La encarnación de la verdad y la política de la comunidad: Foucault y los cínicos

This article investigates Foucault’s analysis of the philosophical life of the Cynics in The Courage of Truth from the perspective of the Nietzschean question: how truth can be incorporated or embodied? In order to consider philosophy as a form of life and not merely as a doctrine or a science, the question of how can truth be lived or materialized in the physical body is obviously crucial. Whereas both Foucault and Arendt can be read as defenders of the philosophical life because of its ethical-political effects, Arendt argues that the Socratic philosophical life is a life that allows a distance to the body. By way of contrast, in Foucault’s analysis of the Cynics we find an idea of the philosophical life in which truth is revealed or manifest in the material body of life. This article takes up Esposito’s immunitary logic of biopolitics in order to argue that whereas the Platonic-Socratic philosophical life exemplifies an ascetic ideal that reflects an inherently immunitarian idea of politics, the philosophical life of the Cynics uses the communitary resources of embodiment so as to unite life and philosophy in a cosmopolitical form of life.Este artículo investiga el análisis que Foucault lleva a cabo de la vida filosófica de los cínicos y de la parrêsia en El coraje de la verdad desde la perspectiva de la siguiente pregunta nietzscheana: ¿Cómo puede ser incorporada la verdad? Para considerar a la filosofía como una forma de vida y no meramente como una ciencia o una doctrina, la pregunta de cómo puede vivirse o materializarse la verdad en el cuerpo físico es, evidentemente, crucial. Mientras que tanto Foucault como Arendt pueden ser leídos como defensores de la vida filosófica por sus efectos ético-políticos, Arendt sostiene que la vida filosófica socrática es una vida que habilita una distancia con el cuerpo, en contraste, en el análisis de Foucault sobre los cínicos encontramos una idea de la vida filosófica en la que la verdad se revela o manifiesta en el cuerpo material de la vida. Este artículo recoge la lógica inmunitaria de la biopolítica de Esposito con el fin de sostener que la vida filosófica de los cínicos y su hablar franco (parrêsia) utilizan los recursos comunitarios de la encarnación para unificar la vida y la filosofía en una forma de vida cosmopolita

Book review - Deadly Biocultures: the Ethics of Life-making

Book review Nadine Ehlers y Shiloh Krupar. Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-Making. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. (ISBN:9781517905071), 288 p

The work of art and the death of God in Nietzsche and Agamben

The repercussions of Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God were not only felt in the religious sphere, but also in how we think about the meaning and place of creation and creativity in life. Agamben’s discussion of creativity as ‘inoperativity’ is the latest, important contribution to the debate, arguably initiated by Existentialism, on how the death of God relates to life as material for artistic creation. I situate Agamben’s theses on ‘inoperativity’ in dialogue with Nietzsche’s discussion of the death of God and the ‘work of art without artist.’ Agamben helps us to get beyond the Existentialist interpretation of the human subject as creator of its own life (bios) by proposing an anarchic conception of giving artistic form to life (zoe) that deconstructs the position of mastery over life assigned to modern subjectivity and de-centres the idea of the human agency in the process of creation. However, Agamben’s conception of the artistic life downplays or avoids other features of Nietzsche’s thinking on the death of God and creation that are tied to animality and the divinity of nature

Ideologies of contagion and communities of life

This chapter offers a critical discussion of the first reactions of philosophers and public intellectuals to the pandemic from the rise of a new communism to the hope for new Enlightenment. It questions the humanist and religious underpinnings of ideologies of contagion and points toward the possibility of communities of life that are immune against these ideologies

Posthumanism and plant studies

Foucault famously argued that there exists a tension between humanism and the Enlightenment project. Whereas humanism is understood as the philosophical attempt to define the essence of the human being, the Enlightenment project continuously seeks to transgress the boundaries of the human. If we agree with Foucault, then posthumanism is inscribed within this project of Enlightenment. But what is the relation between posthumanism and plant studies? The following chapter discusses the way in which the recent “plant turn” in science and philosophy has further challenged our understanding of what it means to be human. It asks what plant studies has brought to current posthumanist debates and how it has perhaps reoriented these debates

Nietzsche's Natures: Readings of Nietzsche

The Anthropocene, and the concurrent awareness that life develops on planetary scales of time and our species is dependent on a habitable planet, seems to call for major revisions in our ethical and political views such as to register how thoroughly we are shaped by nature, that is, biology and physics. At the same time, among the most disputed questions in public and private life are those related to our gender, sexual, and racial differences and identities. This volume asks about the relevance of Nietzsche’s thought for contemporary debates on conceptions of nature, ecological movements, and political activism. This volume also explores how Nietzsche’s writings foster cultural-aesthetic approaches to flora, fauna and non-living matter, anticipations of “naturecultures” as well as contemporary debates in Animal, Plant and Posthuman studies. As a thinker of nature, Nietzsche advocates for a re-naturalisation of the human being. This book invites to consider how Nietzsche’s task has been understood as an invitation to approach embodiment as an occasion for the critique of power, for dismantling hierarchical binarism and open subjectivity to practices of care of self

Poder, vida y subjetivación

Carlos Manrique y Laura Quintana (CM y LQ): en el debate contemporáneo sobre “biopolítica”, en particular en el contexto italiano y siguiendo, entre otros, el impulso de Roberto Esposito, ha cobrado una cierta fuerza la idea de que una verdadera resistencia al gobierno sobre la vida tendría que implicar necesariamente repensar la categoría de la “vida” (más allá de las oposiciones metafísicas entre lo humano y lo animal, o entre bios y zoê) y desarrollar en conformidad con esto las posibilida..