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Ross Abbinnett

The University of Birmingham, Sociology, Faculty Member

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I am interested in the social, ethical, economic and political implications of technology. I have written quite a bit on this in last ten years or so, including books on the evolution of the relationship between Marxism and technology, the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler, and the emergence and transformation of a 'neoliberal imagination'.

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József Böröcz

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Alberto Toscano

Goldsmiths, University of London

Lancaster University

University of Cambridge

George Steinmetz

University of Michigan

University of Chicago

Efstratios Papanis

University of the Aegean

Leuphana University

Madhusudan Subedi

Patan academy of health sciences

Sinisa Malesevic

University College Dublin

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Papers by Ross Abbinnett

The Politics of Spirit in Stiegler’s Techno-Pharmacology

Theory, Culture & Society, Jun 27, 2014

Marx and the Powers of Capital

Marxism After Modernity, 2006

Neoliberalism, Technocracy and Higher Education: Editors’ Introduction

Social Epistemology, Jul 4, 2019

Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern yo... more Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

Happiness as Enterprise. An essay on neoliberal life

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2015

The Politics of Spirit in Stiegler’s Techno-Pharmacology

Theory, Culture & Society, 2014

This article begins by examining the concept of the pharmakon that is developed in Derrida’s essa... more This article begins by examining the concept of the pharmakon that is developed in Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, as it is here that the idea of a medium that is simultaneously poisonous and therapeutic is developed in relation to the discursive effects of writing. The author then goes on to look at Stiegler’s attempt to reconfigure the ‘orthographic economy’ of deconstruction, particularly his account of how the ‘tertiary supports’ of virtual and information technologies have transformed the experience of the real in the regime of global capitalisation. Finally, he argues that the appearance of the pharmakon as a matrix idea in his work, sharpens his account of the aporia of technological society: for the impossibility of human culture being reduced to either the disorientated life industrial populism, or to idealist notions of reflexivity, is what, for Stiegler, offers the chance of a new politics of spirit.

Marxism after Modernity: Politics, Technology and Social Transformation

The Neoliberal Imagination

The Neoliberal Imagination, 2020

Technology and the Ethics of Penality

The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society, 2007

My paper is concerned with the ethics of a new kind of technological penality which is beginning ... more My paper is concerned with the ethics of a new kind of technological penality which is beginning to emerge; a penality which is based not upon incarceration, but upon the neutralization of the criminal&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;s capacity to transgress the law. This new penality has two main aspects: the ...

Living After Auschwitz: Memory, Culture and Biopolitics in the Work of Bernard Stiegler and Giorgio Agamben

Theory, Culture & Society, 2018

The problem with remembering Auschwitz is that the neoliberal paradigm of economic utility, demot... more The problem with remembering Auschwitz is that the neoliberal paradigm of economic utility, demotic happiness, and programmed consumption has tended to erase its facticity from public consciousness. Technoscientific capitalism functions as a regime of amnesic performance that prevents a ‘working through’ of the Nazi genocide. I argue that Agamben’s work on the implicit violence of the biopolitical paradigm gives a crucial insight into the fate of humanity in the time of global capitalism. However, I contend that the idea of testimony he presents in Remnants of Auschwitz recapitulates a Heideggerian ontology of experience that is enacted outside of the technological dynamics of trauma and memory. I employ Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenetic memory, first, to explore the economy of fascisms that has emerged within the networks of global capitalism (hyper-nationalisms, religious fundamentalisms, technological transhumanisms) and, second, to examine the material affects through which ...

The Anthropocene as a Figure of Neoliberal Hegemony

Social Epistemology, 2019

The idea of the Anthropocene postulates that, epistemically and ontologically, we must consider t... more The idea of the Anthropocene postulates that, epistemically and ontologically, we must consider the climatic, geological, and biological systems of the Earth as essentially bound up with the technological systems that have been developed by human beings. This idea has been aesthetically configured through images of 'Spaceship Earth' and in the orbital pictures of light patterns emitted by human settlements across the globe. I will argue that this shift towards the idea of the Anthropocene is complicit with a certain kind of technological messianism, which assumes that the most serious problems of global warming and environmental despoliation will be solved by future technologies. Furthermore the impact of this futural orientation, which includes the idea of transhumanist adaptations to the consequences of climate change, has been to intensify the nexus between technological innovation, neoliberal economics, and entrepreneurial heroism that has come to shape the collective imagination of the future. This, I will argue, has profound consequences for the way human beings orientate themselves to their ethical and political responsibilities in respect of climate change, human suffering, and cosmopolitan democracy.

