Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy

This text was delivered as the Opening Remarks for the conference, "“The Concept of Immanence in Philosophy & the Arts”, held in Vienna from 5-7 May 2016. Please cite as Cull Ó Maoilearca (2016) 'On Immanence', The Concept of Immanence in Philosophy & the Arts, Vienna, unpublished conference paper.

This thesis contributes to contemporary debates on the nature of immanence and transcendence in political philosophy by developing the political and micropolitical implications of a philosophical position committed fully to immanence. For many in the current debates who maintain that politics requires some notion of a political subject, philosophies of immanence are considered incapable of mounting an effective politics because they deny the antagonisms and ruptures considered necessary for such a subject. These perspectives often define immanence in terms of ‘complete inclusivity’ of differences, and often accuse it of eschewing emancipation and siding with some form of bourgeois ethics. Against these dismissals, this thesis argues that a philosophy of immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of the political, one that re-orients our understanding of the self away from a still dominant reliance on an idea of the subject. It achieves this by conceiving of the Other or the Outside not (pace philosophies of transcendence) in terms of an absolute but never present fullness or lack, but instead as a disjunctive fold that goes beyond the opposition of interiority and exteriority in favour of the idea of intensity. In this way immanence becomes the ontological centre of a different type of emancipatory politics. The thesis presents its argument by tracing out a lineage of immanence through the work of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze. Together these thinkers present a ‘spectre of immanence’ that counters Slavoj Žižek’s proclamation of a ‘spectre of the [Cartesian] subject’ haunting contemporary thought. Proceeding this way, the study shows how a common thread of immanence unites these four thinkers, informs their relations to one another (in terms of what each one picks up and discards from his predecessors), and unifies them in a shared attempt to reconceptualise the terms by which the political is thought. In this way, the theme of immanence acts as the primary catalyst or dark precursor to their thought as a whole. Though presented as an evolutionary chronology in the sense that it outlines a series of progressive moves from Sartre to Deleuze, the lineage the thesis establishes also works by way of a number of productive misreadings each thinker makes of the others. In this respect, the lineage accords with Nietzsche's comparison of the thinker to an arrow shot by Nature, that another thinker picks up where it has fallen so that he can shoot it somewhere else: each arrow is taken up in part through a misunderstanding, or at least a strained understanding.

coscienza umana e che in essi non si raggiunge un'autentica trascendenza."(A. LLANO, op. cit., pp. 92, 96). Carlos Cardona notes the eventual agnostic (and atheistic) outcome of the immanentist "option" which endeavors "di definire l'essere a partire dalla mia conoscenza. Quando questo atteggiamento diviene esclusivo e dichiara la non validità dell'apprensione immediata dell'essere e pretende di costituire quello che è stato chiamato inizio assoluto, vera origine dell'essere, posizione radicale di tutta la realtà, siamo di fronte a un'interpretazione del cogito, storicamente data, che porta alla negazione di Dio."(C. CARDONA, Metafisica dell'opzione intellettuale, EDUSC, Rome, 2003, p. 15). The principle of immanence has its roots in the rationalism of the father of modern philosophy René Descartes and is adopted, with variations of formulation, by thinkers like the empiricist Locke, the rationalist Leibniz, the immaterialist Berkeley, the sensist, pan-phenomenalist Hume and the transcendental idealist Kant, reaching its apex with the radicalized immanentism of Hegel's system of absolute idealism. Descartes, in spite of his theistic and realist intentions, can be said to be the father of modern philosophical agnosticism and modern philosophical atheism. "El principio filosófico de inmanencia es la raíz común de los diversos tipos de ateísmo moderno; una vez afirmada la primacía de la conciencia sobre el ser, se afirma que Dios sólo puede ser una modificación o producto de la conciencia del hombre. Es patente que el abandono de los presupuestos de la metafísica del ser, la disolución de su punto de partida-el conocimiento de los entes-hacen imposible el ascenso a Dios. Cuando el comienzo radical se establece en la conciencia, y es ésta quien pone la realidad, la cual únicamente tiene existencia en mí, se bloquea automáticamente el paso a la trascendencia del Ser subsistente. «Admitido que el cogito sea el comienzo absoluto, sin presupuestos, serán los sucesores de Descartes, por medio de sucesivas y variadas radicalizaciones, los que se encargarán de probar que, por lo menos, el hombre no puede saber nada de Dios: ni lo que es ni siquiera si es».(C. CARDONA, Metafísica de la opción intelectual, Rialp, Madrid, 1973, p. 192). "Es significativo que todos los autores inmanentistas hayan sido acusados en vida de criptoateísmo (así Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling y Hegel), aunque la explícita proclamación de ateísmo no empezara hasta Feuerbach (cfr., id., p. 194). "A cada una de las progresivas radicalizaciones del principio de inmanencia (reducción del ser a su posibilidad, a su ser conocido, al pensamiento, a la praxis, etc.) corresponde paralelamente un grado en la curva moderna hacia el ateísmo. Así, el panteísmo de Spinoza, el panteísmo idealista de Hegel, el ateísmo materialista de Feuerbach, el ateísmo militante (o antiteísmo)-teórico práctico-del marxismo, el absurdo radical del existencialismo de Sartre que lleva anejo el punto de partida ateo. Un estudio de la raíz especulativa del ateísmo moderno y contemporáneo, localizada en el principio de inmanencia, no puede ser llevado a cabo aquí. Puede verse para ello el exhaustivo estudio llevado a cabo por Fabro en su citada obra Introduzione all'ateismo moderno, y su trabajo de síntesis, también citado, «Génesis histórica del ateísmo contemporáneo», y la voz

