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Review of Heather Murray’s «Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture»
The author reviews Heather Murray’s monograph «Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture» (2022), which traces shifts in the cultural perception of psychiatric patients’ experience in the United States over the twentieth century, focusing on the term “asylum” and the ambivalence of psychiatry as an institution. The review shows how changes in emotional culture shaped the re-evaluation of patients’ behavior — from an ideal of calm to the figure of the “automaton” — outlines the book’s methodological framework and body of sources (including the “therapeutic archive” and mass culture), and discusses limitations related to the fragmentary and anonymized nature of archival materials, as well as the analytical burden placed on the category of “patient community”. The review concludes by emphasizing the book’s contribution to the history of American psychiatry and the history of emotions, while acknowledging these methodological caveats.
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The formation of the clinical examination. The rise of the textbook and case writing in psychiatry in German-speaking countries (1875-1900)
The article investigates the function of textbooks for the formation of clinical psychiatry in German speaking countries from 1875-1900. It argues that textbooks were supposed to play a crucial epistemic role for directing clinical observation. For this reason psychiatrists like Emil Kraepelin devoted much time and effort to writing and rewriting textbooks. Their rhetoric can be linked to différents nosological positions and practises of case writing.
«And I'm afraid I won't get out alive»: Illness and Unfreedom in Psychiatry
Ever since Michel Foucault detailed the connection between psychiatric diagnosis and the cultural-historical paradigm, it has become poor form to think of a diagnosis as analogous to lung cancer or kidney stones. The organic paradigm of clinical psychiatry seemed to have been shaken, replaced by humanistic approaches inspired by existentialists such as Martin Heidegger or Jean-Paul Sartre. However, this discovery has had almost no impact on institutional psychiatric practices. The foundation of psychiatric treatment is still considered to be pharmacotherapy, and the most funded research in the field is pharmacological. Occupying a secondary role in this partnership is cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which nonetheless presents itself as the predominant evidence-based paradigm for understanding the human psyche. CBT is considered most effective in treating depression and anxiety disorders. The cognitive-behavioral approach forms a specific theoretical understanding of a person, defining their place in the world and showing the limits of their influence on it. A basic premise of cognitive-behavioral therapy is positivity, an aim for proactive thinking free of logical errors, thus focusing on the individual's conclusions about reality. By working with these, the psychotherapist teaches the client correct thinking, thereby curing the illness. The illness, in this framework, is conceived as that which imposes a limitation on a person's freedom of thought. A person is free when they can think correctly and is dependent when errors are present in their thinking. Thus, modern psychiatric and psychotherapeutic discourse can be conceptualized as part of the broader philosophical debate on freedom and determinism (the subordination of humans to biology, physics, or logos). By introducing a social approach to psychiatric diagnosis, Foucault did not overcome this debate but complicated it, adding another variable to the equation: society, which defines the criteria of health and sickness. So, psychotherapeutic discourse has repeatedly only made a person dependent, but the point is to liberate them.
Language as Violence: Beyond the Immanence of Orthodox Psychiatry. On the Emergent Nature of the Symptom and the Transcendent in the Experience of Patient and Specialist
The article offers a detailed critique of the epistemological foundations of orthodox psychiatry through the lens of an analysis of its language. The authors show how psychiatric discourse, being a closed immanent system, perpetrates symbolic violence against the patient by constructing a pathological identity and ignoring the patient’s unique ontology. Such an approach proves untenable when working with complex cases involving the aftermath of destructive social constructs, violence, or high comorbidity. As an alternative, the authors propose a functional-phenomenological approach that integrates ideas from R. D. Laing and Arnhild Lauveng, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, and the principles of object-oriented ontology. Using a detailed clinical case, they demonstrate that productive symptomatology should be interpreted not as an internal illness, but as an emergent property of the “patient — environment” system and as an encoded existential message. Thus, clinical practice shifts from “treating the patient” to transforming the entire network of actors that generates “madness”. This requires the specialist to adopt the position of a “conscious solitary sailor” capable of working under conditions of epistemological uncertainty. The authors conclude that the future of psychiatry lies in creating conditions for the deconstruction of the old discourse and the development of new linguistic models that invite the patient to change the very structure of their being, rather than simply fitting them into the health/illness binary.
