Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixtieth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas October 13–15, 2022.Michael Hardt of Duke University and Patricia Pisters of the University of Amsterdam gave the SPEP 2022 Plenary Addresses, and we are grateful to be able to include their plenary papers in this special issue. Hardt’s paper, “The Politics of Articulation and Strategic Multiplicities,” treated SPEP members to an early peek at his newest book, The Subversive 70s (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this work, Hardt digs into the powerful resources for social movements that activists and theorists from the 1970s developed. As he argues, in many ways those activists and thinkers were ahead of their times—and also ahead of ours—in understanding how to analyze interwoven multiplicities of power and how to articulate and organize liberation struggles based on those multiplicities. Hardt brilliantly demonstrates how analyzing the progressive and revolutionary social movements of the ’70s can help us not only understand the roots of contemporary social and political struggles but also reclaim critical resources for those struggles.Patricia Pisters’s paper, “Thinking with Fire: Elemental Philosophy and Media Technology,” draws upon Gaston Bachelard’s “fire complexes” to address a variety of pyrotechnical images appearing in contemporary cinema. Noting that elemental philosophy is on the rise in media studies and elsewhere, not least because of current environmental crises, fire is particularly engaging for its metaphorical, “matterphorical,” and technological associations. While acknowledging fire as a material medium—cooking, heating, burning, etc.—Pisters’s primary focus in her paper is on fire as an immaterial medium, and it is here that she turns to Bachelard’s constellation of fire complexes—the Empedocles, Prometheus, and Novalis Complexes—to which she adds her own fourth complex, the Sita Complex. With these complexes, she provides readings of four cinematic productions that elucidate the annihilating, transgressive, sexual, and purifying qualities of fire, and she suggests that these entangled fire complexes present different kinds of combustive knowledge in which the element of fire manifests itself as material phenomenon of nature, the engine for modern life, and immaterial affective reverie of destruction, transgression, and sexuality.The other articles in this special issue have been organized according to five broad groupings. The first grouping, “On Latin American Philosophy,” brings together three papers that engage Latin American philosophy, particularly as found in Mexican, Columbian, and Venezuelan history and political movements. In “Radicalizing Localization: Notes on Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Genealogies of Coloniality,” Julian Rios Acuña argues that Columbian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez develops a radical method of localization. This method allows Castro-Gómez to transform Foucauldian genealogy into genealogies of coloniality that grapple with the complexities of extreme violence produced by colonialism. In “Stefan Gandler’s Renewal of Critical Theory from Latin America,” Jake M. Bartholomew argues for a version of Critical Theory that is not bound by Europe but also remains true to its first-generation Marxist roots. Relocating to Mexico and advocating for Mexican philosophers, German-born philosopher Stefan Gandler shows how Latin American philosophy can enrich Critical Theory, providing more than can the second and third generations of Critical Theory because of its ability to analyze capitalism from outside the economic perspectives of the Global North. In “Two Versions of the Mestizo Model: Toward a Theory of Anti-Blackness in Latin American Thought,” Miguel Gualdron Ramirez criticizes the anti-Blackness that he sees at the heart of mestizo models of latinidad, or lo latinoamericano. Focusing on the concepts of liberation offered by Venezuelan theorist and politician Simón Bolívar and Mexican philosopher José de Vasconcelos, Ramirez reveals the exclusion and erasure of Black bodies, lives, and histories that ground their versions of Latinx identity and Latin American history. Together these three articles showcase how Latin American philosophy can enrich and expand the scope of Continental philosophy.The second grouping, “Liberatory Limits and Misalignments,” features three articles that analyze various dangers for feminist, queer, and critical race philosophy to avoid. In “Conceptually Misaligned: Black Being, the Human, and Fungibility,” Jasmine Wallace confronts several misalignments in the field of Afropessimism. Focusing on the work of Calvin Warren, Wallace argues that Warren overextends Sylvia Wynter’s historiography of the Human and misappropriates Saidiya Hartman’s concept of the fungible commodity. In response, Wallace calls for a correction within Afropessimism that would make better use of Black women’s scholarship and steer away from abstract and transhistorical theories of Black existence. In “María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, and Intersex Liberation,” Alex Adamson reads Lugones and Wynter with intersex theorists to help avoid the coloniality of gender in queer and feminist philosophy. As Adamson argues, intersex liberation can help activists steer clear of the heteronormativity upon which coloniality depends, but only if that goal of liberation is understood within a decolonial framework. For Adamson, reading these theorists together provides the best chance for building effective coalitions and international solidarity. Combining Theodor Adorno’s critical theory with contemporary ecofeminism, Jordan Daniels’s article “Adorno and Ecofeminist Ethics” develops a feminist ethics that follows Adorno’s imperative to avoid a strict dualism between nature and the human. Daniels argues that complicating this dualism has ontological and ethical implications concerning “what things are” and how we ought to act toward them. By denaturalizing history and historicizing nature, Daniels opens up new possibilities for thinking in environmental and animal ethics.In the third grouping, “Mythologies and Poetics,” we have three articles that in diverse ways draw our attention to the imaginative use of language. The first, Matthew J. Delhey’s “Hölderlin’s Politics of the New Mythology,” defends Hölderlin’s social and political thought against Georg Lukács’s critique that Hölderlin’s utopian politics of the new mythology fails to offer anything other than a “mystical” sociopolitical theory. Instead, through a reading of several of Hölderlin’s