2011

Are the things of this world given to thought? Are things really meant to be known, to be taken as the objective manifestations of a transcendental conditioning power? The Western philosophical tradition, according to Francois Laruelle, presupposes just this transcendental constitution of the real-a presupposition that exalts philosophy itself as the designated recipient of the transcendental gift. In our article on Laruelle's trenchant project we try to show how this presupposition controls even the ostensibly radical critiques of the philosophical tradition that have proliferated in the postmodern aftermath of Nietzsche and Heidegger. An effective critique of philosophy must be non-philosophical. It must, according to Laruelle, suspend the presupposition that otherness is given to be known, that thought has a fundamentally differential structure. Non-philosophy begins not with difference, not with subject and object, but with the positing of the One. From this axiomatic starting point, non-philosophy takes as its material philosophy, rethought according to the One. The non-philosophy project does not, like so much postmodern philosophy, herald the end of philosophy. It takes philosophy as an occasion to raise the question of another kind of thought-one that, instead of differentially relating to the world that it presupposes, asserts that it is ultimately, in the flesh, at One with what it can never know.

2019

The digital police state: Fichte’s revenge on Hegel/ Slavoj Žižek ............................. Personal or impersonal knowledge? / Susan Haack …………………………...……. Heidegger never got beyond facticity/ Thomas Sheehan ……………...…….……… Our confrontation with tragedy/ Simon Critchley …….…..…………...…......…..… On the permissible use of force in a Kantian dignitarian moral and political setting, or, Seven Kantian Samurai/ Robert Hanna, Otto Paans………...…………… Self-, social-, or neural-determination/ Lawrence Cahoone……....................……… Important aspects of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy that could not be known through Husserl’s own publications during his lifetime/ Iso Kern………………………………………………………..………… Heidegger’s Socrates: “pure thinking” on method, truth, and learning/ James M. Magrini ………………………………………………...………………………..…….. Intuition as a capacity for a priori knowledge/ Henry W. Pickford…………….….. The absence of self: an existential phenomenological view of the Anatman experience/Rudolph Bauer…………………………………………………….…...…. Genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and natural man: an existential inquiry into being and rights/ Anthony Asekhauno …………………………....…… Heidegger in Iran: a historical experience report/Bijan Abdolkarimi ………….…. The priority of literature to philosophy in Richard Rorty/Muhammad Asghari..… An argument in defense of voluntary euthanasia/Hossein Atrak………………...… Existential anxiety and time perception: an empirical examination of Heideggerian philosophical concepts towards clinical practice/ Alireza Farnam, Samira Zeynali, Mohammad Ali Nazari, Prinaz Vahid Vahdat, Masumeh Zamanlu ……………………………………………………………………….………………… Plantinga on divine foreknowledge and free will/Abdurrazzaq Hesamifar……..….. Language and philosophy: an analysis of the turn to "subject" in modern philosophy with historical linguistic approach/Ahmad Hosseini ….……….……… Divine foreknowledge and human moral responsibility (in defense of muslim philosophers’ approach)/Tavakkol Kuhi Giglou, Seyed Ebrahim Aghazadeh………………………………………………...…………………..……….. "Autrui" selon Lévinas et Blanchot/ Maryam Mesbahi, Mohammad Hossein Djavari, Allahshokr Assadollahi Tejaragh ………………………………...…….…… Language, gender and subjectivity from Judith Butler’s perspective/ Massoud Yaghoubi-Notash, Vahid Nejad Mohammad, Mahmoud Soufiani……….………...…

Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge

A review of From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism: Philosophies of Immanence, edited by Christine Daigle and Terrance H. McDonald

HORIZON / Fenomenologicheskie issledovanija/ STUDIEN ZUR PHÄNOMENOLOGIE / STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY / ÉTUDES PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIQUES, 2019

Th is article deals with a core matter of continental philosophy which is the nature of the ego taken as a concept originating in the subjective idealism of the German school of the early nineteenth century and further developed in its various ramifi cations throughout the twentieth century. Th e main philosophical positions I will discuss are Husserl's phenomenology of the ego in his later transcendental phase, the Heideggerean view of the nature of Dasein, and Sartre's approach of the Being-for-itself as mainly exposed in Being and Nothingness. Th e central idea defended throughout this article is that self-constituting temporality as immanently induced may serve as a common foundation of the nature of the transcendental ego both in the Husserlian phenomenology and in the Heideggerean and Sartrean alternative positions; further, I will hold that, as consequence, the ultimate question about the possibility of an ontology of the pure ego is transposed to the question of the origin and foundation of inner temporality. Yet, in this case one is set to face anew the circularity of an infi nite regression in terms of refl ecting-refl ected and the inevitability of the subjective character of the origin of temporality. Besides this key question-a primary issue of this article-I will address the issue of the convergences and diff erences regarding aspects of the essential nature of the Husserlian ego, the Heideggerean Dasein, and the Sartrean Being-for-itself, especially regarding the widely debated topic of the 'exteriority' of the latter two 'egological' concepts with regard to the world in contrast to the 'interiority' of the Husserlian absolute ego.