Mad Travelers: Ian Hacking’s Concept of Transient Disorders
This article reconstructs Ian Hacking’s concept of transient mental disorders and proposes it as a methodological tool for analyzing the ontological status of psychiatric categories. The authors argue that Hacking’s model reframes the realism/social constructivism debate in psychiatry in terms of historical ontology: a diagnosis becomes real not only through the identification of symptoms, but through the stabilization of a configuration comprising (a) observational practices, (b) procedures of clinical validation, (c) institutional rules, and (d) culturally available scripts of self-understanding. Central to this account are dynamic nominalism and the looping effect, which describe how classificatory practices shape people’s conduct and reflexive self-understandings and how these responses, in turn, generate pressures to revise the classifications themselves. The conclusion outlines the epistemological implications of Hacking’s approach for critiques of psychiatric taxonomy and specifies the limits of its applicability.
Clinical Epistemology in Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966): Psychiatry as a «Science of the Singular»
The author examines the epistemological foundations that shaped the emergence of existential psychiatry and argues that its methodological choices developed in response to a theoretical need grounded in clinical demands. The article reconstructs and analyzes Ludwig Binswanger’s methodological intuitions in order to clarify the structure of «clinical epistemology» — a problem field in which the structure of patients’ experience confronts psychiatry’s scientific need for generalization. The conclusion discusses the practical implications of these commitments for therapeutic work, focusing on how they reshape modes of clinical description and symptom interpretation, as well as the boundary between the individual case and the theoretical articulation of psychopathological experience.
This article examines how critiques directed at psychiatry gained renewed momentum in the aftermath of the events of May 1968. Its aim is to assess the extent to which a moment that has become so significant in our collective imagination can be situated within the longer history of the contestation of psychiatry — a chronology that does not coincide with that of purely political events. The article focuses on the positions of two psychiatrists, the Italian Franco Basaglia and the French Henri Ey. Although their professional trajectories and perspectives differed, both engaged with questions of psychiatric power, medicalization, and the social normalization of behavior — topics that were widely debated in the period following the protest movements of the late 1960s.
Dreaming of the Clinic. The Münsterlingen Nurses’ Dream Collection
This article examines a corpus of dream reports produced by nurses at the Münsterlingen psychiatric hospital (Canton Thurgau, Switzerland), compiled by the psychiatrist Roland Kuhn between the 1950s and the 1980s and incorporated into psychotherapy documentation. It argues that these dream narratives — mediated through a layered documentary chain (clinical dictation, secretarial typing, and filing in patient records) — constitute a distinctive historical source not of «raw» subjectivity but of the clinical and therapeutic order that renders experience reportable and interpretable. Through recurring motifs and selected cases, the article traces how institutional role boundaries become porous: nurses appear at once as employees and as therapeutic subjects, while the clinic’s head occupies the intersecting positions of therapist and administrator. Finally, it shows how, amid power asymmetries and chronic staffing pressures, organisational problems and moral expectations are reframed in psychotherapeutic terms and take on a disciplinary valence. In this sense, the dream archive is approached as an interface where therapeutic work, epistemic practices, and modes of institutional governance converge.
Concepts of Healing in Early Psychoanalysis
This article examines the concepts of healing in the works of three psychoanalysts of different theoretical orientations — Zigmund Freud's, Sándor Ferenczi's and Wilhelm Reich' s, — who address the question of healing primarily in terms of resolving clinical difficulties. The key question of the article: what does psychoanalysis accomplish in relation to the suffering, the patient himself can do nothing about? It substantiates why this question should be considered decisive, preceding psychoanalysis and continuing to exist apart of it. For comparative analysis, the general landscape of Freud's early thought prior to and at the inception of psychoanalysis is provided, where healing is served as a springboard for the establishment of psychoanalytic theory. The second and third chapters are devoted to Freud's later reflections on the therapeutic potential of psychoanalysis and his conflict with his colleague, analysand, and student, Sándor Ferenczi. The Ferenczi's position is described through the concept of "psychoanalytic soteriology," prompted by the limit of clinical results and dissatisfaction with the Freud's "therapeutic realism" in his post-war works. To resolve this epistemological issue, the works of Reich, presented as a psychoanalyst and activist who resolves the conflict between Freud and Ferenczi, but with the consideration of the challenges of his epistemological, clinical, and political experiments. Analysis uncovers the underlying polemic that determines the contemporary engagement with psychoanalytic epistemology in the context of therapeutic culture's development and a heightened discontent with suffering.
