By Michael Marder · Wednesday, February 13, 2013 Michael Marder’s “After the Fire: The Politics of Ashes” appears in Telos 161 (Winter 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
 Two fires are kindled at the threshold of the metaphysical era, and both are extinguished, almost simultaneously, as soon as metaphysics exhausts itself (or else gets exhausted, tired, fatigued with itself) in its final Nietzschean inversion. The political reality of the twenty-first century is, as a whole, a comet tail of these ancient blazes that, until recently, seemed to be older than time itself, gave the impression of being eternal, undying, inextinguishable. How to find one’s bearings among the cinders and ashes of what the flames consumed? How to make sense—if make sense we must—of the burnt and smoldering remains, the traces of catastrophes, as much as of hopes and revolutionary desires, littering the horizons of the political today?
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By Michael Marder · Thursday, June 7, 2012 Following my recent articles in the New York Times, “If Peas Can Talks, Should We Eat Them?” and “Is Plant Liberation on the Menu,” I have been debating the question of plant ethics with Professor Gary Francione (Rutgers University). The three installments of our debate are now available on the blog of Columbia University Press: part 1, part 2, and part 3. In our discussion, Professor Francione and I have addressed issues surrounding veganism, plant sentience, anthropocentrism, environmental justice, the possibility of non-conscious intentionality, and the controversial difference between vegetal response and a mechanical reaction.
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By Michael Marder · Wednesday, January 5, 2011 Philosophy is a discipline in crisis, a discipline literally split, in an exceptionally asymmetrical fashion, between two competing strands that go under the names “analytic” and “Continental.” The crisis of philosophy is, in the first instance, one of legitimacy and legitimation, whereby each of the unevenly divided halves claims for itself the exclusive right to represent the discipline as a whole. While it is notoriously difficult to define the main criteria of what constitutes analytic, as opposed to Continental, thinking, the most blatant distinction is that the former relies on formal logic in measuring the quality of argumentation, while the latter generally explores a set of questions and concerns—dealing with human existence and death, for instance—where formal logical thinking falters. More broadly, analytic philosophy models itself after modern science and adopts a problem-solving approach to its subject matter, whereas its Continental counterpart explores the fundamental questions that have troubled philosophers for millennia, without putting forth exhaustive and universally applicable solutions.
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By Michael Marder · Wednesday, December 8, 2010 For the past twenty years, a sizeable segment of analytic philosophy has been openly promoting naturalization, a process that has implicitly defined the goals of this philosophical strand since its very inception. The object of naturalization is so diffuse as to include epistemology and phenomenology, jurisprudence and education, power and responsibility, and, indeed, any human phenomenon whatsoever. The sheer extent of this devastating trend makes it a good candidate for close critical scrutiny, which can help us diagnose the condition of analytic thought, structurally incapable of a sober self-assessment, and to explain its pernicious political consequences.
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By Michael Marder · Monday, February 1, 2010 This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.”
Carl Schmitt has been often accused of uncritically utilizing metaphysical concepts, such as “the will,” in his political philosophy. In this talk, I will begin to reconstruct the onto-phenomenological foundations of the Schmittian conception of the political will, arguing that it is not a pre-fabricated or transcendental entity, but a historical instant of what Edmund Husserl called “constitutive subjectivity.” The argument entails two crucial theoretical steps. First, I will draw a parallel between Husserl’s account of the crisis of European sciences and Schmitt’s version of the crisis of the political. In each case, the crisis reveals multiple disconnects between the institutional, bureaucratized reality, on the one hand, and the suppressed lifeworld (political or otherwise) that underpins this reality, on the other. Second, I will explore the Schmittian analogue to the Husserlian subject who inhabits this lifeworld. I hope to demonstrate that, for Schmitt, the will is not a numinous, interiorized entity but power in its lived, historical actuality, in other words, political facticity. To reclaim the political lifeworld in 2010, then, we need to tease out the living political will buried beneath the institutionalized, bureaucratized edifice of contemporary politics.
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By Michael Marder · Wednesday, February 4, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
A conflation of legality and legitimacy, brilliantly explored by Carl Schmitt, is the first of three essential confusions I term “the metonymic abuses of modernity.” In a nutshell, I argue that, when it comes to the modern political order, one of its privileged parts always stands for the whole: bourgeois legality metonymically signifies legitimacy in general, constitutional law and the Rechtsstaat constitution denote the constitutional regime as such, and the state appears as the incarnation of the political. The rampant abuses of metonymy and synechdoche in modern political thought polemically raise a particular kind of legitimacy, a specific type of the constitution, and one of the loci of the political to the status and the dignity of the genus, in a way that de-legitimizes their rivals. Furthermore, in aligning the three metonymic abuses of modernity, I reconstruct the multi-layered edifice of contemporary politics and, at the same time, show how Schmitt chisels away its fixed and ossified building blocks. If legality, which usurps the place of legitimacy, is the most superficial, depersonalized, “dead” stratum, then the political (metonymized by a centralized state) is the most profound and animating source, defaced by everything that is predicated upon it. Finally, the metonymy of the constitution and constitutional law is the intermediate step between the state that does not merely have but is its constitution and the legitimacy assumed in keeping with the existing constitutional order.
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