If, as Walter Benjamin believed, historical understanding is to be viewed primarily as an afterlife of that which is to be understood, what are the afterlives of the central concepts of modern European philosophy today? These essays reflect on the afterlives of three such concepts the transcendental, the universal and otherness as they continue to animate philosophical discussion at and beyond the limits of the discipline. Anthropology, law, mathematics and politics each provide occasions for testing the historical durability and transformative capacity of these concepts.
Preface, PETER OSBORNE
I. AFTERLIVES OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL
1. Scotuss disjunctive transcendental and its anthropological afterlife.
HOWARD CAYGILL
2. Adorno beside himself: objective humour and the transcendental in
Dialectic of Enlightenment, ANTONIA BIRNBAUM
II. UNIVERSALS AND THEIR LIMITS
3. Belonging to the human race: one as many, ETIENNE BALIBAR
4. General predicament, specific negotiations: Spivaks persistent critique,
MARIE LOUISE KROGH
5. The subject and/of the law: Yan Thomas and the excess of history over
concept, COOPER FRANCIS
6. The philosophy of the concept and the specificity of mathematics, MATT
HARE
III. OTHERNESS AND ANARCHISM
7. Otherness as a kind of being: a reading of Platos Sophist, CATHERINE
MALABOU
8. Cynicism and anarchism in Foucaults last seminars, CATHERINE MALABOU
9. Anarchism, philosophy and the state today: a conversation, ÉTIENNE
BALIBAR & CATHERINE MALABOU
IMAGE CREDITS
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London