Culture and Identity: Critical Theories

Culture and Identity: Critical Theories Culture and identity: Critical theories, 2003

Introduction PART ONE: POSTMODERNITY AND POSTMODERNISM Levinas and Bauman The Ethics of Care Beck... more Introduction PART ONE: POSTMODERNITY AND POSTMODERNISM Levinas and Bauman The Ethics of Care Beck and Giddens Risk and Reflexive Modernity Baudrillard Media and Simulation Lyotard and Jameson Postmodernity and the Aesthetic Derrida Deconstruction and Identity PART TWO: MEDIA, CULTURE AND IDENTITY Technology, Ideology and the Culture Industry Information, Simulation and the 'Silent Majorities' The Postmodern and the Sublime Culture, Politics, Differance PART THREE: POSTMODERNISM AND THE END OF HISTORY Derrida, Fukuyama and the 'New World Order' Science, Technology and Catastrophe Capitalism, Globalization and Cosmopolitanism

Politics of happiness: connecting the philosophical ideas of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida to the political ideologies of happiness

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

Introduction: Elements of the Politics of Happiness 1. Liberalism and the Uses of Desire The Gove... more Introduction: Elements of the Politics of Happiness 1. Liberalism and the Uses of Desire The Governance of Pain and Pleasure The Science of Wellbeing Life Beyond Contentment Death and the New World Order 2. Postmodernism, or, The Dream of Limitless Excess Aesthetic Consolations Art, Irony, and Romanticism The Tragedy of Pure Culture Simulacra of Happiness 3. Marxism and the Beautiful Object of Labour Organic Labour and Species Being Happiness and Revolutionary Materialism Work, Servitude, and Ressentiment Socialism and the Messianic 4. Fascism and the Pleasure of Self-Destruction The Essence of Fascism Anxiety and Modern Desire Reactionary Love and 'The People' Spectres of Fascism 5. Religion and the Love of the Sacred Religion in the Disenchanted World Faith and Enlightenment Orthodoxy and the Death of God The Ecstasy of the Sacred Conclusion: Happiness and Catastrophic Modernity

Book review: Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life, by Sam Binkley

Capital & Class, 2015

particular, Coutinho endorses a development of Gramsci along Eurocommunist lines, building on the... more particular, Coutinho endorses a development of Gramsci along Eurocommunist lines, building on the author’s interpretation of Palmirro Togliatti and Nicos Poulantzas. Although unfortunately not included in this collection, Coutinho’s essay ‘A democracia como valor universal’ (‘Democracy as a universal value’) offers the clearest formulation of the connection between these two positions. In this foundational text of the Brazilian Workers’ Party, Coutinho suggests that left strategy must now take the form of a broad strategy inclusive not only of Marxist tendencies, but also of social democracy. Emir Sader (2011), amongst other commentators on Brazilian politics, has astutely highlighted the role of this flawed ideological base in the absorption of the Workers’ Party into capitalism. In summary, Gramsci’s Political Thought provides a first engagement with the work of a celebrated scholar whose political application of Gramscian thought has been instrumental in the formation of the modern left. Contemporary thinkers, including Luiz Werneck Vianna, Alvaro Bianchi, Ruy Braga, Virginia Fontes, Sonia Regina de Mendonça and Marcos Del Roio, all owe a debt to the author’s work. However, as reflected in the text, for Brazil’s modern Marxists, Coutinho’s interpretation of Gramsci is as much a legacy to be inherited as a barrier to be overcome.

The ethics of heterogeneity : a speculative critique of Jean-François Lyotard's "The differend

