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Ioannidis’ passage to altruism attempts to perform altruism while exploring it. By reversing the axioms of classical phenomenology, what he calls unbracketing, he welcomes in his writing space any discourse, any human expression which could help the philosophical investigation.
Ioannidis’ passage to altruism attempts to perform altruism while exploring it. By reversing the axioms of classical phenomenology, what he calls unbracketing, he welcomes in his writing space any discourse, any human expression which could help the philosophical investigation.
Abstract
Beginning with a brief discussion of Dominique Janicaud’s proposal for a minimalist phenomenology, I turn to the work G. van der Leeuw and argue that his work in the phenomenology of religion can be profitably read as a minimalist phenomenology. I do this by focusing mainly on his methodological remarks, but do occasionally refer to his analyses of particular religious phenomena. Finally, the paper closes with some suggestions about how to think of the relationship between minimalist phenomenology and religious belief.
Threading together a range of Lyotard’s work through four pedagogical processes—reading, writing, voicing, and listening—the author insists on the distinct educational logics that can uphold or interrupt different ways of being-together in the world, touching on a range of topics from literacy and aesthetics to time and political-economy. While Inhuman Educations can serve as an introduction to Lyotard’s philosophy, it also constitutes a singular, provocative, and fresh take on his thought.
Threading together a range of Lyotard’s work through four pedagogical processes—reading, writing, voicing, and listening—the author insists on the distinct educational logics that can uphold or interrupt different ways of being-together in the world, touching on a range of topics from literacy and aesthetics to time and political-economy. While Inhuman Educations can serve as an introduction to Lyotard’s philosophy, it also constitutes a singular, provocative, and fresh take on his thought.
Transitions as qualitative shifts between societies are often considered as eventual historical stages, or effaced altogether. Theorising transition in a new direction, Onur Acaroglu elaborates a theory of temporal dislocation. Considering transition through a framework of out-of-joint temporalities, the notion comes through as an undervalued tendency in social reproduction.
Transitions as qualitative shifts between societies are often considered as eventual historical stages, or effaced altogether. Theorising transition in a new direction, Onur Acaroglu elaborates a theory of temporal dislocation. Considering transition through a framework of out-of-joint temporalities, the notion comes through as an undervalued tendency in social reproduction.
Abstract
Among the ancients, there was no proper conception of the I. Yet an I emerges in ancient Israel. I therefore inquire into the philosophical anthropology of ancient Israel. How did the I emerge? By interpreting the Song of Songs as political myth, from which a philosophical anthropology can be unearthed and reconstructed, I theorize that not only an I, but also a different kind of we emerged through gift-dynamics. Then I demonstrate that these gift-dynamics are compatible with the ancient Israelites’ religious-political institutions and manifest itself in their collective psyche.
The intermezzo introduces an explicit consideration of aesthetics into the book, with a concentrated focus on Lyotard’s book on Kant’s third critique of judgment. Here, the distinction between the two forms of inhuman education turns on the difference between the aesthetic of the beautiful and the aesthetic of the sublime. After exploring Lyotard’s writing on Kant, I show how the inhuman education of the system, which is about innovation, is organized around the beautiful—with its demands for endless articulations and limitless dialogue—and how the inhuman education of infancy, which remains within initiation, finds resonance in the sublime—with its monstrous formlessness that blocks understanding, knowledge, and communication, disseizing the subject’s capacity of understanding. After articulating these differences and providing examples of each through Lyotard’s writings on art and artists, I return the idea of childish or idiotic writing—providing examples from Lyotard’s own writing—thereby demonstrating the ways in which they provide examples of writing under the (dis)order of the sublime.
In this chapter, I propose different sonic modes of engaging the distinct voices of the two inhuman educations, the public life and secret life, lexis and phonè. The two main modes, hearing and listening, are differentiated according to the role the subject plays in each. Hearing is about affirming and creating new forms of understanding, while listening reaches beyond understanding and subjects us to the force of sonorous matter itself. Lyotard’s writings on John Cage and Pierre Boulez, who each approach sublime sounds through different tactics, the former through minimalism and the latter through overdetermination. Next, I turn to timbre or the nuance of sounds, or those sonorous elements that are unpredictable and sublime, and which disseize the subject and disable our capacity to identify, understand, and know. To experience the force of timbre, the inhuman education of infancy requires passibility and another form of listening: not listening, upsetting the apparent dichotomy of sonic pedagogy. When not listening, we’re subjected to the force of timbre, or the inaudible and immaterial matter of sound. In the end, I read these forms of listening back through the examples of the ellipses and the list introduced in chapter 2.
The introduction begins with one place Lyotard explicitly focused on education, in his introduction to The Inhuman, which serves to introduce the two inhumans mobilized through the book: the inhuman of the system and the inhuman of humanity. The system is organized not around ideals or community but by development, exchange, transparency, and deliberation. The system’s inhumanity emerges from the fact that it disregards or represses the inhumanity of the human, which concerns the infancy of humanity, or the inability to speak. The inhuman education of the system works to develop the child into an adult, whereas the inhuman education of the human finds resonance with that which cannot be, or is beyond, articulation. After a brief biographical sketch of Lyotard, I conclude the chapter with a justification for the book and the approach it takes. Rather than applying Lyotard to education or mining Lyotard’s writings for references to education, the remaining chapters engage Lyotard’s thinking and writing as pedagogical in themselves, and approach them through four educative processes: reading, writing, voicing, and listening.