Ontological Captivity

Departing from where Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Martin Heidegger’s gender-neutral Dasein left off, this article argues for “ontological captivity” as a critical analytic for questioning Being under conditions of racial capitalism. Based on a broad understanding of the Black Radical tradition, the author argues for the importance of connecting the analysis of ontological difference with the political critique of concrete historical and material conditions that structurally link what it means to be human to overlapping and mutually reinforcing technologies of capture. From the slave ship, the plantation, the reservation, the prison, the detention center, the penal colony, and the concentration camp to the ways in which injurious signifiers fix the body and arrest its mobility, ontological difference should be unthinkable outside a confrontation with its material conditions of possibility and impossibility. These are the material conditions that, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the “color-line” to Calvin Warren’s analytic of “onticide,” from Lewis Gordon’s “antiblackness” to Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s “coloniality of being,” and from Hortense Spillers’s “being for the captor” to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “ontological plasticization,” call for a political rather than an ethical interrogation of Being.

Critiquing Latour’s Explanation of Climate Change Denial: Moving Beyond the Modernity/Anthropocene Binary

The concept of the Anthropocene has reintroduced politics of denial at the centre of critical studies of international relations. This article interrogates Bruno Latour’s explanation of climate change denial with reference to an ontological difference between Modernity and the Anthropocene, together with his advocacy for a new language beyond the Modern gaze. Our aims are twofold: to disclose how Latour’s posthuman critique risk reproducing prevalent forms of climate change denial in the global North, and to question what falls outside Latour’s dualistic frame: the heterogenous ways through which climate change and the Anthropocene is met across the globe; the ambiguous relation with nature through which modernity was formed; the modernist genealogy of Anthropocene discourse, and lastly how discourses of global governance have absorbed posthumanist critique in its attempt to naturalise postcolonial power relations. At stake, we argue, is critical theory’s paradoxical complicity in the denialism it seeks to critique.

Main (Grundfrage) and leading (Leitfrage) questions about being: Claim for ancient understanding

The article is devoted to the question of being in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, namely, his claim to understand the ancient idea of being. In his work “Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)”, Heidegger distinguishes between the understanding of being as the being of everything that exists and his own understanding of being as such, out of connection with things. He calls the first point the “leading question” and attributes its authorship to Aristotle, the second one – “the main question”. The article discusses the relationship of these issues, the possibility of their formal coincidence and discrepancy between them. The first part of the article introduces the context of Heidegger’s thought. It deals with the “ontological difference” that Heidegger introduces in the framework of “Being and Time”, as well as with what transformation this difference undergoes in his later works, after the “turn” (“Kehre”). In the second part of the article, attention is drawn to the convergence and divergence of the “leading question” from the “main one” by clarifying the ontology of Aristotle. Particular attention is paid to various ways of understanding existence, in particular – an incidental and accidental existence. At the end of the article, the attempt will be made to reconstruct the direction of Heidegger's thought, based on the results of consideration achieved earlier.

A Conversation with Jacques Derrida about Heidegger

This 1986 conversation with Jacques Derrida about Heidegger offers Derrida at his most disarmed and tentative, venturing into areas of Heidegger's thought that he was “the least sure about” around the mid 1980s. Topics discussed include the status of the question, technology, animality, the problem of life, epochality, the ontological difference, as well as a brief but poignant discussion on how to avoid future Holocausts.

Ontology in Neolithic Britain and Ireland: Beyond Animism

A combination of new animism and new materialism has influenced recent interpretations of the Neolithic archaeology of Britain and Ireland, including decorative and figurative productions often referred to as ‘art’. This article critiques the appeal to animism in some of this work and considers four alternative ways to address the critique. First it considers contextualizing animism by discussing Descola’s identification of four kinds of ontologies—animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism–outlining examples of practices and material culture involved in each. After examining the effect of applying these to the Neolithic archaeology of Britain and Ireland, it then considers identifying Neolithic practices which seem at odds with animism without boxing these as indicative of other categories of ontology. After noting the wide range of Indigenous ontologies such models attempt to characterize, the article advocates an emphasis on ontological difference and attends to ontological diversity within the Neolithic.

