This essay is part of a project that has set out, as one of its primary objectives, to observe perversions as important indicators of broader changes and developments within society. Both of the momenta I follow in this study meet all the requirements for such an inquiry. The first development to be examined is what I will call the decline of pornography. At a time when all of society is increasingly becoming pornographic in so many ways, it sounds strange to talk about the decline of pornography. And yet pornography as a genre is, I believe, losing ground to something else – to a distinctly different system of unfolding sexuality and its economic exploitation. The second development to be discussed is the rise of masochism. In this context, I will analyse certain reports that show that, especially since the outbreak of the pandemic COVID-19, the number of people practicing masochistic “heavy play” has increased significantly. It appears that in a period when one would expect people to be dreaming of the lifting of restrictions, freedom, or whatever, many have chosen to undertake the cruel path of “servitude”. Eventually, I will show that these two developments are essentially connected, probably even consubstantial.
{"title":"In Times of “Chastity”: An Inquiry into Some Recent Developments in the Field of Perversion","authors":"Aleš Bunta","doi":"10.3986/fv.42.1.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.11","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is part of a project that has set out, as one of its primary objectives, to observe perversions as important indicators of broader changes and developments within society. Both of the momenta I follow in this study meet all the requirements for such an inquiry. The first development to be examined is what I will call the decline of pornography. At a time when all of society is increasingly becoming pornographic in so many ways, it sounds strange to talk about the decline of pornography. And yet pornography as a genre is, I believe, losing ground to something else – to a distinctly different system of unfolding sexuality and its economic exploitation. The second development to be discussed is the rise of masochism. In this context, I will analyse certain reports that show that, especially since the outbreak of the pandemic COVID-19, the number of people practicing masochistic “heavy play” has increased significantly. It appears that in a period when one would expect people to be dreaming of the lifting of restrictions, freedom, or whatever, many have chosen to undertake the cruel path of “servitude”. Eventually, I will show that these two developments are essentially connected, probably even consubstantial.","PeriodicalId":41584,"journal":{"name":"FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45052163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The late reflections of G.W. Leibniz on eternal return have often been dismissed as insignificant as regards his wider philosophy. This may be due to the prevalent championing of his optimistic views on the continual progress of humanity, which seem to contradict the notion of eternal return. Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze both put forward concepts of eternal return that form part of their respective critiques of historical progress, yet these have rarely been read in conjunction with their views on Leibniz. This article argues, first, that for Leibniz progress and return are not contradictory, and second, that Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s concepts of return were informed, in different ways, by their readings of Leibniz, and specifically by his conception of multiple worlds as the spatial equivalent of eternal return. In doing so I will shed light on the contribution of Leibniz’s philosophy not only to the progressive theories of history put forward during the Enlightenment, but also to the critique of these very visions.
{"title":"Spectres of Eternal Return: Benjamin and Deleuze Read Leibniz","authors":"Noa Levin","doi":"10.3986/fv.42.2.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.2.14","url":null,"abstract":"The late reflections of G.W. Leibniz on eternal return have often been dismissed as insignificant as regards his wider philosophy. This may be due to the prevalent championing of his optimistic views on the continual progress of humanity, which seem to contradict the notion of eternal return. Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze both put forward concepts of eternal return that form part of their respective critiques of historical progress, yet these have rarely been read in conjunction with their views on Leibniz. This article argues, first, that for Leibniz progress and return are not contradictory, and second, that Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s concepts of return were informed, in different ways, by their readings of Leibniz, and specifically by his conception of multiple worlds as the spatial equivalent of eternal return. In doing so I will shed light on the contribution of Leibniz’s philosophy not only to the progressive theories of history put forward during the Enlightenment, but also to the critique of these very visions.","PeriodicalId":41584,"journal":{"name":"FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43353306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The first part of the article analyses the imaginary of the characteristics and form of (civil) society as developed in early modern liberal political philosophy, especially by John Locke and Thomas Paine. It uses different contemporary receptions of the key authors of this tradition, namely the liberal reception of John Keane, which emphasizes the theoretical distinction between civil society and the state, the materialist reception of Ellen Meiksins Wood, which contextualizes political ideas in the political struggles and class interests of the time, and the reception of Foucault, which focuses on the development of biopolitical governmentality. The article finds that the liberal tradition imagined (civil) society as a given and self-regulating sphere that does not require interference from the state. A socio-historical presupposition of this imaginary was the economic sovereignty of individuals, and it overlooked the relations of domination and exploitation. In its second part, the article presents Hannah Arendt’s critical concept of society. She did not conceptualize society as a given totality and in a spatial way, but used it as a qualifier of a specific, impoverished mode of being, in particular to analyse the situation and perspective of minorities.