Objectifying the Phenomenal in Experimental Psychology: Titchener and Beyond
This paper examines Titchener’s notion of stimulus error in the experimental study of mental experience. It places Titchener’s introspective methods into the intellectual world of early experimental psychology. It follows the subsequent development of perceptual experimentation primarily in the American literature, with notice to British and German studies as needed. Subsequent investigators transformed the notion of a specifically stimulus error into experimental questions in which subjects’ attitudes toward their perceptual tasks became independent variables to be manipulated experimentally. Ultimately, these manipulations supported a distinction between accessing phenomenal as opposed to cognitive aspects of subjects’ responses to stimulus objects.
The Pass of Psychoanalysis: From the End of Analysis to New Analytic Forms
The article proposes a new approach to conceptualizing Lacan’s theory of the pass as a mechanism that links the end of individual analysis, the training of analysts, and the transformation of analytic institutions. It formulates three key theses according to which the political dimension of psychoanalysis is determined primarily by the regimes of training and the reproduction of analytic practice rather than only by conditions of access to analysis, and shows that changes in the social composition of analytic schools have direct epistemological consequences for the theory itself. Drawing on contemporary clinical initiatives and theoretical debates, the article rethinks classical Lacanian categories (the signifier, the Other, interpretation, the Real) from the standpoint of analytic listening and introduces the notion of “analytic egalitarianism”, which underscores the decisive role of the distribution of the capacity to listen within the clinical space. The pass is treated not as a final act of analyst authorization but as a specific form of analysis that links singular analytic trajectories to the collective task of restructuring the analytic community. The article concludes by arguing for a political project aimed at institutional change within the Lacanian field and at the creation of new analytic forms.
Discussing the clinical efficacy of psychoanalysis: ideological stakes and current empirical studies
The article addresses the issue of the clinical efficacy of psychoanalysis, which occupies a central place in contemporary discussions of its scientific and therapeutic validity. The author critiques the ideology of contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysis, which interprets the “undemonstrability” of efficacy as a value and as proof of autonomy from the capitalist logic of productivity. Arguing against this position, the author substantiates the possibility of empirically studying the clinical efficacy of psychoanalysis without compromising its theoretical specificity and without being automatically reduced to capitalist practices. To this end, the author conducts a critical analysis of the argumentation within contemporary Lacanian discourse and of Lacan’s classical thesis on the analyst’s desire as a “desire not to heal”, followed by a review of current empirical data, including meta-analyses and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) devoted to psychoanalysis and long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy (LTPP). The author demonstrates that the a priori rejection of the possibility of empirically testing the efficacy of psychoanalysis is based on logical fallacies, while recent RCTs and meta-analyses show statistically significant positive effects of LTPP in complex mental disorders, comparable to the results of cognitive-behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy. The article thus shows that the empirical demonstrability of psychoanalysis in no way undermines its status and need not function as a way of its reduction; on the contrary, it may ultimately prove useful for a clearer articulation of its specificity. Clinical effectiveness, therefore, appears to be no less well substantiated for psychoanalysis than for most other psychotherapies, and the question of effectiveness is proposed as a potential site of emancipation — rather than, as standard Lacanian dogma suggests, a domain logically incompatible with psychoanalysis.
Deliberative Practices in Psychotherapy and Transdisciplinary Communicativity
The epistemology of psychotherapeutic knowledge is developing as an integrative field that encompasses the intersection of the philosophy of science, psychology, and various helping practices. This contributes to the expansion of therapeutic concepts, enabling a deeper understanding not only of the complexity and dynamism of the psyche but also of the system of cultural relations. In this context, the epistemological problems of psychotherapy are closely linked to the crisis of the mental sciences, the methodological split between theoretical science and practice, and the expansion of psychotherapeutic practice into cultural space. In addition to specific questions, a meta-problem is becoming relevant: is psychotherapy an applied discipline within psychological science or does it represent a new form of knowledge with specific epistemological foundations. Changes in the cognitive and social status of psychotherapy are supported by the processes of global consolidation of Big Psychology, aimed at clarifying the place of the individual in the world, integrating knowledge and cooperation among actors, and using contextually personalized approaches to address contemporary challenges. In this context, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research opens up new epistemological perspectives, which is particularly important given the insufficient substantive and methodological development of psychotherapy research. Despite the undeniable value of such research, problems remain with overgeneralization or excessive specificity of research approaches, which makes it difficult to capture the lived experience of development. The current focus of psychotherapy problematization is not so much the effectiveness of methods as the professional and personal development of psychotherapists. The uniqueness of this article lies in its concretization of the idea of developing psychotherapists who strive to recognize their mistakes and limitations, drawing on the experience of deliberative practices. The principles of deliberation as purposeful development were identified through studying the activities of highly effective professionals who make decisions based on careful consideration and discussion, which also corresponds to the practice of transdisciplinary projects with social significance. It is shown that both the aspects of deliberative practices (professional and social) mutually enrich each other.
