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Philosophy After Friendship: Towards a 'Post-War' Philosophy

When:
Venue: Birkbeck 28 Russell Square

No booking required

‘The idea of a Western Democratic conversation between friends has never produced a single concept.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?)

This talk is drawn from my forthcoming book 'Conceptual Personae: Philosophy After Friendship' concerning what I call “post-war philosophy,” a term that in my earlier writings I have proposed in place of what we call political philosophy today. The idea is premised upon an argument first made by Kant in his later political writings, especially 'Perpetual Peace' and the 'Reschtlehre' that the final end or goal (Zweck) of any future political philosophy would be nothing less to “depart from the state of nature,” which for Kant was equivalent to a state of war.

Kant also argued that such a departure would need to be preliminary to addressing any higher goal that could be imagined such as a universal cosmo-political constitution of the human species, or even the complete and systematic construction of a “Science of Right.” In other words, as long as there is actual war, and even if only a portion of Humanity exists in a state of war (i.e., a state of nature), then the whole of Humanity will remain without the possibility of justice.

Today, we have various avatars of this principle in several contemporary philosophies that substitute the end of actual war with other ends, such as the end of Capitalism, the end of Humanism, the end of racism and neo-colonialism, the end of sexism or the violence directed against certain groups, etc. In my argument, I propose to cut through these other ends and return to the claim that the first principle of any future political philosophy is a critique of actual war, including the juridical-legal conditions of war, the rights of the current nation state, the economic and corporate interests involved in the perpetuation of wars, including the notion of “just war” and the continued threat of nuclear war, as well as other forms of warfare directed against entire populations and the environment (i.e., the scientific and technological region of “thanapolitics,” strictly defined in its different modern senses by Foucault, Agamben, Derrida, and Esposito).

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