Bibliography 233 I am indebted to the following people for their help over the last four years. M... more Bibliography 233 I am indebted to the following people for their help over the last four years. My mother and father, without whose constant hard work and support I would never have completed my thesis. To my supervisor, Professor Gillian Rose, for her inspiration and guidance. To the late Mary Farmer, whose enthusiasm and encouragement were of immense value. To Janey Clare, for making the last twelve months memorable for more than my thesis. To Henry Rothstein and Anthony Levinson, for their patience and good will in helping to type and edit my thesis. To Matt Staton, for his optimism. And to Stephen Driver, for his good humour. IV Abbreviations In the text I have used the full titles of the works which I have cited, with the exception of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, which I have referred to simply as the Phenomenology. 'incommensurability'5 of heterogeneous phrase regimes and genres of discourse. Lyotard's reading of the critical philosophy, attempts to show that the forms and categories of cognition, or representation, through which Kant expounds transcendental subjectivity, depend upon metaphysical ideas of reason to guarantee the unity of experience. His claim is that the practical and theoretical cognitions of the critical subject, are originally sensitive to the `the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be', lo that thinking is responsible: each genre excludes an `otherness' from its `rules' of formation, and it is this otherness which must be constantly re-phrased. The ethical and the political are presented in The Differend as moments of spontaneous origination, in which thinking `links onto', or judges, the event of the current phrase, without the metaphysical elements of Kant's critical philosophy therefore, are the evil of `Auschwitz', which Lyotard presents as `blocking' speculative discourse, must, I have argued, be conceived as a deeply contradictory `culture'14 of subjectivity, which destroys its own particular ethical life. It is the failure of Lyotard's attempt to consign Hegel's speculative philosophy to the realm of metaphysics, that underpins my exposition of his reading of Kant's critical philosophy. the second chapter of my thesis is critiques of abstract self-legislation developed in the Phenomenology and Philosophy of Rightis to The Differencf s idea of obligation, I have argued that Lyotard's idea of spontaneous reception of differend is afflicted (a fortiori) by the same aporias as Kant's moral will. The formal possibility of freedom which

Carnival and Cannibal, or, The Play of Global Antagonism by Jean Baudrillard. London/New York: Seagull Books (distributed by University of Chicago Press), 2010

Theory, Culture & Society, 2011

Have you ever received a backhanded compliment? You know the kind of thing: ‘I didn’t think Asian... more Have you ever received a backhanded compliment? You know the kind of thing: ‘I didn’t think Asian guys could play football, but you’re pretty good!’ ‘You play the blues pretty good for a white bloke!’ ‘You’re really sexy for a Muslim woman!’ What these well-intentioned put-downs reveal is a technique of subordination that is all the more effective because of the apparent goodwill of those who bestow the ‘gift’ of their approval. For what is so annihilating about this kind of compliment is the recognition of a valiant effort that was, from the beginning, doomed to failure. The ‘Muslim woman’, the ‘Asian guy’ and the ‘white bloke’ remain trapped within the confines of their respective modes of being and, as such, their attempts to be something different are always slightly laughable. It is precisely this kind of gift economy that is at stake in Jean Baudrillard’s two late essays ‘Carnival and Cannibal’ and ‘Ventriloquous Evil’. No one could accuse Baudrillard of avoiding the big questions of modernity: the relationship between the human and the technological, the loss of the symbolic order of the social, and the fate of Enlightenment ideals of democracy. As is well known, his approach to these issues was inspired by the writings of Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille, and Le¤ vi-Strauss, and, as such, the fundamental concepts of his thought are best understood as disclosing the loss of the symbolic energies that the French anthropologists invoked as the originary source of ‘the social’. These energies are given a variety of names (the sacred, taboo, sacrifice, etc.), and it is they that mark the presence of an unfathomable being within the life of the social, and which constitute it as a kind of dangerous performance that might at any time incur divine retribution. For Baudrillard, the life lived within this symbolic order is constituted by its intrinsic meaningfulness: the law is actually present both in the performance of everyday life and in the soul of the transgressor who immediately puts him/herself at risk of death. This condition is clearly very different from the one in which we in the West currently find ourselves. Something has happened that seems to have definitively separated our way of living from the economy of the sacred that constituted the symbolic order of ‘primitive’ societies. We no longer dwell within the power of the unfathomable; our sense of belonging and responsibility is stripped of meaning because