{"title":"Arendt’s Break with the Liberal Imaginary of Society","authors":"Gorazd Kovačič","doi":"10.3986/fv.42.1.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.06","url":null,"abstract":"The first part of the article analyses the imaginary of the characteristics and form of (civil) society as developed in early modern liberal political philosophy, especially by John Locke and Thomas Paine. It uses different contemporary receptions of the key authors of this tradition, namely the liberal reception of John Keane, which emphasizes the theoretical distinction between civil society and the state, the materialist reception of Ellen Meiksins Wood, which contextualizes political ideas in the political struggles and class interests of the time, and the reception of Foucault, which focuses on the development of biopolitical governmentality. The article finds that the liberal tradition imagined (civil) society as a given and self-regulating sphere that does not require interference from the state. A socio-historical presupposition of this imaginary was the economic sovereignty of individuals, and it overlooked the relations of domination and exploitation. In its second part, the article presents Hannah Arendt’s critical concept of society. She did not conceptualize society as a given totality and in a spatial way, but used it as a qualifier of a specific, impoverished mode of being, in particular to analyse the situation and perspective of minorities.","PeriodicalId":41584,"journal":{"name":"FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45759622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The text attempts to rethink the concept of emancipation and how it is structured as political action, while describing its historical origins and how it is further understood by the three important political philosophers: Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Rancière. All three of them – specifically and with substantial differences – understand politics as a space for political action that leads to emancipation in the name of equality. In order to determine the historical origin of the concept in more detail, the argumentation of the text rely upon its elaboration within the school of “conceptual history”, which deals with the historical semantics of terms and sees the etymology of and the change in the meaning of terms as forming a crucial basis for a contemporary cultural, conceptual, and linguistic understanding, and afterwards it links this “pre-history” with Marx’s, Arendt’s, and Rancière’s understanding of the concept of emancipation, and see how they differ and are related to each other, considering what theoretical conclusions about the concept of emancipation we can take from these relations. Particular interest is aimed at how the concept of emancipation is perceived today, who the subject of emancipation is, what the method and final goal of emancipation is, and, finally, how these understandings can help us in the present time when it seems that we need emancipation more than ever.
{"title":"The Concept of Emancipation as Political Action (Marx, Arendt, Rancière)","authors":"Lana Zdravković","doi":"10.3986/fv.42.1.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.07","url":null,"abstract":"The text attempts to rethink the concept of emancipation and how it is structured as political action, while describing its historical origins and how it is further understood by the three important political philosophers: Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Rancière. All three of them – specifically and with substantial differences – understand politics as a space for political action that leads to emancipation in the name of equality. In order to determine the historical origin of the concept in more detail, the argumentation of the text rely upon its elaboration within the school of “conceptual history”, which deals with the historical semantics of terms and sees the etymology of and the change in the meaning of terms as forming a crucial basis for a contemporary cultural, conceptual, and linguistic understanding, and afterwards it links this “pre-history” with Marx’s, Arendt’s, and Rancière’s understanding of the concept of emancipation, and see how they differ and are related to each other, considering what theoretical conclusions about the concept of emancipation we can take from these relations. Particular interest is aimed at how the concept of emancipation is perceived today, who the subject of emancipation is, what the method and final goal of emancipation is, and, finally, how these understandings can help us in the present time when it seems that we need emancipation more than ever.","PeriodicalId":41584,"journal":{"name":"FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41381188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In order to be able to raise the question of the “world” today in an effective way, we have to reactivate the Goethean categories of Weltliteratur and Weltschmerz for a critique of our own historical moment. We need to understand the phenomenon of