prose works, works either not available to Lukács or not discussed by him, Delhey demonstrates that while perhaps not ultimately successful, Hölderlin did take steps to supplement Hyperion with a theory that addressed the market-based social relations and forms of alienation integral to modern society, seeing in them possibilities for realizing freedom by means of an aesthetic experience capable of ennobling those relations. Bryan Smyth, in “Critical Phenomenology and the Mythopoetics of Nature,” argues that if critical phenomenology is to be truly liberatory, it requires an alternative to the assumption that the task of phenomenology is to provide a rigorous description of the content of experience as it is. Smyth argues that critical phenomenology will find such an alternative by engaging in a moment of critical mythopoetic praxis, what Hans Blumenberg called “work on myth,” as it reconceives nature not as something merely given to experience (akin to the “myth of the given”) but as mythopoetically understood as in dialectical continuity with nature. Drawing on parallels between the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Brady DeHoust’s article “Saturation, Language, and History: Marion and Gadamer on the Communicability of Excess” puts French and German philosophy in conversation to examine how a non- or extra-horizonal event like Marion’s “saturated phenomenon” might appear within language and history. This matters because such events often are an important basis for communal values. But how can they perform that role if they lie outside of a community’s language and history? For DeHoust, the answer may be found in Gadamer’s account of the role of the question in the event of understanding, as excessive phenomena that appear as “saturated questions” may allow for community grounded in the appearance of the other.The fourth grouping, “Derrida’s Seminars,” features papers that address important issues in two of Derrida’s late seminars. In the first, “Perjury, Promising, and the Ethical Life,” Charles Barbour explores Derrida’s concept of perjury as it appears in his 1997–99 seminars on Le parjure et le pardon and several of his published texts from around those years that are often characterized as constituting Derrida’s “ethical turn.” Barbour argues that contrary to the common view of perjury as error, mistake, or lie, Derrida presents it as an unavoidable animating condition of the truth. While suggesting that such an account raises troubling consequences for Derrida’s view of ethical life as a relationship with the other, Barbour suggests that it might in fact play a constitutive role in a Derridean ethics of one’s relationship with oneself. In “Fictionalism and Aesthetic Experience in The Beast and the Sovereign,” Ammon Allred argues for the importance of aesthetic experience in linking together the political and existential implications of Derrida’s ontological investigations in his final seminar. To do so, Allred proposes a Derridean version of fictionalism that holds that ideal entities are irreal but work in the way that the meaning of fictional discourse works. This, he argues, allows Derrida to appeal to the poetry of Paul Celan, and especially to Celan’s figure of the end of the world, to draw concrete political consequences from what on the surface might appear to be mere flights of fancy.The fifth and final grouping, “Varieties of French Philosophy,” includes three articles that explore different issues addressed by philosophers in France in the twentieth century. In the first, “Transcendence and Dialectics: Note on a Note from Black Skin, White Masks,” Jesús Luzardo reflects on an underexamined footnote in Franz Fanon’s text where he appeals to Jean Wahl’s understanding of transcendence to distinguish Fanon’s view of dialectics from Sartre’s. Where Sartre, in “Black Orpheus,” argued that there would soon be a dialectical synthesis between white supremacy and negritude that would manifest itself in the “universal” figure of the proletarian, Fanon holds that such a synthesis is neither tenable nor desirable. Following Wahl’s notion of transcendence as both an end and a movement, Luzardo argues that transcendence, as a relationship of qualitative difference constitutive of our subjectivity, is key to understanding why Fanon concludes that there can be no ultimate sublation of the difference between the white and the Black. In “Wayward Fables, Poem-Life Experiments: Foucault and Hartman in the Archives,” Lauren Guilmette draws upon Michel Foucault’s “Lives of Infamous Men” to discuss Saidiya Hartman’s speculative mode of narration. Where Foucault cautions that when we look to the archives, we must attend to the violent will-to-know that frames the descriptions of the lives found therein, Guilmette looks at how Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation” allows her to inventively imagine the details of the Black women’s lives she discusses that the historical record chose to omit. In so doing, Guilmette reveals that Hartman is aware that, like Foucault, narrating these counter-histories contributes to what they both call a “history of the present.” In the third paper in this grouping, Christopher Penfield’s “Foucault’s Virtual Force Ontology,” he challenges the widely accepted view that Deleuze’s monograph Foucault tells us much about Deleuze but little about Foucault. Contrary to this view, Penfield shows how Foucault’s microphysics of power and Deleuze’s metaphysics of the virtual share a common ontology of forces, which is to say that Foucault, like Deleuze, holds the Nietzschean view that power entails force against force—actions acting on other actions—and not force acting on things or bodies. In so doing, Penfield suggests that Deleuze’s reading of Foucault reveals a greater continuity between Foucault’s account of disciplinary power and his later account of governmentality than has been appreciated.On behalf of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the editors would like to thank all of the authors for allowing us to include their papers in this special issue. We would also like to express our gratitude to John Stuhr, general editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Astrid Meyer, Leah Noel, Patty Mitchell, and the JSP production staff at the Penn State University Press for their invaluable assistance with the publication process. Final thanks go to all the participants at our sixtieth SPEP conference at Texas A&M University, which marked SPEP’s return to in-person annual meetings in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their intellectual engagement made the conference a resounding success.