What does it mean to construct a perspective in the psi sciences? By what means does the psychic become observable — both for the researcher, in the form of data, descriptions, and classifications, and for the subject herself, in the form of a habitual language of self-description? What techniques of observation and self-observation, what criteria of truth, and what institutional procedures render the psyche visible — and thereby constitute it as an object of knowledge and therapeutic intervention? The thematic issue «Constructing a Perspective: Epistemology of the Psi Sciences» was conceived precisely as an inquiry into these mechanisms: how knowledge of the psychic emerges, becomes stabilized, is transmitted, contested, and — most importantly — how it reshapes its own objects. Our concern is not with the competition among schools, nor with the history of the search for the «best method», but with the organization of regimes of observation and regimes of discourse that determine what counts as a fact and what as an error, what is recognized as care and what as violence; where the boundary between description and evaluation is drawn; and how evidentiality, authority, and responsibility are configured within the spaces of the therapeutic office, the laboratory, and the clinic.
Ontical Drift: the Amphibious Ruins between Cultural Techniques and Non-Being
«If media theory were or had a grammar, that agency would find its expression in objects claiming the grammatical subject position and cultural techniques standing in for verbs», writes Cornelia Vismann of the prolific subgenre of media theory known as cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken). Cultural techniques attempts to approach media not as ontological objects, but through their conditions of representation as a network of operations — their so-called onticity. Strikingly, it seeks to account for multiple cross-cultural accounts of the making of man, or hominization, in the space between land and sea. Here, the ship emerges as a primary object of analysis: for example, Bernhard Siegert’s claim that in maritime Trobriands society, a myth of flying witches conditions the technological seaworthiness of the canoe. As such, the human emerges from the inhuman. I take up Vismann’s invitation to examine cultural techniques’ «grammar» through a comparative study of another grammar — what Hortense Spillers names an American one. Spillers’ «Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book» provides an alternate formulation of the sea’s foundational potential, locating the symbolic order of America at the scene of the Atlantic slave trade. While the study of cultural techniques often moves from myth to historical analysis, I interrogate what happens when the domestication of human bodies aboard the slave ship results from history — yet never culminates in the human. By this I mean that the slave, made chattel and fungible, never arrives at personhood under landed law. In this comparative study of cases of becoming-inhuman, my cultural-technical engagement with «Mama’s Baby» redirects media philosophy toward non-being, an impossible ontological status not lost but re-articulated in the turn to conditions of representation. In tracing this drift, I draw also on the 20th century land art movement, through two cases that similarly mark the violent, technological infusion of land/sea, inscription/forgetting, and human/inhuman.
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The text attempts an anthropological investigation of European metaphysics and colonialism from the perspective of Amerindian worldviews and collective practices. In the clash of radically incompatible ways of constituting and living relations with the world, illustrated by the Spanish conquista campaign led by Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco Orellana (1545), autochthonous peoples see not only evidence of colonial brutality. Through commemorative ritual practices that play up “first contact” in a humorous and critical way, they also objectify this encounter in order to stage and ridicule the practical unviability of the colonial project, correlating with its theoretical narrowness. In the Amazonian cosmological terrarium, the colonialist reveals himself as a super-predator, endowed with deadly appendages (the soldier's arquebus), an impenetrable skin of chain mail and iron lats, and the ability to panopticize by observing others from beneath the visor of his helmet. However, the alien pays for this position of absolute invulnerability with its own blindness, when it is found to be immune to relationships of commodification at the lower levels of the food chain. The invader's behavior becomes the object of alien perspectives that require a different scaling of reality and consideration of its irreducible diversity. This critical reassessment of colonial thinking and praxis is expressed in American mythology and the culture of ritual cannibalism, an integral part of the autochthonous worldview. Translated from the edition: Goddard J-C. Ce sont d’autres gens: Contre anthropologies décolonisées. — Paris: Hermann, 2024. — pp. 109–136. — ISBN : 978-2381140742. Published with the kind permission of the author and the rights holder.
