Continental Philosophy Commons^™

The (Im)Possibility Of Anti-Systemic Politics: Uprisings, Exilic Spaces, And Alain Badiou, Jason C. Mueller

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

The world-system is in crisis, and a flurry of uprisings challenge the mantra that 'there is no alternative' to capitalism. However, some questions remain. What will replace the global capitalist mode of production, and how will those aspiring to transform the system do so? These questions are of relevance to three separate but related domains of research: (1) the study of anti-systemic movements by world-systems analysts; (2) the study of exilic spaces by scholars using an anarchist perspective; and (3) the work of French Philosopher Alain Badiou. This article stages a discussion between these three areas, locating areas in each …

Global Metaphors For Wisdom: Philosophy As A Species Of The Genus Hao-Xue, Joshua Mason

Comparative Philosophy

Many philosophers have refused to recognize Chinese traditions as genuinely philosophical. The conceptual foundations of these exclusionary efforts appear in Aristotle’s dividing philosophy from rhetoric, then associating philosophy with truth, and rhetoric with metaphor. The Chinese have frequently been defined as metaphorical thinkers, in contrast with the logical, scientific, or literal pursuits of Occidental traditions. Because metaphor is classed with rhetoric, and Chinese was associated with metaphor, critics had a way to say that the Chinese weren’t participating in philia-sophia as rational inquiry into truth. I draw on two strands of 20^th century philosophy to move us beyond this …

The Basic Dualism In The World: Object-Oriented Ontology And Systems Theory, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Graham Harman writes that the “basic dualism in the world lies…between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things.” However, dualism implies irreconcilable difference; what Harman points to is better expressed as a dyad, where the two components imply one another and interact. This article shows that systems theory has long asserted the fundamental character of Harman’s dyad, expressing it as the union of internal structure and external function, which correspond exactly to what Levi Bryant, characterizing Harman’s views, refers to as the intra-ontic and the inter-ontic, respectively. After interpreting Harman’s dyad in terms of the …

Being And Sacrifice: An Essay On Hegelian Logic, Mitch Thiessen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A study of Hegelian logic in relation to postmodern thought, this essay investigates the limits and contemporary significance of Hegel’s concept of knowledge, both on its own terms and from the perspective of three of its most polemical critics: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georges Bataille. Of especial consequence in this study are the themes of individuality, desire, history, and death, insofar as Hegel’s critics judge him to have inadequately come to terms with—and to have even suppressed—the truth or fact of these realities, all of which are potentially fatal for his theory of the subject.

Thinking Blue / Writing Red: Marxism And The (Post)Human, Stephen C. Tumino

Publications and Research

Thinking Blue/Writing Red interrogates contemporary culture across a range of texts, from the pandemic (‘Covid’ and ‘Trump Speak’) to high theory (Melville's narratives) and popular culture (Beyoncé's ‘Formation’ and Super Bowl performance, Twin Peaks , metamodern ‘cli-fi’ films). Inspired by Derrida’s idea of the secret, Tumino examines the significance of social movements (Black Lives Matter, Occupy, alter-globalization) and naïve art (Darger, Ryden) to argue that these texts speak of the secrets that capitalism cannot speak. Contending that the cultural surfaces narrate only the ‘nonsecret,’ that to see the social logic of the culture one must dig into what Bruno Latour …

Praying To Tiktok, Seeking The Self: How Rhetoric Reveals And Conceals The World’S Most Powerful Guru Of The Postindustrial Age, Samantha L. Gillespie-Hoffman

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Imagine a world where the most powerful leader is a wellness guru that runs an elaborate church with millions of followers. The guru is so powerful that everyone believes they can read minds and make ordinary people rich and famous. The guru controls forms of communication, media channels, consumer tastes, and what people eat, drink, say, and even think. What if this guru was not human but actually an algorithm? Does this sound like the plot of a science fiction novel? I argue that this scenario is closer to reality than most will admit. In this project, readers encounter a …

Anātman & Lack: Between Nāgārjuna And Lacan, Carter Morris

The Confluence

The notion of the Self lies at the heart of subjectivity. This paper aims to analyze and compare two intellectual traditions that have their own subversive philosophies of the Self and subjectivity—these two traditions being Mādhyamaka Buddhism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Beginning with primers on both Nāgārjuna’s philosophy and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, this paper will discuss the comparative psychologies and philosophies of subjectivity presented by the ideas of non-Self and Lack, respectively. Also briefly compared are the implied metaphysics of both Śūnyatā and Lacanian Lack. An examination of these comparisons’ weaknesses follows along with some closing remarks.