Weltschmerz as a symptom of the impossibility of Weltliteratur. Going beyond the context of the original formulation of these categories, we could argue that something akin to the historical phenomenon of Weltschmerz emerges every time the ideological constitution of the world threatens to fail. Today, we live in an age of a generalised state of cultural disorientation that has produced its own Weltliteratur, which includes a wide range of discourses about the “world” – from officially endorsed theories of economic globalisation, to scientific treatises on the Anthropocene, environmental protest movements, philosophical pamphlets, all the way to world-historical conspiracy theories. Yet, an anxiety concerning the impossibility of world-formation in general is also recorded in these documents. In order to be able to capture our contemporary Weltschmerz, the article turns to the young Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the task of this age is to produce an “objective” (rather than subjective) Weltschmerz. However, the most effective tools to conceptualise this objective Weltschmerz come from the traditions of philosophical acosmism. It is a notable philosophical development of our times that some elements of the acosmic tradition have recently resurfaced in speculative realism. Thus, speculative realism could be described as a possible site of our contemporary Weltschmerz: its acosmic metaphysics is repeatedly tamed by a mournful longing for the world.
{"title":"On Acosmic Realism","authors":"Roland Végső","doi":"10.3986/fv.42.2.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.2.04","url":null,"abstract":"In order to be able to raise the question of the “world” today in an effective way, we have to reactivate the Goethean categories of Weltliteratur and Weltschmerz for a critique of our own historical moment. We need to understand the phenomenon of Weltschmerz as a symptom of the impossibility of Weltliteratur. Going beyond the context of the original formulation of these categories, we could argue that something akin to the historical phenomenon of Weltschmerz emerges every time the ideological constitution of the world threatens to fail. Today, we live in an age of a generalised state of cultural disorientation that has produced its own Weltliteratur, which includes a wide range of discourses about the “world” – from officially endorsed theories of economic globalisation, to scientific treatises on the Anthropocene, environmental protest movements, philosophical pamphlets, all the way to world-historical conspiracy theories. Yet, an anxiety concerning the impossibility of world-formation in general is also recorded in these documents. In order to be able to capture our contemporary Weltschmerz, the article turns to the young Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the task of this age is to produce an “objective” (rather than subjective) Weltschmerz. However, the most effective tools to conceptualise this objective Weltschmerz come from the traditions of philosophical acosmism. It is a notable philosophical development of our times that some elements of the acosmic tradition have recently resurfaced in speculative realism. Thus, speculative realism could be described as a possible site of our contemporary Weltschmerz: its acosmic metaphysics is repeatedly tamed by a mournful longing for the world.","PeriodicalId":41584,"journal":{"name":"FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44648609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
“There is no longer any world,” wrote the late philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in 1993, and in this paper, the sense of this loss of world is analysed in terms of the modal notions of necessity, impossibility, and possibility. Modal differentiation can illuminate what constitutes the sense of actuality in a world, and hence, what it is that has been lost regarding this actuality of being in a world. Modal thinking does not rely on knowledge of the true state of affairs, nor on having a constant grasp on necessity: modal thinking enables us to discern the actual by way of the relations between necessity, possibility, and impossibility. It is on the basis of these relations that a mode of rethinking actuality is suggested. In order to pursue this line of thought, I rely on Jacques Lacan’s understanding of modalities as writing operations, concentrating mostly on certain sections from his Seminar XXI (1973–1974), wherein he refers to Aristotelian modal logic and mentions the analytic philosopher Jaakko Hintikka (as one of Aristotle’s commentators). This ternary relation between Aristotle, Hintikka, and Lacan suggests a different outlook on the actual being-such of a world. The being-such of a world, its actuality, is understood as a contingency (what ceases not to be written), a possibility emerging from the relation between what is declared necessary and what is impossible. The paper shows the implications of such a modal understanding of actuality, as demonstrated in Lacan’s view of human sexuality and sexual difference.
