In this paper we provide a general account of the causal models which attempt to provide a solution to the famous measurement problem of Quantum Mechanics. We will argue that—leaving aside instrumentalism which restricts the physical meaning of QM to the algorithmic prediction of measurement outcomes—the many interpretations which can be found in the literature can be distinguished through the way they model the measurement process, either in terms of the efficient cause or in terms of the final cause. We (...) will discuss and analyze why both, ‘final cause’ and ‘efficient cause’ models, face severe difficulties to solve the measurement problem. In contradistinction to these schemes we will present a new model based on the immanent cause which, we will argue, provides an intuitive understanding of the measurement process in QM. (shrink)

In response to the growing emphasis on learning outcomes, life-long learning, and what could be called the learning society, scholars are turning to alternative educational logics that problematize the reduction of education to learning. In this article, we draw on these critics but also extend their thinking in two ways. First, we use Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze to posit two educational logics—tinkering and hacking, respectively—that suspend and render inoperative learning logics, expectations, and evaluative metrics. Second, we argue that contemporary (...) artists and designers such as Katerina Kamprani and Grupo de Arte Callejero have much to offer educational philosophers and theorists interested in practices of suspension. In conclusion, we suggest ways in which educators can tinker with and hack into the curriculum by playing with the quintessential embodiment of learning: the test. (shrink)

This article utilizes the work of Judith Butler in order to chart a queer and feminist animal studies, an animal studies that celebrates our shared embodied finitude. Butler's commentary on other animals remains dispersed and fragmented throughout books, lectures, and interviews over the course of the last several years. This work is critically synthesized in conjunction with her work on mourning and precarious lives. By developing an anti-anthropocentric understanding of mourning and precarious lives, this article hopes to create ontological, ethical, (...) and political concepts that resist the violence of the present. In so doing, the article contrasts Butler's understanding of precarious life with Giorgio Agamben's understanding of bare life in order to conceive of precariousness as constitutive of social reality. This intellectual labor lays the groundwork for understanding mourning the lives of other animals as a political act that produces new communities, rather than as an individuating and isolating emotion. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical insights provided by Anne Truitt's minimalist sculptures, as viewed through the phenomenological lenses of Hannah Arendt's investigations into the co-constitution of reality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's investigations into perception. Artworks in their material presence can lay out new ways of relating and perceiving. Truitt's works accomplish this task by revealing the interactive motion of our embodied relations and how material objects can actually help to ground our reality and hence human potentiality. Merleau-Ponty shows how our prereflective (...) bodies allow incompossible perceptions to coexist. Yet this same capacity of bodies to gather multiple perceptions together also lends itself to the illusion that we see from only one perspective. If an ethical perspective becomes reified into one position, it then becomes detached from reality, and the ethical potential is actually lost. At the same time, phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations and meanings. An ethics that does not take embodied relations into account—that allows for only one perspective��ultimately loses its capacity for flexibility, and for being part of a common and shared reality. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the philosophical concept of 'tabula rasa' originates with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and refers to a state in which a child is as formless as a blank slate. Given that both these beliefs are entirely false, this article will examine why they have endured from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the history of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and feminist scholarship it will be shown how the image of the tabula rasa has been (...) used to signify an originary state of formlessness, against which discourses on the true nature of the human being can differentiate their position. The tabula rasa has operated less as a substantive position than as a whipping post. However, it will be noted that innovations in psychological theory over the past decade have begun to undermine such narratives by rendering unintelligible the idea of an 'originary' state of human nature. (shrink)

Italian critical theorist Giorgio Agamben is well known for his rigorous attempts to redefine political, aesthetic, and theological concepts through messianic categories. For Agamben, the messianic is not concerned with perpetual waiting for a savior to come and redeem the world. Rather, it concerns the radically open potentiality for action within the contemporary moment. While the temporality of the messianic moment has been emphasized both by Agamben and by the vast secondary literature that has provided ample reflections on his body (...) of work, the important concept of messianic space has not been given equal treatment. Space and time must be thought together if we are to appreciate the unique qualities of .. (shrink)

Nietzsche's model of eternal return triggers a drama of affirmation, the overcoming of a simple miming of our ancestors in favour of an active participation in the counter-actualisation of hidden potentials in recurrent events. Based on a close study of Zarathustra's struggle to free himself from a suffocating nihilism, the paper focuses on the revelatory caesura that ushers in what Deleuze calls the third synthesis of time, a time of ‘doing’ rather than reflection.

