Continental Philosophy Commons^™

Günther Anders’S “Promethean Shame”: Technological Ressentiment And Surveillance, Babette Babich

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Günther Anders’s philosophy of technology, particularly his complex notion of ‘Promethean shame,’ or technological ressentiment, may illuminate questions of surveillance and AI ethics. As a critical philosopher of technology, radically so, his emphasis on the negative or downside of technology distinguishes Anders’s thinking on technology from future-focused and mainstream technological messianism. Key to Anders’s notion of ‘Promethean shame’ was his observation that we adapt ourselves to our technology, not the other way around. Provocatively, Anders argued that while the populace in the past—referring to Nazi Germany—required the techniques of mass psychology and mass gatherings for the purposes of manipulation and …

"Foul Death, Bitter Death": On Ivan Illich's Amicus Mortis, Babette Babich

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No abstract provided.

Gnosticism, Political Theory And Apocalypse: Jacob Taubes And Günther Anders, Tracy Strong And Carl Schmitt, Babette Babich

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Beginning with Jacob Taubes and Günther Anders on eschatology, apocalypse and political theology, including Saint Paul and Frankfurt School critical theory along with bombs and power plants (energy/climate), this essay parallels a re-reading of Tracy B. Strong’s political reading of Nietzsche on Jesus (and love) with Taubes, Anders and Carl Schmitt on politics (and technology). Highlighted throughout is the politically charged (and inherently esoteric) context of Gnosticism for philosophy and theory for Taubes but also for Anders.

Günther Anders’S Epitaph For Aikichi Kuboyama, Babette Babich

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Günther Anders’s poem Du kleiner Fischerman is read here as a text contribution to the irruption that is violence and its enduring (omnipresent) aftermath. The essay includes a discussion of transmedial expression, including dramatization, or television and social media, text and subtext, as well as the inspiration of Anders’s poem as a work of art continuing in our times: the ongoing exclusion(s) of certain names and certain thinkers as of certain musical modes, including electronic musical works, as of voices and of collective memory, or oblivion. Reading Raymond Williams along with Anders and Adorno on television updated in today’s era …

Ood For The Ghosts: Reading Ruin’S Being With The Dead With Nietzsche, Babette Babich

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A focus on roots, localizations, usurpations, and obliterations together with commemoration and different fields of scholarly research, along with a thematic focus on Homer’s Nykia, permit Hans Ruin to revisit the foundations of history in Being with the Dead. Ruin draws on cultural sociology, including the work of Alfred Schütz, as well as Heideggerian historicity and the dead of the distant past, including archaeology and ethnography, paleography and physical anthropology. Ruin also engages Michel de Certeau’s Writing of History and its focus on the other in a necropolitical account tracked through interdisciplinary fields. In my reading I supplement Ruin’s critical …

Talking Weather From Ge-Rede To Ge-Stell, Babette Babich

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Talking about the weather was until recently a clicM expression for time wasting, idle chatter, what Heidegger calls Gerede. Today's talk of global warming seems altogether different. Yet Heidegger's analysis of Ge-Stell also permits a complex reading of the mobilization of popular opinion, totalized as he knew this to have been in his own political era. Here it is useful to take up the question of its current totalization along with a reflection on today's "climatic regimes," as Bruno Latour has recently spoken of these. For his part, Peter Sloterdijk uses the language of atmoterrorism, and although his analysis draws …

Musical “Covers” And The Culture Industry: From Antiquity To The Age Of Digital Reproducibility, Babette Babich

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This essay foregrounds “covers” of popular recorded songs as well as male and female desire, in addition to Nietzsche’s interest in composition, together with his rhythmic analysis of Ancient Greek as the basis of what he called the “spirit of music” with respect to tragedy. The language of “sonic branding” allows a discussion of what Günther Anders described as the self-creation of the mass consumer but also a reflection on the ghostly time-space of music in the broadcast world. A brief allusion to Rilke complements a similarly brief reference to Jankelevitch’s “ineffable.”

Solicitude: Towards A Heideggerian Care Ethics-Of-Assistance, Babette Babich

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No abstract provided.

Heidegger And Hölderlin On Aether And Life, Babette Babich

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No abstract provided.

On Guenther Anders, Political Media Theory, And Nuclear Violence, Babette Babich

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• Guenther Anders was a philosopher concerned with the political and social implications of power, both as expressed in the media and its tendency to elide the citizenry and thus the very possibility of democracy and the political implications of our participation in our own subjugation in the image of modern social media beginning with radio and television. Anders was particularly concerned with two bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II, and he was just as concerned with the so-called ‘peaceful’ uses of nuclear power, i.e., what he named our apocalypse-blindness and the urgency of violence. To …

Hermeneutic Philosophies Of Social Science: Introduction, Babette Babich

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No abstract provided.