Alterity and Repetition. Phenomenological Interpretation of the Divinity in the Later Heidegger

The purpose of this paper is phe-nomenological interpretation of the various faces of divinity in the later Heidegger and elucidation of the human comportment corresponding to this divinity. In the first chapter, I will make clear the relation between ontological difference in the sense of the later Heidegger and the primordial dimension of divinity which is called the last god (der letzte Gott) and the sacred (das Heilige). Further, the relation between such divinity and entity as a whole (das Seiende im Ganzen) will be clarified. In the second chapter, I will elucidate the place of the divinities in the manifestation of entity as a whole by considering the role of the godlikes (die Göttlichen) in the fourfold (das Geviert). When the primordial alterity of the last god should be experienced in entity as whole, which leads to the notion of the godlikes, it must confront human subject in totally asymmetrical manner. Such asymmetrical communication can be structurally made explicit by taking the concept of “discourse” in Being and Time into account. Finally, I will consider the character of human comportment called preservation (Bergung) with focusing on its relation to the later Heidegger’s conceptions of divinity. This will shed light on how human beings could properly appreciate the experience of what is beyond our understanding and nevertheless supporting our existence.El objetivo de la ponencia es llevar a cabo una interpretación fenomenológica de las diversas facetas de la divinidad en el Hei-degger tardío y elucidar el comportamiento humano respecto de esta divinidad. En el primer capítulo, se esclarece la relación entre la diferencia ontológica en el sentido que le da el segundo Heidegger y la dimensión primordial de la divinidad, llamada el último dios (der letzte Gott) y lo sagrado (das Heilige). A conti-nuación, se esclarecerá la relación entre la divinidad así concebida y lo ente en totalidad (das Seiende im Ganzen). En el segundo apar-tado, se elucidará el lugar de las divinidades en la manifestación de lo ente en totalidad considerando el papel de los divinos la Cuaternidad (das Geviert). Cuando la alteridad primordial del último dios se experimente en lo ente en totaliadd, lo cual conduce a la noción de los divinos, tiene que enfrentarse al sujeto humano de una forma totalmente asimétrica. Esta comunicación asimétrica puede explicitarse estructuralmente mediante la consideración del concepto del discurso en Ser y tiempo. Final-mente, consideraré el carácter del comportamiento humano denominado la preservación (Bergung), con especial atención a su relación con la noción de lo divino en Heidegger tardío. Esto arrojará luz sobre cómo los seres humanos podrían apreciar de manera adecuada lo que está más allá de nuestra comprensión y sin embargo, sostiene nuestra existencia.

MERLEAU-PONTY Y LA PSICOLOGÍA DE LA FORMA

A partir del análisis de la relación de Merleau-Ponty con la psicología de la forma, se intenta dar una lectura de su fenomenología como una lectura ontológica de la forma. De este modo, Merleau-Ponty no solo puede pensar una alternativa a la fenomenología de Husserl, sino que le permite elaborar su propia idea de Ser y dar una nueva interpretación de la diferencia ontológica de Heidegger. Desde una descripción fenomenológica de la experiencia perceptiva, a partir de las nociones de comportamiento, forma y estructura, se mostrará enseguida el sentido de ser que moviliza una filosofía de la forma que implicará proyectar un pensamiento de una pertenencia radical de la fenomenalidad a la existencia, y además renovar el sentido de una fenomenología genética que considera toda conciencia trascendental en el marco de una facticidad originaria.On the basis of the relationship Merleau- Ponty establishes with Gestalt psychology, I seek to provide an interpretation his phenomenology as an ontological reading of the notion of form. Therefore, I claim that Merleau-Ponty is able, not only to develop an alternative to Husserl’s phenomenology, but also to elaborate his own idea of Being; in addition, he can offer a new understanding of the Heidegger's ontological difference. From a phenomenological description of perceptive experience, and starting with the notions of behavior, form and structure, I will then show the sense of being mobilized by a philosophy of form. This sense of being implies a projection of a thinking of phenomenality's radical belonging to the existence and, also, renewal of a genetic phenomenology that considers the whole of transcendental consciousness within the framework of an originary facticity

Hegel’s Apprentice: from Speculative Idealism to Speculative Materialism

Chapter 4 identifies the epistemological limits of Hegel’s idealism, showing that the concept of the whole is incompatible with Hegel’s methodological alternation between reason and experience. Since this method relies upon the movement of becoming, it is incompatible with the “annulment of time” at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. I argue that Quentin Meillassoux’s development of a “speculative materialist” philosophy responds directly to this methodological contradiction in Hegel’s work and, in particular, to its consequences for the theory of time. Mediating between my reading of Hegel and my reading of Meillassoux is Heidegger’s theory of the ontological difference. I argue that Meillassoux’s effort to sustain the philosophical consequences of the ontological difference is the key to understanding and appreciating the stakes of his theory of absolute contingency.