In this article, I deal with the transition from traditional ‘school’ forms of instruction to educational processes that are fully mediated by digital technologies. Against the background of the idea the very institution ‘school’ is closely linked to the invention of the alphabetic writing system and to the need of initiating new generations into a literate culture, I focus on the issue of literacy training. I argue that with the digitization of education, a fundamental transition takes place regarding what it (...) means to be literate, but also what it means to educate and to be educated. I do so by developing a ‘techno-somatic’ approach, which means that I look at the use of concrete instructional technologies, and the bodily disciplines that are involved. I set out a double comparison in which I contrast existing, ‘traditional’ ways of learning how to read/write with the way in which literacy training looked like before the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and with the initiation into literacy in the Chinese/japanese language, on the other hand. I argue that these comparisons shed light on the differences between traditional and digital literacy. More precisely, I show that in each case, a different relation toward what it means to produce script is involved. As such, both forms of literacy go together with different spaces of experience and senses of being-able, and therefore with altogether different ideas of what education is all about. (shrink)

In this article, I go deeper into the educational meaning of tiredness. Over and against the mainstream view that tiredness is an impediment for education, I show that this phenomenon is intrinsically meaningful. My arguments are based, first, on a detailed phenomenological analysis of tiredness, as proposed by Buytendijk. Tiredness can be defined as the point where lack of willpower and lack of ability become utterly indistinguishable. Second, I turn to Agamben’s genealogy of the will, which shows that willpower was (...) invented in order to control a more original, but also more arcane sense of what it means to be able to do something: potentiality. I argue that tiredness, as analysed by Buytendijk, is a state of potentiality. As such it has the power to interrupt the contemporary ordering of society and of the realm of education, which is fully predicated upon individual wilful self-commandment. More positively speaking, tiredness has an important educational value in that it grants the opportunity of beginning anew with the world. This article is also an attempt to show how phenomenological work and genealogical approaches can inform one another. (shrink)

In this article I deal with the impact of digitization on education by revisiting the ideas Neil Postman developed in regard with the omnipresence of screens in the American society of the 1980s and their impact on what it means to grow up and to become an educated person. Arguing, on the one hand, that traditionally education is profoundly related to the initiation into literacy, and on the other hand, that the screen may come to replace the book as the (...) prevailing educational medium, Postman’s theses are worth reconsidering. Moreover I propose to develop further one strain of thought in Postman’s work, viz. the interconnectedness of technological inventions, material practices and ideas regarding what education is all about. As such I analyse in great detail the differences between traditional and digital literacy by looking from a material and practical perspective at how we relate to books and screens. This is not a normative analysis, but one that aims at fleshing out differences in spaces of experience. As such I wind up with suggestions regarding the affordances that a new form of literacy, no longer based on the model of the book, might bring about. (shrink)

Agamben’s philosophy of education can be arrived at by focusing on the nexus of philology, philosophy and poetry that is prominent in his work. By exploring the functional and semantic reciprocity between these fields, one can identify diverse pedagogies: of language and the poetic voice, of infancy and history, of history redeemed (in the Benjaminian sense), of the cultural image, and of potentiality. These overlapping areas of research share the common trait of Agamben’s personalism, which embraces the view that education (...) expands the affective and spiritual wholeness of the person. (shrink)