The article is a detailed review of Yuk Hui’s book «Art and Cosmotechnics» (2021). The review opens with a consideraation of one of the major analytical decisions and conceptual innovations in Hui’s work: the division of recursive logic into tragist and Daoist one. The reviewer then focuses on Hui’s key concept of cosmotechnics, understood as the unification of the cosmic and moral order in technical activity, and points out how this concept is specified in «Art and Cosmotechnics». Reflecting on the need to clarify what is meant by «cosmos» in this context and how this cosmos relates to the function of art, the reviewer draws a line that in its own way supplements Hui’s approach: whereas Hui emphasizes recursivity (and unity), the reviewer emphasizes contingency (and not-one). This reaccentuation also leads to a shift from Hui’s claimed epistemological pluralism to ontological anarchism. After pointing to Hui’s general intension and clarifying both the function of aesthetic thinking and the understanding of the cosmos in the conception of cosmotechnics, the reviewer problematizes the aspect of Hui’s project consisting in the search for the universal, and for this purpose turns to an indigenous cosmo-aesthetics.
Homo animalis, a Japanese Futurism: a Dialogue between Hiroki Azuma and Yuk Hui
In this dialogue, Hiroki Azuma discusses with Yuk Hui about the perception of technology in Japan after the defeat in the Second World War, from the Kyoto School to the postmodern critics, and the ambivalent conflicts between the modern and the tradition. The postmodern culture has a different signification in Japan than in the West as well as in other parts of Asia. Azuma documents the rise of the Otaku culture in Japan, and calls them “database animals”, a thesis that he formulated through his reading of Alexandre Kojève’s end of man and the absorption of the human subject into the technological world. Translated from the edition: Azuma, H., Hui, Y. Homo animalis, a Japanese Futurism, Philosophy Today, 2021, Vol. 65(2), pp. 401–408. DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2021412395.
The Abstract Machine and the Nondiscursive Field
In this seminar delivered on March 12, 1985, Félix Guattari develops the concept of the abstract machine. Contrasting it with representational and structural models, he investigates the processes of existentialization, speculative cartography, and semiotic assemblages which, in his view, function outside the logic of the symbolic order. Special attention is given to the notion of existential territory and to the conditions of its emergence across psychic, social, and political domains. Translated from the edition: Machine abstraite et champ non discursif // Chimères. Les séminaires de Félix Guattari [Web resource]. — 1985. — Mars 12. — Available at: https://www.revue-chimeres.fr/12-03-1985-Felix-Guattari-Machine-abstraite-et-champ-non-discursif. (Accessed: 25.06.2025). © Bruno et Emmanuelle Guattari fonds IMEC 2025. Published with the kind permission of the rights holders.
Monster: the Economy of Parts and the Limits of Evolution
The article examines the ontological economy of the concept of «monster» as a radicalization of «being-to-death», i.e. as a literal approach to death, previously impossible. This concept is constructed in opposition to two other interpretations — the monster as “undead” in contemporary psychoanalysis, and its neutral interpretation as multiplication of modes of existence or hybridization. The first version is too hasty because it puts the monster in a kind of ontological limbo, while the second sees it as no different from a host of other hybridized or «weird» entities. The notion of the monster as a mereological economy directed towards death draws on the interpretation of cinematic monsters proposed by the film critic Tarnowski and the philosopher Clément Rosset. The monster is one who engages in an impossible bargain with death, based on the question «what can be taken away or added to if you want to stay alive?». The crucial factor in the construction of the monster is the accidentality of death, that is, the impossibility of meaningful interpretation of death as a specific medium. As a result, the monster undermines not only the classical being-to-death (death as an impossible horizon), but also the evolutionary logic of selection in which survival requires mediation by an ecological interface. The mereology of the monster blurs the distinction between phenotypically relevant traits and irrelevant, or freeriding, leaving it with a pure economy of accidental annihilation in which any part can claim its own dominance.