Review of Nigel Tubbs, Education in Hegel

Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2009

Spectres of Class: Marxism, Deconstruction and the Politics of Affiliation

Journal for Cultural Research, 2006

The paper is concerned with the reaction of the left to the publication of Jacques Derrida's Spec... more The paper is concerned with the reaction of the left to the publication of Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (SM). My argument is that this reaction has, in general, been unwilling to engage with the ethico-political significance of Derrida's thought, and that it has concentrated largely on reiterating certain protocols which ought to govern the inheritance of Marx's political provocations. I have taken three particularly vociferous critics of SM as exemplary of this attempt to designate the proper conditions of affiliation to Marxism: Aijaz Ahmad, Alex Callinicos and Tom Lewis. I argue that each of these thinkers has ignored the concept of the question which informs Derrida's attempt to remain faithful to "a certain spirit" of Marxism, and that consequently they have failed to take seriously his attempts to transform conventional notions of class solidarity. In the final section I will examine Fredric Jameson's attempt to restage the encounter between Marxism and deconstruction, and to reconfigure the idea of class in the light of Derrida's remarks on logic of revolutionary condensation and historical necessity. My aim is to show that the apparent homology between Derrida and Jameson is ruptured by the latter's insistence upon the "allegorical" configuration of class solidarities, and the former's commitment to the de-affiliating questions (of hospitality) that arise from global organization of capitalism. I will always wonder if the idea of Marxism-the self-identity of Marxist discourse or system or even a science of philosophy-is not incompatible with the event-Marx. (Derrida 1993

Postmodernity and the ethics of care: Situating Bauman's social theory

Cultural Values, 1998

... social relations. What Bauman attempts to do with Levinas&#x27;s original specification o... more ... social relations. What Bauman attempts to do with Levinas&#x27;s original specification of &#x27;ontological violence&#x27; (the cognitive, theoretical reduction ... Face. This one, the aesthetic proximity, is nearness of the crowd, and the meaning of the crowd is facelessness&#x27; (1993, p. 130). ...

Politics and enlightenment: Kant and Derrida on cosmopolitan responsibility

Citizenship Studies, 1998

Walter Benjamin once remarked of the enterprise of translation ‘that it is nowhere’: that the lab... more Walter Benjamin once remarked of the enterprise of translation ‘that it is nowhere’: that the labour of transcribing the sense, inflection and difference of any particular language and text must always situate the translator in a space which is neither ‘of the original, nor ‘of the language into which it is to be transcribed. This ‘non‐position’ of the translator—between the original and its analogue, between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, the difference and the acceptability of the text—marks the labour of translation as an ethical responsibility: that of communicating the significance of something—a gesture, a story, a custom, a tradition—which has appeared to this/our socio‐linguistic culture as strange and unfathomably alien; and to achieve this communication without annulling its strangeness, its alterity. The purpose of my comparison of Kant and Derrida's remarks on cosmopolitical responsibility therefore, is fourfold. First, I want to suggest that it is this ‘stricture’ of translation—this difficul...

Machiavelli's Double: Power, Simulation, and Hyper-Sovereignty

International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2012

The Politics of Spirit in Stiegler’s Techno-Pharmacology

Theory, Culture & Society, Jun 27, 2014

Marx and the Powers of Capital

Marxism After Modernity, 2006

Neoliberalism, Technocracy and Higher Education: Editors’ Introduction

Social Epistemology, Jul 4, 2019

Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern yo... more Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

Happiness as Enterprise. An essay on neoliberal life

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2015

The Politics of Spirit in Stiegler’s Techno-Pharmacology

Theory, Culture & Society, 2014

This article begins by examining the concept of the pharmakon that is developed in Derrida’s essa... more This article begins by examining the concept of the pharmakon that is developed in Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, as it is here that the idea of a medium that is simultaneously poisonous and therapeutic is developed in relation to the discursive effects of writing. The author then goes on to look at Stiegler’s attempt to reconfigure the ‘orthographic economy’ of deconstruction, particularly his account of how the ‘tertiary supports’ of virtual and information technologies have transformed the experience of the real in the regime of global capitalisation. Finally, he argues that the appearance of the pharmakon as a matrix idea in his work, sharpens his account of the aporia of technological society: for the impossibility of human culture being reduced to either the disorientated life industrial populism, or to idealist notions of reflexivity, is what, for Stiegler, offers the chance of a new politics of spirit.

Marxism after Modernity: Politics, Technology and Social Transformation

The Neoliberal Imagination

The Neoliberal Imagination, 2020

Technology and the Ethics of Penality

The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society, 2007

My paper is concerned with the ethics of a new kind of technological penality which is beginning ... more My paper is concerned with the ethics of a new kind of technological penality which is beginning to emerge; a penality which is based not upon incarceration, but upon the neutralization of the criminal&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;s capacity to transgress the law. This new penality has two main aspects: the ...

