Nicholas Rescher examines the controversial social issue of the welfare state, and offers philosophical thoughts on the limits and liabilities of government and society. Questioning some of the principal assumptions of democratic theory and classical liberalism, Rescher theorizes that the current system is not a be-all end-all, but rather a necessity with limited scope that will ultimately fail to achieve its objectives. He further purports that the welfare state must be a transitional phase to a more affluent postindustrial society-a satisfying (...) life, rather than an adequate one. (shrink)

In “A Hymn to Tethys: Chronofabulation and the Emptiness of Ancient Oceans,” the intimate connections between the human encounter with the sea in its various moods and phases, the experience of the passing of time on a human scale, but also on the geological and cosmic scales of deep time, and our propensity as a species for fictionalizing or fabricating as a way of orienting ourselves through language and imagery in the face of mortality and loss, areas explored through a (...) theory-fictional or ficto-critical narrative based around the concept of chronofabulation. Chronofabulation on one level is here concerned with the use of philosophically oriented storytelling as a form of time travel, in which the ocean is both a constant thematic background and a central character in the story, whilst on another level it is about divination – or divine dissipation – as a kind of philosophizing; an understanding of the divinatory process that is also, in the senses considered here, a prolegomenon for an oceanic materialism. In using a theory-fictional approach to time and the sea, this paper is responding to recent critical thinking on the consequences of post-critique in the theoretical humanities as a route to investigate and test out new ways of deploying literary-philosophical immersion to navigate Nietzsche’s “new seas,” which for him were, and from this perspective are for us now, the truly open seas of a future beyond the inherent nihilism of modernity. In doing so, and in terms of methodology, it takes seriously the idea of treating theory and literary-philosophical discourse in the form of a kind of graphic novel, but a graphic novel without any images, on the assumption that readers will supply their own images and visual and contextual continuities as they read, and in doing, so engage directly with the oceans and their philosophemes as revealed in the process of reading and writing as chronofabulation. (shrink)

This collection provides a major reassessment of the question of nihilism in modernity. It has a multi-focal approach, looking at the return of angelic and demonic principles in current cultural production and thinking. It also makes a claim for another interpretation of modernity.

It is by now something of a commonplace for readers of Blanchot to claim that the limpid quality of his prose and the wealth of allusion woven through even his more opaque writings often have the paradoxical effect of making his work both engagingly lucid and approachable and utterly resistant to interpretation or even comprehension in any ordinary sense. At the core of this paradoxical experience is a theory of creativity that Blanchot frequently alludes to and often appears to be (...) about to reveal before allowing it to vanish into what he calls his “third night,” a darkness beyond both day and night, being and non-being, from which the artist, writer or composer draws the inspiration required for both the initiation and completion of the textual artefact or, as will be argued here, the musical event. Focusing on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that Blanchot outlines most fully in “The Gaze of Orpheus,” and deploying this writer’s own theory and practice of xenosonics, the fundamental question here will be – and to borrow from his friend Bataille – the “use-value” of Blanchot’s evasive theory of creativity for the creator of music, text or art. (shrink)

Looking back in the late fifties on the rise of New York's postwar avant-garde, Clement Greenberg remarked that “some day it will have to be told how ‘anti-Stalinism,’ which started out more or less as ‘Trotskyism,’ turned into art for art's sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.” It was a good point, and one that Greenberg himself had largely neglected in his own accounts of American Modernism. The story of how New York Intellectuals and (...) Abstract Expressionists came to the defense of artistic vanguardism from a common past of Marxist commitments, and of how that defense ended in the fifties with a celebration of American cultural freedom, certainly had to be told. (shrink)

This special issue of Angelaki sets out to curate a range of literary and philosophical perspectives on how the sea is currently thought, felt and theorized across the theoretical humanities. Drawi...

Tee-ar-r-r! Tee-ar-r-r! rattled the tern1There is nothing more important on this planet than the sea. Nothing, that is, more important for our species at this juncture in our development as a speci...