Issue 14: Editor’s Note

Issue 14 | November 2026 Welcome to the tenth anniversary of the digital edition of Exordium! Exordium originally started as…

“Even in Another Time”: Benjamin, “Sappho,” and the Phenomenology of Aura

In this essay, Liv Evans takes an encounter with a Pompeiian fresco often associated with Sappho as an opportunity to place Walter Benjamin’s better-known and more polemical account of aura in conversation with his other writings on translation and history, as well as with a broader tradition of queer scholarship concerned with how we relate to an absent and fragmentary past. By complicating the apparent opposition between aura and reproducibility, Evans explores the possibilities that arise from reconceiving their relation as entangled and generative, suggesting that reproduction may be understood to emerge from and itself become a site of auratic distance. As this exploration unfolds, Sappho becomes both the imagined subject of the painting and a philosophical voice through which to think about the ethical and political significance of aesthetic and temporal relations, and about what auratic distance, when freed from institutional authority, might offer: the possibility of re-encountering, re-creating, and remembering, “even in another time.”

Por un futuro que es mío y mestizo

In this critical reflection I focus on themes of cultural identity and hybridity in the age of AI through an exploration of the challenges I faced when AI generating a CV to communicate my skills, my strengths, and most importantly, my story to a potential employer. This essay analyses the ways that AI perpetuates Western colonial frameworks and, in doing so, fails to capture the complexity of hybrid identities when crafting personal narratives. For a deeper understanding of the conflicting feelings that emerged through this process I turn to the work of Frantz Fanon and Gloria Anzaldúa. Through this reflection I explore both the depths of my hybrid identity and my opposition to any attempts to constrain this ‘mestizaje’.

Benevolent Anthropocentrism and the Problem of Selfishness

This paper investigates William Grey’s claim that a moderate conception of anthropocentrism is not only inevitable, but also conducive to the promotion of a thriving biosphere. It considers the underlying motivational externalist basis of Grey’s anthropocentrism and highlights a risked incoherence between Grey’s two premises: anthropocentric inevitability and prescribed benevolent action. Illuminating this tension, this paper questions the legitimacy of motivation as an appropriate yardstick for measuring the efficacy of a normative framework. It concludes that beyond mere arbitrary distinction, anthropocentrism fails as a compelling alternative to aspirational rationalist frameworks of environmental ethics.

What Gets Lost in Literary Translation: Walter Benjamin and the Limits of Meaning

Translation, frequently conceived as a technical operation concerned primarily with the identification of lexical and structural equivalents between languages, demands a more searching philosophical examination — one this paper undertakes through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” and, to a lesser extent, Benjamin Constant’s reflections on the cultural mediation inherent in all translation. Benjamin’s central contention — that translation is not a communicative act in any conventional sense but rather a mode of survival through which the original text persists in a transformed state, its afterlife constituted precisely by the loss and gain that translation entails — offers a framework for understanding why certain words resist straightforward transfer between languages. Drawing on this framework and supplemented by Constant’s recognition that rendering a text from one language to another is always shaped by the translator’s own cultural and historical position, I examine a series of translation challenges encountered in rendering Angela Slatter’s short story Ash from English into French. Lexical items such as “gainsay,” the phrasal construction “her kind,” and the declarative statement “I did not warm his bed,” resist translation — not because of any inherent linguistic complexity, but because they are embedded in culturally specific matrices of meaning: forms of life, to invoke Wittgenstein’s terminology, that are irreducible to other linguistic and cultural frameworks. These examples illuminate a broader philosophical claim, namely that untranslatability is not a failure of translators but a constitutive condition of language itself, and that translation, on this view, is not about carrying meaning across borders but about recognising the limits of what can be carried, marking the gap between worlds, and choosing to translate regardless.

