True enough, not many of the human lot we know, not least of all thosewe may chance upon in life in an intricate tangle of modern socialformations where individuals get to interface rather unreflectively mostof the time, would be so generous as to bestow a casual interest in philosophy. Two thousand years ago, this kind of antipathy toward philosophy made its point well when a man named Socrates was condemned to death, proof rather of the unchanging isometrics of equivocation in (...) the face of the compelling demands of justice and truth that Socrates exposed to be the skeleton in the cupboard of power, hiding under the façade of indestructibility. This pervasive practice would have by now covered an entire époque of Western intellectualtradition from the death of Socrates to the contemporary, disguised asunwavering love of everything that abounds in beauty and vitality, adetermined search for the fundament that holds everything together under the condition that Man is free and that Life is precious as too rich and valuable for the taking. (shrink)

True to his early Schellingian roots, Slavoj Zizek, in his recent book, Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World describes a virus as “a kind of zero-level life,” invoking Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. Perhaps the closest reference, though Zizek did not mention it, is his second major work on the subject, namely, First Outline of A System of the Philosophy of Nature where Schelling originally propounded the theory of nature’s ‘duplicity’. In the following discussions, we will situate Zizek’s timely intervention within the context of (...) his naturalism that politically mediates the differential flows of the present world and the subject itself, against the background of a space of difference between the two, whereby the virus acts as a kind of deferral mechanism in which something like the future is suspended, finally rendering the relation motionless. The discussions will also briefly situate Zizek’s political naturalism within contemporary political discourse involving some of his direct and indirect engagements with Agamben, Latour, Badiou, Berardi, Deleuze, and others. This critical review stakes out a view of Zizek’s recent intervention as a timely polemics, consistent with his global image as one of the most dependable public intellectuals of our troubled time. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Immanuel Kant - two important pillars of contemporary philosophy-were proficient critics of traditional metaphysics in their time. They were known to be critical of a sort of metaphysical striving predisposed to grounding or representing an elusive concept of the universal.. Kant had earlier deconstructed a pre-eminent feature of Western metaphysics, namely, the socalled essence of thing, had it consigned to the noumenon evocative of the paradoxical nature of human knowing: it regulates the boundaries according to which any (...) notion of the infinite, the universal or the absolute can be reflexively thematized, or, thus strategically said, problematized. (shrink)