Tag: continental philosophy

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.

Fragmentary Subjectivity and the Evolution of the Museum: Examining Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

This essay examines Walter Benjamin’s text, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) to explore how technological advancement transformed the socio-political function of art and severed its ties to religious tradition. Benjamin identifies the degradation of art’s ‘aura’ as a casualty of these changes. I review how Benjamin defines aura, as a sensation connected to art’s cult value, before considering the political implications of its decay. I demonstrate how mechanical reproduction fundamentally altered art’s function to enable a fragmentary construction of subjectivity. I then draw on Rosalind Krauss’ essay, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum” (1990), to demonstrate the cultural changes predicted by Benjamin decades earlier. Specifically, how the degradation of ‘aura’ led to a radical restructuring of the museum as a site which produces identity, moving from a temporal to spatial organising principle to accommodate a radically contingent and embodied subject.

The New Symbolic and How to Get There: Understanding Cixous’ Celebration of Libidinal Difference

In this paper, Conor Jedam interrogates Hélène Cixous’ work regarding écriture féminine and women’s libidinal difference. He engages with criticisms that raise concern that Cixous appeals to a feminine essence and works within the dominant patriarchal discourse. Ultimately, he argues that Cixous’ work ought to be read as a cultural critique and strategy for the construction of a new symbolic, which necessarily begins within patriarchy. He also raises concern about the accessibility of écriture féminine, as well as its reliance on notions of masculinity and femininity.

From Binary to Singularity: Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body and Queer Identities

For Monique Wittig, the political fight against hetero-patriarchal oppression requires work in writing to destroy the gendered language and concepts which justify and perpetuate this material reality. In this essay, Nicholas Scott explores the implications of Wittig’s project for queer identities, recognising that such subjects are often constructed with the language of gender. Rejecting a view that posits this as a tension, he argues instead that contemporary conceptions of queer subjectivities can be understood as a demountable bridge between the world Wittig diagnoses, and the one she wishes to create.

The Culture Industry: Fanaticism as Redemption

I present an argument for the capacity of fan-art (Fanfiction, visual art, etc.) to reclaim some cultural and creative autonomy from Adorno and Horkheimer’s vision of the culture industry. While never a total nor mainstream reclamation of art, I argue that fan-art proves that there is a desire in the masses to create meaning where there was none, for motives other than profit. I draw primarily on Adorno and Horkheimer, particularly “The Culture Industry,” alongside media scholar Henry Jenkins.

Kristeva and Lacan: The Maternal Semiotic and the Ethics of Subjectivity

This essay concerns Kristeva’s philosophical debt to Lacan. I argue that Kristeva’s contribution to psychoanalysis does not involve the wholesale rejection of Lacanian theory. I place specific emphasis on her notion of the maternal semiotic and relate it to Lacan’s notion of the symbolic. I then investigate how this forms the basis for Kristeva’s ideas related to feminist ethics, before addressing criticisms directed towards her purported essentialism.