Azafea: Revista de Filosofía

Credits

Secretaría de Redacción Azafea — 2024-10-16

Cirilo Flórez Miguel, in memoriam

Roberto Albares — 2024-10-16

Romero, Javier. Democracia ecológica. Entre la sociedad civil y el Estado ecosocial democrático de derecho. Barcelona: Horsori Editorial, 2024, 175 pp. ISBN: 978-84-17994-90-7

María G. Navarro — 2024-10-16

Hernández Marcelo, Jimmy. Fenomenologia dei margini. Derrida allievo di Husserl. Milán-Údine: Mimesis, 2024, 210 pp. ISBN: 9791222307022

José Juan Palomo del Rey — 2024-10-16

Giménez Mateu, Francisco. Utopía, distopía y estética. Análisis fílmico de “El cuento de la criada”. Castelló de la Plana: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I. Servei de Comunicació i Publicacions, 2023, 245 pp. ISBN: 9788419647085

Marta Castanedo Alonso — 2024-10-16

Laleff Ilieff, Ricardo. Poderes de la abyección. Política y ontología lacaniana I. Prólogo de Fabián Ludueña Romandini. Barcelona/Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila Editores, 2022. 136 pp. ISBN: 09788418929830

Leonela Infante — 2024-10-16

Hannah Arendt. Politics and Philosophy

Antonio Gómez Ramos — 2024-10-16

The Call of the Wild

Jocelyn Benoist — 2024-10-16

Prima facie, the idea of sustainable development seems to bring in a limitation to the absolute power of modern subjectivity. On closer examination, however, it reveals itself to be the necessary detour for the reign of this subjectivity, following the principle of the economic rationality of the Moderns. The author discusses the limits of the anthropocentrism inherent in such a perspective, and opens up another, metaphysical, meaning of sustainability, which inscribes in the subject the awareness of belonging to a reality which, in some of its aspects, may surpass him, and with which he is not always in solidarity. In so doing, he moves away from a «New Realism» that can be characterized as neo-humanism, which, under the guise of overcoming subject/object dualism, maintains the essential presuppositions of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity –and thus a conceptual framework beyond which the ecological question today invites us to think–.

The evidence of Epicurean πρόληψις and its Practical Scope

Javier Aoiz Monreal — 2024-10-16

This paper discusses the Epicurean preconception and the issues related to its acquisition and function (both in theoretical and practical domains). The authors argue that in the Epicurean contractual model justice is regarded as a modality of the useful and that the preconception of the just is a canon that validates the laws in the political communities. They also examine the link between language and justice in Epicureanism, focusing first on the role of language in the Epicurean genealogy of justice and, second, on the connections between language learning and the prolepsis of the just in constituted political communities. In this vein, they hold that language learning is a relevant ingredient of experience for understanding the empirical genesis of the Epicurean preconception.

Minima Moralia and the Experience of Late-style

Antonio Castillo Ávila — 2024-10-16

In order to give a right and just interpretation of Minima Moralia in relation with its methodological particularities, this paper puts forward the necessity of carefully rethinking the dialectical relationship between «form» and «content» in Adorno’s work. The dilucidation of the particular ways in which this relationship functions within each text is considered in these pages as one of the fundamental keys to gain a correct intellection of the texts by Adorno. This paper shall try a reading of Minima Moralia in which the inmmanent criticism of the modern subjective form through its alienated means of expressions is activated. In doing so, the adornian cathegory of «late style» will be of great help. This reading of Minima Moralia also tries to show the fundamental continuity of the same conditions of subjetivization throughout the whole modern-capitalist period, based on the hegemony of «value law» as the general form of socialization.

Minor art as production of groups, machines and/or assemblages: the meaning of an “aesthetic” in Félix Guattari between 1955 and 1980

Jesús Ayala-Colqui — 2024-10-16

This article problematizes the meaning of an “aesthetic” in the work of Félix Guattari. Unlike the existing bibliography that focuses on Deleuze’s work, on the joint work of Deleuze and Guattari and on Guattari’s late notion of aesthetic paradigm, here we propose alternatively to deal with the French militant’s early period. Since references to art run through the totality of his writings, it is a double movement here: to delimit the multiple indications on art (and aesthetics), as well as to link them to the rest of the Guattarian discursive universe. Our research question is therefore the following: what conceptualization of art does he envision for himself between 1955 and 1980? For this purpose, we divide the text into three sections: a problematizing introduction, a body where we chronologically visit the texts in order to obtain the meanings of a possible “aesthetics” and a closing by way of conclusion.

Incompleteness: Remarks on Arendt's Method

Wolfgang Heuer — 2024-10-16

Hannah Arendt is commonly criticized for defining action as an end in itself, of horizontal power and of councils as an alternative to representative democracy that is unrealistic and unrealizable. In contrast, I show how much Arendt was concerned about the dangers of these concepts: the replacement of action by fabrication, of power by domination and violence, and the impossibility of a council democracy in the face of a highly administrative and depoliticized society. Arendt shows how these hybrid forms revealed their pure forms as a hidden tradition in revolutionary situations. The supposed incompleteness and failure of a struggle for another society can therefore be understood as a recurring possibility and reality and thus as a specific condition of the political. The critique of the hybrid form also includes the critique of modern scientific thought and political thought.

