Author: Krisis

This new issue of Krisis covers a wide array of subjects that are close to the aims and legacy of our journal. This issue includes reflections on contemporary political developments both on the international stage and with regards to more local levels, paying attention as well to the academic milieu in which many of our readers and contributors find themselves. As critical reflections on any of these developments presuppose a self-reflective attitude towards the means, potentials and ends of critique, it is no coincidence that the aforementioned topicalities are accompanied in this issue by engagements with central concepts and thinkers from the social, political and cultural philosophical traditions in which Krisis inscribes itself. Indeed, given the ways in which we are confronted with political agendas that hardly could be described otherwise than as “regressive,” the very title of our journal once again proves to be timely, just as the invocation of critical thought that is central to all of our contributions.

This issue contains a dossier of five essays on the topic of “Shame and Citizenship in Democracy,” which results from a workshop held at the University of Amsterdam in October 2017. Jill Locke’s essay discusses how the trope of the child is used in the public debate about the current President of the United States: Donald Trump. Josef Früchtl’s contribution analyzes the emergence of the Wutbürger and argues for the political potential of impertinence. Three shorter essays by Darryl Barthé, Lisa Koks & Natalie Scholz, and Tessa de Vet further engage with the relation between shame and democracy.

Furthermore, two articles are included in this issue. In Annemarije Hagen’s contribution she argues that political struggles do not have to rely on an account of the good life, but rather aim at the contestation of the limits of articulated universals. Ivana Perica’s article considers Jacques Rancière’s critique of Hannah Arendt’s thought, and aims – against Rancière’s own position – to bring both thinkers together and show the resonances between their projects.

Speaking of resonance, two interviews found their way to this issue. Our editors Robin Celikates and Thijs Lijster discussed Hartmut Rosa’s work on the concept of “resonance” and other topics with the author himself. Anna Blijdenstein’s conversation with Cécile Laborde on its turn engages with topics such as liberalism and religion, secularism, tolerance, and immigrant integration in Laborde’s oeuvre.

Three review-essays found their way as well to this issue. Didier Fassin takes issue with Chantal Mouffe’s call for a Left populism. Willem Halffman discusses the legacy of the 2016 Maagdenhuis occupation at the University of Amsterdam as represented in two publications, and Sigmund Bruno Schilpzand and Tom Kayzel discuss Bruno Latour’s Reset Modernity-project.

Six further book reviews complete this issue. Alma Apt discusses the Dutch translation of Isabell Lorey’s Regierung der Prekären; Natasha Basu reviews Natasha King’s No Borders; Corrado Fumagalli assesses Ryan Muldoon’s Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World; Hans Radder engages with Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle’s Socrates tenured; Paul Raekstad discusses Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government; and Robert Sinnerbrink reviews Aesthetic Marx, edited by Johan F. Hartle & Samir Gandesha.

On the occasion of Karl Marx’s 200th birthday this year, numerous conferences, edited volumes and special issues have celebrated his work by focusing on its main achievements – a radical critique of capitalist society and an alternative vocabulary for thinking about the social, economic and political tendencies and struggles of our age. Albeit often illuminating, this has also produced a certain amount of déjà vu. Providing an occasion to disrupt patterns of repetition and musealization, Krisis proposes a different way to pay tribute to Marx’s revolutionary theorizing. We have invited authors from around the globe to craft short entries for an alternative ABC under the title “Marx from the Margins: A Collective Project, from A to Z” – taking up, and giving a twist to, Kevin Anderson’s influential Marx at the Margins (2010). The chief motivation of this collaborative endeavour is to probe the power – including the generative failures – of Marx’s thinking by starting from marginal concepts in his work or from social realities or theoretical challenges often considered to be marginal from a Marxist perspective. Rather than reproduce historically and theoretically inadequate differentiations between an ascribed or prescribed cultural, economic, geographic, intellectual, political, social, or spatial centre and its margins, the margins we have identified and inspected are epistemic vantage points that open up new theoretical and political vistas while keeping Marx’s thought from becoming either an all-purpose intellectual token employed with little risk from left or right, or a set of formulaic certitudes that force-feed dead dogma to ever-shrinking political circles.

We have welcomed short and succinct contributions that discuss how a wide variety of concepts – from acid communism and big data via extractivism and the Haitian Revolution to whiteness and the Zapatistas – can offer an unexpected key to the significance of Marx’s thought today. The resulting ABC, far from a comprehensive compendium, is an open-ended and genuinely collective project that resonates between and amplifies through different voices speaking from different perspectives in different styles; we envisage it as a beginning rather than as an end. In this spirit, we invite readers to submit new entries to Krisis, where they will be subject to our usual editorial review process and added on a regular basis, thus making this issue of Krisis its first truly interactive one. The project is also an attempt to redeem, in part, the task that the name of this journal has set for its multiple generations of editors from the very beginning: a crisis/Krise/Krisis is always a moment in which certainties are suspended, things are at stake, and times are experienced as critical. A crisis, to which critique is internally linked, compels a critique that cannot consist simply of ready-made solutions pulled out of the lectern, but demand, in the words of Marx’s “credo of our journal” in his letter to Ruge, “the self-clarification (critical philosophy) of the struggles and wishes of the age”.

