Che Vuoi? Politico-philosophical remarks on Leo Strauss\u27 Spinoza

Rumors surrounding the Hebraic-American classical philosopher Leo Strauss&rsquo; supposed influence on leading neoconservative politicians and commentators make reconsidering Leo Strauss&rsquo; thought and legacy a philosophical task of the first political importance today. A host of articles have appeared by students and (more recently) books by Stephen Smith (2006), Heinrich Meier (2006) and Catherine and Michael Zuckert (2006). This essay is proffered as a critical contribution, by a non-Straussian student, to this literature. Its methodology and justification is to return to and reconsider Strauss&rsquo; earliest works, on the &lsquo;political theology&rsquo; of Benedict de Spinoza. The paper argues two theses. The first is that the popular depiction of Strauss as an esoteric Nietzschean hiding behind a &lsquo;noble&rsquo; classical or theological veneer importantly misses the mark. The second is that Strauss&rsquo; early work shows his proximity, via Jacobi, to the Heideggerian disclosure of the groundless grounds of philosophical reason, given which one must extra-rationally choose reason over faith. One striking implication of this argument, in the contemporary political climate, is to underscore the unlikely convergence between the philosophical sources of neoconservative and the &lsquo;post-structuralist&rsquo; thought associated with much of the intellectual left in France and the Anglophone world. Yet in contrast to the widespread image of Strauss, I argue that the mature Strauss&rsquo; continuing commitment to this decisionistic framework is in fact most clear is his &lsquo;exoteric,&rsquo; public statements on religion &ndash; i.e. it is not the &lsquo;esoteric&rsquo; purloined letter Strauss&rsquo; critics seek out. The reason for Strauss&rsquo; continuing public advocacy of the impossibility of reason&rsquo;s disproving faith, I propose, highlights the primarily political (versus philosophical) nature of this turn: in Strauss&rsquo; conservative acceptance of the political necessity of religion for social order, framed in terms of a revised commitment to the &lsquo;medieval&rsquo; (versus modern) enlightenment of Maimonides and Farabi.<br /

Light hadronic physics using domain wall fermions in quenched lattice QCD

In the past year domain wall fermion simulations have moved from exploratory stages to the point where systematic effects can be studied with different gauge couplings, volumes, and lengths in the fifth dimension. Results are presented here for the chiral condensate, the light hadron spectrum, and the strange quark mass. We focus especially on the pseudoscalar meson mass and show that, in small volume, the correlators used to compute it can be contaminated to different degrees by topological zero modes. In large volume a nonlinear extrapolation to the chiral limit, e.g. as expected from quenched chiral perturbation theory, is needed in order to have a consistent picture of low energy chiral symmetry breaking effects.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of Lattice 2000 (spectrum), Bangalore, India. Work done as part of the RIKEN/BNL/Columbia Collaboration. (4 pages) - Reference adde

Controlling the philosophical imaginary: reading Pierre Hadot with Luiz Costa Lima

This essay proffers a critical complement to Luiz Costa Lima\u27s claims concerning the nature, history, and control of the imagination in Western culture. Accepting the wide scope of Costa Lima\u27s critical claim about the socio-political control of imaginative literature in Western history, we claim that Pierre Hadot\u27s work on philosophy as a bios in the ancient West cautions us lest we position philosophy in this history as always and necessarily an agency of control. At different times, philosophy has rather stood as an ally in practicing and promoting forms of criticity, and the playful, creative, and transformative envisaging of alternative ways of experiencing the world Costa Lima theoretically celebrates in literary fiction. Any critique of philosophy as always opposed to the critical imagination can only stand, we have argued, relative to philosophy as conceived on what Hadot suggests is but one, albeit the now hegemonic model: namely, as a body of systematic rational discourses, including discourses about the literary, poetics, and imaginary. What this vision of philosophy misses, Hadot shows, is how the ancient conception of philosophy (which survives in figures like Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Goethe) as a way of life promoted distinctly literary, aesthetic, and imaginative practices; first, to assist in the existential internalisation of the schools\u27 ideas; secondly, to envisage in the sage and utopias edifying counterfactuals to help students critically reimagine accepted norms; and thirdly, in the conception of a transformed way of living and perceiving &lsquo;according to nature&rsquo;, whose parameters of autonomy and pleasurable contemplation of the singularity of the present experiences anticipate the experiences delineated in modern aesthetic theory

