Adam Arola
I received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Oregon in 2008 and have worked at a number of institutions in the past 6 years. I am presently Senior Strategist at Mother LA - an advertising agency - after pivoting to marketing from academia about 3 years ago. Though I still write from time to time - mostly about indigenous issues as an enrolled member of the KBIC Ojibwe in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I'm currently working on a manuscript on Indigenous issues in Rhetoric, Philosophy and Digital Media that is co-authored with my sister Kristin Arola who is an English professor at Washington State University. My contributions to this project connect the ethical implications of Deleuze & Guattari's concept of the Assemblage as articulated in their own writings - as well as in those of Manuel Delanda, Elizabeth Grosz and others - to contemporary work in indigenous philosophy. The first chapter titled "An Ethics of Assemblage: Creative Repetition and the 'Electric Pow Wow.'" was published in Assembling Composition and won the Computers & Composition Ellen Nold Award for best article in 2017.
Address: Seattle, WA, United States
Address: Seattle, WA, United States
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (15)
Uploads
Papers by Adam Arola
The third antinomy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I argue, demonstrates the necessary failure, the perpetual aporia, of continuing to discuss whether humans conceived of as subjects possess the predicate freedom. I argue that if we do not want to fall either into the Third Antinomy, we must steer away from thinking of freedom as a predicate of a subject and reconfigure it as an experience or a comportment.
Following suggestions from Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, Being Singular Plural, and The Experience of Freedom, my dissertation argues that re-thinking of freedom as an experience simultaneously requires a re-thinking of identity, in terms of ecstasy, ek-stases, or ex-position, and accordingly a re-thinking of the activity of thinking itself. Nancy cites Schelling and Heidegger as the thinkers who have made an attempt to think about ecstasy seriously as a fundamental ontological fact about the constitution of things.
This reconfiguration of the constitution of things as either parts of organic structures (Schelling) or beings in a world (Heidegger), demands that we recognize how our identities are perpetually being constituted in all of our acts of relating with the world. We are constituted and constituting by our engagement with the things that environ us, and this environing is active and alive. If this is accepted as an ontological fact, this requires that we reconsider what it would mean to think, as all of our engagements with the world would be creative—both of ourselves and of what it is that we encounter. This would also mean that the meaningfulness of all things is wildly contingent, in fact necessarily, so. Accordingly, I defend that freedom, as the experience of possibility through our awareness of this contingency due to the lack of an origin, emerges for us in the experience of thinking.
Key words: freedom, Spinoza, Schelling.
The third antinomy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I argue, demonstrates the necessary failure, the perpetual aporia, of continuing to discuss whether humans conceived of as subjects possess the predicate freedom. I argue that if we do not want to fall either into the Third Antinomy, we must steer away from thinking of freedom as a predicate of a subject and reconfigure it as an experience or a comportment.
Following suggestions from Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, Being Singular Plural, and The Experience of Freedom, my dissertation argues that re-thinking of freedom as an experience simultaneously requires a re-thinking of identity, in terms of ecstasy, ek-stases, or ex-position, and accordingly a re-thinking of the activity of thinking itself. Nancy cites Schelling and Heidegger as the thinkers who have made an attempt to think about ecstasy seriously as a fundamental ontological fact about the constitution of things.
This reconfiguration of the constitution of things as either parts of organic structures (Schelling) or beings in a world (Heidegger), demands that we recognize how our identities are perpetually being constituted in all of our acts of relating with the world. We are constituted and constituting by our engagement with the things that environ us, and this environing is active and alive. If this is accepted as an ontological fact, this requires that we reconsider what it would mean to think, as all of our engagements with the world would be creative—both of ourselves and of what it is that we encounter. This would also mean that the meaningfulness of all things is wildly contingent, in fact necessarily, so. Accordingly, I defend that freedom, as the experience of possibility through our awareness of this contingency due to the lack of an origin, emerges for us in the experience of thinking.
Key words: freedom, Spinoza, Schelling.