Living After Auschwitz: Memory, Culture and Biopolitics in the Work of Bernard Stiegler and Giorgio Agamben

Theory, Culture & Society, 2018

The problem with remembering Auschwitz is that the neoliberal paradigm of economic utility, demot... more The problem with remembering Auschwitz is that the neoliberal paradigm of economic utility, demotic happiness, and programmed consumption has tended to erase its facticity from public consciousness. Technoscientific capitalism functions as a regime of amnesic performance that prevents a ‘working through’ of the Nazi genocide. I argue that Agamben’s work on the implicit violence of the biopolitical paradigm gives a crucial insight into the fate of humanity in the time of global capitalism. However, I contend that the idea of testimony he presents in Remnants of Auschwitz recapitulates a Heideggerian ontology of experience that is enacted outside of the technological dynamics of trauma and memory. I employ Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenetic memory, first, to explore the economy of fascisms that has emerged within the networks of global capitalism (hyper-nationalisms, religious fundamentalisms, technological transhumanisms) and, second, to examine the material affects through which ...

The Anthropocene as a Figure of Neoliberal Hegemony

Social Epistemology, 2019

The idea of the Anthropocene postulates that, epistemically and ontologically, we must consider t... more The idea of the Anthropocene postulates that, epistemically and ontologically, we must consider the climatic, geological, and biological systems of the Earth as essentially bound up with the technological systems that have been developed by human beings. This idea has been aesthetically configured through images of 'Spaceship Earth' and in the orbital pictures of light patterns emitted by human settlements across the globe. I will argue that this shift towards the idea of the Anthropocene is complicit with a certain kind of technological messianism, which assumes that the most serious problems of global warming and environmental despoliation will be solved by future technologies. Furthermore the impact of this futural orientation, which includes the idea of transhumanist adaptations to the consequences of climate change, has been to intensify the nexus between technological innovation, neoliberal economics, and entrepreneurial heroism that has come to shape the collective imagination of the future. This, I will argue, has profound consequences for the way human beings orientate themselves to their ethical and political responsibilities in respect of climate change, human suffering, and cosmopolitan democracy.

Culture and Identity: Critical Theories

Culture and Identity: Critical Theories Culture and identity: Critical theories, 2003

Introduction PART ONE: POSTMODERNITY AND POSTMODERNISM Levinas and Bauman The Ethics of Care Beck... more Introduction PART ONE: POSTMODERNITY AND POSTMODERNISM Levinas and Bauman The Ethics of Care Beck and Giddens Risk and Reflexive Modernity Baudrillard Media and Simulation Lyotard and Jameson Postmodernity and the Aesthetic Derrida Deconstruction and Identity PART TWO: MEDIA, CULTURE AND IDENTITY Technology, Ideology and the Culture Industry Information, Simulation and the 'Silent Majorities' The Postmodern and the Sublime Culture, Politics, Differance PART THREE: POSTMODERNISM AND THE END OF HISTORY Derrida, Fukuyama and the 'New World Order' Science, Technology and Catastrophe Capitalism, Globalization and Cosmopolitanism

Politics of happiness: connecting the philosophical ideas of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida to the political ideologies of happiness

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

Introduction: Elements of the Politics of Happiness 1. Liberalism and the Uses of Desire The Gove... more Introduction: Elements of the Politics of Happiness 1. Liberalism and the Uses of Desire The Governance of Pain and Pleasure The Science of Wellbeing Life Beyond Contentment Death and the New World Order 2. Postmodernism, or, The Dream of Limitless Excess Aesthetic Consolations Art, Irony, and Romanticism The Tragedy of Pure Culture Simulacra of Happiness 3. Marxism and the Beautiful Object of Labour Organic Labour and Species Being Happiness and Revolutionary Materialism Work, Servitude, and Ressentiment Socialism and the Messianic 4. Fascism and the Pleasure of Self-Destruction The Essence of Fascism Anxiety and Modern Desire Reactionary Love and 'The People' Spectres of Fascism 5. Religion and the Love of the Sacred Religion in the Disenchanted World Faith and Enlightenment Orthodoxy and the Death of God The Ecstasy of the Sacred Conclusion: Happiness and Catastrophic Modernity

Book review: Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life, by Sam Binkley

