Florian Grosser
University of Chicago, The College, Department Member
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Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Social Philosophy, Moral and Political Philosophy, History of Political Thought, and 19 moreRefugee Studies, Migration Studies, Refugees and Forced Migration Studies, Philosophy Of Race, Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Political Phenomenology, Postfoundationalism, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Émmanuel Lévinas, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Art, 20th century Avant-Garde, Philosophy and Literature, Philosophy of Technology, and Philosophy of the City edit
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Within the vast reception history of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical thought poets, novelists, and playwrights have occupied a central place. This collection of essays opens up new perspectives by tracing the manifold, often surprising... more
Within the vast reception history of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical thought poets, novelists, and playwrights have occupied a central place. This collection of essays opens up new perspectives by tracing the manifold, often surprising ways in which Heideggerian concepts, motifs, and concerns have been taken up in literary and poetic writing since the middle of the 20th century. In their contributions, scholars from the Americas, Asia, and Europe explore intellectual constellations between Heidegger and selected literary figures such as John Ashbery, Julia de Burgos, Paul Celan, Elfriede Jelinek, and Velimir Khlebnikov.
The volume unveils the immense creativity that crystallizes in these poetic and literary traces and disseminations of Heidegger’s thinking. Hence, it points to new and fruitful ways to critically intervene in current philosophical and literary debates.
The volume unveils the immense creativity that crystallizes in these poetic and literary traces and disseminations of Heidegger’s thinking. Hence, it points to new and fruitful ways to critically intervene in current philosophical and literary debates.
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The contributions selected for this special issue address the topic of borders, bordering, and border regimes from a variety of thematic, methodological, and disciplinary perspectives. While normative political philosophy and theory... more
The contributions selected for this special issue address the topic of borders, bordering, and border regimes from a variety of thematic, methodological, and disciplinary perspectives. While normative political philosophy and theory rarely recognize borders as a discrete problem or operate with traditional conceptions that understand borders as static separating lines constitutive of territorial states, the texts assembled here seek to determine borders more precisely in their current forms and effects in order to develop alternative theoretical approaches on this basis. The central question is how the increasing mobility of borders – a mobility that is not only the result of newly configured politico-juridical measures and institutions but also of new control technologies – affects the understanding of state sovereignty, democratic legitimacy, or human rights.
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The contributions selected for this special issue address the topic of borders, bordering, and border regimes from a variety of thematic, methodological, and disciplinary perspectives. While normative political philosophy and theory... more
The contributions selected for this special issue address the topic of borders, bordering, and border regimes from a variety of thematic, methodological, and disciplinary perspectives. While normative political philosophy and theory rarely recognize borders as a discrete problem or operate with traditional conceptions that understand borders as static separating lines constitutive of territorial states, the texts assembled here seek to determine borders more precisely in their current forms and effects in order to develop alternative theoretical approaches on this basis. The central question is how the increasing mobility of borders – a mobility that is not only the result of newly configured politico-juridical measures and institutions but also of new control technologies – affects the understanding of state sovereignty, democratic legitimacy, or human rights. This introduction discusses certain significant phenomena of bordering that have recently been made particularly visible by the Covid-19 pandemic; it also outlines basic features of a new politico-theoretical thinking on borders. In addition, it provides synopses of the seven contributions to this special issue.
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This paper offers a critical analysis of the role of political theology in contemporary political praxis and theory. In particular, it examines the idea that a retrieval of politico-theological thinking can counter what some theorists... more
This paper offers a critical analysis of the role of political theology in contemporary political praxis and theory. In particular, it examines the idea that a retrieval of politico-theological thinking can counter what some theorists describe as the disorienting effects of 'postmodern relativism'. With a focus on the United States, the paper first shows that the political landscape there attests to an excessive political theology that is 'messianic' in structure and that carries markedly Schmittian traits on the level of its content as it detaches decisionmaking from prudential and ethical concerns. Subsequently, it argues that the fact that 'new political theology' in its currently dominant (messianic, decisionist, and conflictual) form is incompatible with cornerstones of what Hannah Arendt defines as 'real democracy' does not preclude a different return to conceptual resources provided by the politico-theological tradition: This productive alternative is elaborated with the help of Arendt's reinterpretation of two notions central to Schmitt's discourse, sovereignty and the miracle.