The paper’s purpose consists in pointing out the importance of the notion of “territory”, in its different accepted meanings, for the development of a theory and a practice of subjectivity both in deleuzean and canettian thought. Even though they start from very different perspectives and epistemic levels, they indeed produce similar philosophical effects, which strengthen their “common” view and the model of subjectivity they try to shape. More precisely, the paper focuses on the deleuzean triad of territorialisation, deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation, with (...) regard to the role it plays in the forming of the subject and in connection with the fundamental deleuzean notion of difference; it furthermore concentrates on the characterization of the notion of territory in Canetti’s work, also in the light of the mentioned deleuzean categories and with reference to the crucial canettian concept of transformation. Finally, the paper analyses both the political consequences of the “nomadic subjectivity” Deleuze and Canetti deal with and the critical and problematic aspects it involves. (shrink)

Eleven top Deleuze scholars reclaim Deleuzian philosophy as moral philosophy Ethics plays a crucial, if subtle, role in Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project. Michel Foucault claimed that Anti-Oedipus was `a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time'. But what is the nature of the immanent ethics that is developed in Deleuze's thought? How does it differ from previous conceptions of ethics? And what paths does it open for future thought, given (...) the ethical challenges facing humanity in so many domains? Each of the eleven essays in this collection explores the ethical dimension of Deleuze's thought along a new and singular trajectory, and in so doing, attempts to reclaim his philosophy as an ethical philosophy. (shrink)

In her last novella, The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes plain that the brilliance of life – any life whatever – lies in its capacity to endlessly contemplate itself and that as such it is inseparable from its mode of contemplation. As we will suggest in this article, Lispector’s view of life as living contemplation resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s conception of being as potentiality. In the last installment of his Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben tries to (...) offer an alternative paradigm of life to that of Western biopolitics, whose power operates on its separation of bare life from forms of life. Central to this new ontology is Agamben’s notion of a life as inseparable from its mode or form, as he highlights using a hyphen: form-of-life. By form-of-life, Agamben means that one’s living is never reducible to the biological or economic facts of existence because it essentially concerns itself with its potentialities, its singular modes of being. Life that contemplates itself is a life which simply is without being reducible to its function. In The Hour of the Star, Lispector’s heroine, Macabéa is not simply a figure of bare life as some critics have suggested by reducing her life to her factual circumstances. She is rather a figure whose life is affected by its own sensation of existing – its unborn possibilities. (shrink)

This article argues that Agamben’s conception of fiction is crucial for understanding his recent works. I suggest that the key to understanding Agamben conception of fiction is to be found in a few curious remarks at the end of Language and Death. These remarks explain why the distinctions between life and death, animal life and human life, bare life and political forms of life, the outlaw and the sovereign, and the norm and the exception that continue to preoccupy Agamben are (...) all fictions. After considering Agamben’s account of these fictions and their relation to the relevant passage in Language and Death, the article explores the ways Agamben thinks the fictions that govern human action and social life might be unworked. (shrink)

According to What Is Philosophy?, all disciplines combat opinion, but art fights most effectively because art and opinion both pertain to sensibility. Yet, this common provenance also makes the line dividing art and opinion porous. The stakes of this porosity are perhaps most visible in the relation of art to life. Although art must avoid two forms of death, ‘chaos’ and ‘opinion’, Deleuze and Guattari don't treat chaos and opinion equally. The fundamental distinction between good death and bad death, between (...) death by chaos and death by opinion, has a number of problematic consequences. Perhaps the most consequential: opinion is deadlier than death itself. (shrink)

What has not yet been imagined in thought is: how to remain together while still being two, how to be and become subjectively two, how to discover a way of coexisting as two beings … a way of living and thinking and loving as two beings without one being reduced to the other? … [t]hanks to the respect that I feel for the other as other, to articulate both attraction and restraint with respect to him. I go out from and (...) return to myself in order to respect his alterity, and this respect for the other becomes respect for myself, my life and my growth. So there is no longer fusion or submission, but the existence of a two which is irreducible to one or to the simple opposition between one (male) and the other (female), a reduction which makes them simply two poles of the one. Luce Irigaray , Democracy Begins Between Two 112-13. (shrink)

