Gavin Rae

• Ph.D. Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Complutense University of Madrid

Judith Butler’s work has tended to be read through two axes: (1) an early gender theory/later ethical theory division, and/or (2) an ethical/political divide. In contrast, I aim to undercut both hermeneutical strategies by turning to her epistemology, as manifested through her analyses of normativity and “frames,” to argue that the latter acts as t...

This article defends Ernesto Laclau against the charge that his work, manifested most clearly in On Populist Reason, affirms an authoritarian politics to account for the genesis of collective identity. To outline this, I read Laclau’s thought through three logics – termed the logics of universal imposition, negation, and symbolic mediation – to arg...

This paper outlines and engages with Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘autoimmunity’ to argue that it offers a unique resource for understanding the potential for critique inherent in and resultant from the COVID-19 pandemic. I first offer a brief genealogy of the terms ‘immunity/autoimmunity’ to show how they operate in biological, philosophical, and s...

Michel’s Foucault’s later work has been the subject of much critical interest regarding the question of whether it provides a normative stance that prescribes how the self ought to act. Having first outlined the nature of the debate, I engage with Foucault’s comparative analysis of the ethical systems of ancient Greeks and Christianity to show that...

The Heidegger–Deleuze relationship has attracted significant attention of late. This paper contributes to this line of research by examining Deleuze’s claim, recently reiterated and developed by Philip Tonner, that Heidegger offers a univocal conception of Being where there is one sense of Being that is said throughout all entities. Although these...

This article defends Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler against the long-standing but recently reiterated charge that they affirm a linguistic idealism or foundationalism. First outlining the parameters of Lacan’s thinking on this topic through his comments on the materiality inherent in the imaginary, symbolic, real schema to show that he offers an a...

This paper engages with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of the sexed body in the Phenomenology of Perception . I focus on his notion of the sexual schema to show that, contrary to a number of feminist critiques, it does not (1) posit a neutral body overcoded by culturally-contingent sexual determinations or (2) erase the feminine body, but is infor...

This volume brings together an international array of scholars to reconsider the meaning and place of poststructuralism historically and demonstrate some of the ways in which it continues to be relevant, especially for debates in aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The book’s chapters focus on the works of Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray...

The Kristeva–Lacan relationship has been a difficult one, with commentators tending to either collapse the former into the latter or insist on an absolute division wherein Kristeva emphasizes the maternal function over Lacan’s privileging of the symbolic paternal law. In contrast, I argue that Kristeva’s actual position regarding Lacan and, by exte...

This article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler res...

While Freud and Heidegger were antipathetic towards one another’s ideas, a number of commentators have argued that the Freud–Heidegger relation is actually quite complementary. This paper contributes to this position by engaging with the relationship through the mediation of their respective views on the ‘origins’ of sexuality; a topic that is impl...

This chapter explores the ways in which Jacques Lacan and Cornelius Castoriadis understand the role(s) that violence plays in the formation of the individual. While the majority of the literature tends to focus on their accounts of the symbolic and imaginary to highlight the differences between them, this chapter claims that a different and more ha...

While Hannah Arendt claimed to have abandoned her early conception of radical evil for a banal one, recent scholarship has questioned that conclusion. This article contributes to the debate by arguing that her conceptual alteration is best understood by engaging with the structure of norms subtending each conception. From this, I develop a compatib...

While Western moral, philosophical, and theological thought has historically privileged the good, this has been accompanied by profound, if subterranean, interest in evil. This book charts a history of evil as it has been thought within this tradition. Showing that the problem of evil, as a conceptual problem—that is, as a problem to be dealt with...

Sovereign violence is a dominant issue in contemporary political theory and has attracted much attention from proponents of critical theory, biopolitics, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. While heterogeneous, these commentators are united in rejecting the classic-juridical conception that holds sovereignty to be indivisible and orientated tow...

Violence has long been noted to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Traditionally, however, philosophical discussions have tended to approach it through the lens of warfare and/or limit it to physical forms. This changed in the twentieth century as the nature and meaning of ‘violence’ itself became a conceptual problem. Guided by the co...

Long neglected, Schelling’s 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom has been the subject of renewed contemporary interest with scholars linking it to debates in ontology, psychology, and social philosophy. This paper argues, however, that its fundamental importance lies in bringing to our attention the way in which our m...

Those commentators who accept that Agamben offers an affirmative political project tend to hold that its realization depends upon pre-personal messianic or ontological alterations. I argue that there is another option based around the notion of individual agency that has received relatively little attention, but which clarifies whether or not Agamb...

In the early and often ignored 1934 essay ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’, Levinas identifies a historically dominant form of politics rooted in the ontological reduction of the other to the same that provides intellectual justification for physical violence against the other. The ethical relation aims to overcome this political violen...

The traditional interpretation of the Sartre-Derrida relationship follows their own insistence that they are separated by a certain irreducible distance. Contemporary research has, however, questioned that assessment, mainly by reassessing the thought of Sartre to picture him as a precursor to poststructuralism/deconstruction. This article takes of...

This chapter explores the instability of ‘the political’ through an analysis of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. While much work has been done on Levinas’s ethical theory, increasing attention is being paid to the political aspect of his thinking. By showing that Levinas’s notion of the political is intimately connected to the theological, I chart...

Despite, or quite possibly because of, the structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist critiques of subjectivity, master signifiers, and political foundations, contemporary philosophy has been marked by a resurgence in interest in questions of subjectivity and the political. Guided by the contention that different conceptions of the po...