«I want to understand», notes on Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi

Fina Birulés — 2024-10-16

Understanding and narration can be considered the center of gravity of the work of Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi. Although both used a different interpretive apparatus and started from different life experiences, this article aims to highlight the points of contact between the thoughts of both authors, particularly with regard to their approach to understanding and responsibility, to the place that passions such as indignation or hope occupy in his work. Likewise, it tries to show parallels and links between the type of approach that the two thinkers make of the moral collapse produced by Nazism.

KEYWORDS: Understanding; Narration; Contingency; Hope; Indignation; Totalitarianism; Lager; Hannah Arendt; Primo Levi

Arendt as Husserl’s Pupil

Agustín Serrano de Haro Martínez — 2024-10-16

My essay reconstructs the university course taught by Edmund Husserl that the young Arendt listened to in the winter semester 1926/27 in Freiburg. These ‘Introduction to Phenomenology’ lectures have not received attention either from the secondary literature on Husserl, since we only have fragments of the course, or from the literature on Arendt, which assumes that they were irrelevant to her philosophical trajectory. The course did, however, offer a deep immersion in the mature configuration of phenomenology and included an advanced discussion of the problematic of embodiment and intersubjectivity. This allows for a fresh look at the possible latency of Husserlian motifs in important themes of Arendt's thought. Such a possibility is suggested here through five final hypotheses, culminating in The Life of the Spirit's meditation on the phenomenal nature of the world.

The Transformative Potential of the Body:Arendt and the XXth Century Afro-American and French Caribbean Thought Towards Love as a Political Stake

Nuria Sánchez Madrid — 2024-10-16

This paper aims to inspect the reasons which Arendt uses to reject love as a source of political activity, as she rather views it as a passion impeding the human beings to take care of a common world. I undertake this aim by engaging into a dialogue between Arendt and some voices stemming from the black movement for civil rights and the Afro-American feminism of XXth century. My main aim is to highlight sundry blind spots of Arendt’s appraisal of love taking into account the contributions that James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde and bell hooks made to this issue. This dialogue underscores the political potential of body and emotions to shape new civil frameworks in societies historically hit by racial violence, insofar as both unfold telling transformative features to endeavor a normative reexamination of the universal right to political agency.

Notes on Hannah Arendt as Cultural Historian

À. Lorena Fuster Peiró — 2024-10-16

This article aims to open a line of research to explore in what sense the methodology and some of Hannah Arendt’s works can be interpreted as forms of cultural history. This first incursion will be carried out, in particular, from the study of three writings that coincide at the time of their publication: Rahel Varnhagen (1957), The Human Condition (1958) and «Culture and politics» (1959). All three deal with the topic of the relationship between culture and politics from different angles: from the link between the socialization of culture and Jewish assimilation, from the position of art in the activities of the vita activa and from her political theory and her reflections on the crisis in the culture.

Citizens’ Councils in Contemporary Democracies: Arendtian Proposals

Cristina Sánchez Muñoz — 2024-10-16

The text addresses the contemporary crisis of representative democracy and explores alternatives such as popular councils from Hannah Arendt's perspective. It examines the different forms of councils throughout her work and highlights the various purposes they serve. The second part of the paper focuses on presenting two examples of popular councils in an Arendtian sense: the 15M movement in Spain and the Constituent Assembly in Chile in 2020. Both processes reflect the challenges Arendt foresaw in her analysis of councils.

«So Many Ways of Singing the World»: Reflections on Transborder Movement, Common Speech, and Care for the World with Arendt and Merleau-Ponty

Maria Robaszkiewicz — 2024-10-16

Today, in times of intensification of migratory mobility around the world, and hence multiplication and diversification of languages spoken in and on the margins of the communities we inhabit, sharing a language is less and less a matter of course. In this paper, I examine practices of speaking to each other under the condition of lack of a common language, i.e. situations in which no foundation for verbal communication is given but also translingual communication using proximity of languages, as well as mediated speaking. Theoretically, I primarily depend on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language and Hannah Arendt’s political and existential reflections on speech.

Sorge and Prosopopoeia: Arendt after Goethe, Goethe with Arendt

Javier Sánchez-Arjona Voser — 2024-10-16

The last book Arendt planned to write, Judging, was supposed to close the trilogy on The Life of the Spirit. The project was reduced to a paratext consisting of a title and two quotations, one of them taken from the fifth act of the second part of Goethe's Faust. The present article proposes a reading of the context of this quotation with Arendt's work in order to clarify why it would have made sense to include precisely this quotation as an opening of the never-written volume. Far from being read, with Arendt, only as an example of a totalitarian dictator, the character of Faust can also be read from another political perspective. His dispute with the allegory of restlessness and healing, the Sorge, presents us with a figure about to become a person capable of reflection and therefore judgement: a mask with a voice of his own.

Arendt and Hegel: A Political Philosophy versus Philosophy of History

Borja Lucena Góngora — 2024-10-16

In her reflection on politics, Hannah Arendt was forced to realize the importance of Hegelian philosophy for the modern conception of human affairs. The purpose of this article lies in the analysis of the ambivalent nature, with respect to the political, that Arendt locates in Hegel’s thought. According to Arendt, in Hegel there is, on the one hand, a rehabilitation of politics, given that the German thinker definitively undoes the metaphysical conviction that no truth belongs to the sphere of action; However, and at the same time, certain results are achieved that tended to be fixed in an anti-political concept of human affairs, adjusted to certain dominant paths in Modernity. In Hegel, in short, the modern promises of politics, but also its risks, paradoxes and blind alleys, are presented in the same gesture.