La Violenza Della Violenza, Babette Babich

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ünther Anders, al pari di Hannah Arendt, fu un teorico del potere che sviluppò un’esplicita riflessione filosofica sulla violenza. Tuttavia, anche gli esperti delle sue opere trovano solitamente che le riflessioni di Anders sul potere (in tedesco Macht) implichino una certa difficoltà interpretativa, specialmente perché la sua scrittura è stilisticamente impegnativa, ma anche perché, in modo più decisivo, Anders scrisse sulla natura della tecnica, argomento inusuale per la maggior parte dei teorici della politica e dei filosofi. Questo interesse può essere riscontrato a cominciare dalle primissime riflessioni del filosofo tedesco sulla musica, e in tutti i suoi studi sull’essere …

Aftermath, Babette Babich

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Aftermath

The question after any disaster is the question of what remains and that, to the extent that there is still something that remains, is the question of life. It is life that is the question after Auschwitz—how go on, how write poetry, how philosophize? What is called thinking after Heidegger? Are we still inclined to thinking, after Heidegger? And what of logic? What of history? And what of science? In addition, we may ask after ethical implications, including questions bearing on anti-Semitism, but also issues of misogyny, as well as Heidegger’s critical questions concerning technology and concerning animal life …

Tools For Subversion: Illich And Žižek On Changing The World, Babette Babich

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Reviewing the work of Ivan Illich, Robert Kurz and Stanley Aronowitz together with Slavoj Žižek, this essay includes a discussion of Heidegger’s technically economic articulation of standing reserve correspondent to challenging forth (the world, ourselves, animals, plants, whatever), this essay takes up “the thought of the weak in search of alternatives” as Vattimo and Zabala argue for the possibility of interpretive transformation. In addition to Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of the resistance to revolution that functions as corollary to the existential stress of the dislocated mind, this reflection includes a discussion of media and illusion via Adorno.

Nietzsche’S Posthuman Imperative: On The Human, All Too Human Dream Of Transhumanism, Babette Babich

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No abstract provided.

Are They Good? Are They Bad? Double Hermeneutics And Citation In Philosophy, Asphodel And Alan Rickman, Bruno Latour And The ‘Science Wars, Babette Babich

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The attached file is a proof copy.

Please see the printed version. Das interpretative Universum

William J. Richardson, S.J.: Reflections In Memoriam, Babette Babich

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Fr. William J. Richardson, S.J., was born in Brooklyn, New York on the 2nd of November, 1920. He died at the Jesuit Campion Health Center, in Weston, Massachusetts, on the 10th of December, 2016.

Leo O’Donovan, S.J., Richard Kearney, and Jeffrey Bloechl, each in different ways gathered the diffusions of mourning friends, students, colleagues, patients, and admirers of the late William J. Richardson, via email over the days leading up to and after his funeral.

As Bill was one of the founding members of the Heidegger Circle (Penn State, 1967) and was present at the first conference on Heidegger’s thought …

On Heidegger On Education And Questioning, Babette Babich

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Discussions of Heidegger and education, particularly as expressed by those interested in the philosophy of education, take a number of perspectives as thematic foci. Questioning is key to Heidegger’s thinking from the start of his 1927 Being and Time, calling into question the foundations of what we suppose ourselves to know. Thus questioning involves a reflection on education, that is: both teaching and learning. Heidegger himself thematizes education, significantly so in the light of the political circumstances of his 1933 “Rectoral Discourse” as well as, in an inventive mode which would, as we shall see, have been better had …

Ivan Illich’S Medical Nemesis And The ‘Age Of The Show’: On The Expropriation Of Death, Babette Babich

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What Ivan Illich regarded in his Medical Nemesis as the ‘expropriation of health’ is exacerbated by the screens all around us, including our phones but also the patient monitors and increasingly the iPads that intervene between nurse and patient. To explore what Illich called the ‘age of the show’, this essay uses film examples, like Creed and the controversial documentary Vaxxed, and the television series Nurse Jackie. Rocky’s cancer in his last film (and his option to submit to chemo to ‘fight’ cancer) highlights what Illich along with Petr Skrabanek called the ‘expropriation of death’. In contrast to what Illich …

Nietzsches Lyrik. Archilochus, Musik, Metrik, Babette Babich

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No abstract provided.