Reassembling the Human: Anthropology after the «Death of Man»
The «death of Man» was proclaimed by Foucault in «The order of things» (1966) as both an outcome and a goal. This thesis is sometimes interpreted as already accomplished. An example of such an interpretation is the reception of this thesis in posthumanism. Posthumanism is a branch of contemporary philosophy that tries to construct a fundamentally new understanding of man by reсonsideration relationships between the human and his/her multiple others — nature and technology — in the light of the development of biological and information technologies, environmental, postcolonial and feminist studies. The article attempts to analyze posthumanism from the point of view of the archaeology of knowledge. The aim of this paper is to establish in which sense posthumanistic concepts represent thinking after the «death of Man». In the first part of the article, the thesis of «death of Man» is clarified through a description of the basic principles of the archaeology of knowledge. The article reveals the specifics of understanding man as an epistemic construct (modern episteme) and highlights the problematic nature of defining criteria for realization of «death of Man», one of which may be philosophy's rejection of transcendentalism. The second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of posthumanism (based on Rozi Braidotti’s conception) from an archaeological perspective. Posthumanism is fundamentally interpreted as inheriting the thesis of the «death of Man», as well as sharing with the archaeology of knowledge the position of the radical historicity of any conception of man. An attempt is made to identify empirical-transcendental duality within the framework of posthumanism. It makes possible to interpret the posthuman conception of man as a kind of philosophical transcendentalism. It is concluded that posthumanism belongs to the modern episteme. In the third part of the article, as an alternative way of interpreting Foucault's thesis, a neo-rationalistic program of overcoming man is outlined.
Left, (Non)White, and Plural, or Toward a Plural Turn: an Interview with Jean-Christophe Goddard
The interview is dedicated to the concept of the «multiple turn», which emerged in the context of a 2021 Stanford seminar organized by Gabriel Catren with the participation of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. At the core of the discussion is Viveiros de Castro’s Amazonian perspectivism, which offers a radical alternative to Western multiculturalism by highlighting the incompatibility between the ontologies of the colonial «white world» and Indigenous peoples. It is emphasized that the «multiple turn» is not an academic label but a critical practice rooted in the thinking of Indigenous peoples of Amazonia and Africa, resisting Euro-Christian monotheism and individualism. The discussion addresses the role of counter-anthropology in deconstructing colonial epistemes, the rethinking of the Teacher figure through Fichte’s lens, and the significance of laughter in the «cargo-theater» of the Wayana tribe as an anti-capitalist strategy.
The seminar of June 21, 1984, is dedicated to the concept of schizoanalysis — an approach developed by Félix Guattari in collaboration with Gilles Deleuze as an alternative to traditional psychoanalysis. Guattari proposes a rethinking of psychoanalytic theory, rejecting the models of Freud and Lacan. He argues that schizoanalysis does not seek to become a new discipline but functions as a tool of meta-modelling, enabling the analysis of how assemblages of enunciation influence semiotic processes and modes of subjectivation. These assemblages, understood as dynamic configurations, include not only linguistic but also non-semiotic, non-subjective, and unconscious elements. Guattari emphasizes the importance of a micropolitics of meaning, where pragmatic effects arise within social and institutional fields rather than solely through the interpretation of signifiers. He introduces the concept of deterritorialization, which avoids the fixation of subjectivity within static structures and instead treats it as a process of singularization connected to machinic — both material and social — flows. In contrast to Freudian libido, conceived as a static energy, schizoanalysis interprets libido as an abstract, deterritorialized force that opens up new possibilities for becoming. Guattari also criticizes the reterritorialization of the unconscious in psychoanalysis, proposing instead that it be mapped as a dynamic system interacting with social, technological, and aesthetic processes. Schizoanalysis thus becomes, according to Guattari, an interdisciplinary approach oriented toward the analysis and transformation of subjectivity. Translated from the edition: Guattari F. Les schizoanalyses // Chimères. Revue des schizoanalyses. — 1987. — No. 1. — pp. 1–21. DOI: 10.3406/chime.1987.1022. © Bruno et Emmanuelle Guattari fonds IMEC 2025. Published with the kind permission of the rights holders.
