scholarly journals Simondon (novo)materialismo? Um movimento para além do pensamento político moderno

DoisPontos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Bardin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Strategic Experimentation ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Civil Science ◽  
Cybernetic Theory

Abstract: This paper combines Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with some aspects of post-humanist and‘new materialist’ thought, while, at the same time, remaining within the ambit of a more classically ‘historical’characterisation of materialism. Two keywords drawn from Karen Barad and Simondon respectively – ‘ontoepistemology’and ‘axiontology’ – represent the red thread of a narrative that connects the early modern invention of civil science(emblematically represented here by the conceptual couple Descartes-Hobbes) to Wiener’s cybernetic theory ofsociety. The political stakes common to these forms of what I call ‘banal’ materialism, Simondon attacked ontologically,epistemologically and politically. The conceptual tools Simondon’s philosophy of individuation elaborates prove tosupport a ‘non-banal’ materialist critique of the alleged ‘unsocial sociability’ of human nature theorised in modernpolitical theory. A genuine materialist approach, as I will argue, allows us to shift political thinking from politicsconceived as a problem to be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation.

scholarly journals Simondon Contra New Materialism: Political Anthropology Reloaded

2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642110120
Author(s):  
Andrea Bardin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Strategic Experimentation ◽  
Civil Science ◽  
And Shifts

This paper responds to an invitation to historians of political thought to enter the debate on new materialism. It combines Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with some aspects of post-humanist and new materialist thought, without abandoning a more classically ‘historical’ characterization of materialism. Two keywords drawn from Barad and Simondon respectively – ‘ontoepistemology’ and ‘axiontology’ – represent the red thread of a narrative that connects the early modern invention of civil science (emblematically represented here by the ‘conceptual couple’ Descartes-Hobbes) to Wiener’s cybernetic theory of society. The political stakes common to these forms of mechanical materialism were attacked ontologically, epistemologically and politically by Simondon. His approach, I will argue, opens the path for a genuine materialist critique of the political anthropology implicit in modern political thought, and shifts political thinking from politics conceived as a problem to be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation.

Introduction: Ethical and Political Thinking after Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Erin Graff Zivin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Ricardo Piglia

In the Introduction, the author proposes a mode of reading that would expose the misunderstanding that is constitutive of both the literary and the political. A reading of the figure of the “blind” reader in two primal, early modern scenes of reading taken up by Ricardo Piglia in his 2005 El último lector [The Last Reader] is then taken up, suggesting that the blind reader might be that reader who—desperately close to the text—is attuned to its marks of invisibility, to those elements of unreadability that serve as an aporetic demand for more (blind) reading. The motif of opacity, or invisibility, recurs throughout Anarchaeologies vis-à-vis a cluster of concepts—misunderstanding, error, equivocation—to which the author turns in order to imagine new interpretative possibilities not only within literary criticism, but within ethical and political thinking as well.

Culture and Difference

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farah Godrej
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Political Approach

Can non-Western traditions offer the West intellectual resources to re-conceptualize the human–nature relationship, and transform our ethical relationship to the natural world? This essay argues that there have been two kinds of approaches to this question: first, an almost purely ethical approach that is termed “civilizational,” which follows the logic inherent in biocentric critiques of Western anthropocentrism and instrumentalism; and second, a more political approach which is called “neo-Gandhian,” which takes inspiration from the political thinking of Mahatma Gandhi. After describing each approach at length, the chapter argues that the latter is a more sophisticated way to turn to non-Western traditions for environmentally just solutions to the global environmental crisis. It not only avoids reproducing the binaries and dichotomies to which the former approach seems indebted, but it also marries normative environmental concerns with practical, material concerns and explicitly political critique and action.

scholarly journals Hobbes in the Anthropocene: Reconsidering the State of Nature in Its Relevance for Governing

2021 ◽  
pp. 030437542110086
Author(s):  
Maximilian Lakitsch
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Accountability ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Political Modernity

The theoretical work of Thomas Hobbes marks the dawn of political modernity and thus also the beginning of modern reasoning about governing. In his Leviathan, Hobbes creates the modern space of the political through the exclusion of the world’s social and natural abundance. This crossroads of political thinking might not least be of relevance for the Anthropocene. After all, affirming the Anthropocene returns mankind to a cosmos of infinite human–nature interrelationships, which strongly resembles Hobbes’s conceptual depiction of the premodern state of nature and its incomprehensible, contingent, and precarious world, a world that Hobbes had intended to ban for good. In this context, this article reconsiders the state of nature’s internal dynamics in its relevance for governing in the Anthropocene—at the expense of the normative claims of modernist governing. After all, embracing the complex ontologies of the Anthropocene and the state of nature disperses agency among the human and nonhuman world, which questions the idea of ethical and political accountability. Without such a reference, governing runs the risk of becoming arbitrary and thereby another shallow projection of modernist conceptions. This article develops an interpretation of political subjectivity as a reference for governing, deriving from the materialistic world of the Hobbesian state of nature. On this foundation, the article elaborates on how this reading of subjectivity reconfigures the conception of political space and how this shift affects the scope of governing.

