Gestures are usually regarded as a casual element of communication processes between logicians. By contrast, we aim to show that gestures have played a significant role in logic. We argue that the development of communication techniques and their standardization have led to the rise of formal notation systems commonly used in logic today. In order to substantiate this claim, the historical development of the use of gestures in (early) modern logic is investigated. This investigation uncovers exemplary communication (...) and proof techniques that illustrate the efficacy of gestures as representational media in formal logic. Revisiting the tradition of gestures in logic offers promising paths and insights for today’s logic as a communication practice in the digital age. (shrink)

In this paper I propose to read and understand gestures as logical tools within a synthetic paradigm of knowledge. This interpretation of gesture is drawn from a new pragmatist reading of reasoning in general, and synthetic reasoning in particular. Complete gestures are actions with a beginning and an end that bear a meaning. It is our regular way to embody vague ideas into singular actions with general meaning. The tool is forged by a dense blending of icons, indices, and (...) symbols and by a complexity of phenomenological characteristics as feelings, actual actions, general concepts and habits. The paper illustrates this new way to look at gestures and different kinds of complete and incomplete gestures. (shrink)

Analogy researchers do not often examine gesture, and gesture researchers do not often borrow ideas from the study of analogy. One borrowable idea from the world of analogy is the importance of distinguishing between attributes and relations. Gentner observed that some metaphors highlight attributes and others highlight relations, and called the latter analogies. Mirroring this logic, we observe that some metaphoric gestures represent attributes and others represent relations, and propose to call the latter analogical gestures. We provide (...) examples of such analogical gestures and show how they relate to the categories of iconic and metaphoric gestures described previously. Analogical gestures represent different types of relations and different degrees of relational complexity, and sometimes cohere into larger analogical models. Treating analogical gestures as a distinct phenomenon prompts new questions and predictions, and illustrates one way that the study of gesture and the study of analogy can be mutually informative. (shrink)

The idea of ‘gesture’ is present in the philosophical world in various forms. All of them might find an important theoretical grounding in pragmatist philosophy, if we combine pragmatism with some French philosophies of mathematics and read it as a way out of the Kantian philosophy of representation. The paper uses the insights of Jean Cavaillès to set out the problem of the weakness of the epistemic Kantian defense of mathematical and logical thought. Cavaillès rejected the possible amendments to (...) Kant’s explanation provided by both Husserl and Bolzano and their heirs. He used the word ‘gesture’ in order to explain the activity of mathematicians who have to act synthetically, following rules, with some physical representation, and being aware of the possibility of failure. Cavaillès conceived the use of gesture as an alternative to the Heidegerian idea of event defended by Albert Lautman. The paper then follows the idea of gesture in the French philosophy of mathematics of Gilles Châtelet and Giuseppe Longo. Finally, the paper illustrates how Peirce’s study of Existential Graphs and the main insights of pragmatism complete Cavaillès’s idea by giving to gestures a phenomenological and semiotic structure. The pragmatist philosophy of gesture is thus a new way of overthrowing Kant’s philosophy of representation without surrendering to irrationalism. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to present ways in which gestures combine with the verbal layer of an utterance, thus reflecting embodied thinking and the rooting of abstract concepts in human bodily experience. The article discusses two different ways in which gestures, described in the literature as metaphoric, illustrate both linguistically expressed metaphors and abstract concepts that are not verbally expressed as metaphors. The data analyzed in this paper have been taken from speeches of politicians and other public figures.

This paper addresses the question of how emojis are integrated into the text that they occur with. I use the typology of gestural iconic enrichments proposed by Schlenker (2018a, 2018b) to investigate the hypothesis that emojis denoting objects (e.g., ????) and activities (e.g., ????) project (i.e., interact with logical operators) when co-occurring with text in a similar way as gestures do with speech. In particular, I claim that [i.] emojis generate co-suppositions, i.e., assertion-dependent presuppositions, when immediately following text (e.g., the (...) sentence “John didn’t train today ????” gives rise to the inference that “if John had trained today, weightlifting would have been involved”); [ii.] emojis generate supplements (in the sense of Potts, 2005), just like appositive relative clauses, when they are separated from the accompanying text by a pause (e.g., the sentence “John trained today...????” gives rise to the inference that “John trained today, which involved weightlifting”); [iii.] when used as replacements for words (e.g., “Yesterday, John didn’t ???? ”), emojis have an at-issue semantics and can trigger standard presuppositions. (shrink)

Western philosophy often overlooked the problem of technology. It is a long-standing prejudice of a nominalist or idealist mentality that goes on from ancient Greece up to today. Compared to other contemporary currents of thought, the pragmatist tradition had some interesting ideas because it united in a profound continuum theory and practice, overthrowing any dualism. This move was particularly effective in Peirce’s studies on continuity, logical modalities, logic of abduction, and existential graphs as well as in Dewey’s approach to (...) logic as an integrated tool of inquiry in which technology is part of the human organism. However, also the pragmatist tradition remained somehow only with a good analysis of synthesis and a good theory of practice but did not complete its drive toward a different vision of syntheticity and technology. The philosophy of gesture that I will propose in this paper wants to complete the unfinished work of this tradition relying heavily on pragmatist phenomenology and semiotics. In the first part, I will sum up the main structure of this philosophy of gesture, as I name it (I). In the second part, I will show the fundamental application of this philosophy to technology (II). At the end, I will illustrate an application for blind people to see a museum that is inspired by the Philosophy of gesture (III). (shrink)

By examining the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy from 1901 to 1914, this essay reveals that he possessed a more robust philosophy of gestures than has been accounted for. This study is executed in two stages. First, I explore how Husserl analyzed gestures through the lens of his semiotics in the 1901 Logical Investigations. Although he there presents a simple account of gestures as kinds of indicative signs, he does uncover rich insights about the role that gestures play in communication. Second, (...) I examine how Husserl augmented his theory of gestures in his 1914 Revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation. Husserl describes some gestures as signals, which are experienced as intersubjective communication, as having a temporally diachronic structure, and as possessing an obliging tendency. Husserl also contrasts gestures to language by showing how language habitually leaves traces on us. (shrink)

In this paper I question the primacy of argumentation relying solely on logic by showing how the body and mind are deeply connected and as a result how communication and argumentation are a product of this mind/body connection. In particular, I explore the physicality of argumentation through the research and writings on gestures and the embodied mind. Michael Gilbert’s theory of multi-modal argumentation provides the general approach for this elaboration.