Equipmentality As A Pharmakon, Sherif Khalil

Theses and Dissertations

One must lose the world to know himself, if in his attempt to know the world he lost himself.

In this thesis, I argue that equipment is a pharmakon in that its harm lies in the service it is supposed to provide. Through equipment one gets to have a practical sense of the world. But, the world in this sense is a world for everyone and for no one in particular, that is, it is made to the measure of the average person who has no aspirations to realize his authenticity. That is how equipment helps us practically make sense …

A Thesis, Or Digressions On Sculptural Practice: In Which, Concepts & Influences Thereof Are Explained, Set Forth, Catalogued, Or Divulged By Way Of Commentaries To A Poem, First Conceived By The Artist, Fed Through Chatg.P.T., And Re-Edited By The Artist, To Which Are Added, Annotated References, Impressions And Ruminations Thereof, Also Including Private Thoughts & Personal Accounts Of The Artist, Jaimie An

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exercise in, perhaps a futile, attempt to trace just some of the ideas, stories, and musings I might meander through in my process. It’s not quite a map, nor is it a neat catalogue; it is a haphazard collection of tickets and receipts from a travel abroad, carelessly tossed in a carry-on, only to be stashed upon returning home. These ideas are derived from much greater thinkers and authors than myself; I am a mere collector or a translator, if that, and not a very good one, for much is lost. I do not claim comprehensive …

I Am Becoming., Dai Asano

Masters Theses

This is a collection of essays documenting my grappling with the idea that time is always in motion. When you say now, it is not now anymore, but we are still in now, a new now. How can I stay in the now without being swept away by the current of time? Describing a film by Ozu Yasujiro, Deleuze writes, “The vase in Late Spring is interposed between the daughter’s half smile and the beginning of her tears. There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change does not pass on. This is time, …

An Existentialist Love, Garrett T. Harrison

The Corinthian

This paper seeks to establish an existentialist concept of virtuous Love by discussing the works of famous modern Existentialist thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus within the realm of Love as discussed by Bell Hooks and Skye Cleary. It also seeks to express the significance of this Love within modern society. Our notion of Existentialist Love is built upon Sartre’s concept of authenticity, and branches into the inter-personal through Beauvoir’s notion of reciprocal, virtuous love. It is then expounded into the greater collective through a discussion of fear as the breeder of inauthenticity and is …

Mythos And Meaning: Medieval Appropriations Of Mythological Types In The Consolation Of Philosophy And Later Western Literatures, Francis J. Hunter

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Often referred to as the last Roman and first medieval, Boethius, author of The Consolation of Philosophy, has been widely received as an unoriginal philosopher who sought to preserve Platonic thought as the Western Roman Empire fell. However, this essay features an investigation into the literary originality of Boethius who initiates a line of Christian and Platonic literatures to follow in the medieval European tradition. Boethius demonstrates himself to be a poet who makes great use of philosophy rather than as a philosopher writing poetry. Boethius’ poetic influence is felt most strongly in major aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy and …

A Hegelian Theory Of Divine Revelation, Jason D. Barton

Philosophy ETDs

Through an intensive examination of the second volume of G.W.F. Hegel’s oft-neglected Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I demarcate and elucidate a Hegelian theory of divine revelation. The second volume of these Lectures advances a series of configurations for religious consciousness through which absolute spirit passes in order to gain awareness of itself in the register of representation. While Hegel identifies divinity with absolute spirit in its moments and movements indicative of an odyssey, Hegel also ventures to painstaking lengths for the sake of authentically capturing how world-historical religions respectively portray(ed) the divine. Such a distinction between …