Critique as technology of the self

This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant\u27s practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault\u27s apparent later \u27turn\u27 to Kant, and the label of \u27critique\u27, to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant\u27s practice of \u27critique\u27 should be read, after Foucault, as a distinctly modern practice in the care of the self, governed by Kant\u27s famous rubric of the \u27primacy of practical reason\u27. In this way, too, Foucault\u27s later interest in Kant - one which in fact takes up a line present in his work from his complementary thesis on Kant\u27s Anthropology - is cast into distinct relief. Against Habermas and others, I propose that this interest does not represent any \u27break\u27 or \u27turn\u27 in Foucault\u27s work. In line with Foucault\u27s repeated denials that he was interested after 1976 in a \u27return to the ancients\u27, I argue that Foucault\u27s writings on critique represent instead both a deepening theoretical self-consciousness, and part of his project to forge an ethics adequate to the historical present.<br /

Who stole the cheese? or : How postmodernism can grow your business

In this paper, I examine some of the key management literature of the neoliberal 1990s to make a series of wider observations about contemporary ideology. Post-structuralist or post-modernist theory is often presented as the arch-enemy of neoliberal capitalism, as the orthodoxy of late capitalism. However, adding to work by Frederic Jameson, Thomas Frank and others, this paper examines uncanny proximity between neoliberal ideas about disaggregating, outsourcing, networking, etc. and the learning motifs of postmodernist theory. Its guiding hypothesis is that postmodernism in the academy, despite its own self-misrecognition as &quot;racial&quot;, is a further ideological expression of the samr neoliberal drive to overcome &quot;Fordist&quot;, &quot;authoritarian&quot; ways of organising producation and social regulation

On eschatology and the \u27return to religion\u27

We begin with Tony Blair\u27s July 2009 Australian visit. Mr Blair converted publicly to Catholicism in 2008. In Australia that year, he argued that the West was facing an internal crisis of confidence, as well as external threats. Blair warned in particular against what he called \u27aggressive secularism\u27 and the Western tendency to \u27see people of religious faith as people to be pushed to one side\u27. The Australian\u27s \u27editor at large\u27, Paul Kelly, responded enthusiastically. Blair\u27s position represented \u27the best argument against the rise of secular intolerance and its distorting of history in the education system by seeking to downgrade or eliminate religion in the West\u27s story\u27. This stood in contrast to the Australian Labour Party\u27s disastrous\u27 distancing from the Christian tradition. Kelly styled Blair as opposing \u27the fashionable Western idea that religion can be suppressed or confined to the private realm\u27 as \u27a delusion and dangerous\u27. The Australian\u27s position is not surprising, given the news paper\u27s long- standing, US-influenced neoconservative position

\u27To be or not ...\u27 Lacan and the meaning of being in Shakepeare\u27s Hamlet

This chapter provides a reading of Lacan\u27s important reading of Shakespeare\u27s Hamlet in Seminar VI, in the context of his developing thought on the neuroses, and obsessional neurosis in particular.&nbsp; The article draws atttention to the way Lacan\u27s focus shifts from Hamlet\u27s \u27Oedipal\u27 relation towards his uncle towards his inability to fathom teh desire of his mother, Gertrude.&nbsp; This interpretive optic opens up many scenes of the play, and strange transformations in the heor\u27s conduct: his terrible hostility to Ophelia, and his \u27rebound\u27 at the moment that he leaps into her open grave, able at last to say \u27It is I, Hamlet the Dane!&quot; and undertake to do the task his father\u27s ghost had implored of him