Capital & Class, 2015

particular, Coutinho endorses a development of Gramsci along Eurocommunist lines, building on the... more particular, Coutinho endorses a development of Gramsci along Eurocommunist lines, building on the author’s interpretation of Palmirro Togliatti and Nicos Poulantzas. Although unfortunately not included in this collection, Coutinho’s essay ‘A democracia como valor universal’ (‘Democracy as a universal value’) offers the clearest formulation of the connection between these two positions. In this foundational text of the Brazilian Workers’ Party, Coutinho suggests that left strategy must now take the form of a broad strategy inclusive not only of Marxist tendencies, but also of social democracy. Emir Sader (2011), amongst other commentators on Brazilian politics, has astutely highlighted the role of this flawed ideological base in the absorption of the Workers’ Party into capitalism. In summary, Gramsci’s Political Thought provides a first engagement with the work of a celebrated scholar whose political application of Gramscian thought has been instrumental in the formation of the modern left. Contemporary thinkers, including Luiz Werneck Vianna, Alvaro Bianchi, Ruy Braga, Virginia Fontes, Sonia Regina de Mendonça and Marcos Del Roio, all owe a debt to the author’s work. However, as reflected in the text, for Brazil’s modern Marxists, Coutinho’s interpretation of Gramsci is as much a legacy to be inherited as a barrier to be overcome.

The ethics of heterogeneity : a speculative critique of Jean-François Lyotard's "The differend

Bibliography 233 I am indebted to the following people for their help over the last four years. M... more Bibliography 233 I am indebted to the following people for their help over the last four years. My mother and father, without whose constant hard work and support I would never have completed my thesis. To my supervisor, Professor Gillian Rose, for her inspiration and guidance. To the late Mary Farmer, whose enthusiasm and encouragement were of immense value. To Janey Clare, for making the last twelve months memorable for more than my thesis. To Henry Rothstein and Anthony Levinson, for their patience and good will in helping to type and edit my thesis. To Matt Staton, for his optimism. And to Stephen Driver, for his good humour. IV Abbreviations In the text I have used the full titles of the works which I have cited, with the exception of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, which I have referred to simply as the Phenomenology. 'incommensurability'5 of heterogeneous phrase regimes and genres of discourse. Lyotard's reading of the critical philosophy, attempts to show that the forms and categories of cognition, or representation, through which Kant expounds transcendental subjectivity, depend upon metaphysical ideas of reason to guarantee the unity of experience. His claim is that the practical and theoretical cognitions of the critical subject, are originally sensitive to the `the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be', lo that thinking is responsible: each genre excludes an `otherness' from its `rules' of formation, and it is this otherness which must be constantly re-phrased. The ethical and the political are presented in The Differend as moments of spontaneous origination, in which thinking `links onto', or judges, the event of the current phrase, without the metaphysical elements of Kant's critical philosophy therefore, are the evil of `Auschwitz', which Lyotard presents as `blocking' speculative discourse, must, I have argued, be conceived as a deeply contradictory `culture'14 of subjectivity, which destroys its own particular ethical life. It is the failure of Lyotard's attempt to consign Hegel's speculative philosophy to the realm of metaphysics, that underpins my exposition of his reading of Kant's critical philosophy. the second chapter of my thesis is critiques of abstract self-legislation developed in the Phenomenology and Philosophy of Rightis to The Differencf s idea of obligation, I have argued that Lyotard's idea of spontaneous reception of differend is afflicted (a fortiori) by the same aporias as Kant's moral will. The formal possibility of freedom which

Carnival and Cannibal, or, The Play of Global Antagonism by Jean Baudrillard. London/New York: Seagull Books (distributed by University of Chicago Press), 2010