Against Double Ontological Blackmail: Materialist Dialectics between Deconstruction and Speculative Realism
The article examines the transformation of materialist dialectics in contemporary philosophy. The author argues that the structure of modern philosophical space is defined by a fundamental conflict between metaphysicians and hermeneuts, speculative realists and deconstructionists, metaphysicians of finitude and new philosophers of the Absolute. The core problem of this conflict lies in both sides insisting on the incompatibility of the Absolute and finite being: the former demand the reduction of finite being in the name of the Absolute, while the latter demand the reduction of the Absolute in the name of finite being. The author pins hopes for resolving this ontological impasse on the materialist dialectics developed by Alain Badiou. Badiou’s materialist dialectics, through its theory of immanent truths, enables the discovery of absolute content within finite being itself. Thus, it suggests a path for overcoming correlationism while avoiding the metaphysical temptations of speculative realism.
Anarchy or Aporia? The Aporetic Ground of Coexistence in Derrida's Deconstruction Project
The critique of the dominance of the metaphysical ground, at first approximation, can be realized within the framework of two obvious strategies — the strategy of inversion and the strategy of subversion. Both of these strategies, however, do not fully achieve their purpose, implicitly preserving and affirming the hierarchical structure of binary oppositions. Inversion involves inverting the positions of ground and non-ground (the identical and the other), assuming as ground something that has been oppressed. Subversion involves the breakdown of the oppositional structure itself and the unfolding of ontological an-archy supposedly on the other side of metaphysical limitations. However, the conceptualization of ontological an-archy, groundlessness, or absolute emancipation remains inscribed in the same horizon of imagination, which is initially set and limited by the dominant discourse of grounding. Derrida's deconstructivist project suggests an alternative way of both criticizing the domination of the ground and acquiring a new form of grounding. The new form of ground must avoid both metaphysical implications and the defects of the strategies of inversion and subversion. We call this form of ground - aporetic ground. The aporetic ground doesn’t provide a privileged form of presence or coexistence, but holds the permanent displacement and undecidability of the instances of ground and non-ground in relation to each other. Therefore, it doesn’t presuppose a dualization into grounding and grounded, which is ontotheological in nature. On the contrary, the aporetic ground appears as an immanent condition of the (non-)possibility of heterogeneous coexistence, inscribed in the latter. However, the main hypothesis is that the aporetic ground doesn’t lead only to a «short-circuit» or mutual neutralization of the ground and non-ground, the identical and the other. The aporetic ground proves to be effective in the moment of its very undecidability: undecidability becomes a necessary condition for justice and the democracy to come. Derrida's democracy to come, as a prototype of heterogeneous coexistence, is an internally aporetic auto-immune concept, within which there is an endless oscillation between in-co-possible demands — the affirmation of democracy itself as totality and the affirmation of absolute openness to the other. This is why democracy exists only in the horizon of an indefinite/indefinable future.
On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject
In the essay «On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject», Reiner Schürmann rethinks the figure of the subject in light of late Foucault, drawing on the archaeological-genealogical method as well as the analysis of practices of the self. Reconstructing ethical, moral, and ascetic forms of subjectivation, he traces how the subject is formed at the intersection of discursive and non-discursive configurations of power/knowledge. Special attention is given to the anarchic subject as a figure of resistance within a contemporary isomorphic society oriented toward totalizing homogeneity. For Schürmann, philosophy is conceived as a form of ascetic exercise — a practice of writing capable of exposing and displacing the boundaries of dominant regimes of truth. Translated from the edition: Schürmann, R., Villela-Petit, M. Se Constituer Soi-même Comme Sujet Anarchique, Les Études Philosophiques, 1986, No. 4, pp. 451–471. © Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis, 1986. Published with the kind permission of the copyright holder. The editors thank Nikita Arkhipov for his assistance with the translation.