Congratulations, You’re Included! Now, You’re Under Arrest: Arendt and Colonial Forms of Rightlessness

This paper offers a critique of Hannah Arendt’s account of the “right to have rights” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). While accepting Arendt’s claim that rights depend upon political belonging rather than humanity alone, it argues that her framework fails to capture rightlessness produced through coercive legal inclusion. The argument draws on Irene Watson and Sharon Venne’s critique of state-administered Indigenous rights, using the criminalisation and over-incarceration of Indigenous Australians to demonstrate that recognition by law does not necessarily restore political standing. Instead, colonial law can render Indigenous peoples visible primarily as subjects of policing and punishment while denying their authority as self-determining peoples. The paper concludes that Arendt’s account, including her analysis of assimilation, is sensitive to exclusion and defective belonging. Yet, settler-colonial rightlessness reveals a limitation: having rights requires not merely belonging to a political community but belonging as a people capable of self-determination.

How much does the practice of art change you? Applying Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Schiller’s Play Drive to Lived Experience

Jordyn Garvie examines whether artistic practice can offer a way out of the instrumental rationality diagnosed by the Frankfurt School. Drawing on Friedrich Schiller’s account of the play drive and Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Garvie reconstructs two competing pictures of aesthetic experience: one argues for a lasting transformation of the self, the other offering only temporary dissolution of individuation. Through a phenomenological case study from her own work as a visual artist, the essay argues that these are not rival claims but successive moments in a single process. Art thus emerges as a site where instrumental rationality is suspended, and the self is both undone and remade.

Essentialised Disruption? Rancière, Catholic Drag, and the Police Order

Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetics concerns what is sensible—that is what is visible, sayable, intelligible, and perceptible in a specific social order. This provides a framework for examining how aesthetic acts by marginalised peoples might reshape their position within society. In this essay, Mia Bock evaluates Jacques Rancière’s claim that aesthetic acts shape experience to create new modes of perception and forms of political subjectivity through a case study of a queer Catholic drag performance. Bock argues that although Rancière successfully demonstrates how aesthetic acts facilitate political subjectivisation through an agent’s enactments of their inherent equality, this does not mean that disruption necessitates a redistribution of the sensible. While aesthetic acts may indeed render excluded subjects visible, they do not always entail new intelligible possibilities. Where marginalised identities are already understood through stereotypes of disruptiveness, aesthetic disruptions may be interpreted as confirming rather than reconfiguring existing modes of perception.

Quietist Speech and the Phenomenological Sign

Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a novel and cutting criticism of philosophical realism. The ‘quietist’ critique finds fault with the discipline’s misuse of concepts outside of their relevant ‘language games.’ Instead, it calls for a philosophy that forgoes positing any form of explanation and, in lieu of doing so, limits itself to pure description. In practice, this is often taken up by withholding any positive theses about the ontological ‘state of things,’ and simply stating things ‘as they are.’ In this essay, Mikel van Dyken extends upon John McDowell’s and Paul Davies’ proposals of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl, respectively, as philosophers who manage to avoid the quietist critique. Van Dyken argues that while Kant and Husserl are largely successful in constructing a purely descriptive philosophy, they each make certain dogmatic explanatory assertions. Van Dyken then proposes Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the lived experience of the world as a productive philosophy which succeeds in avoiding the quietist critique.

Faith: Eschatological Hope and the Absurd

Kierkegaard’s treatment of the Akedah in Fear and Trembling has caused consistent confusion for ethicists and existentialists alike. In this essay, James Patterson advocates a reconsideration of the universal and absolute in Kierkegaard’s theory, and a subsequent criticism of 20th century responses. The inner workings of Abraham’s mind are a mystery to us, but we must take Kierkegaard’s attempt to unravel this display of faith seriously. Readings posited by Levinas and Derrida show compelling responses to Kierkegaard, however, they ultimately fail to realise the significance of eschatological hope – a state of mind that embraces a teleology founded on absurdity. Viewing faith as a function of eschatological hope is necessary to fully appreciate how belief sits not alongside, but above ethics.