“I'd make thee eat the mischief thou hast vented”: Discourse of Law in Ben Jonson's Catiline His Conspiracy

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Gunpowder Plot ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Legal Procedures ◽  
The Way

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.

Facing the Challenge of Democracy

2011 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Democratic Representation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Party Polarization

Citizens are political simpletons—that is only a modest exaggeration of a common characterization of voters. Certainly, there is no shortage of evidence of citizens' limited political knowledge, even about matters of the highest importance, along with inconsistencies in their thinking, some glaring by any standard. But this picture of citizens all too often approaches caricature. This book brings together leading political scientists who offer new insights into the political thinking of the public, the causes of party polarization, the motivations for political participation, and the paradoxical relationship between turnout and democratic representation. These studies propel a foundational argument about democracy. Voters can only do as well as the alternatives on offer. These alternatives are constrained by third players, in particular activists, interest groups, and financial contributors. The result: voters often appear to be shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent because the alternatives they must choose between are shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent.

Persons Together

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Market Relations ◽  
The Image Of God

This chapter moves into the political and economic aspects of human nature. Given scarcity and interdependence, what sense has Judaism made of the material well-being necessary for human flourishing? What are Jewish attitudes toward prosperity, market relations, labor, and leisure? What has Judaism had to say about the political dimensions of human nature? If all humans are made in the image of God, what does that original equality imply for political order, authority, and justice? In what kinds of systems can human beings best flourish? It argues that Jewish tradition shows that we act in conformity with our nature when we elevate, improve, and sanctify it. As co-creators of the world with God, we are not just the sport of our biochemistry. We are persons who can select and choose among the traits that comprise our very own natures, cultivating some and weeding out others.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas I. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Political Conception ◽  
Legal Principle ◽  
Ethical Disposition

In academic debates and popular political discourse, tolerance almost invariably refers either to an individual moral or ethical disposition or to a constitutional legal principle. However, for the political actors and ordinary residents of early modern Northern European countries torn apart by religious civil war, tolerance was a political capacity, an ability to talk to one’s religious and political opponents in order to negotiate civil peace and other crucial public goods. This book tells the story of perhaps the greatest historical theorist-practitioner of this political conception of tolerance: Michel de Montaigne. This introductory chapter argues that a Montaignian insistence that political opponents enter into productive dialogue with each other is worth reviving and promoting in the increasingly polarized democratic polities of the twenty-first century.

Stuart Succession Literature

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Distinct Category ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Distinguished Group ◽  
Modern British Literature

Moments of royal succession, which punctuated the Stuart era (1603–1714), occasioned outpourings of literature. Writers, including most of the major figures of the seventeenth century from Jonson, Daniel, and Donne to Marvell, Dryden, and Behn, seized upon these occasions to mark the transition of power; to reflect upon the political structures and values of their nation; and to present themselves as authors worthy of patronage and recognition. This volume of essays explores this important category of early modern writing. It contends that succession literature warrants attention as a distinct category: appreciated by contemporaries, acknowledged by a number of scholars, but never investigated in a coherent and methodical manner, it helped to shape political reputations and values across the period. Benefiting from the unique database of such writing generated by the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project, the volume brings together a distinguished group of authors to address a subject which is of wide and growing interest to students both of history and of literature. It illuminates the relation between literature and politics in this pivotal century of English political and cultural history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume will be indispensable to scholars of early modern British literature and history as well as undergraduates and postgraduates in both fields.

Intertheatricality and Propaganda

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Publicover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Political Background ◽  
Controversial Nature

This chapter analyses the ways in which the collaborative drama The Travels of the Three English Brothers defends the Sherley brothers’ real-world political endeavours across Europe and Persia through its intertheatrical negotiations. Explaining the political background of those endeavours and their controversial nature, it illustrates how the playwrights liken the Sherleys to the heroes of dramas that had been popular on the early modern stage over the preceding twenty years, in particular Tamburlaine and The Merchant of Venice. It also examines the significance of Francis Beaumont’s specific parody, in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, of an episode in Travels in which the Persian Sophy acts as godfather to the child of Robert Sherley. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of playing companies in shaping dramatic output.

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