Husserl credited Riemann for bringing the modern idea of “mathesis universalis‘ to its realization. Going beyond the logical ideal of a theory of all possible forms of theories, this paper explores the phenomenological sense of intrinsically physical geometry. Starting from Kant, how can we follow the thread of transcendental idealism in the search for the hidden presuppositions of this kind of geometry? This is achieved by reflecting on the paradigmatic experience of the earth at rest in our primary lifeworld.

According to the deductivist view of mathematics which became the rule during the nineteenth century, formal proofs working with symbolic formulas replaced the intuitive knowledge that used to be gained by the step-by-step construction of geometric fgures and diagrams. Twentieth century epistemological refection on symbolic formulas and formal proofs, however, took them to be diagrams respectively exhibiting formal relations and transformations. The claim was also made that, for such diagrams to be proofs, temporal displays of transformations—and of other speech acts—were (...) required. By returning to the signifcant elements of contemporary theories of mathematical proofs, we will here show how these proofs came to be a matter for semiotics and pragmatics as much as for formal logic. Once this is done, we will provide a few arguments against the standard objections to the ability of diagrams to present temporal order or perform speech acts. (shrink)

Giovanni Maddalena’s The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists’ Incomplete Revolution is an ambitious, original, and creative contribution to the re-evaluation of the history of pragmatism and its contemporary legacy in various areas of philosophy, ranging from logic and the theory of reasoning to the philosophy of science and art, as well as ethics and the philosophy of education. A reader can only admire the author’s broad and deep knowledge and learning, which extends from the hist...

The aim of this paper is to investigate, if there is a principal disagreement between Husserl's early concept of expression and his later discussions on gestures. In the early work Logical Investigations (1900–1901), Husserl quite bluntly excludes gestures from the category of meaningful expressions; thirty years later (1928), in the second volume of Ideas, he argues to the contrary that gestures are meaningful and expressive in the very same way as linguistic units, words and sentences. The question of this paper (...) is: What happened in Husserl's thinking in the two decades between Investigations and the last versions of Ideas II? I argue that the disagreement between Husserl's early statement and his later discussion on gestural expressions is due to a refinement in his account of embodiment. I claim that Husserl did not abandon his concept of expression, but dismissed his early analysis of embodiment as simplistic and as motivated by a certain preconception about the relationship between nature and spirit. This change became possible for him as he developed conceptual and methodic tools for distinguishing between different meanings of the body: the physical thing or the mere material body, the perceived body, and the sensuous body. The difference between the body as a physical thing and the body as a sensuous-spiritual unit proves to be crucial to the understanding of gestural expressions. (shrink)

This article argues the necessity of overcoming the hierarchical and pyramidal conception of the central nervous system that has subordinated the motor function to the higher brain activities for at least the last 150 years. The evolution of some motor modes of behavior?such as the ability to construct and manipulate instruments?has given rise to an ?embodied logic? underpinning not only the development of models of action and prediction but also the production of gestures and sequences of syllables that are (...) at the basis of human communication. Whether it is a matter of shaking someone's hand, writing a letter, or whatever, each executive function?controlled by a series of nervous structures and mental procedures that process the information?requires behaviors that are oriented to a specific end. (shrink)

The paper presents a cognitive semiotic perspective on spontaneous gesturing (or singular gestures), understood as spontaneous co-speech embodied activity, devoid of linguistic properties, and not conforming to social conventions. In line with the cognitive-semiotic attitude, the paper addresses the so far underexplored methodological issue of complementing third-person methods of gesture studies with first- and second-person perspectives on speech and gesturing in line with phenomenological triangulation. Merleau-Ponty’s ideas presented in Phenomenology of Perception are the starting point for the exploration of (...) aspects of a phenomenological view of gestural meaning-making. Gesturing, as a meaning-making activity, is analyzed in terms of embodied accomplishment of meaning. Gestural bodily activity is subsequently analyzed in terms of pre-reflective self-consciousness and reflective self-consciousness. The paper is intended as a contribution to studies on the phenomenology of gesturing, with perspectives for further research sketched in the concluding section. (shrink)

In Voyous, Jacques Derrida develops his argument starting from the presupposition that democracy as such is the entity whose integrity and immunity are at stake and, therefore, under investigation. This gesture reflects the setting in which ten years before, in Foi et savoir, he had cast his reasoning about the logic of immunity. There, it was one of the sources of religion, the immunity of the sacred, that operated according to this logic. The hyphen between these two (...) essays, beside Derrida’s own crossed references, is the genealogical reasoning on the meaning and essence of the concept of democracy: contrary to what Derrida claims, it will be maintained that Athenian democracy had a clear immune matrix, whose constant exercise is clearly defined, in spite of himself, by Vernant, and it will be shown how modern democracy has been forced to change policy. Modern democracy is an entity characterized by an immune deficiency. In order to save Derrida’s intuition from both the collapse of different vantage points and from a quite bizarre reticence in taking into account of the immune value of rituals, our starting point will be René Girard’s œuvre and his reading of the role of immune logic in sacred systems and, more generally, in modernity. The threshold between the auto-immune reaction, immune deficiency and auto-immune disease, between the sacrifice who delimits and constitutes the self and the holocauste du peuple en détail, is the space where, constantly exposed to the risk of auto-denial, democracy lives. (shrink)

We argue that the pictorial nature of certain constructions in signs and in gestures explains surprising properties of their syntax. In several sign languages, the standard word order (e.g. SVO) gets turned into SOV (with preverbal arguments) when the predicate is a classifier, a distinguished construction with highly iconic properties (e.g. Pavlič, 2016). In silent gestures, participants also prefer an SOV order in extensional constructions, irrespective of the word order of the language they speak (Goldin-Meadow et al., 2008). But in (...) silent gestures and in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), intensional constructions can override these SOV preferences, yielding SVO instead (Schouwstra & de Swart, 2014; Napoli et al., 2017). This distinction was argued to be due to iconicity: arguments are expressed before the verb if they correspond to entities that are present before the action, otherwise they follow the verb. While agreeing with this intuition, we propose that the extensional/intensional distinction is neither empirically nor theoretically appropriate. In new data from American Sign Language, we replicate the distinction among extensional classifier predicates: for _x ate up the ball_, the ball is typically seen before the eating and a preposed object is preferred; but for _x spit out the ball_, the ball is typically seen after the spitting and a postposed object is preferred, although both _eat up_ and _spit out_ are used extensionally. We extend this finding to data involving pro-speech (= speech-replacing) gestures embedded in French sentences. We argue for a Visibility Generalization according to which arguments appear before the verb if their denotations are typically visible before the action, and we develop a new formal account within a pictorial semantics for visual animations (inspired by Greenberg and Abusch). It derives the observed word order preferences, it explains how the semantics of classifier predicates combines iconic and conventional properties, and it makes a more general point: sign language semantics combines logical semantics with pictorial semantics. (shrink)