La Violenza Della Violenza, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Günther Anders, al pari di Hannah Arendt, fu un teorico del potere che sviluppò un’esplicita riflessione filosofica sulla violenza. Tuttavia, anche gli esperti delle sue opere trovano solitamente che le riflessioni di Anders sul potere (in tedesco Macht) implichino una certa difficoltà interpretativa, specialmente perché la sua scrittura è stilisticamente impegnativa, ma anche perché, in modo più decisivo, Anders scrisse sulla natura della tecnica, argomento inusuale per la maggior parte dei teorici della politica e dei filosofi. Questo interesse può essere riscontrato a cominciare dalle primissime riflessioni del filosofo tedesco sulla musica, e in tutti i suoi studi sull’essere umano …

Nietzsche's Spiritual Exercises, Babette Babich

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Nietzsche’s third Untimely Meditation, composed in 1874, Schopenhauer as Educator, reflects upon and describes a “spiritual exercise” not unlike the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, detailing tactics and including practical advice. Thus Nietzsche’s “spiritual exercises” correspond to the traditional practice of self-cultivation, self-education, characteristic of the Stoic philosophers but also influential for the Hellenistic neo-Platonic tradition, the church fathers, and St. Augustine, author of De Magistro and the Confessions. Beyond antiquity, spiritual exercises refer to a theological practice of selfcultivation and self-discipline.

Nietzsche’S Digital Alexandrians: Greek As Musical Code For Nietzsche And Kittler, Babette Babich

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No abstract provided.

On The Hallelujah Efect: Priming Consumers, Recording Music, And The Spirit Of Tragedy, Babette Babich

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An overview of The Hallelujah Effect concentrating on priming or sonic branding, media, online porn as well as marketing and media programming, with a special excursus on the space of music --and radio in Adorno's Current of Music, and a detailed discussion on Nietzsche and music in antiquity as he explores this with reference ot Beethoven in The Birth of Tragedy.

Nietzsche's Antichrist: The Birth Of Modern Science Out Of The Spirit Of Religion, Babette Babich

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Nietzsche argued that the Greeks were in possessions of every theoretical, mathematical, logical, and technological antecedent for the development of what could be modern science. But if they had all these necessary prerequisites what else could they have needed? Not only had the ancient Greeks no religious world-view antagonistic to scientific inquiry, they also lacked the Judeo-Christian promissory ideal of salvation in a future life (after death). Subsequently, when Greek culture had been irretrievably lost, what Nietzsche regarded as the "decadent" Socratic ideal of reason ultimately and in connection with the preludes of religion and alchemy developed into modern science …

The ‘New’ Heidegger, Babette Babich

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If discussion of “new” approaches to Martin Heidegger contradicts Heidegger’s own indictment of the passion for “novelty” in philosophy, today’s Black Notebooks scandal reminds us of the ontic problem of new news. Indeed the backwards working evidence of the notebooks kept before, during, and after WWII both vindicates and problematizes his notion of temporality temporalizing from the future -- lapsing into the past -- setting up what is now regarded as patent in the present. Simultaneously, we see that if heretofore many philosophers of technology sought to dismiss engagement with Heidegger’s critique of technology, these critical contributions turn out to …

Calling Science Pseudoscience: Fleck’S Archaeologies Of Fact And Latour’S ‘Biography Of An Investigation’ In Aids Denialism And Homeopathy, Babette Babich

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Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact foregrounds claims traditionally excluded from reception, often regarded as opposed to fact, scientific claims that are increasingly seldom discussed in connection with philosophy of science save as examples of pseudo-science. I am especially concerned with scientists who question the epidemiological link between HIV and AIDS and who are thereby discounted—no matter their credentials, no matter the cogency of their arguments, no matter the sobriety of their statistics—but also with other classic examples of so-called pseudo-science including homeopathy and other sciences, such as cold fusion. The pseudo-science version of the demarcation problem turns …

Becoming And Purification: Empedocles, Zarathustra’S Übermensch, And Lucian’S Tyrant, Babette Babich

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Nietzsche’s Übermensch is derived from Lucian of Samosata’s term hyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman or Übermensch should be read in correspondence with the context of its (terminological) origination in Lucian’s satirical dialogue Kataplous, referring to the journey of the soul from its life on earth into the afterlife, as escorted by Hermes and ferried by Charon along with myriads of others facing the same fate, traditionally the journey is downward journey and the human soul does not tend to be translated to regions above its former station (the literal meaning of the Übermensch). The Kataplous …

“Who Do You Think You Are?” On Nietzsche’S Schopenhauer, Illich’S Hugh Of St. Victor, And Kleist’S Kant, Babette Babich

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No abstract provided.

The Universality Of Hermeneutics In Joseph Kockelmans’S Version Of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Dimitri Ginev

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There is in Professor Kockelmans’s works from the 1950s a gradual transition from Nikolai Hartmann’s theory of the ontological modalities and categories (addressed in its capacity to serve as a prerequisite for reconstructing the ontological assumptions of basic scientifi c theories) to a kind of hermeneutic ontology. This transition is especially palpable in his reading of Hartmann’s “Philosophy of Nature.” In Hartmann’s categorial metaphysics of knowledge Dasein and Sosein (as ways of being) are subordinated to the modes and spheres of being. The transition was by no means accomplished via a direct borrowing of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein . It …