capture the ethical obligations and failures arising in the context of sex. Instead, she offers more nuanced scripts for the kinds of communication that occur throughout sex, not just at the beginning. I agree with Kukla that consent language is too narrow; however, I argue that she overlooks the fact that intimate personal communication requires an emotional attunement to context precisely because it cannot be fully scripted. To demonstrate this I turn to Cavell’s category of the passionate utterance which gestures at this dynamic dimension of performatives, but doesn’t deliver a detailed account. In this paper I will expand on Cavell’s idea of the passionate exchange in order to shed light on the active interpretive role of the audience, and how it contributes to performative success.

Abstract:

As a specific form of rights insecurity the revocability of reproductive rights manifests contradictory understandings (privative and productive) of the political status of pregnancy.

I ask how and why we should understand reproductive rights as revocable, giving a broad meaning to the term “revocability,” and suggesting a conjoined vocabulary that includes conditionality, exceptionality, and disqualifying qualification.

I ask: what kind of grammar might help us understand more specifically how the concurrent action of conflicting combinations of power (such as sovereignty, discipline, security, necropower, and neoliberal expectation) coordinate together in relation to reproductive rights-bearing, and how heterogeneous combinations of power also produce a mutual disruptiveness, even auto-critique, manifesting as conflictual embodiment.

External visitors must comply with the university’s guest policy as outlined here: https://www.newschool.edu/covid-19/campus-access/?open=visitors.

Audience members must show proof of a full COVID-19 vaccination series (and booster if eligible), ID, and remain masked at all times.

still scheduled, but zoom link for those who can’t travel: https://NewSchool.zoom.us/j/8479688193

Throughout the 21st century, philosophers of language have increasingly concerned themselves with the hateful, coercive, dehumanizing, and deadly. In particular, ‘non-ideal’ philosophers of language question whether received conceptual toolkits from philosophy of language manage to make contact with our non-ideal world at all. This paper takes up that methodological interest from a Wittgensteinian perspective. Drawing on critical interventions by Nancy Bauer, Avner Baz, Alice Crary, Cora Diamond, and Toril Moi, I argue that non-ideal philosophers of language neutralize their ideology-critical bite when they presume an authoritative force for their words by virtue of a normatively neutral conception of reason. This neutralization is driven and sustained by an idle picture of language that isolates our words from the activities into which they are woven. To make discursive phenomena available in their political import, we philosophers of language must acknowledge our own non-neutral involvement in the very discursive practices we’re theorizing – and this will require us to relinquish the entitlement to impose authoritative requirements on language through theories of meaning.

To illustrate the need for normatively non-neutral methods in philosophical practice, I focus on cases where philosophers’ curious gaze treats trans people
as fascinating objects of knowledge, as opposed to acknowledging us as interlocutors and recognizing the political stakes of our discursive practices. What inhibits the cultivation of acknowledgement, of normatively resonant modes of attention, is a picture of philosophical theorizing that forbids us from articulating our political solidarities through our work (and thus obfuscates what we ourselves are doing with words when theorizing). The non-ideal philosopher’s critical concept of idealization, seen aright in a normatively non-neutral light, exemplifies the sort of theoretical resource that is mobilized by members of marginalized groups to invite such modes of attention – to shape not only our epistemic resources, but also our senses of what matters.

The virtually ubiquitous view of seeing-as experiences in Wittgenstein scholarship interprets them as conceptually-laden (with some exceptions, e.g. Travis 2016). The claim is that we can see the same image differently due to switching the conceptual filters, as it were, through which we experience the image (e.g. Schroeder 2010; Mulhall 2001). In this paper I focus on a specific kind of a seeing-as experience for which Wittgenstein’s example of suddenly noticing the similarity between faces is the paradigm. I argue that it is possible to have no concepts involved in this experience, and propose an understanding of what I call “the imagistic seeing-as” as a similarity association, of the kind that grounds poetic means of expression, such as metaphors. The associative nature of this imagistic seeing-as experience may also contribute to the understanding of biases – both personal (e.g. displaced offence) and social (e.g. sexism).