{"title":"The Actuality of a World: What Ceases Not to Be Written","authors":"Ruth Ronen","doi":"10.3986/fv.42.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"“There is no longer any world,” wrote the late philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in 1993, and in this paper, the sense of this loss of world is analysed in terms of the modal notions of necessity, impossibility, and possibility. Modal differentiation can illuminate what constitutes the sense of actuality in a world, and hence, what it is that has been lost regarding this actuality of being in a world. Modal thinking does not rely on knowledge of the true state of affairs, nor on having a constant grasp on necessity: modal thinking enables us to discern the actual by way of the relations between necessity, possibility, and impossibility. It is on the basis of these relations that a mode of rethinking actuality is suggested. In order to pursue this line of thought, I rely on Jacques Lacan’s understanding of modalities as writing operations, concentrating mostly on certain sections from his Seminar XXI (1973–1974), wherein he refers to Aristotelian modal logic and mentions the analytic philosopher Jaakko Hintikka (as one of Aristotle’s commentators). This ternary relation between Aristotle, Hintikka, and Lacan suggests a different outlook on the actual being-such of a world. The being-such of a world, its actuality, is understood as a contingency (what ceases not to be written), a possibility emerging from the relation between what is declared necessary and what is impossible. The paper shows the implications of such a modal understanding of actuality, as demonstrated in Lacan’s view of human sexuality and sexual difference.","PeriodicalId":41584,"journal":{"name":"FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49335954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Drawing on a forthcoming book by Rok Benčin on the concept of world (the multiplicity of real worlds as transcendental frameworks and the fictional structure thereof), the article proposes a reading of Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf that focuses on the dialectic of dispersion and unity. The novel presents a multiplicity of dispersed and fragmented transcendental frameworks that tend towards – an attempt that is always doomed to fail, but always begins anew – unification within the ideological apparatuses (family, religion, national history, literary canon). In this endless dialectic, literature occupies a singular place, for the fictional structure of these frameworks makes of it a transcendental-abyss, which enables passage from the novel of worlds to the world of the novel.
{"title":"Dispersed are we : roman des mondes et monde du roman dans Between the Acts, de Virginia Woolf","authors":"Jean-Jacques Lecercle","doi":"10.3986/fv.42.2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.2.11","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on a forthcoming book by Rok Benčin on the concept of world (the multiplicity of real worlds as transcendental frameworks and the fictional structure thereof), the article proposes a reading of Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf that focuses on the dialectic of dispersion and unity. The novel presents a multiplicity of dispersed and fragmented transcendental frameworks that tend towards – an attempt that is always doomed to fail, but always begins anew – unification within the ideological apparatuses (family, religion, national history, literary canon). In this endless dialectic, literature occupies a singular place, for the fictional structure of these frameworks makes of it a transcendental-abyss, which enables passage from the novel of worlds to the world of the novel.","PeriodicalId":41584,"journal":{"name":"FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44150128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Reinhard Koselleck has long been regarded as a particularly eminent theorist of socio-political concepts, while Hannah Arendt had not been in focus as a conceptual author until recent times. This article explores the common thinking space between Arendt and Koselleck through their thesis about the gap, rupture, crisis, or break in the tradition of political thinking and historical periods and how this is linked to their notion of conceptuality, i.e. Begreifen (understanding). Despite the impression that each of them focused on the one main break between the past and the future, Arendt and Koselleck both studied multiple breaks and crises in the Western political tradition. The article attempts to show how their distinctive thinking and rethinking of political concepts (Begreifen) are related to these breaks through several direct and indirect encounters and how these are both close and apart at the same time. While they have different concepts of politics and the political, their understanding of the breaks in time and crises can be read as complementary, especially considering their concern with returning the responsibility for actions and concepts to the human sphere.
