Editors’ Introduction

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixty-first annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) hosted by Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on October 12–14, 2023. The SPEP 2023 plenary addresses were delivered by Rahel Jaeggi of Humboldt University of Berlin and Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò of Georgetown University. Jaeggi’s presentation, “Progress and Regression,” defended Critical Theory’s traditional pairing of these two concepts as a necessary tool for diagnosing and analyzing the crises of our times. Táíwò’s presentation, “The Point Is to Change It,” expanded on the constructive approach to politics developed in his recent book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (2022). Unfortunately, for various reasons, we are not able to include either of the plenary addresses in the present issue.The thirteen articles in this issue have been organized according to four broad groupings. The first set of papers, on “Varieties of French Philosophy,” address important themes in the work of three of the most influential and important French philosophers of the past half-century: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Michel Serres. Eric Aldieri, in “Infinite Speed, or the Metaphysical Basis for Deleuzian Epistemology,” argues that the Deleuzian concept of infinite speed plays a role in Deleuze’s epistemology similar to the role played by the concept of eternity in Spinoza’s epistemology. By carefully reconstructing Spinoza’s appeal to eternity as the foundation of adequate knowledge, Aldieri shows that although Deleuze is critical of how the category of eternity functions in Spinoza’s philosophy, his idea that thought operates at infinite speed functions in the same way as the condition of possibility of knowledge in Deleuze’s later work.Through a close reading of the formal correspondences between the ontological and logical structures of Deleuze’s theory of sense-events, M. Curtis Allen, in “Singularities and Genetic Structure in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense,” seeks to clarify the role of singularities in Deleuze’s early major works. Are they, Allen asks, physical, metaphysical, or logical primitives, or are they relational, formal, or functional indices? Are they the building blocks out of which things and thought are made, or are they points of degeneration that cause systems to break down? Ultimately, what Allen concludes is that these questions presuppose an opposition that Deleuze will not recognize because they both mistake singularities as states of affairs while for Deleuze singularities are events.In “Sense and Circumstance: Michel Serres on the Transcendental,” Brent Adkins argues that Serres’s account of the transcendental differs in important ways from the post-Kantian consensus that by transcendental, we refer to the general conditions of possibility. Such a view depends on understanding the difference between the conditions and the conditioned as the difference between the general and the particular, and this is where Serres intervenes by suggesting instead that the transcendental has nothing to do with generality; rather, it concerns particular circumstances coming together as contingent stabilities. Adkins concludes by suggesting that here Serres and Deleuze share common ground.Joshua Avery Dawson, in “Power Failure: Appearance and Change in Badiou’s Logics of Worlds,” has a two-fold task. First, he wants to show how William Watkin, in his groundbreaking work on Badiou’s Being and Event trilogy, offers an account of power that Dawson calls the “power of appearance” but fails to account for another function of power that Dawson calls the “power of change.” Moreover, if Watkin’s account of power in Badiou is accurate, and Dawson thinks it is, then this raises a serious problem for Badiou’s account of power insofar as these two modes of power are incommensurable, and this incommensurability may render Badiou’s notion of the event unviable.The topic of the second set of papers is “Varieties of Phenomenology,” which assesses anti-colonial phenomenology, early origins of French phenomenology, and cross-cultural phenomenology. In “Tran Duc Thao: The Foundations of Anti-Colonial Phenomenology,” Ernesto Blanes-Martinez examines the underappreciated work of Vietnamese Marxist phenomenologist Tran Duc Thao. Thao anticipates many of the later developments in critical phenomenology insofar as he was one of the first to mobilize phenomenology in a political context. Blanes-Martinez further suggests that Thao not only critically appropriates Husserl’s thought for transformative or liberatory purposes, but also draws from his teacher Merleau-Ponty’s account of lived experience to show that a political intervention must be experientially conditioned and respond to the very horizons it seeks to critique.Christian Roy’s article, “Prometheus Underground: Probing the Scientist in Depth as the Carnal First Act of French Phenomenology with Arnaud Dandieu and Claude Chevalley,” draws attention to the work of two early French phenomenologists who, he argues, began a distinctly French school of phenomenology grounded in embodied personhood decades earlier than the work of Merleau-Ponty. In their phenomenology of the scientist, rather than a phenomenology of science, Dandieu and Chevalley frame Husserl’s bracketing as the scientist’s “rational act of exclusion” that allows the scientist to go beyond what might be anticipated to make new discoveries. Insofar as they argue that such exclusion involves not just the intellect, but also the totality of the scientist’s personality, Roy suggests Dandieu and Chevalley’s collaboration be viewed as one of the earliest examples of carnal hermeneutics.David W. Johnson brings together the work of Japanese philosopher Kimura Bin and French phenomenologist Renaud Barbaras in “Life Between Bios and Zoē: Barbaras and Cross-Cultural Philosophy.” Intersecting Kimura and Barbaras’s philosophies reveals an account of life as caught up in the activity of the world that is not fully articulated in either of the two thinkers’ separate work. On Johnson’s reading, Kimura’s concepts of the individual life of the organism (bios) and life in all living things (zoē) parallel Barbaras’s notions of life as a movement (becoming) and as an event (individuation), providing a rich framework for understanding human life and the life of the world as an unfolding. As Johnson argues, while this activity is one of self-realization, it is a goal rather than a given. As such, the unfolding of life is capable of cultivation.The third set of papers, “Variations of Political Philosophy,” pulls together scholarship on colonial political ontology, connections between theology, political history, and violence, and attempts to locate a non-essentialist concept of sex in Heidegger’s philosophy. In “The Terror of the Foundation in Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Political Philosophy: A Critique of Political Ontology,” Julian Rios Acuña criticizes Castro-Gómez’s break with Foucauldian genealogy and his corresponding embrace of a normative political philosophy and political ontology. This occurs, Acuña argues, as a result of Castro-Gómez’s treatment of “the marginalized” as an ultimate political foundation, which returns to the very colonial logic that Castro-Gómez tried to escape. In dialogue with Franz Fanon and Frank B. Wilderson III, Acuña demonstrates how the ontologizing of civil society in Castro-Gómez’s work forecloses incommensurability and difference and thus replicates the terror of colonial foundationalism.Natasha Hay examines the relationship between theological concepts, political history, and intergenerational violence in “Unlearning Pauline Messianism: Prophetic Study and Historical Injustice in Walter Benjamin and Hermann Cohen.” Challenging Giorgio Agamben’s use of St. Paul to align Walter Benjamin with antinomian theology, Hay examines Benjamin’s inheritance of the work of neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. As Hay argues, Cohen reveals the Pauline-inspired distortion of Torah into “Law” instead of “Teaching,” which pervades secular Protestant culture’s misunderstanding of Jewish prophecy. The upshot, for Hay, is an appreciation of Benjamin’s theopolitics apart from Paul that both separates human law and divine justice and helps cultivate resistance to state violence.In “Mirages of Transition: Derrida and Malabou’s Search for a Heideggerian Sex,” Nora Fulton critically assesses the attempts of Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou to identify the thinking of sex in Heidegger’s philosophy. Whereas Derrida focuses on sexual difference in Heidegger’s preturn (Kehre) work and Malabou concentrates on sex change in Heidegger’s post-turn writings, both philosophers use Heidegger’s understanding of transition to challenge conventional understandings of his work as silent on the subject of sex and gender. As Fulton argues, however, Heidegger’s philosophy of transition is conservative, alien to the kind of transformational queerness that Derrida and Malabou seek. For Fulton, rather than read into Heidegger an account of sex and gender as malleable, contemporary philosophers need to face up to what they might wish not to find in his philosophy.The fourth set of papers, “Putting Marx to Work,” brings Marx’s political philosophy into conversation with Du Bois, Foucault, and Indigenous philosophies to examine issues of alienation, epistemic injustice, and dispossession under capitalism. In “Du Bois on Double Life: Du Boisian and Marxist Alienation,” Alexander Drusda reexamines the concept of alienation in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, demonstrating an overlooked complexity in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Rather than being an early liberal work distinct from Du Bois’s turn to Marxism in the second half of his career, Souls anticipates the Marxist concerns of Du Bois’s later work. As Drusda shows, in addition to Du Bois’s famous analysis of double-consciousness provided by the veil, Souls also examines the objective conditions of racial capitalism. For the young Du Bois, the alienation of Black consciousness was already part of the alienation of Black life that included the racialized material conditions of capitalism.Gordon Hull connects the work of Foucault with issues of epistemic injustice in “Structures and Subjects: Epistemic Injustice between Foucault and Marx.” Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s groundbreaking development of epistemic injustice, Hull critically investigates Fricker’s attempts to position herself between Foucault and Marx. As Hull argues, Foucault’s work aligns well with accounts of hermeneutic injustice while also helping Fricker avoid the standpoint Marxism that she claims to eschew. Working with examples involving data and privacy regulations, Hull emphasizes the institutional embeddedness of epistemic practices and power, which Fricker mistakenly resists but Foucault can help us realize.Finally, in “Primitive Speculation: Marx on Precapitalism, Social Relations to Land, and Indigenous Dispossession,” Wayne Wapeemukwa focuses on Marx’s post-1868 research on Indigenous Peoples and natural science. Wapeemukwa argues that Marx’s late-career work radically changes the way that we should think about his accounts of capitalism and history. Rather than a linear “historicity,” Marx provides an account of capitalism that developed unevenly via relationships with land and its dispossession. Since land is not a fungible commodity, decolonialization cannot take the form of merely transferring land to Indigenous Peoples. On Wapeemukwa’s reading of Marx, it also has to grapple with the destructive social relations that settlers imposed on land and to appreciate land as a “subject” in decolonizing processes.On behalf of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the editors would like to thank all the authors for allowing us to include their papers in this special issue. We would also like to express our gratitude to John Stuhr, general editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Astrid Meyer, Leah Noel, Rachel Anderson, and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy production staff at the Penn State University Press for their invaluable assistance with the publication process. Final thanks go to all the participants at our sixty-first SPEP conference in Toronto. Their outstanding scholarly work and lively intellectual engagements with each other contributed to a very successful conference despite all the curveballs the hotel threw at us.

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