This special volume explores the transition from the multiplier turn towards ontological anarchy. This transition constitutes neither a sidestepping nor a refocusing of thought from one subject to another, but rather a de-centered movement of «reflection into itself». Western European metaphysics, transformed notably by Heidegger and subsequently through post-structuralism and post-phenomenology towards Viveiros de Castro, Goddard, and Descola, reveals modes of being-plural. The irreducibility of ontologies actualized by beings in a world where actual place is perpetually insufficient addresses the problem of coexistence without a single — dogmatic — foundation. Prevailing tendencies towards the pluralization of existence necessitate the inclusion of the stranger-native within self-referential discourse. Amazonian tribes demonstrate a multiplicity of ways of drawing distinctions, wherein the natural is no longer homogeneous — to be incorporated into a collective means sharing a commonality of modes and practices of existence; «an animal of one species may transform into an animal of another species or into a human, and a human may transform into an animal». The diversity of life-actualized ontological forms opens the possibility not only to learn more coherent models for resolving the impasses of contemporary Western European metaphysics, but also to begin recalibrating the constants of thought and action — constants that establish constraints while simultaneously opening new possibilities for the transcendental.
A minor biopolitics. Interview with Giorgio Agamben
The political potential of Giorgio Agamben's intellectual legacy is a long-standing topic of discussions. Agamben is primarily known for his concept of biopolitics, which significantly expands the scope of Michel Foucault's application of this concept. In his works he seriously criticises the models of political action established in Western culture, but, as his opponents point out, he does not offer or simply does not see any alternative to them. In academic circles, the claim that Agamben's thought is pessimistic and nihilistic is a kind of cliché. Moreover, Agamben's publicistic works of recent years, in which the philosopher makes a number of ambiguous statements about the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, have become a target for criticism. Initially recognised among left-wing theorists, Agamben's thought is now being actively appropriated by conservatives, including Russian conservatives. This interview helps to clarify certain aspects of Agamben's political views and provides a key to understanding the relationship between his middle period, when his most famous works were published, and his late period, when he focused on Christian theology. In the interview, Agamben outlines the theory of the subject central to his work, and discusses the authors who have most influenced him — in particular, along with Foucault and Benjamin, he mentions Deleuze and his notion of the «line of flight». Interviewers: Stani Grelet, Mathieu Pott-Bonneville.
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In this essay Cameroonian researcher Achille Mbembe draws on Michel Foucault's concept of sovereign power, Giorgio Agamben's discourse on homo sacer, and Frantz Fanon's decolonial approach to situate the notion of biopower in the space of postcolony and demonstrates its insufficiency for understanding contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death. Mbembe introduces the notion of necropolitics, or necropower, to explain the various ways in which weapons are used in the modern world to create ‘worlds of death’. He argues that the colony in general and slave plantations in particular gave rise to those necropolitical practices that remain relevant today. Mbembe describes the postcolonial locus as a place where diffuse and not always exclusively state power inscribes an ‘economy of death’ into relations of governance and production, and argues that whereas in the colonial era violence was solely a means of achieving profit, in the space of postcolony it becomes an end in itself. The translation is based on the edition: Mbembé J.-A. Necropolitics / J.-A. Mbembé // Public Culture. – 2003. – Vol. 15(1). – P. 11-40. The editor is Mikhail Zhuravlev. The scientific editor (consultant) is Alexey Kylasov. Published with the kind permission of the author.
Po(e/li)tical Anarchaeology of the Outside: Essays on Foucault, Truth and Freedom
Today, Michel Foucault's concept of disciplinary power is one of the most represented in the academic intellectual field. The common knowledge of Foucault's legacy gives rise to controversial perceptions of him, making him a convenient object of criticism. In particular, Michel Foucault is forgotten as a thinker who proposed one of the most subtle theory-practices of the liberation of the subject. The aim of this text is to explicate the philosophical foundations of Foucauldian archaeology, allowing us to take it beyond the ‘critical barbarism’ of contemporary culturalists and offer a formal-materialist interpretation. The article demonstrates that this kind of foundation is the problem of the impossible Outside as differential immanence and the consequent heterogeneity of truth. From the author's point of view, it is the heterogeneity, not the neutrality, of truth that is the main subject of archaeological research, and it is also the reason for Foucault's fundamental (un)coincidence of truth with freedom, which shaped his research on power and sexuality. There is no subject without truth, there is no truth without freedom, and in their absence there remain only the contingent possibilities of language, closed off from the outside and incapable of the mysterious in its simplicity ‘I say’. Thus, this article attempts to comprehend Foucauldian archaeology as going beyond the stable stereotype about it, capable of plunging into the actual problems of the new materialism and universalism.