Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 2025)
CRISIS AND POWER IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY
Guest Editors: Antonio Calcagno and Silvia Benso
JOHN CARUANA, Massimo Cacciari’s Agonic Thought: On Crisis and the Future of Europe
abstract
Massimo Cacciari’s reflections on crisis (krisis) and its implications for Europe’s future are more urgent than ever. This article traces his shift from an early Marxist view of crisis as a historical condition to be overcome to his later engagement with pensiero negative (negative thought), where crisis is seen as an ineradicable fissure at the heart of reality. Drawing on thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schopenhauer, as well as religious and mythological sources, Cacciari argues that crisis must be embraced rather than resolved. He extends this understanding of crisis beyond philosophy to his political reflections, portraying Europe as an unresolved paradox—its identity shaped by the perpetual interplay of difference and belonging. Rejecting both reactionary nostalgia and technocratic homogenization, Cacciari envisions a Europe that must navigate its uncertainties through intellectual and cultural openness.
JETA MULAJ, Letters of Blood and Fire: Silvia Federici on the Crisis of Capitalism
abstract
This article focuses on Silvia Federici’s analysis of crisis. In particular, it illuminates that her understanding of crisis contains two interrelated components: on the one hand, a historical approach, and, on the other, an understanding of crisis as an ongoing phenomenon inherent to capitalist society. The paper argues that, for Federici, it is exclusively in capitalist society that crisis becomes a normal state of affairs. Demonstrating this through her understanding of the constant re-enactment of primitive accumulation, the article explores the implications of this analysis for our understanding of capitalism and emancipation. Recovering Federici’s understanding of the ongoing capitalist crisis illuminates the need to advocate for the radical transformation of the materials condition for our reproduction.
DIANE ENNS, Elena Pulcini on Crisis and Vulnerability
abstract
In Care of the World: Fear, Responsibility and Justice in the Global Age, Elena Pulcini makes a strong and urgent claim that vulnerability is a force that motivates us to take care of an ailing world. I explore the limitations of this claim, for vulnerability inspires not only kindness, but also indifference and cruelty, and argue that any discussion of vulnerability needs to take into account the motivating effects of shared power or strength under conditions of crisis. This demands a new appreciation of courage, which I illustrate with reference to Ranabir Samaddar’s analysis of the “public power” of Indian migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
REGULAR ARTICLES
TAYLOR ROGERS AND LAUREN GUILMETTE, Taylor Rogers’s NOA: Filmmaking as Research-Creation in Feminist Continental Philosophy
abstract
This interview, conducted over several months between Lauren Guilmette and Taylor (“Tay”) Rogers, in conversation with Amy Marvin, Qrescent Mali Mason, and Kelly Gawel, examines the creation and impact of a film that Rogers produced as part of their doctoral research in Continental philosophy. The film’s creation process is, itself, of interest to contemporary Continental philosophy: this process was collaborative, emergent, and based on music that Rogers composed. In the interview, the film’s philosophical import is explored, from its connections to canonical figures like Nietzsche and Lugones to emerging feminist voices in philosophy of humour, trans studies, critical race studies, and themes related to embodiment, grief, affect, and relational ontologies. Readers are introduced to research-creation as an arts-based practice of research that holds great, often untapped value for philosophical inquiry.
JOSHUA ST. PIERRE AND DANIKA JORGENSEN SKAKUM, Towards a World That Stutters: Dysfluency in Three Modes of Belonging
abstract
This article explores three conceptual modes of belonging within the stuttering community—curative, inclusive, and transformative—each reflecting distinct relationships to disability, social relations, and political action. Curative belonging operates within an ableist framework, positioning fluency as a prerequisite for belonging. In the mode of inclusion, people who stutter seek belonging within existing societal relations and must contort themselves appropriately. Transformative belonging, by contrast, reimagines dysfluency as a generative difference, challenging the dominance of fluency and advocating for a world that embraces stuttering on its own terms. By mapping these modes, this article highlights the tensions within the stuttering community and argues for a political shift that moves beyond tolerance and integration towards an affirmative vision of dysfluency as a site of resistance and belonging.
ANNA MUDDE AND EDITH SKEARD, Craft Practices as Soft Collaboration: The Relational Ethics of Making and Doing
abstract
From our shared interest in the philosophical implications of craft practices, this article is grounded on a workshop we developed around making and doing for philoSOPHIA 2024, in which we invited philosophers and other scholars to work with clay while contact mics amplified and called attention to the sounds of their working. In our workshop, we sought to ask whether “intangible culture” is, in fact, ungraspable, as its name suggests, or whether its work is being done in quiet and overlooked places of habit. In this article, we discuss how affordances shape our perceptual fields and how amplification—in this case, the amplification of otherwise unattended-to sound—is a possible tool in undermining these coded assumptions. We propose that what is considered intangible is actually what we call “soft collaboration”—the unintentional but relationally consequential ways individuals operate in the world.
KYLE BARBOUR, The Saturated Phenomenon as Contradiction:
A Contribution to the Hermeneutic Critique of Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology
abstract
Jean-Luc Marion’s account of the saturated phenomenon has come under criticism from a variety of positions, most importantly the “hermeneutic critique” which claims that Marion does not account for the way in which the very appearing of phenomena are dependent upon interpretation. While appreciative of Marion’s ingenuity in conceiving the saturated phenomenon and the rigour of his phenomenological investigation, I agree with the hermeneutic critique that Marion has sidelined the fundamental role that subjectivity has in the constitution of experience. However, despite my endorsement of the hermeneutic critique, I do not believe that its proponents go far enough in bringing forth the implicit conclusion of the critique. In this article, I will argue that the saturated phenomenon generates a contradiction that Marion has not successfully grappled with: either the phenomenon appears and is not saturated, or else it is saturated and does not appear.
COSIMO COEN, La métaphore de la « courbure de l’espace » : Obligation éthique et limite du droit dans le sillage de Levinas
abstract
Beginning with Levinas’s metaphor of the curvature of space found in Totality and Infinity and following with passages in Otherwise Than Being, this article argues for the asymmetry of ethical obligation as the constitutive event of our experience of spatiality. At the same time, I will point out, the juridical obligation appears as a form of delimitation pivotal to the shaping of geometrical spatiality—i.e., of ontological symmetry. Subsequently, I propose to deepen the status of law through its metaphorical representation as a city or a refuge: a place to build the justice of the institutions, but where one may be tempted to find refuge from ethical exposition. Finally, by tackling the task of keeping open a passage between the dit and the dire, I shall inquire into the possibility—including by referring to Jewish hermeneutics—of a liminal experience that may prevent the limit of the law from closing in on itself, degenerating into totality.
A TRIBUTE TO CONSTANTIN V. BOUNDAS
Section Editors: Ada Jaarsma and Antonio Calcagno
DAVID MORRIS, Boundas: Scholar, Scrivener, Dancing Philosopher
DOROTHEA OLKOWSKI, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The Deleuze of Constantin Boundas
DANIEL W. SMITH, “I Have Never Become Deleuzian”: In Homage to Constantin V. Boundas
JAY LAMPERT, “Boundas: The Series”
CONSTANTIN V. BOUNDAS, A Letter, In Absentia