Disley Liz . Hegel, Love and Forgiveness: Positive Recognition in German Idealism. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015. ISBN 978-1-848-93520-4 (hbk). Pp. 178. £95/$150. - Gavin Rae

While Levinas famously claims that ethics precedes ontology and emanates from the concrete experience of the other's face, it is often forgotten that Deleuze also discusses the face in numerous writings. The purpose of this paper is to briefly outline Levinas's arguments regarding the constitution of the face to chart its ethical importance, before...

n this book, Gavin Rae analyses the foundations of political life by undertaking a critical comparative analysis of the political theologies of Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas. In so doing, Rae contributes to key debates in contemporary political philosophy, specifically those relating to the nature of, and the relationship between, the theologic...

The question of nothingness occupies the thinking of a number of philosophers in the first half of the twentieth-century, with three of the most important responses being those of Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Surprisingly, however, there has been little discussion of their specific comments on nothingness either individual...

Interest in, and discussions of, the posthuman dominate contemporary thinking across a range of disciplines. By calling into question the nature and structure of the conceptual categories that structure thought in many areas, defenders of posthumanism have argued that “it” liberates us from the repressive thought processes associated with humanism...

Anthropocentrism is a concept with a long history. This chapter briefly outlines this history to identify what it entails and show its historical importance. It then engages with its ethical significance by, first, engaging with the ways its proponents have justified it, before, subsequently, examining a number of criticisms that have been made aga...

The theological turn in studies of Carl Schmitt is pronounced. This paper does not challenge this turn, but questions what theology means for Schmitt. Specifically, it challenges the assumption that Schmitt's political theology is grounded in divine revelation. By distinguishing between “theology in the sense of divine revelation” and “theology in...

Carl Schmitt’s use of the friend–enemy distinction to define the political is intimately connected to the question of how to define who is a friend and who is an enemy. This article shows that Schmitt bases it on the perceived threat posed by another. Because the political is social, this means that the political decision is intimately connected to...

In Of Spirit, Jacques Derrida claims that Heidegger's attempted deconstruction of metaphysical anthropocentrism remains anthropocentric and, as such, is inherently authoritarian. This paper takes up these charges to engage with whether Derrida is justified in coming to this conclusion. To do so, it briefly outlines Heidegger's critique of anthropoc...

The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the main philosophical roots of Donna Haraway’s thinking, an issue she rarely discusses and which is frequently ignored in the literature, but which will allow us to not only better understand her thinking, but also locate it within the philosophical tradition. In particular, it suggests that Harawa...

This groundbreaking book engages with the relationship between ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology in Heidegger and Deleuze. Showing that the latter are rooted in their respective ontologies not only provides a clear, detailed, and holistic outline of all three, but also reveals that Heidegger and Deleuze are highly critical of thinking that as...

Deleuze’s differential ontology is a sustained attempt to think and affirm difference as opposed to the unity of identity he insists philosophical thought has tended to privilege. However, by distinguishing between three senses of identity, termed identity of the identical, same, and common, I show that, while Deleuze’s differential ontology offers...

Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is central to his attempt to re-instantiate the question of being. This paper examines Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics by looking at the relationship between metaphysics and thought. This entails an identification of the intimate relationship Heidegger maintains exists between philosophy and metaphysics, an a...

While Jacques Derrida's influence on posthumanist theory is well established in the literature, given Martin Heidegger's influence on Derrida, it is surprising to find that Heidegger's relationship to posthumanist theory has been largely ignored. This article starts to fill this lacuna by showing that Heidegger's writings not only influences but al...

While it has long been recognized that the concept ‘alienation’ plays a crucial role in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and indeed his overall philosophical project, too often commentators simply note its importance without providing an in-depth discussion of this important concept. I aim to remedy this by providing an extended discussion of the ro...

This paper shows that while Sartre’s account of love relations in Being and Nothingness is famously conflictual, his Notebooks for an Ethics offers a far more positive account. It pays particular attention to the role that each lover’s pre-reflective fundamental project plays in shaping the content of stheir love relationship.

What is it to be human? What place do we have in the world? How should we live? What can we be? This book provides a comparative analysis of the response that Hegel and Sartre give to these questions and, in so doing, offers one of the first sustained, comparative studies of their thought available in the English speaking world. The discussion is w...

In this essay, I attempt to remedy the relative neglect that has befallen Sartre's analysis of social relations in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. I show that, contrary to the interpretation of certain commentators, Sartre's analysis of social relations in this text does not contradict his earlier works. While his early work focuses on individu...

While many commentators have held that the concept "alienation" is of crucial importance when attempting to understand human existence, others have held that it is an inherently empty concept that we should abandon. In this article, I refute the latters' charge by showing that each conception of "alienation" is underpinned by a normative ontologica...

This essay engages with Heidegger’s attempt to re-think the human being. It shows that Heidegger re-thinks the human being by challenging the way the human being has been thought, and the mode of thinking traditionally used to think about the human being. I spend significant time discussing Heidegger’s attempt before, in the final section, asking s...

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard outlines and defends a faithbased religious ethic, belief in which justifies transgressing the universal ethical norms of the community. In contrast to certain commentators who maintain that Kierkegaard's argument is about the individual's relation to God, I understand that this aspect of Kierkegaard's argument is...

Herbert Marcuse is a thinker associated with one of the most radical and totalising critiques of modernity ever produced. Marcuse maintains that contemporary capitalist society is a one-dimensional prison that is capable of perpetuating itself by incorporating any criticism into its logic. Despite this totalisation, Marcuse insists that the realm o...

Sartre's phenomenological ontology discloses that understanding consciousness and its mode of being requires an analysis of its relation with other consciousnesses. The primordial manner in which the Other relates to consciousness is through the look. Sartre claims that consciousness tends to adopt a pre-reflective fundamental project that leads it...