One of the more interesting philosophical debates today centers on the concept of potentiality. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has been one of the main driving forces behind the renewed interest in the concept, as he has made his own particular understanding of potentiality a crucial tool for his analyses in the book series on Homo Sacer.1 Agamben developed his understanding of potentiality through a striking reading of Aristotle that goes against the grain of certain generally accepted truths of Aristotelianism. (...) In particular, he claims that potentiality for Aristotle can be defined as "potentiality not to be", which seems to go against mainstream Aristotelian thought, according to... (shrink)

This article is concerned with the educational value of raising the human body at school. Drawing inspiration from the work of Giorgio Agamben, I develop a new perspective that explores the possibility of taking the concept of physical education in a literal sense. This is to say that the specific educational content of physical education (in contradistinction to organized sporting life outside school) resides in its concentration on the physical ?as such?. This is not an obvious path to explore, because (...) defenders of physical education as a rule have to compete against the (dualist) prejudice that this discipline is merely an instrument to train the body or to keep it fit, and that it therefore should not be considered as a serious endeavour. Therefore, more often than not, apologists try to justify the relevance of physical education on the very ground that it is a practice that is concerned with something ?beyond? the merely physical that is at stake in movement activity. I argue, however, that this line of thought excludes the possibility of conceiving an alternative approach that relates the concentration on ?entirely physical? activities (as opposed to ?merely physical? activities) to an experience of potentiality. I develop this idea on the basis of an analysis of repetitive, rhythmical and collective body-exercise (e.g. running in a group or basic callisthenics). (shrink)

Both ‘philosophy’ and ‘the child’ are notions that seem to have an everlasting presence in our daily vocabulary. What is less common and perhaps lacking is any reflection on the relation between them, which is rarely a focus of the researcher’s attention. We believe that it is precisely this relation that is at stake in increasingly popular notions such as ‘philosophy for/with children’, or even in philosophy of education as such. In this article we will expand upon this claim by (...) exploring the meeting place(s) of both notions. An extensive elaboration of this relation would need not only more space than the average journal article offers, but also much more extensive research. Both ‘philosophy’ and ‘the child’—if we were to do justice to the wealth these terms offer—should each form separately the object of further research, in order to be able to pick the fruits of their shared household. We will bypass a labyrinthine study of this sort, however, and instead offer some thoughts on the cross-section of both these terms, seeking as it were what could be philosophical about the child, and where philosophy becomes childish. We hope that the reader would be so kind as to step into this brief, and somewhat associative, reasoning and find something of value in this wordplay, knowing that the more extensive treatise that the interconnection of these two realities demands is to be found elsewhere. The authors, for their part, are writing in the conviction that less can sometimes be more. (shrink)

Schmitt insists that the sovereign decision is unavoidable, that even an anarchist is caught in the trap of sovereignty when he tries to ‘decide against decision’. This article begins to think about a critical legal vocabulary that might suspend the necessity of the will to constitute, while emphasising the creativity of the constituent moment. The terms inoperativity, dis-enclosure and dissensus are developed and deployed in order to think about certain aspects of the Tunisian revolution. In particular, the article focuses upon (...) the refusal of the state of the situation, the subtraction of loyalty and the insistence of a form of life beyond Ben Ali’s sovereign order. (shrink)

This study seeks to critically explore the link between sovereignty, violence and war in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. From a brief rereading of Leviathan’s main arguments that explicitly revolves around the Aristotelian distinction between actuality/ potentiality, it will conclude that Hobbesian pre-contractual violence is primarily based on what Hobbes terms “anticipatory reason” and the problem of future contingency. Relying on Foucauldian insights, it will be emphasized that the assumption of certain potentialities suffices in leading to (...) Hobbes’s well-known conclusion that the state of nature is a “condition of Warre.” In a second step, this study considers some of Agamben’s arguments to account for how pre-contractual violence as envisioned by Hobbes cannot be rendered impotent through the integration of a sovereign. In specific, Agamben’s claims shed light on an irreducible, inextricable entwining between the state of nature and the state of law as “Siamese twins” (Virno). On a meta-level, Agamben thus implicitly shows how the “Hobbesian problem” cannot be merely reduced to a “problem of order” (Parsons). With regard to the current functioning of the stratagems of financial markets and the mechanisms of future-colonization underpinning global politics, this study finally argues that Hobbes ought to be reevaluated in particular regarding the problem of the future in his account. Partly responding to Agamben’s critical investigations, I suggest that a careful exploration of what will be coined “the prospects of an actualization of the potentiality not-to-be” might serve as a first theoretical step towards a productive form of criticism. (shrink)

