Badlands and the Music of Temporal Immanence

As an eccentric outlaw crime film, Terrence Malick’s Badlands employs expressive sensory immersion, eccentric humor, and a concern for the relationship between history and human experience. The past, in Badlands, is a complex ontological ground for the characters’ (and audiences’) senses of being in the world, a temporalized film world akin to a field of pure immanence within the uncanny strangeness of material reality. A film set in the fifties, but far more concerned with transhistorical philosophical questions, Badlands uses the musical soundtrack to explore these existential concerns. Within this musically heterogeneous film, the two most important sources of compiled non-diegetic classical music (the pedagogical music of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman and the early compositions of Erik Satie) function as active philosophical agents, cultivating embodied states of play and melancholy that strive, albeit ambiguously and inconclusively, to create meaning from the raw immediacy of experience.

The Oil-Flower Unfurling Its Petals The Phenomenological Aesthetics of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

The article analyses Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island as giving literary form to the aesthetics of materiality. Acknowledging the work’s function as philosophical cognition, the investigation utilises the concept of Einfühlung (empathy) as the ‘feeling-into’ of aesthetic experience, while concomitantly determining that ordinary empathy as fellow-feeling is lacking. Combining that ahuman aspect with Husserlian time constituting flow, underlying time consciousness, as another aspect of the ahuman, the thesis argues that the novel stages the mattering of matter and the patterning of patterns as surface phenomena that constitute the aesthetics of this particular fictional world. The aesthetics appears as a near-metaphysical phenomenon in manifesting an instantiation of Nietzsche’s concept of the human only being eternally justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. As such a phenomenon, the human amalgamates with matter and is dead. However, the world can be said to harbour ‘A LIFE’ in the sense of the Deleuzean concept of pure immanence. Moreover, as an avant-gardist artwork, the novel may provoke an ethical counter-reaction in the reader, inducing an ecocritically grounded ethics that would empathise with the planet earth as a manifestation of life itself.

El problema de la donación en la reflexión de Patočka

Esta contribución presenta como el concepto filosófico de “donación” es reinterpretado en la reflexión de Patočka. Partiendo de la lección husserliana, gracias a la cual las cosas son dadas en la pura inmanencia de la consciencia, él critica esta orientación “subjetivista” porque no desarrolla adecuadamente el tema del aparecer en el campo fenomenal. La segunda sección analiza tres desplazamientos metódicos que abarcan: el rol del sujeto, su relación con la trascendencia, el darse a sí mismo del mundo en su totalidad. La tercera sección compara la reflexión de Patočka con dos referencias cruzadas a algunos intentos similares en la historia de la fenomenología. El tema de “la donación”, por tanto, nos traslada al mayor problema con el que ha trabajado siempre la filosofía: la manifestación del mundo. Patočka intentó esclarecer este problema mediante dos metáforas (el espejo y la pintura), pero también subrayó cómo concierne el modo en el que el hombreinterpreta la propia existencia.This paper presents how the philosophical key concept of givenness is reinter-preted in Patočka's reflection. Starting from the Husserlian idea, according to which things are given in the pure immanence of consciousness, Patočka criticized this "subjectivist" orientation because it doesn’t adequately develop the appearing in the phenomenal field. The second section analyzes three main methodical shifts concerning: the nature and the role of the subject, its relationship with the transcendence, the self-giving of the world as a whole. The third section compares Patočka's reflection and two cross-references to similar undertaking in the history of phenomenology. The theme of givenness brings us back in the end to the biggest problem within which philosophy has always worked: world manifestation. Patočka tried to clarify this issue through two metaphors (the mirror and the painting), but he also highlighted as it concerns the way in which man interprets his existence.

Theology, Evolution, and the Figural Imagination: Teilhard de Chardin and His Theological Critics

Teilhard de Chardin has been criticized by both Roman Catholic (Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Dietrich von Hildebrand) and Protestant (David Lane and Jurgen Moltmann) theologians for allegedly promulgating a heterodox, modernist version of Gnosticism that substitutes a naturalistic account of evolution for the supernatural Christian story of redemption in Christ, departs from scriptural and classical theological norms, gives primacy to scientific over theological reasoning, and articulates a vision of pure immanence. Teilhard’s theological integration of salvation and evolution in The Human Phenomenon and other works is, however, grounded in an implicitly figural interpretation of history that is both scriptural and classical in inspiration. Reading Teilhard’s early essay, ‘Cosmic Life,’ through the studies of Erich Auerbach, Leonard Goppelt, and Tibor Fabiny on figural interpretation demonstrates that Teilhard describes evolutionary history as a typological anticipation for the coming Christ, thus refuting misconstruals of his theology as gnostic, heterodox, naturalistic, and immanentalist.