This paper looks at intrinsic disputation within proposition, and specifically within propositions that offer a moderated version of the freedom of speech and expression. It begins from a consideration of what is at stake in Othello's ‘Rude am I in my speech’, a rhetorical gesture that frames an act of great eloquence, and in which the eloquence serves to formulate a quarrel by ostensibly resolving it. This example reveals that there is a conflict between empirical quarrel and articulated spoken (...) resolution. This leads the essay to explore the way in which diplomacy works, whereby we establish the pretence that there is peace between disputatious positions through the power of the logic of ‘but’, thus: ‘I agree with you, but …’. Finally, this is extended to a consideration of the limits of and/or on free speech: ‘I defend free speech, but …’, where the ‘but’ is a gesture in which the defence of free speech is modified to the point of being obliterated. (shrink)

This slender volume attempts to determine the role of logic in Heidegger’s thought and its incompatibility with logic as others understand it, so as to show that Heidegger’s overcoming of logic entails an overturn of philosophy as conceived since Plato. Fay carries this out in six steps: 1) Heidegger’s critique of logic is motivated by metaphysics’ forgetfulness of Being and by the need for a fundamental ontology of alëtheia; 2) the primacy of the preconceptual, prelogical grasp (...) of Being shows that not logic but "the command of Being," grasped "by a thankful gesture of acceptance", rules thought; 3) discussion of "Nothing" in Wegmarken, Carnap’s attacks thereupon, and Heidegger’s counterclaims; 4) discussion of the devolution from truth as the bond of physis-alëtheia-logos to truth as correspondence; 5) a Heideggerian view of the development of symbolic logic and its relation to technicity; 6) the overcoming of technicity in Heidegger’s meditation on language. Professor Fay concludes that Heidegger’s reflection on logos is incompatible with logic as ordinarily understood but that the attempt to overcome traditional logic delivers Heidegger’s thought not to irrationalism but to the original sense of logos. (shrink)

Logicism is, roughly speaking, the doctrine that mathematics is fancy logic. So getting clear about the nature of logic is a necessary step in an assessment of logicism. Logic is the study of logical concepts, how they are expressed in languages, their semantic values, and the relationships between these things and the rest of our concepts, linguistic expressions, and their semantic values. A logical concept is what can be expressed by a logical constant in a language. So (...) the question “What is logic?” drives us to the question “What is a logical constant?” Though what follows contains some argument, limitations of space constrain me in large part to express my Credo on this topic with the broad brush of bold assertion and some promissory gestures. (shrink)

Music is at the centre of what it means to be human – it is the sounds of human bodies and minds moving in creative, story-making ways. We argue that music comes from the way in which knowing bodies (Merleau-Ponty) prospectively explore the environment using habitual 'patterns of action' which we have identified as our innate ‘communicative musicality’. To support our argument, we present short case studies of infant interactions using micro analyses of video and audio recordings to show the (...) timings and shapes of intersubjective vocalisations and body movements of adult and child while they improvise shared narratives of meaning. Following a survey of the history of discoveries of infant abilities, we propose that the gestural narrative structures of voice and body seen as infants communicate with loving caregivers are the building blocks of what become particular cultural instances of the art of music, and of dance, theatre and other temporal arts. Children enter into a musical culture where their innate communicative musicality can be encouraged and strengthened through sensitive, respectful, playful, culturally informed teaching in companionship. The central importance of our abilities for music as part of what sustains our well-being is supported by evidence that communicative musicality strengthens emotions of social resilience to aid recovery from mental stress and illness. Drawing on the experience of the first author as a counsellor, we argue that the strength of one person’s communicative musicality can support the vitality of another’s through the application of skilful techniques that encourage an intimate, supportive, therapeutic, spirited companionship. Turning to brain science, we focus on hemispheric differences and the affective neuroscience of Jaak Panksepp. We emphasise that the psychobiological purpose of our innate musicality grows from the integrated rhythms of energy in the brain for prospective, sensation-seeking affective guidance of vitality of movement. We conclude with a Coda that recalls the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, which built on the work of Heraclitus and Spinoza. This view places the shared experience of sensations of living – our communicative musicality – as inspiration for rules of logic formulated in symbols of language. (shrink)

This essay explores the lines of thought focused on the relationship between gesture and technique, examining the theories which have conceptualized the transfer of gestural matrices into inert matter, and understood technique as a result of this process. Although associated mainly with the writings of the palaeontologist André Leroi-Gourhan, this thought actually predates his work, and consists of multiple branches: having first taken root at the end of the nineteenth century, it became diffused throughout the following decades in different (...) forms. These nevertheless shared a constant reference to cinema, both as a privileged place that captures gestures, and as a technique that can absorb their quintessence. From Espinas to Simondon, via Jousse and Eisenstein, the theory of gestural transmission breaks down various polarities, such as body and environment, organic and inorganic, animated and inanimate, performativity and inner life. It foregrounds the imaginative logic of the body and the many forms of somatic thinking developed by man. Such forms lie at the heart of the creative processes and have found their highest appreciation in cinema, as a machine that, from its very origins, has been grafted not only on the eye but on the whole body. (shrink)

[Un]disciplined Gestures and [Un]common sense: The Sensual, Acoustic Logic[s] of Paradox and Art Photography and the Representation of Modernist Architectural Space: From the Melancholy Fragment to the Colour of Utopia.