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The paper aims at showing the potential of a phenomenologically informed approach for contemporary debates on democratic legitimacy and community. While the role of affectivity has recently been reconsidered in social and political... more
The paper aims at showing the potential of a phenomenologically informed approach for contemporary debates on democratic legitimacy and community. While the role of affectivity has recently been reconsidered in social and political theory, phenomenological insights into affective moments of subject-and community-formation can contribute to further methodological refinement. Inversely, it is suggested that phenomenological analyses on subjectivity and intersubjectivity should be broadened so as to include what often remained a blind spot: the political dimension. Drawing on descriptive resources offered by Levinas, Waldenfels, and Esposito, the paper sets off to rehabilitate the concept of Betroffenheit, of concernedness or being concerned, which, historically, was at the center of conceptions of democratic politics before being removed from it. Questioning its unreserved 'juridization', it is argued that an affec-tive understanding of being concerned is relevant for re-describing the emergence of collective political agents: The shared response to an initial experience of being concerned opens up an alternative account of political processes that, venturing beyond issues of legitimacy and sovereignty, outlines the perspective of democracy out of shared concernedness.
[An English version has been published here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429259852/chapters/10.4324/9780429259852-5]
[An English version has been published here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429259852/chapters/10.4324/9780429259852-5]
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This article gives an overview of differing paradigms at the center of contemporary politico-philosophical discourses on forced migration. Focusing on two predominant approaches to refugee politics that revolve around the paradigms of... more
This article gives an overview of differing paradigms at the center of contemporary politico-philosophical discourses on forced migration. Focusing on two predominant approaches to refugee politics that revolve around the paradigms of inclusion and of alterity respectively, it reconstructs and, subsequently, critically assesses key assumptions and concepts these approaches build on as well as political positions they lead to and concrete policies they justify. In particular, the critique concentrates on their individualist bias, which is reflected in the emphasis of inclusion theories on the citizen as the essential, sovereign political subject and of alterity theories on the host as the essential, sovereign ethical subject. It will be argued that, as a consequence of this bias, the inclusion and alterity approaches run the risk of, among other things, reproducing and reinforcing asymmetrical relationships of power promoted by existing politico-legal regimes that regulate forced migration; regimes that tend to take refugees, both in terms of their (political and moral) consideration and their (political and legal) treatment, as a masse de manœuvre. It is against the background of this problematization that the final section of the article outlines an alternative way of thinking about refugee politics: Shifting to a communal angle, it points to possibilities of conceptually grasping modes of encounter, coexistence, and interaction between the long-established (i.e., citizens) and the new arrivals (i.e., refugees) – between ‘strangers’ who do not have a common political, ideological, or religious, historical, cultural, or ethnic ground ab initio. Based on a modified concept of solidarity – understood as synergetic, i.e. as a bond that emerges in common endeavors of ‘world-building’ – it thus suggests a reconceptualization of democratic citizenship and civil community consistent with present phenomena of migration.
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In light of the marked heterogeneity of the ways in which thinkers such as Thomas Paine (1737–1809), J.A.N. de Condorcet (1743–1794), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), Karl Marx (1818–1883),... more
In light of the marked heterogeneity of the ways in which thinkers such as Thomas Paine (1737–1809), J.A.N. de Condorcet (1743–1794), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), or Michel Foucault (1926–1984) reflect on the possibilities and conditions of radically transforming political and social structures, this entry concentrates on a set of key questions confronted by all these theories of revolution. Most notably, these questions pertain to the problems of the new, of violence, and of freedom, the problems of the revolutionary subject, the revolutionary object or target, and of the extension (both in the temporal and spatial sense) of revolution. In covering these problems in turn, it is the goal of this article to outline substantial arguments, analyses, and aporias that shape modern and contemporary debates and, thereby, to indicate important conceptual and normative issues concerning revolution.
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The paper concerns Hannah Arendt's attempt to identify both historical types and conceptual understandings of revolution that can be considered to be genuinely 'political.' Its aim is to first reconstruct Arendt's distinction between... more
The paper concerns Hannah Arendt's attempt to identify both historical types and conceptual understandings of revolution that can be considered to be genuinely 'political.' Its aim is to first reconstruct Arendt's distinction between 'political' and 'anti-political' processes and conceptions of profound, lasting transformation. In this section of the paper, it will be shown to what extent the critical distinction she proposes is informed by her understanding of (a) the role of the social question' and (b) the role of violence for the praxis as well as the theory of revolution. In a second step, the focus will be on the problematization of certain aspects of her critique of political revolution that lead, as will be argued, to the counter-intuitive exclusion of a variety phenomena and theories as properly revolutionary. The final part of the paper will hint at the possibility of a productive re-appropriation of Arendt's critique of political revolution.