Cinema's Poetic Function: Creating An Amorous Distance, William Yonts

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The aim of this thesis is to examine how cinema can embrace its poetic function to avoid its assimilation into preexisting hermeneutic structures, which would leave it vulnerable to myth as defined by Roland Barthes, and instead be a generative force, encouraging its viewer to engage with the full potential of the text. This mode of spectatorship is termed the “amorous distance,” which Barthes describes as his simultaneous fascination with the film and that which exceeds it. The amorous distance finds further articulation through the work of Roman Jakobson and Julia Kristeva. Jakobson’s schema of six language functions describes the …

Embracing The Wound Of Contingency: Transcribing Reality In Supernatural Horror And Found Footage, Mason Dax Dickerson

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

To counter both the form of critical thought first outlined by Kant that dispels absolute knowledge, as well as the dogmatic necessitarianism that asserts the universe must be one way for an absolute originary reason, Quentin Meillassoux argues for the “non-facticity of facticity” to implicate an absolute contingency or unreason structuring reality: in effect, anything could happen for no reason at all. Meillassoux suggests the trauma of the contingent event and the sudden impossibility of inductive science in its wake may be explored in an “Extro-Science Fiction” text (XSF) – but limits his examples to science fiction literature. Framing the …

Illusions Of Freedom? A History Of Attitudes Toward Death, Dominick Bucca

All Theses

My thesis explores the historical question: “Is there any freedom from death?” through three figures within the Western metaphysical tradition: Thucydides (460-400 BCE), Augustine (354-430 CE), and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). In so doing, my thesis suggests the following: for Thucydides, freedom from death arose through the immortality of empire; for Augustine, through the immortality of God’s grace; and for Cervantes, through the immortality of narratives/attitudes of immortality. Moreover, I nest my claim within an exploratory narrative. Which is to say that, lifting a page from Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), I have attempted to break away from the near total …

Violence As The Imposition Of Difference: A Case Study Of The 2020 Riots In Minneapolis, Jude Sims-Barber

Honors Theses

Violence has received a great deal of study in many disciplines—as an act of force, or as a theoretical concept. Slovenian political philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek provides in his work Violence: Six Sideways Reflections a unique typology of violence, building and expanding upon decades of existing research in many areas. In so doing, Žižek establishes uniquely insightful links between different forms of violence that open the opportunity to examine outbursts of violence, be they riots, rebellion, or war, in a new way. Cognizant of the inability for us to simultaneously analyze both the person-to-person violence seen in acts …

Incorporating Institutions And Ideology: Why Covid Didn't Change Anything, Cullen Kendrick

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In this paper, I investigate the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic through an economic and philosophical lens to try and understand why government aid was removed. Looking at the problem as solely a structural issue, with Jurgen Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms and Douglas North’s Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance guiding my understanding, provides useful insights. Namely, how the informal and formal structures of society interact, and their cyclical nature. However, that perspective does not provide a complete picture. And so, I developed an understanding of ideology to investigate the origins of informal societal structures. To do this I …

The Drivers Of Academic Novelty In Digital Capitalism: Job Insecurity, Mental Illness And Time Poverty, Adalberto Fernandes

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

The present-day digital capitalist academy increases novel academic results by leveraging factors such as precarious academic employment, time poverty, and mental illness. This paradigm reveals a confluence that turns seemingly negative aspects into productive elements. The consequence of this hypothesis is that by enhancing work, time and mental health conditions, there may be a reduction in the number of novelties, with an enhancement of academic's role as producers of truth.

The Bengali Oil-Eaters: A Speculative Approach To New Materialism And The Nonhuman In Contemporary Petrofiction, Jenna Wayland

Honors Projects

Despite oil’s heavy saturation within the context of contemporary global life, novelistic registrations of oil frontiers and extractive drilling in contemporary world literature remain proportionally barren with regards to oil’s political and geographical importance across the world-system. Petro-cultural production, transnational in scale and imposing in material basis, relegates oil to a paradoxical literary deferment. The general invisibility of petrofiction within the petro-sphere suggests that the materialist basis of petroleum and its fraught geopolitical history has culturally transformed oil into a repressed, peripheral, and hidden material that subsequently renders the oil-encounter unseen in contemporary literature. This creative synthesis of the oil-encounter …