Phenomenology and logical positivism both subscribed to an empirical-verifiability criterion of mental or linguistic meaning. The acceptance of this criterion confronted them with the same problem: how to understand the Other as a subject with his own experience, if the existence and nature of the Other's experiences cannot be verified. Husserl tackled this problem in the Cartesian Meditations, but he could not reconcile the verifiability criterion with understanding the Other's feelings and sensations. Carnap's solution was to embrace behaviorism and eliminate (...) the idea of private sensations, but behaviorism has well-known difficulties. Heidegger broke this impasse by suggesting that each person's being included being-with, an innate capacity for understanding the Other. To be human is to be "hardwired" to make sense of the Other without having to verify the Other's private sensations. I suggest that being-with emerged from an evolutionary imperative for conspecific animals to recognize each other and to coordinate their activities. Wittgenstein also rejected the verifiability criterion. He theorized that the meaning of a term is its usage and that terms about private sensations were meaningful because they have functions in our language-games. For example, "I'm in pain," like a cry of pain, functions to get the attention of others and motivate others to help. Wittgenstein's theory shows how Dasein's being-with includes "primitive" adaptive behavior such as cries, smiles, and threatening or playful gesture. As Dasein is acculturated, these behaviors are partially superseded by functionally equivalent linguistic expressions. (shrink)

Boghossian argued that externalism is incompatible with a transparency thesis according to which we can know a priori whether any two of our occurrent thoughts have the same or distinct content, and that this transparency thesis is integral to our commonsense conception of rationality, which requires the apriority of our logical abilities. Stalnaker offered a detailed compatibilist response to Boghossian. Boghossian criticized this response, and Stalnaker replied. But the outcome of that important discussion remained unclear, partly because it was unclear (...) how to understand the amended transparency thesis at which Stalnaker was gesturing. My aim in this paper is to settle the matter. I wish to clarify the terms of the debate, also by highlighting the relevant commitments of Stalnaker’s two-dimensionalist account, and to show that his compatibilist response, which appeals to diagonal propositions, is unsuccessful. (shrink)

Peirce’s anti-psychologism hinges on two main assumptions. First, logic and psychology belong to two separate disciplines – respectively, the normative sciences and the experimental sciences. Second, externalism must be understood as a crucial and inescapable epistemological criterion. The introspectionist illusion, according to which individuals have direct and epistemologically flawless access to their own internal states, should be dismissed. As Colapietro (2003) and Calcaterra (2006) observe, Peirce’s standpoint is far different from the Kantian classical account of anti-psychologism. This original take (...) on anti-psychologism leaves room for a functional distinction between logic and psychology, emerging from a semiotic and communicative continuity. This means that psychology, unlike logic as a formal doctrine of signs, will be epistemologically appropriate for dealing with internal psychological states, on the condition that this inquiry be focused on the communicative processes through which these internal states are expressed and conveyed. Such a Peircean account of anti-psychologism forms the epistemological background of this paper. My goal is to show how Peirce’s approach to communication and semiosis can be applied in order to discuss a specific psychological theory, in this case, attachment theory. Specifically, I propose employing Giovanni Maddalena’s Peircean distinction between complete and incomplete gestures (Maddalena 2015) to account for the distinction between secure, dismissing and preoccupied attachment patterns. To this end, I will be discussing three different measurements of attachment: the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI, George, Kaplan & Main 1985), the Adult Attachment Projection (AAP, George & West 2006), and the Patient Attachment Coding System (PACS, Talia, Miller-Bottome & Daniel 2015). Throughout this discussion, I will examine the connection between the semiotic and phenomenological category of completeness, and the psychological category of security. This connection involves an interesting normative import, which I briefly discuss in the conclusions. (shrink)

We study a contemporary need to complement analytic philosophy with pendular, synthetic approaches. We provide new definitions of the dyad analytics/synthetics and complete it with a natural third, horotics. Some historical trends to support a synthetic/horotic paradigm are studied: (i) Peirce’s ideas around his logic of continuity – non Cantorian continuum and existential graphs – emphasizing the importance of mathematical gestures, (ii) Gödel’s understanding of intuitionism as a synthetic counterpart of classical logic, along with a new horotic approach (...) to his work, (iii) Contemporary mathematical achievements (1950-2000), difficult to understand from analytical philosophy perspectives. Finally, we indicate some main features that a systematical synthetic/horotic reasoning should enforce, in order to fulfill its historic sequence. (shrink)

Language has a rich typology of inferential types. It was recently shown that subjects are able to divide the informational content of new visual stimuli among the various slots of the inferential typology: when gestures or visual animations are used in lieu of specific words in a sentence, they can trigger the very same inferential types as language alone (Tieu et al., 2019 ). How general are the relevant triggering algorithms? We show that they extend to the auditory modality and (...) to music cognition. We tested whether pro-speech musical gestures, i.e. musical excerpts that replace words in sentences, can give rise to the same inferences. We show that it is possible to replicate the same typology of inferences using pro-speech music. Minimal and complex musical excerpts can behave just like language, gestures, and visual animations with respect to the logical behavior of their content when embedded in sentences. Specifically, we found that pro-speech music can generate scalar implicatures, presuppositions, supplements, and homogeneity inferences. (shrink)

The objective in this paper is to demonstrate the indispensability of Peirce’s double consciousness to foster abductive reasoning, so that internal/external dialogue inform the worthiness of hunches. These forms of dialogue establish a mental give-and-take forum in which novel meanings/effects are particularly highlighted and noticed. Such attentional shifts are compelled by surprising states of affairs within the beholder’s internal, interpretive competencies, or from external factors (pictures, gestural or linguistic performatives). The dialogic nature of these signs pre-forms operations not possible non-dialogically; (...) they command, interrogate, or suggest alterations to established conduct/beliefs in contexts in which propositional/argumentative conflicts are obviated. This inquiry proposes experimental methodologies to measure when double consciousness (via private/inner speech) mediates hypothesis-making. Vygotsky’s conflict of motive at four distinct developmental stages constitutes the foundation for the proposed experiments. Designs draw upon Vygotsky’s ‘double stimulation’ paradigms that force decision-making processes when conflicts of motive surface. Paradigms include forced imitation of one model while ignoring another (imitating bear, not dragon), and altering a visual array to depict logical sequencing accurately (the “Cycles Test”; “The Odd One Out”). These conflicts require children to change their conduct/beliefs to accommodate to atypical states of affairs. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that it is possible to approach teaching from a fully affirmative perspective: as an educational practice that has its own internal logic and intrinsic value. By analysing a fragment from one of the Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts presented in this article as a teaching event, we show that when starting from an empirical example of teaching it is possible to distinguish principles and gestures that testify to an ontological dimension of teaching. This is (...) possible, however, only when a particular reading of this empirical material is applied. We call this an immanent reading, as opposed to a transcendent (in this case critical) reading. It should be clear that this kind of inquiry we briefly demonstrate here is exactly a post-critical attempt to re-establish our affirmative relation with one of the most devalued, repressed, and neglected educational practice, namely teaching. (shrink)

