Thank you very much for this excellent presentation. In my comment I aim to render more explicit some fundamental tensions or contradictions between legal emancipation and queerness, which are at stake in your description of the legal frameworks for the protection of queers. It thereby reopens the question of the strategic choice between appealing…[Read more]

One of the longest lasting problems in the discussion about Foucault has been the problem of freedom. More precisely the question is: How can freedom and resistance be thought and explained in a theory of power and subjectification?
I will address this problem not by talking about Foucault himself, for example by offering a new interpretation of…[Read more]

Wie können Freiheit und Widerstand innerhalb von Foucaults Theorie der Macht und Subjektivierung konzipiert werden? Karsten Schubert liefert die erste systematische Rekonstruktion der sozialphilosophischen Debatte um Freiheit bei Foucault und eine neue Lösung für das Freiheitsproblem: Freiheit als die Fähigkeit zur reflexiven Kritik der eig…[Read more]

Foucault’s theory of power and subjectification challenges common concepts of freedom in social philosophy and expands them through the concept of ‘freedom as critique’: Freedom can be defined as the capability to critically reflect one’s own subjectification, and the conditions of possibility for this critical capacity lie in political and soc…[Read more]

Right-wing intellectuals often invoke Nietzsche’s concept of slave morality to underpin their criticism of ‘political correctness’ (‘PC’). This interconnection of Nietzsche’s slave morality and ‘PC’ criticism is correct, as a systematic analysis of their common elements shows, which leads to a new description of ‘PC’ criticism as a defense of…[Read more]

The article develops the concept of “political judgement” – a new, affirmative understanding of the phenomena which are criticized as “political correctness” by both right-wing and liberal commentators. To that end, it takes the right’s claims, that “political correctness” is slave morality in Nietzsche’s sense seriously and proposes a systematic…[Read more]

How can freedom and resistance be conceived within Foucault’s theory of power and subjectivation? This central question of the interpretation of Foucault’s multi-layered work has been widely discussed and yet not satisfactorily answered. The fact that until today there has been little clarity about the status of freedom in Foucault’s work is also…[Read more]

e popular idea, especially among the young, is that religion and spirituality are things of the old age. We generally think that spirituality is a post-retirement plan; something which has to be enjoyed with the gratuity, provident fund, and pension that you get after retirement. This is not true. Spirituality is something we need when we are…[Read more]

Présentation de l’article « Humanisme et Organisations »
par Bernard Sionneau
In Humanisme et Entreprise, numéro spécial 200/201, Octobre 1993, pp. 51-115
Près de trois décennies se sont écoulées depuis la rédaction de cet article. Accepté pour être présenté en mars 1993 au cours de la 5ème conférence de la Society for the Advancement of So…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Notas, debates y comentarios con ocasión del congreso The “Holocaust Metaphor” (La ́Metáfora del Holocausto ́), en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Zaragoza (a finales de mayo de 2013). _________________________________________________________________________

English abstract: Notes, debates and comm…[Read more]

This is the syllabus for an introductory course on Marx and critical theory that I taught at Binghamton University in the spring semester, 2020. It revises and expands an earlier iteration of the course that I had taught in spring, 2018, also at Binghamton University.

This is a review of the book “Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, Jeffrey J. Kripal, University of Chicago Press, 1995” . “Kali’s child” fell well short of a proof that Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences were actually “profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic”. To reconstruct the autobiogr…[Read more]

Mit dem Begriff der Kunstvermittlung wird Politik gemacht und er wird mit gegenläufigen Verständnissen verknüpft. Das Buch “Was heißt hier Vermittlung?” arbeitet heraus, dass die Bedeutungskonkurrenz bereits im Streitbegriff der Vermittlung angelegt ist. Der unternommene Gang durch sozialhistorische und philosophische Begriffsgeschichten wird mit…[Read more]

Selbstbeschreibungen der Kunstpädagogik greifen oft auf binäre Logiken zurück – sei es, um eindeutige Ein- und Ausgrenzungen vornehmen zu können oder um spannungsvolle Zweierverhältnisse zum Ausgangspunkt kunstpädagogischer Überlegungen zu machen. Kunstpädagogische Komplexität ist ein Angebot, das sich neben solche Logiken stellt, wirbt dafür, Kun…[Read more]

Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s objections against the possibility of a science of aesthetics were influential on different sides of the analytic/continental divide. Heidegger’s anti-scientism leads him to an alētheic view of artworks which precedes and exceeds any possible aesthetic reduction. Wittgenstein also rejects the relevance of causal…[Read more]

Genevieve Lloyd argues that when we follow Spinoza in understanding reason as a part of nature, we gain new insights into the human condition. Specifically, we gain a new political insight: we should respond to cultural difference with a pluralist ethos. This is because there is no pure universal reason; human minds find their reason shaped…[Read more]

Students often have difficulty connecting theoretical and text-based scholarship to the real world. When teaching in Asia, this disconnection is exacerbated by the European/American focus of many canonical texts, whereas students’ own experiences are primarily Asian. However, in my discipline of political philosophy, this problem receives little…[Read more]

According to a recent interpretive orthodoxy, Spinoza is a profoundly democratic theorist of state authority. I reject this orthodoxy. To be sure, for Spinoza, a political order succeeds in proportion as it harnesses the power of the people within it. However, Spinoza shows that political inclusion is only one possible strategy to this end;…[Read more]

At the centre of Powers’ (2019) China and England is an extraordinary forgotten episode in the history of political ideas. There was a time when English radicals critiqued the corruption and injustice of the English political system by contrasting it with the superior example of China. There was a time when they advocated adopting a Chinese…[Read more]

The book draws on the political writings of Hobbes and Spinoza to establish a conceptual framework for understanding the genesis, risks, and promise of popular power.
It makes an original contribution at the intersection of early modern philosophy and democratic theory.