Sartre's Postcartesian Ontology: On Negation and Existence

This article maintains that Jean-Paul Sartre’s early masterwork, Being and Nothingness, is primarily concerned with developing an original approach to the being of consciousness. Sartre’s ontology resituates the Cartesian cogito in a complete system that provides a new understanding of negation and a dynamic interpretation of human existence. The article examines the role of consciousness, temporality and the relationship between self and others in the light of Sartre’s arguments against “classical” rationalism. The conclusion suggests that Sartre’s departure from modern foundationalism has “postmodern” implications that emerge in the areas of ontology, existential analytics and the ethics of human freedom

Rhythm-Sense-Subject, or: The Dynamic Un/Enfolding of Sense

This article traces Henri Meschonnic's concerted attempts to grasp the interaction rhythm-sense-subject, and situates this with the broader concerns of his work: the critique of ‘sign-thinking’, the elaboration of rhythm as le continu, his reflection on historical subjectivity. Meschonnic's thinking of rhythm is of an exigency from which he himself often shrinks back, notably through a series of equivocations (between language and sense, between rhythm as such and an individual rhythmic figure, between discourse as activity and an individual's discourse/idiom). The article focuses on these equivocations, and argues that within them we come to see the complexity, and mutability, of the rhythm-sense-subject interaction. It ends by proposing that we think the place of rhythm in this interaction in terms not of continuity/discontinuity, as per Meschonnic, but rather as a ‘dynamic unfolding/enfolding of sense’

Dialogue as Moral Paradigm: Paths Toward Intercultural Transformation

The Council of Europe’s 2008 White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue: ‘living together as equals in dignity’ points to the need for shared values upon which intercultural dialogue might rest. In order, however, to overcome the monologic separateness that threatens community, we must educate ourselves to recognize the dialogism of our humanity and to engage in deep encounters with others with a mature skepticism of all dogmatisms, including our own. In order to aid us in reaching the necessary insight, the author calls upon Bakhtin’s ideas of the dialogism of every utterance and of the unity and heteroglossia of language, Gadamer’s hermeneutical experience that shakes us loose from what we think we know, and Levinas’s description of that transcendent ideal of a dialogue beyond reciprocity. These perspectives break open our certainty that tribalism and individualism are fundamental, placing them instead as secondary phenomena that, though powerful, pronounce neither the initial nor the final word on our life together

'Pouring politics down our throats': political CSR communication and consumer catharsis

This chapter theorizes the outrageous consumer response that may follow the communication of political corporate social responsibility (CSR). We consider two recent cases (Starbucks’s offer to hire refugees and Pepsi’s appropriation of protest movements in an ad) and how consumers-citizens reacted when these corporations communicated political issues. By drawing from psychoanalytic concepts, we illustrate how consumers’ outrage, expressed in angry social media comments, and in the creation and sharing of memes, is cathartic of unconscious repressed matter: the realization of their own powerless and the domination of corporations. We further note how these expressions of outrage may be understood to result from defense mechanisms such as denial, displacement, or more complex sublimation that help consumers maintain a position of passive domination by corporations. Like all psychoanalytic applications, our interpretation represents only a plausible metaphor that can explain the “irrational” behavior of consumers. Positivist traditions of CSR theorization may demand further causal studies to confirm the ideas we express. Our study is an original exploration of what underlies consumer responses to political CSR. These cases could inform academics and practitioners working in the business and society arena asking them to re-evaluate whether and how political CSR should be communicated, and the implications of the rapid diffusion of messages in social media that include mocking parody and offensive brand comments

Beyond dis-identification: A discursive approach to self-alienation in contemporary organizations

Dis-identification has become a key research area in organization studies, demonstrating how employees subjectively distance themselves from managerial domination by protecting/constructing their more ‘authentic’ identities. But how should we understand situations where even these ‘real’ selves are experienced as alien and foreign? We revise the theory of self-alienation to explain cases beyond disidentification, where even back-stage identities (‘who we really are’) are considered something polluted, objectified and foreign. Drawing on an illustrative empirical vignette of a consultant, we demonstrate how a revised version of self-alienation might usefully capture experiences of work where the back-stage/front-stage boundary breaks down. We tentatively posit three causes of this self-alienation in relation to contemporary organizations, and discuss their significance in the context of organizational dis identification