Since Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end. The violent transformations which Hegel's philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible is Hamacher's topic. Starting from Hegel's commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature works--the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of History--focusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual movements. (...) Because the concept for Hegel is the end of the thing--the point where it peaks--because it occurs by severance from its representational content, the trace of this splitting appears imprinted into its discursive articulation. The Hegelian text is punctuated by a series of terms and topics that operate according to the logic of the turning point: one function activating its opposite, they serve as pores between mutually exclusive experiences and establish their unity. This dialectical procedure falters, its unity dissolves, the pores turn into aporias, wherever conceptual exigencies surpass the reality they have instilled. Hamacher shows that dialectics, proceeding by way of aporias, remains unable to account for its own movement. Hegel's system must be read from the point where its rupture fails to converge with its end. Analyzing both the historical and the systematic aspects of Hegel's philosophy, addressing Kant and religious fetishism, Nietzsche and the impossible repetition of the same, Marx and the aroma of religion, Freud and the hysterical body, Hamacher's argument is directed toward what in Hegel's philosophy of spirit resists spiritualization and defeats philosophy. Aspiring to be the last philosophy, speculative idealism has to incorporate all previous systems and spiritualize its incorporation. Its logic of ingestion must, however, reject with repulsion and nausea everything that resists appropriation. Emphasizing Hegel's claim to present the political theology of modern society, Hamacher shows that the mechanism of nausea meant to keep the system intact is in fact itself a mechanism foreign to its body; it averts the promised incorporation, defeats idealization, leaves the body politic disintegrated, and voids the claim of the most powerful ontology of modern society to mark the end, the completion and plenitude--the pleroma--of philosophy and history. What remains--the indigestible, the unreadable, the nondiscursive--demands yet another kind of discourse and another practical gesture: toward a pleroma other than Hegel's. (shrink)

Work defines the lives of most people. Many people work overtime, work second jobs, or bring work home with them. It is often difficult to know when work stops and the rest of life begins. In a culture where work is central to our identities, good work is increasingly difficult to find. This article argues that one of the impediments to imagining a future beyond work is the productivist logic that predominates today, which determines labor and production to be (...) key activities and values. To sketch a path beyond work, the author turns to Marx, arguing that Marx provides an important critique of productivism and gestures toward a postwork future in his own writings. To do so, the author defends Marx against critiques of productivism. (shrink)

Receiving another person’s gestures is an aesthetic production and an ethical pursuit. Cuffari finds support for this claim in Merleau-Ponty’s sustained comparisons between speaking, writing, and painting and in his concepts of reversibility and encroachment in The Prose of the World. She considers complex instances of gesture reception in interactions occurring in family life, poetic response to racist speech, and a robotic art exhibition. Gestures signify according to a logic of appropriative disclosure, wherein gesturing bodies select and stylize (...) features of shared space and history in an effort to say something new. Gesture receivers complete acts of meaning making by confronting and co-inhabiting the coherent deformations of another’s stylized and expressive action. Cuffari calls for efforts to perceive ourselves perceiving as a conscious practice of artistic stance towards conversational meaning co-construction. Recevoir les gestes d’une autre personne est une production esthétique et une recherche éthique. Cuffari trouve un soutien à cette thèse dans les comparaisons de Merleau-Ponty entre parler, écrire et peindre, et dans ses concepts de la réversibilité et de l’entrelacement dans La prose du monde. Elle prend en considération des instances complexes de réception de gestes dans des interactions qui se produisent dans la vie familiale, la réponse poétique à un discours raciste, une exposition d’art robotique. Les gestes signifient selon une logique du dévoilement et de l’appropriation, où les corps gesticulants sélectionnent et stylisent les caractères de l’espace partagé et de l’histoire dans un effort de dire quelque chose de nouveau. Ceux qui reçoivent les gestes accomplissent des actes de signification en confrontant et en co-habitant les déformations cohérentes d’une action stylisée et expressive d’un autre. Cuffari appelle à des efforts pour nous percevoir nous-mêmes en percevant, en tant que pratique consciente artistique à l’égard de la co-construction conversationnelle du sens.Ricevere il gesto di un’altra persona implica una produzione estetica ed una ricerca etica. Cuffari poggia la sua tesi sul confronto che Merleau-Ponty stabilisce tra parlare, scrivere e dipingere e sul concetto di reversibilità e di intreccio ne La prosa del mondo. L’autrice esamina la complessa questione della ricezione del gesto in diversi contesti: interazioni della vita famigliare, risposta poetica al discorso raziale e una mostra di arte robotica. I gesti significano in base ad una logica di disvelamento e appropriazione, in cui i corpi che performano i gesti individuano e stilizzano i caratteri di uno spazio condiviso e di una storia nello sforzo di esprimere qualcosa di nuovo. I riceventi del gesto vengono a completarne il significato confrontando e coabitando le deformazioni coerenti dell’azione stilizzata e espressiva di un altro. Cuffari ci chiama così a percepirci noi stessi nell’atto di percepire in quanto pratica artistica cosciente rispetto alla co-costruzione discorsiva del significato. (shrink)

Since Wittgenstein's Tractatus first appeared in 1921 two interpretations of it have been offered. The received view emphasizes the book's philosophy of mathematics, logic, and language. The alternative view stresses its philosophy of religion, ethics, and aesthetics; it thereby takes seriously Wittgenstein's assertion that the "point" of the Tractatus is ethical. The aim of my dissertation is to build upon and improve the alternative interpretation in three ways. First I show through examination of the Western mystical canon that Wittgenstein's (...) axiology is based on a conception of mentality in which the subject-object distinction is annulled. This clears the ground for clarification of the metaphor of the Tractatus as a "ladder" of transcendence. Next I illustrate through scrutiny of Schopenhauer's theory of art how this metaphor ties up with Wittgenstein's claim that "Ethics and Aesthetics are one." Like Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein holds that moral transformation may be wrought by aesthetic contemplation. I then conclude with a sketch of the Lebensform implied by such transformation which depends on the parallels implied by such transformation which depends on the parallels between Tolstoy's idea of the life outside of time and Wittgenstein's notion of das gute Leben. In so doing I depict the Tractatus's ethical point as gestural, recommending a kind of existence of which the book itself is an expressive part. (shrink)