{"title":"Arendt, Koselleck, and Begreifen: Rethinking Politics and Concepts in Times of Crisis","authors":"Vlasta Jalušič","doi":"10.3986/fv.42.1.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.05","url":null,"abstract":"Reinhard Koselleck has long been regarded as a particularly eminent theorist of socio-political concepts, while Hannah Arendt had not been in focus as a conceptual author until recent times. This article explores the common thinking space between Arendt and Koselleck through their thesis about the gap, rupture, crisis, or break in the tradition of political thinking and historical periods and how this is linked to their notion of conceptuality, i.e. Begreifen (understanding). Despite the impression that each of them focused on the one main break between the past and the future, Arendt and Koselleck both studied multiple breaks and crises in the Western political tradition. The article attempts to show how their distinctive thinking and rethinking of political concepts (Begreifen) are related to these breaks through several direct and indirect encounters and how these are both close and apart at the same time. While they have different concepts of politics and the political, their understanding of the breaks in time and crises can be read as complementary, especially considering their concern with returning the responsibility for actions and concepts to the human sphere.","PeriodicalId":41584,"journal":{"name":"FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42423454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Članek obravnava štiri forme oblastnih prijemov skozi pojmovno sprego dotika in oblasti, pri čemer se osredotoča na štiri strukturno prelomne primere, ki kažejo na proces spremembe dotičnega oblastnega razmerja, ki gredo od sekularizacije sakralnega preko modernega materializma do postmodernega vulgar-materializma: krščanski Noli me tangere; monarhični King’s Evil; materialistični Warenfetischismus; profani Grab-’em-by-the-pussy.
{"title":"Dotik oblasti: štiri forme perverznih oblastnih prijemov","authors":"Mirt Komel","doi":"10.3986/fv.42.3.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.3.09","url":null,"abstract":"Članek obravnava štiri forme oblastnih prijemov skozi pojmovno sprego dotika in oblasti, pri čemer se osredotoča na štiri strukturno prelomne primere, ki kažejo na proces spremembe dotičnega oblastnega razmerja, ki gredo od sekularizacije sakralnega preko modernega materializma do postmodernega vulgar-materializma: krščanski Noli me tangere; monarhični King’s Evil; materialistični Warenfetischismus; profani Grab-’em-by-the-pussy.","PeriodicalId":41584,"journal":{"name":"FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41398702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
By examining the idea found in the works of several contemporary philosophers that the multiplicity of worlds is no longer merely possible – as it was for Leibniz – but actually determines our experience of reality, the article proposes an understanding of worlds as transcendental structures that frame the ontological multiplicity. The article argues that such a proliferation of actual worlds implies that the concept of world should be seen today as a category that belongs to the order of fiction, making the world-building devices of literature relevant for understanding the contemporary experience of reality. The first part examines the conceptions of multiple worlds of Leibniz, Deleuze, and Badiou through the structural differences and similarities between possible and fictional worlds. While Deleuze actualises possible worlds, Badiou actualises fictional worlds. The second part explores worlds as political fictions, revisiting Kant’s conception of cosmopolitanism via Rancière’s definition of politics as a conflict of worlds. Rancière’s formulation of political dissensus in fictional and narrative terms sheds a new light on Kant’s description of cosmopolitanism as a perspective that presents history as a novelistic narrative.
{"title":"Worlds as Transcendental and Political Fictions","authors":"Rok Benčin","doi":"10.3986/fv.42.2.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.2.10","url":null,"abstract":"By examining the idea found in the works of several contemporary philosophers that the multiplicity of worlds is no longer merely possible – as it was for Leibniz – but actually determines our experience of reality, the article proposes an understanding of worlds as transcendental structures that frame the ontological multiplicity. The article argues that such a proliferation of actual worlds implies that the concept of world should be seen today as a category that belongs to the order of fiction, making the world-building devices of literature relevant for understanding the contemporary experience of reality. The first part examines the conceptions of multiple worlds of Leibniz, Deleuze, and Badiou through the structural differences and similarities between possible and fictional worlds. While Deleuze actualises possible worlds, Badiou actualises fictional worlds. The second part explores worlds as political fictions, revisiting Kant’s conception of cosmopolitanism via Rancière’s definition of politics as a conflict of worlds. Rancière’s formulation of political dissensus in fictional and narrative terms sheds a new light on Kant’s description of cosmopolitanism as a perspective that presents history as a novelistic narrative.","PeriodicalId":41584,"journal":{"name":"FILOZOFSKI VESTNIK","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46431400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}