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This article examines Niccolò Machiavelli‘s central political writings by means of asking whether his thinking is structured by an underlying concept of the political. In exploring the ways in which Machiavelli (a) addresses some of the... more
This article examines Niccolò Machiavelli‘s central political writings by means of asking whether his thinking is structured by an underlying concept of the political. In exploring the ways in which Machiavelli (a) addresses some of the basic conditions that determine the political realm and (b) reflects upon the conditions for practical success in this domain, the contours of an implicit, yet consistent concept of the political become apparent. It will be argued that, with regard to its content, this concept is
irreducible to the aspect of power. Instead, it is an element of care — or more specifically: ‘care of many‘ — that is characteristic of Machiavelli‘s understanding of the political and that decisively informs his considerations on both principalities and republics.
irreducible to the aspect of power. Instead, it is an element of care — or more specifically: ‘care of many‘ — that is characteristic of Machiavelli‘s understanding of the political and that decisively informs his considerations on both principalities and republics.
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For a prospective peer-reviewed cluster on Modernism/modernity's Print Plus platform, we seek proposals for original essays that analyze the role of art and culture in building modern worlds in the aftermath of revolutions. Situated... more
For a prospective peer-reviewed cluster on Modernism/modernity's Print Plus platform, we seek proposals for original essays that analyze the role of art and culture in building modern worlds in the aftermath of revolutions. Situated within the discourse of global modernisms, the transdisciplinary cluster probes whether there is something intrinsic to the post-revolutionary reconstructive moment that can be teased out through focused studies on contemporaneous constellations between the aesthetic and the political around the globe during the twentieth century.
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While the role of art as an agent of revolutionary disruption has attracted sustained attention among scholars, this session instead examines the ways in which artistic movements and individual artists have contributed to the... more
While the role of art as an agent of revolutionary disruption has attracted sustained attention among scholars, this session instead examines the ways in which artistic movements and individual artists have contributed to the establishment of new political, aesthetic, and social orders in the wake of mass upheaval. Based on the premises that art can itself be revolutionary and that revolution entails not only deconstructive moments but also an ongoing process of rebuilding, we explore how art has shaped post-revolutionary polities around the world between 1910 and 1930.
Individual papers address contemporaneous constellations between the aesthetic and the political from the perspective of specific sites of revolutionary transformation: China, Germany, Mexico, and Russia. Taken as a whole, the panel analyzes parallels as well as divergences in artistic strategies and practices that attempt to displace pre-revolutionary worldviews, institutions, and forms of (co-)existence. Conceived as a contribution to the study of global modernisms, it brings into dialogue pertinent approaches in art history, philosophy of art, and political philosophy. With attention to the constructive, emancipatory potential many artists believed to be inherent to revolutionary movements, we examine the kinds of worldbuilding that occurred in different regions around the globe. Ultimately, from the vantage point of 2020, this panel challenges the once widespread perception of the “failure” of the revolutions of the early twentieth century.
Individual papers address contemporaneous constellations between the aesthetic and the political from the perspective of specific sites of revolutionary transformation: China, Germany, Mexico, and Russia. Taken as a whole, the panel analyzes parallels as well as divergences in artistic strategies and practices that attempt to displace pre-revolutionary worldviews, institutions, and forms of (co-)existence. Conceived as a contribution to the study of global modernisms, it brings into dialogue pertinent approaches in art history, philosophy of art, and political philosophy. With attention to the constructive, emancipatory potential many artists believed to be inherent to revolutionary movements, we examine the kinds of worldbuilding that occurred in different regions around the globe. Ultimately, from the vantage point of 2020, this panel challenges the once widespread perception of the “failure” of the revolutions of the early twentieth century.
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"Within the vast reception history of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy – a history unfolding in academic circles, in the mediatized public, at times also in popular culture – poets, novelists, and playwrights occupy a central, albeit... more
"Within the vast reception history of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy – a history unfolding in academic circles, in the mediatized public, at times also in popular culture – poets, novelists, and playwrights occupy a central, albeit notoriously underestimated place. This seminar seeks to trace the manifold, often surprising ways in which certain Heideggerian questions, ideas, and terms have been taken up and disseminated in literary texts since the middle of the 20th century..."
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This article proposes a new, movement-oriented approach to theorizing borders. In contradistinction to politico-philosophical conceptions of borders as fixed and impassible, it points to historical and empirical evidence to show that... more
This article proposes a new, movement-oriented approach to theorizing borders. In contradistinction to politico-philosophical conceptions of borders as fixed and impassible, it points to historical and empirical evidence to show that borders are malleable, fluctuating, and constantly in motion. On this basis, it is further argued that dynamic processes of bordering are best understood in terms of circulation: Rather than preventing movement and establishing stable forms of inclusion and exclusion, borders are regimes of social circulation which regulate humans, labor, and taxes in the interest of ordering society and extracting an economic surplus. Drawing on Marx's concept of primitive accumulation, I subsequently redescribe borders as mobile tools of economic as well as social accumulation-of what I call "expansion by expulsion". In the final section, I examine how "expansion by (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) expulsion" operates under conditions of climate change so as to produce highly vulnerable and exploitable populations.