This paper addresses two central issues: the first one briefly presents two stages of anthropological development of Paul Ricoeur’s anthropologic deployment, as an effort to think human being with a renewed logic. The second one states that in such philosophical journey a plus of meaning is inserted into the language of faith which accompanies the anthropological development itself and, in turn, exceeds and contains the philosophical specific task, and also makes clear how such an assignment exceeds the explicit aims (...) of the French author. In other words, this paper only seeks to outline a ‘gesture of openness’ in contemporary philosophy, accepting its heritage, and assuming renewed hues, deeps and scopes, allowing the philosophical work and human being go beyond themselves. (shrink)

This article presents silence as a cognitive tool to comprehend the environment. Two dimensions of silence are addressed: a natural mechanism and human beings' social and cultural construction. There is a link between these two dimensions because, on the one hand, agents' cognitive strategies based on silence influence how meanings and uses of silence have been constructed. The meanings of silence we use are contextual shapers of silence-based cognitive strategies. Silence is analyzed as a resource for coping with ambiguity: situations (...) perceived as uncertain provoke doubt and confusion because they can be understood differently or suggest different interpretations. These situations can occur in the face of epistemic disruption. The consequence is a transfer of the ambiguity property of these situations to the usual ways of relating to the world and people. The cognitive approach is based here on a semiotic-hermeneutic interpretation of silence from a phenomenological perspective. This accounts for a paradox: even if silence does not exist (the world is acoustic), it is real. The silence experience is a non-inferential cognitive capacity located at the base of perception: a stimulus that suggests a particular gesture as an action different from the usual one to deal with the environment. (shrink)

This interview with David Kleinberg-Levin, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, concerns his recent trilogy on the promise of happiness in literary language. Kleinberg-Levin discusses the relationship between and among philosophy, phenomenology, and literature. Among others, he addresses questions regarding literature’s ability to offer redemption, its response to suffering and justice, literary gesture, the ethics of narrative logic, and the surface of the text.Cet entretien avec David Kleinberg-Levin, Professeur émérite au département de philosophie de (...) la Northwestern University, est consacrée à sa récente trilogie sur la promesse du bonheur dans le langage littéraire. Kleinberg-Levin examine les relations réciproques et internes de la philosophie, de la phénoménologie et de la littérature. Entre autres, il pose des questions sur la capacité de la littérature à offrir une rédemption, sur sa réponse à la souffrance et à la justice, sur le geste littéraire, sur l’éthique de la logique narrative et sur la surface du texte.L’intervista a David Kleinberg-Levin, Professore Emerito presso il Dipartimento di Filosofia della Northwestern University, è dedicata alla sua recente trilogia sulla promessa di felicità nel linguaggio letterario. Kleinberg-Levin esplora il rapporto tra filosofia, fenomenologia e letteratura. In particolare egli affronta le questioni che riguardano la capacità della letteratura di offrire redenzione, la sua risposta alla sofferenza e alla giustizia, il gesto letterario, l’etica della logica narrativa, e la superficie del testo. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben presents us with one of the most powerful and controversial criticisms of human rights. He contests conventional understandings of human rights as normative setbacks on sovereign power, and shows instead how these rights reinforce sovereignty by producing bare lives that are irredeemably exposed to violence. This essay aims to understand the distinctive aspects of Agamben's critique and assess his concluding call for a politics beyond human rights. It suggests that this call is necessitated by a counternarrative of Western (...) politics that ties human rights inextricably to the logic Agamben ascribes to biopolitical sovereignty. Within this stringent logic, any politics organized around human rights cannot help but reproduce sovereign violence. The essay questions this counternarrative in two ways: First, it shows how this counternarrative, which aims to unveil all the myths that sustain sovereignty, ends up repeating what it identifies as the distinctive mythologizing gesture: rendering the contingent necessary. Second, it turns to Agamben's notion of ‘potentiality’ to break the binding spell of his narrative of fated necessity and reclaim the contingent, equivocal and unpredictable effects of modern rights declarations and struggles. The essay concludes with a discussion of contemporary rights struggles of sans-papiers to illustrate the strengths and limits of Agamben's critique of human rights. (shrink)

Few philosophers today know much about Charles Peirce’s metaphysics, although a great many know something about his epistemology, philosophy of science, and logic. Indeed, few Peirce experts have written much on his metaphysics or made it the focus of their research. To an extent, this is understandable. Peirce’s writings were left in a disastrously disorganized state (mostly unpublished), and the crucial papers on metaphysics from his later years have not yet been republished in the first-rate chronological edition, the incomplete (...) Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition , edited at Indianapolis by my friends. And then there is Peirce’s writing: an awkward, abrasive, arrogant, eclectic style that demands technical knowledge in diverse fields, especially logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences. His worst personality traits manifested themselves in his highly technical metaphysics—with its idiosyncratic, anti-Cantorian conception of continua, a pecularly mathematical phenomenology, and elaborate views on Darwinian and non-Darwinian evolution, for example. Finally, there is what might appear to be the bizarreness of the theory itself, as we shall see. Peirce was a kind of philosophical swashbuckler, a bold, courageous speculator on philosophical questions beyond most of our temperaments even to ponder. Ours is not the philosophical age of Errol Flynn but the minimalist age of Harrison Ford, with no grand gestures or speeches, just a series of small, no-nonsense gestures: we typically like our philosophy short, neat, "science-like," and isolated from other philosophical issues. (shrink)

Plato's rhetorical gesture invoking a 'quarrel' between philosophy and poetry points to a deep problem in our conception of rational discourse, often obscured or displaced in the history of philosophy's relations with imaginative literature, especially with respect to analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Recent developments have helped focus attention on the overlap between philosophy and literature, which the contemporary retreat from philosophy's 'narrative turn' does little to undermine. Further work in the philosophy of language, (...) the logic of the imagination, and the relations between dialectic and rhetoric promise to throw light on that ancient problem. (shrink)

New words have found their way into the public sphere: we now commonly talk about “confinement”, “barrier-gesture” or “distancing”. The very idea of public space has been transformed: with restrictions on movement and interaction in public; with the reintegration of lives (certain lives) into the home (if there is one) and private space; with the publicization of private space through internet relationships; with the cities’ space occupied, during confinement, by so-called “essential” workers; with the restriction of gatherings and political (...) demonstrations in public space. With these and other recent changes, it is imperative to revisit the concept of public space, which continues to be used as if it were self-evident, despite its profound transformation over the past few decades, in a process of realization and “literalization”. No longer just a comfortable metaphor for reasonable debates, public space has become a concrete reality in the 21th century. This transformation in the various phenomena, such as the occupation of squares and public spaces; the demand for spaces of conversation and expression for those without a voice; the transition of private matters into the public realm through verbal expression; and the expression and circulation of public issues within popular cultures. As a result, the question of public space is increasingly intertwined with that of private spaces, such as the home or individual subjectivities, forming an internal, logical relationship. (shrink)