Theory, Culture & Society, 2011

Have you ever received a backhanded compliment? You know the kind of thing: ‘I didn’t think Asian... more Have you ever received a backhanded compliment? You know the kind of thing: ‘I didn’t think Asian guys could play football, but you’re pretty good!’ ‘You play the blues pretty good for a white bloke!’ ‘You’re really sexy for a Muslim woman!’ What these well-intentioned put-downs reveal is a technique of subordination that is all the more effective because of the apparent goodwill of those who bestow the ‘gift’ of their approval. For what is so annihilating about this kind of compliment is the recognition of a valiant effort that was, from the beginning, doomed to failure. The ‘Muslim woman’, the ‘Asian guy’ and the ‘white bloke’ remain trapped within the confines of their respective modes of being and, as such, their attempts to be something different are always slightly laughable. It is precisely this kind of gift economy that is at stake in Jean Baudrillard’s two late essays ‘Carnival and Cannibal’ and ‘Ventriloquous Evil’. No one could accuse Baudrillard of avoiding the big questions of modernity: the relationship between the human and the technological, the loss of the symbolic order of the social, and the fate of Enlightenment ideals of democracy. As is well known, his approach to these issues was inspired by the writings of Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille, and Le¤ vi-Strauss, and, as such, the fundamental concepts of his thought are best understood as disclosing the loss of the symbolic energies that the French anthropologists invoked as the originary source of ‘the social’. These energies are given a variety of names (the sacred, taboo, sacrifice, etc.), and it is they that mark the presence of an unfathomable being within the life of the social, and which constitute it as a kind of dangerous performance that might at any time incur divine retribution. For Baudrillard, the life lived within this symbolic order is constituted by its intrinsic meaningfulness: the law is actually present both in the performance of everyday life and in the soul of the transgressor who immediately puts him/herself at risk of death. This condition is clearly very different from the one in which we in the West currently find ourselves. Something has happened that seems to have definitively separated our way of living from the economy of the sacred that constituted the symbolic order of ‘primitive’ societies. We no longer dwell within the power of the unfathomable; our sense of belonging and responsibility is stripped of meaning because

Review of Nigel Tubbs, Education in Hegel

Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2009

Spectres of Class: Marxism, Deconstruction and the Politics of Affiliation

Journal for Cultural Research, 2006

The paper is concerned with the reaction of the left to the publication of Jacques Derrida's Spec... more The paper is concerned with the reaction of the left to the publication of Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (SM). My argument is that this reaction has, in general, been unwilling to engage with the ethico-political significance of Derrida's thought, and that it has concentrated largely on reiterating certain protocols which ought to govern the inheritance of Marx's political provocations. I have taken three particularly vociferous critics of SM as exemplary of this attempt to designate the proper conditions of affiliation to Marxism: Aijaz Ahmad, Alex Callinicos and Tom Lewis. I argue that each of these thinkers has ignored the concept of the question which informs Derrida's attempt to remain faithful to "a certain spirit" of Marxism, and that consequently they have failed to take seriously his attempts to transform conventional notions of class solidarity. In the final section I will examine Fredric Jameson's attempt to restage the encounter between Marxism and deconstruction, and to reconfigure the idea of class in the light of Derrida's remarks on logic of revolutionary condensation and historical necessity. My aim is to show that the apparent homology between Derrida and Jameson is ruptured by the latter's insistence upon the "allegorical" configuration of class solidarities, and the former's commitment to the de-affiliating questions (of hospitality) that arise from global organization of capitalism. I will always wonder if the idea of Marxism-the self-identity of Marxist discourse or system or even a science of philosophy-is not incompatible with the event-Marx. (Derrida 1993

Postmodernity and the ethics of care: Situating Bauman's social theory

Cultural Values, 1998

... social relations. What Bauman attempts to do with Levinas&#x27;s original specification o... more ... social relations. What Bauman attempts to do with Levinas&#x27;s original specification of &#x27;ontological violence&#x27; (the cognitive, theoretical reduction ... Face. This one, the aesthetic proximity, is nearness of the crowd, and the meaning of the crowd is facelessness&#x27; (1993, p. 130). ...

Politics and enlightenment: Kant and Derrida on cosmopolitan responsibility

Citizenship Studies, 1998

Walter Benjamin once remarked of the enterprise of translation ‘that it is nowhere’: that the lab... more Walter Benjamin once remarked of the enterprise of translation ‘that it is nowhere’: that the labour of transcribing the sense, inflection and difference of any particular language and text must always situate the translator in a space which is neither ‘of the original, nor ‘of the language into which it is to be transcribed. This ‘non‐position’ of the translator—between the original and its analogue, between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, the difference and the acceptability of the text—marks the labour of translation as an ethical responsibility: that of communicating the significance of something—a gesture, a story, a custom, a tradition—which has appeared to this/our socio‐linguistic culture as strange and unfathomably alien; and to achieve this communication without annulling its strangeness, its alterity. The purpose of my comparison of Kant and Derrida's remarks on cosmopolitical responsibility therefore, is fourfold. First, I want to suggest that it is this ‘stricture’ of translation—this difficul...

Machiavelli's Double: Power, Simulation, and Hyper-Sovereignty

International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2012