Volume 70, Issue 2

In this paper, the term “qualifying disqualification” is introduced to express an intersection of several different types of power that (in a Foucauldian terminology) are differentiated as disciplinary, sovereign, and biopolitical formations. The paper concurs with a viewpoint that has emerged in much post-Foucauldian scholarship that these should not be understood as replacing each other in a historically emerging, linear succession. The resulting question is how to interpret instances of their convergence and intersection – for example, are they best understood as mutually consolidating (as seen in some understandings of domination)? The paper points to the friction caused by a simultaneity of heterogeneous formations of power given that they are understood to “subjectivise” differently. In turn, different understandings and conducts of “capacity” and “qualification” correspond to those differences in addition to different techniques of inclusion, exclusion, and exception. “Qualifying disqualification” is proposed as a terminology to express this friction. The fields in which its implications are explored include critical race studies (particularly the work of Saidiya Hartman), “capacity”-based rights arguments, and new interpretations of power in the work of Foucault, particularly as theorised in his Collège de France lectures.

In 2020, M. Summa developed a promising approach to understanding the concept of illness. This approach combines a theory of organisms with Responsive Phenomenology to gain a concept of illness. Following on from this, the present article shows that the normative presuppositions can be further explicated and justified by drawing on the theoretical resources of Aristotelian naturalism as propounded by Michael Thompson. Aristotelian naturalism does provide a theoretical option to grasp the normative foundations of human life. However, this article argues that Aristotelian naturalism requires another criterion besides human nature to make the concept of illness intelligible. Following John McDowell’s critique of Aristotelian naturalism, it will be shown that this criterion consists in the capacity for autonomy. From this a concept of (mental) illness is developed which describes an impairment of the self-regulated and autonomous realisation of the human form of life.

Conspiracy theories are currently all the rage in philosophy and broader intellectual culture. One of the most common background assumptions in the discourse on conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists exhibit certain epistemic vices in the sense of cognitive misconduct. This epistemic vice is mostly seen as a form of irrationality; the corresponding “remedy”, as suggested by some commentators, is a return to the ideals of the Enlightenment. This article argues that this idea is wrongheaded. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that conspiracy theorists are actually motivated by the rational Enlightenment ideal of self-thinking in the first place. In contrast to the standard discourse, the article posits that conspiracism is based on a certain form of social scepticism, according to which conspiracy theorists radically mistrust a certain form of expert testimony, namely “official” statements. This form of social scepticism in turn facilitates a naive appropriation of the Enlightenment ideal of self-thinking. The article closes by drawing connections to the ethical and epistemological debate on trust and offers the pessimistic assessment that there are no easy solutions based on individual epistemic virtues.

There is an unusual link between the two most prominent themes in Proust’s In Search of Time Past : the psychological dimensions of love and the experience of lived temporality. Each experience is shadowed by, and intensified by, even seems to require, absence. The absence of the beloved is the source of jealousy, and that experience is treated as inseparable, and sometimes as indistinguishable, from love itself. And the absence of reliable access to the past, or the vanishing of the past into a realm of fantasy and projection, undermines any confidence in our mutual interpretability. At the extreme, jealousy is depicted as sustaining a love all by itself, something captured in Swann’s famous, puzzling closing statement at the end of the “Swann in Love” section of the first novel: “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I have experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type.” The aim of this paper is to understand the dynamic of presence and absence, its role in the link between these two themes, and thereby to understand such a claim as much more than a singular character’s expression of a neurotic obsession.

The entire corpus of Proust’s Recherche is permeated by philosophical digressions, reflections, aphorisms, dialogues and monologues. These are presented by a number of different and often divergent voices – that of the narrator who is the fictive author of the novel, that of the young Marcel on his long way to become this writer, those of many other figures, with whom Marcel interacts, that of the real author, who has permanently rewritten the text and finally the authority of the text as a whole. The interplay of these perspectives is an essential part of the drama the novel displays. Their contrast cannot, must not and should not be overcome in favour of an integrated and justified point of view of the kind professional philosophy is aiming at. Following this observation, the essay highlights a number of intertwined strands of philosophical motives in the Recherche in order to explore a basic relationship as well as tension between philosophy and literature. Proust’s novel – like other instances of literature and the arts – is not primarily made for a veridical but primarily for a processual thinking. It invites its readers to get involved and to linger in open ended mind games. Philosophising in and with the Recherche means doing philosophy without heading at a philosophy.

The philosophical reading of Proust’s Recherche presented here suggests Proust’s aesthetic method as a model for philosophy (as an aesthetic practice). The term “aesthetic” refers to the constitutive role of sensation, perception, and sensuality for the practice of philosophising. In Proust’s peculiar descriptions a specific form of “sentient thinking” (empfindendes Denken) takes shape. This thinking is characterised by the entanglement of the particular as detailed description and the general as theoretical reflection. With reference to Proust, the philosophical practice of describing is developed into a central element of philosophy as aesthetic practice.