Collecting goes beyond art collecting and seems to meet a more general need. Although it originally aided survival and has predecessors in the animal world, the gesture of collecting has complex motivations. After exploring the collector’s psychology and the behavioural differences between collectors and spectators, this paper analyses the logic of collecting and its principles: order, variation, attractive and meaningful display, the control of contingency, processuality and growth, seriality, and limitation. Finally, the paradoxical attempt to collect non-collectibles, such (...) as gods, clouds or human relations will be shown to illustrate a para-aesthetics of collecting which ranges from the poetics of everyday life to aestheticism. (shrink)

In this article we address Foucault’s interpretation of Kant’s anthropology as a whole, i.e. beyond Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View . I expose Foucault’s three most important thesis, which concern firstly the faithfulness of this book to the critical work that preceded it; secondly, the need of reading the Introduction to the Logic and the Opus postumum in order to draw crucial aspects of Kant’s anthropology; and thirdly, the importance of reviving a critical gesture , so (...) as to demystify the pretensions of the post-kantian anthropological discourse. This way the difference between Foucault and Heidegger on the one side, and Foucault and Sartre on the other side, becomes clear: against the latter he adopts an anti-humanist perspective, and unlike the former he uses the Opus postumum to distinguish false anthropology from Kant’s anthropology.Neste texto analisamos a leitura que Foucault fez da antropologia kantiana no seu conjunto, isto é, para além da Antropologia de um ponto de vista pragmático . As três teses foucaultianas mais importantes são, primeiro, a da fidelidade deste livro à obra crítica que o precedeu; segundo, a da necessidade de ler a Introdução da Lógica e o Opus postumum para penetrar aspetos essenciais da antropologia de Kant; terceiro, a da importância de retomar um certo gesto crítico , para desmistificar as pretensões do discurso antropológico pós-kantiano. Neste percurso, torna-se nítido o modo como Foucault se distingue tanto de Heidegger quanto de Sartre: se se opõe a este por via do anti-humanismo teórico, também se diferencia de Heidegger pela forma como se serve do Opus postumum, que Heidegger praticamente ignorou. (shrink)

Starting from the current trend to digitise the university, this thesis aims to clarify the specific relation between university thinking and its use of media. This thesis is an investigation concerning the sensorial and medial conditions which enable the event of thinking to emerge at the university, i.e. conditions which do not make thinking necessary, but possible. Thinking is approached as an event which can happen while studying at the university, not as an outcome, nor a disposition or skill. The (...) ambition of this thesis is theory development and of making a contribution in the field of philosophy of education. The theoretical framework discussed in chapters one and two will allow first, an analysis of the university sensorium inspired by the work of Ivan Illich who, through a history of the senses, pioneered this kind of research applied to medieval reading practices. Secondly, the work of media philosopher Vilém Flusser is used to operationalize the analysis of media at the university; this thesis will use the Flusserian concepts of code, modes of consciousness, transcoding, gestures, intellectual field, dialogue and apparatus. The methodology consists of a novel approach inspired by Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures: in order to find traces of thinking, this investigation looks for gestures (with media) occurring in university practices, gestures which seem to imply some form of coding or transcoding. The first chapter critically discusses Ivan Illich’s historical hypothesis of the mediatic specificity of the university thinking. Illich works with a particular conception of the history of the senses through which he shows how the invention of the optical text and its way of reading gave rise to a new way of thinking which was later fostered by the university. The text emerges as an instrumental way of using the book for studying and thinking, a profanation and suspension of the book. This move is taken to be the signature move of the university which enables a particular way of thinking: abstract and non-visual thinking, which is made present through the event of reading. The second chapter introduces the media-theoretical framework of Flusser by discussing his particular take on codes and the modes of consciousness enabled by the dominant codes. Provisionally, transcoding is taken to be an indication of the event of thinking. The threshold introduces the approach of a phenomenology of gestures which will be used in the following two chapters. The third chapter examines the practice of university lecturing from a sensorial and gestural perspective by using several direct observations of lectures and historical reports of lectures. It was found that the lecture does not promote any particular sense, hence no particular mode of consciousness, and that the media in the lecture suffers a continuous transcoding. Thinking in the lecture was described as a thinking which suddenly makes itself present for all those attending the lecture. The fourth chapter examines MOOCs which are taken to be the digital counterpart of the university course. The specific media usage enabled by MOOCs is described starting from two case studies: an xMOOC and the bMOOC (designed by KU Leuven and LUCA researchers). Using interviews and an autoethnographic account, this chapter finds indications of what could be digital gestures in the MOOC and concludes that thinking in the MOOC occurs as a collective construction of a techno-image. The fifth and final chapter outlines the theoretical contributions of this thesis. The kind of thinking made possible by university practices is described as a form of collective thinking, non-productive and anti-apparatus. The ways in which this thinking is made possible are theorised by introducing the notion of mediatic displacement, a specific event in which the particular logic of media is suspended in such a way as to make room for a thinking which is not determined by any mediality. The notion of intellectual askesis is proposed for the collective enactment of attention, as the sensorial condition which makes possible the mediatic displacement. In light of these findings, the thesis proposes to understand the promise of the digital university as still a utopian project to come, because it cannot yet enable the sensorial and collective attention techniques which the classical university managed to enact through its study practices. (shrink)

This essay probes into the possibility of encountering the Deleuzian sense-event in four Tom Stoppard radio plays, Moon (1964), Boot (1964), Glad (1966) and Artist Descending A Staircase (1972). Itself an incorporeal – an occurrence of the interface – the wonderful and strange protagonist of Gilles Deleuze's 1969 Logic of Sense is approached in apophatic gestures, with a glimpse at the various vestiges it has left upon texts. Within this exercise in indirection, ‘empty forms’ present themselves as the texts’ (...) circulating words. Informed by and receiving infusions from two parallel flows of Deleuzian signifiers and signifieds, these entities are singled out as the texts’ pointers that open up a cleavage where the sense-event can issue forth. (shrink)