Merleau-Ponty and the Fold of the Flesh

The second chapter turns to Merleau-Ponty to see how, working through a number of issues with Sartre, phenomenology, and modern thought more generally, he deepens Sartre’s engagement with immanence and elaboration of the subject-body and perceptual consciousness as the condition of meaning, negativity, and action. Through tracing this development, the chapter elucidates the way in which it sets basis for Merleau-Ponty’s later work. In moving away from the subject-body or an exploration of the phenomenal body to a more direct ontological enquiry into the appearing of the visible-tactile (the actual) field itself, the later works develop an anti-humanist ontology that locates perceiving bodies within a meaning-generating flesh, where the reversibility of Being as ‘flesh’ establishes a generativity which is always immanent to it and as such beyond any notion of a metaphysical transcendent Outside or transcendent Other. It is here that the Outside/Other is first construed as a disjunctive fold of immanence itself. Critically, through this, Merleau-Ponty provides a conceptual language that avoids the theoretical snares of the traditional dualist language evoked by Sartre, and lays much of the groundwork for the ‘pure’ immanence of Foucault and Deleuze.

Immanence and Micropolitics

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of ‘pure’ immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of ‘the political’; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or ‘micropolitical’ life of desire. He argues that here, in this ‘life’, is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately justifies the conceptual necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of ‘pure’ immanence are either apolitical or politically incoherent.

From Immanence to Micropolitics

Taken together, the four thinkers of ‘pure’ immanence offer a new take on ethicality, political analysis and political practice; moving the centre of gravity of analysis and action away from the political traid, toward a subjectivity-without-a-subject, one where we no longer look for a transcendent Outside or rupture in/of immanence to ground resistance in spite of our condition (i.e. dialectical excess), but rather work through our condition and its entangled lines of immanence and ‘three’ folds of disjuncture, through an affirmative ethics of self-experimentation. When read within a contemporary setting and so within the context of post-industrial capitalism, it offers a unique critique of it, bested in its refreshing radicality only by its accompanying a-systematic (as opposed to anti-system, i.e. dialectical materialism) political praxis. A praxis that, very much in the vein of Gramsci’s ‘passive revolution’, urges us to work throughcapitalism, in order to truly overcome it strictures and all that relates to it. What some might view as a self-indulgent Renaissance bourgeois concern of playing with one’s sense of self outside of politics, is in fact actually the site where the political is most at stake. Politics begins here.

Sartre and the Instigation of Immanence

This chapter investigates how Sartre instigates the first few moves of ‘pure’ immanence. Through following the progression of Sartre’s thought, there is shown a deepening engagement with immanence, which ultimately sets the foundation upon which the later thinkers build. In his early period, Sartre reworks Husserlian intentionality to bring about a repudiation of the transcendental ego. Following from this, in Being and Nothingness and the Critique, he develops a dialectic in which consciousness, while relating to an ‘outside’, is construed as also thoroughly embedded in that outside through the subject-body of the flesh and relations of desire. From this comes a conceptualisation of the In-itself and For-itself as simulacra or topological variations of a more primordial intertwining or fabric of univocal Being. In this sense, we are immediately taken away from the subject of social contract theory, insofar as this presumes an asocial self, and the notion of identity as the sine qua non of politics, insofar as this presumes the terrain of an inexplicable transcendent Other. This brings with it a new take on politics as an ethical practice – one that will be taken up and extended by the other three thinkers – in which we do not look for a transcendent outside or fracture/break in immanence through which to ground resistance, but rather work through and experiment with our situation or condition.

Nietzsche and the Death of God

In this short discussion of Karl Jaspers’s 1936 work Nietzsche: An Introduction to his Philosophical Activity, Wahl joins the other contributors to the second volume of the journal Acéphale, organized by George Bataille as a counter to the fascist reading of Nietzsche. Highlighting Jaspers’s claim that Nietzsche’s is a philosophy of pure immanence, Wahl questions whether there might remain a will to transcendence that grounds Nietzsche’s will to immanence.