En este artículo se plantea la pregunta sobre el posible giro del pensamiento en Jacques Derrida de una faceta semiológica deconstructiva a una faceta ético-política. Tomando en cuenta las críticas sobre el alcance ético y político de la propuesta de Derrida, se defiende que no existe tal giro en su pensamiento dado que en la deconstrucción, como estrategia de dislocación lingüística, están implicados los momentos críticos de la ética y la política, en tanto que anidan en ella.

This paper suggests that a grammar of the secret forms a concept in Agamben’s work, a gap that grounds the enigma of sovereignty. Between the Indo-European *krei, *se, and *per themes, the secret is etymologically linked to the logics of separation and potentiality that together enable the pliant and emergent structure of sovereignty. Sovereignty’s logic of separation meets the logic of relation in the form of abandonment: the point at which division has exhausted itself and reaches an indivisible element, bare (...) life, the exception separated from the form of life and captured in a separate sphere. The arcanum imperii of sovereignty and the cipher of bare life are held together in the relation of the ban as the twin secrets of biopower, maintained by the potentiality of law that works itself as a concealed, inscrutable force. But the ‘real’ secret of sovereignty, I suggest, is its dialectical reversibility, the point at which the concept of the secret is met by its own immanent unworking by the critic and scribe under the *krei theme, and subject to abandonment through the work of profanation; here, different species of the secret are thrown against one another, one order undoing the other. The secret founded upon the sacred is displaced by Agamben’s critical orientation toward the immanent: what is immanent is both potential and hiddenness. (shrink)

This text is based on a staged dialogue conceived by Alice Lagaay and Juliane Schiffers, which closed the conference ‘How not to speak’ at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin on 22 April. Critical comments and questions emerging from the discussion that took place on that day are reflected in ‘Voice Off’.

The paper attempts to demonstrate; drawing on the recent experience of Philippine Catholic faith; that the relevance of the Church in the postmodern age is as much a political choice as it is a tolerance of the nihilistic mood of the times. It is a political choice insofar as the Church has nowhere to go in the postmodern except through asserting its relevance; which necessarily means homing in on the growing irrelevance of the organized faith; amidst the secular and liberal (...) currents of the present; in order to thresh out strategic directions for its continued survival; which is recently challenged by stories of sex scandals involving its clergy. The postmodern age also compels the Church to come to terms with the nihilism that accompanies what Nietzsche saw in his own time; and still true today; namely; the ‘death of God’. The ‘death of God’ continues to be a pervasive force behind the historical reaction of the faith toward the secularisation of the modern world; in terms; for instance; of the rise of today’s conservative attitude of Roman Catholicism; which can be considered a throwback of the earlier papal orthodoxy that looked down on temporal powers as a disguised evil. This conservatism entails a certain practice and belief in the purity of the faith and the sacred over and against the secular and the profane. It ignores the actual and objective distinctions between the temporal and the sacred; which betrays a form of nihilism; that is; the forced oblivion of the real ambiguity and the paradox that inform the distinction between the secular and the sacred. This kind of nihilism connotes that no distinction can be tolerated at the expense of the sacred; while certain strategic compromise with the secular in the guise of advancing the aims of faith are tolerated if only to allow for the full maturity of the regime of the sacred. (shrink)

This paper returns to the question of how to think of justice through Teubner’s recent definition of what he calls juridical justice. Juridical justice is defined as distinct from political, moral, social and theological conceptions of justice. Teubner attempts to think of an imaginary space for a juridical justice ‘beyond the sites of natural and positive law’ and searches for a conception of justice as the ‘law’s self-subversive principle’. This article reviews Teubner’s conception of juridical justice and further proposes a (...) distinction between juridical and non-juridical understandings of justice. (shrink)