Epistemological investigation belonged to the core topics in Indian philosophical traditions, too. Right cognition had generally been regarded as one of the important means to emancipation (niḥśreyasa) since ancient times. To reach this religious goal, they keenly discussed the problems of what kinds of cognition we should accept as right or what kinds of objects a right cognition refers to. Specifically it is about the number and the nature of the means of right cognition that opinions differ from school to (...) school. The number ranges from one (perception) to six or even ten (perception, inference, comparison, testimony, implication, non-perception, equivalence, tradition, gesture, and intuition). The concept of each means of right cognition, too, varies greatly among schools. In this paper I take up the Nyāya System, a rationalistic school of Brahmanic philosophy. In Nyāya the inference is regarded as particularly important, but it never means that logical thinking dominates testimony or the authority of religious scriptures in the Nyāya System. On the contrary we find such cases as the religious authority seems to delimit the validity of inference. Some inferences are obstructed by an axiom established in the school, whereas others by a ristriction of Brahmanic tradition. In this manner they seemed to protect their whole system from followers of other Schools. By examining this topic I would like to throw a tiny light on the characteristic affinity between philosophy and religion in Indian thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionAnthropocene Feminisms: Rethinking the UnthinkableClaire Colebrook and Jami WeinsteinIn her recent lecture on the Anthropocene (to which she adds the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene), Donna Haraway expresses some alarm that after two major insights into what counts as thinkable, it was “anthropos” that became the term for the post-Holocene (Haraway 2014). Haraway declares, with emphasis, that it is “literally unthinkable” to work with the individual unit of “man” if (...) one is to do good intellectual work. For Haraway, the two knowledge events that ought to have precluded the use of the figure of the “anthropos” are: first, the acceptance that any seeming individual is the outcome of a series of complex relations and must be studied as such (so there would be no epoch with anything, let alone “man,” as its first cause), and, second, intellectual inquiry has acknowledged a general becoming-with, such that in order to be anything at all, “one” must be in a dynamic relation. Haraway’s work is exemplary of post-liberal feminist resistance to the figure of man—as subject, agent, and center of knowing. Terms like “Woman” or “the feminine” do not extend the field occupied by man; they instead create a different intensity. So when Haraway questions the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene she neither asks that women, too, be included in those who have scarred the planet, nor does she claim that “Woman” would occupy some innocent outside. Instead, she proposes that one think of the “anthropos” as untimely, as out of sync with an intellectual milieu that theorizes the death of the subject and the eclipse of the human, and has even begun to renounce the notion of life in itself. It is odd that in the face of this destruction of any possibility of thinking by [End Page 167] way of individualism, the epic gesture of the present deploys the figure of the “anthropos,” as it should be unthinkable today to return to the figure of man.When Haraway invokes what is literally unthinkable, and then gestures to the Anthropocene, she suggests that perhaps the figure of the Anthropocene is a form of unthinking, and that it is precisely when complexities, timescales, predictions, manageability, and any form of sustainability ought to disturb and trouble our logics that we cease to think and ask for a single cause for an entire epoch. If this is so, and the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene is a reaction formation, then we might see the skirmishes and turf wars that surround the golden spike1 as diversions. If we spend our time disputing just when it was that man started to change the planet, then we allow a contested point in time to pass itself off as thinking, all the while allowing the intensive multiplicity of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene to remain unthought. By asking when the Anthropocene began, we revive a modified version of the time of man; once again, man is placed as the agent of history, albeit unwittingly, and he can look back upon and assess the past of his own making. Haraway is not alone in suggesting that such conceptions of a single line of time, and a conception of first cause, are highly gendered and racialized. The figure of “man” who creates his own history and recognizes himself as having come into being through a time that is readable is bound up with hegemonic conceptions of modernity, and has long been the target of feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critique (e.g., Foucault 1970; Amin 1989; Grosz 2004). If it is literally unthinkable to do good work from the premises of a methodological individualism, then asking who or what caused the Anthropocene, or when it began, would amount to a form of un-thinking or not-thinking. At the same time, perhaps the Anthropocene is literally unthinkable in a sense that marks a more positive and profound absurdity. Let us accept, following Haraway, that all “good work” both acknowledges the impossibility of accounting for the complexity of life by way of bounded, individual singularity, and dispenses with the exceptional man of reason as its foundation. If we do, what the Anthropocene... (shrink)

The work of Giorgio Agamben could perhaps best be described as an original extension of the onto-theological critique that has dominated much of the last century’s philosophical endeavors. For him, this fundamental critical perspective extends itself toward the deconstruction of traditional significations, including the boundaries said to exist between the human and the animal as well as between the human and the divine. By repeatedly unveiling these arbitrary divisions as being a result of the state of ‘original sin’ in which (...) we dwell, Agamben aims to advance philosophical discourse ‘beyond representation’ and toward a ‘pure’ encounter with the myriad of faces always ever present before us. In this sense, he works toward redefining ‘revelation’ as being little more than an exposure of our animality, something which indeed lies now unveiled at the real root of our being. This animality is in fact locateable beyond the separation of being into form and content, a division which is rather indebted to the onto-theological representations that have governed the discourse of being.By focusing instead on the manner in which paradigms could be said to operate over and against the rule of representations, he articulates a movement from particularity to particularity that resists the temptation to universalize our language on being. In this sense, then, the analogical logic of the paradigm, expressed always through the absolutely singular, exposes the beings which we all are before another, rather than violently condense any given being into a formal representation. By thus determining the contours of the paradigmatic expression, this essay intends to unite several ‘loose’ strands of Agamben’s thought in order to demonstrate the consequence of this line of inquiry: that the end of representation, often criticized as a form of political nihilism, is the only way in which to develop a justifiable ethics, one beyond the traditional binary divisions of subject and object, or of universal and particular. In the end, as Agamben illustrates repeatedly, there is only the ‘thingness’ that each thing is, and which must be safeguarded in its precarity, thus paving the way for an ethical discourse to appear.It is a final gesture toward the messianic, then, toward a religiously-inflected terminology which hovers over his entire oeuvre, that will ultimately guide Agamben’s ‘political’ project back toward its canonical moment most clearly identifiable within the Christian heritage. As his reading of Benjamin’s relationship to Saint Paul indicates, there is much to be discerned for him in the transition from Judaic law to Christian ‘forms of life’ . Rather than be content with a simple re-affirmation of Christian claims, however, Agamben deftly maneuvers his own position toward one of exposing the logic of Christianity as that which reveals a deep investment in a pantheistic worldview, one which theology can no longer afford to ignore. (shrink)