When Freedom Learns to Bend: Adaptive Preferences and the Politics of Autonomy

This article examines the relationship between autonomy and adaptive preferences, arguing that prevailing philosophical accounts, such as those of Serene Khader and Natalie Stoljar, treat adaptive preferences too superficially. Standard approaches, such as those advanced by Khader and Stoljar, tend to frame adaptive preferences as either impairments of autonomy or as incompatible with basic flourishing. Drawing on cases of intimate partner violence (IPV), Sithara-Anne French exposes a key oversight in these models: the failure to account for the complex interplay between oppression, internalised stereotypes, and preference formation. While Stoljar’s psychological processes model recognises how oppressive contexts undermine critical reflection, French argues that it does not fully address the deep psychological harms such contexts produce. Similarly, she contends that Khader’s focus on expanding options overlooks how internalised oppression can obscure the perceived value of alternatives. French proposes an expanded framework for understanding adaptive preferences, one that recognises the unconscious mechanisms by which oppression shapes desires, while preserving respect for victims’ agency.

e-Withering: A Diachronic Analysis of Auratic Art in the New Age of Film and Livestreaming

In this essay, Xavier Woodgate argues against Walter Benjamin’s claim that film, as a mechanically reproduced work of art, no longer possesses an ‘aura’, and that, rather, having left the spotlight of contemporaneity that Benjamin thought of film in, it has achieved a historicity that has established an ‘aura’ for film. However, Woodgate does not eschew Benjamin’s claim against the loss of aura in mechanically reproduced works entirely, and he maintains it against some contemporary developments in the mechanical reproduction of art through a diachronic analysis of the evolution of film into livestreaming.

Between Seeing and Being Seen: Rembrandt’s Self-Portraiture and the Ethicality of Vision

This essay explores the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s self-portraits from both an art historical and philosophical perspective. In this essay, Andrew Millar argues that rigorous art historical analysis that situates Rembrandt’s self-portraiture within a blossoming, observable art historical tradition intersected with market demands and historically accurate trends in art does not exclude their philosophical, psychological analysis as some art historians claim. Rather, Millar draws from phenomenological art historical methods to argue that Rembrandt’s portraits function as an exploration and disclosure of the acts of seeing and self-recognition.

Conspiratorial Thinking: Can Alternative Facts be a Philosophical Position?

Science, and the epistemological position of scientific realism, hold a privileged position in culture, politics, and philosophy. The proliferation of science-oriented conspiracy theories, appears initially, to be a critique of this privileged position, akin in many ways to philosophical critiques, found in scepticism and quietism. However, conspiracy thinking critiques who holds privileged access to the external world, rather than there being access to a mind-independent world (scepticism), or the use of scientific thinking in philosophy (quietism). Victoria Lawson argues that science-based conspiracy theories, using Naomi Klein, are a political, not philosophical, critique of modern culture. Inside a given conspiracy-theorist denial claim – this scientific fact is incorrect – is a separate claim, that the scientist is ‘lying to them.’ This accusation of deceit is a denial that scientists are communicating to us, an accurate account of the world, which, we do feel unsettled by.

In the Shadows

Inspired by philosophers such as Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Kafka, this literary work explores key themes of Existentialism and Absurdism, uniting them to question what it truly means to live a meaningful life and whether the search for meaning can ever be a productive pursuit. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Thomas, the reader experiences the same torment that arises from this struggle. The work explores nihilism and despair, yet the conclusion seeks to uncover a more hopeful path, one that encourages a renewed pursuit capable of uplifting the reader and those who have faced, or are facing, thoughts of suicide.

Extending Adorno: The Culture Industry, Literature, and Language

While the majority of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s ‘The Culture Industry’ presents a diagnostic account of the culture industry’s institutionalising sameness as a by-product of modern capitalism, the final section undergoes a rapid and distinct turn towards linguistic analysis. In this essay, Melinda Herman argues that this shift in analytical target indicates a deeper relationship between the culture industry’s ubiquity and its effect on language – one that can be expanded upon to account for literature’s position in modern society. To do so, Herman extracts a holistic account of language under capitalism from ‘The Culture Industry’ and Adorno’s broader philosophy of language, arguing that the culture industry’s self-supporting sameness translates into a degradation of language’s meaning-making capacity. Words function representationally, designating things, not meaning. From this standpoint, Herman introduces an obscure essay by Adorno that ties literature’s formal function to its description of subjectively lived specificity. Herman concludes that this role is deeply problematised by hegemonic sameness that reduces the meaning-making capacity of language to a hollow representationalism at direct odds with its artistic function.