While super-hurricane climate and super-offensive politicians are tying up news headlines, the new issue of Krisis brings together philosophical perspectives on urgent political issues. Our first article explores the interrelation between philosophy and activism head-on, when Joost Leuven analyses the role of theory in contemporary animal rights advocacy. Against the backdrop of social research suggesting that animal rights advocates are often weary of taking clear philosophical positions, Leuven argues as to why the articulation of philosophical theory should be an intrinsic aspect of the practice of advocacy. With similar exigency, Michiel Bot’s work focuses on the case of Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s employment of ‘giving and taking offense’. Bot examines one of the architects of modern political rhetoric and demonstrates the enduring salience of Adorno and Marcuse for the 21^st century. The article by Pieter Lemmens and Yuk Hui focusses on two philosophers that have recently waded into the discussion of the Anthropocene, Stiegler and Sloterdijk, and explores their Heideggerian inheritance. This exploration prompts serious questions as to whether Stiegler and Sloterdijk have convincing answers to the Anthropocene’s moral and political challenges.

In addition, Rob Ritzen interviews philosopher Chiara Bottici, author of A Philosophy of Political Myth and Imaginal Politics. As the imaginal’s power – be it fake-news, digital propaganda or conservative utopias – becomes more and more visible, Bottici’s work attempts to build a philosophical framework for investigating the role of images and narratives in politics.

As part of our review section, Sudeep Dasgupta considers Gloria Wekker’s book White Innocence against the backdrop of current politics of race, Matthijs Kouw presents the Dutch geophilosophical work Water by René ten Bos, and Temi Ogunye reviews Alejandra Mancilla’s cosmopolitan exploration of The Right of Necessity. Finally, Marc Tuters discusses Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle’s Cartographies of the Absolute in relation to Fredric Jameson’s legacy.

The promise of modernity’s drone-assisted conquest of air space is far from uncomplicated. As unmanned air vehicles become more ubiquitous, with implementations ranging from intelligence-gathering and covert military attacks to cultural production and everyday logistics, this special issue of Krisis captures the technical, aesthetic, economic, psychic, and political challenges facing the rise of the drone. Attending to the multiple deployment and employment of drones, the various contributions to this issue sustain a critical engagement with the conceptual confusions and practical contradictions in related debates, thus collectively generating a counterpoint to reductionist accounts of scientific determinism, drone fetishism, and political spectacle.

To invoke and provoke the everyday, “These Cryptical Skies” by Rob Stone (Emily Carr University of Art and Design) opens the issue by bringing home the unease of displaced technologies through sonic imagination and biomimicry. Moving from patterned cacophonies to discursive shifts, “Drone Visions: Tomas van Houtryve’s Blue Sky Days and the Rhetoric of Precision” by Øyvind Vågnes (University of Copenhagen) evaluates the role of euphemism in shaping public perception of the so-called War On Terror. Echoing the kind of precarious aesthetic that can lead to the uninvention of precision suggested by Vågnes, the next article tackles the prominent image of the drone operator as PlayStation killer head-on—“Embodiment, Subjectivity, Affect in a Digital Age: Understanding Mental Illness in Military Drone Operators” by Alex Edney-Browne (University of Melbourne), by questioning the assumption that the virtualization of violence yields a decrease in empathy, argues that mediation can also constitute feelings of proximity and stimulate peer-recognition. 

Continuing with the construction of complex understandings of drone capabilities, “Those Who Feel the Fire Burning: Drone Perception and the Aesthetico-Political Image” by Halbe Kuipers (University of Amsterdam) reflects on the metaphysical and ethical implications of image-making when drones participate in filmic world-making. To investigate the phenomenon of the drone further still, a 2015 debate transcript follows, in which Krisis’s own Eva Sancho Rodriguez (University of Amsterdam) moderates a discussion between Willem Schinkel (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Rogier van Reekum (Erasmus University Rotterdam and Krisis member) in the context of Drift, an annual festival of contemporary philosophy organized by students of the University of Amsterdam. The issue ends with two book reviews: Sigmund Bruno Schilpzand (University of Amsterdam) on Grégoire Chamayous’s A Theory of the Drone and Tobias Burgers (Freie Universität Berlin) on Ian Shaw’s Predator Empire: Drone Warfare and Full Spectrum Dominance.

The first Krisis of 2016 will be the last issue before the re-launch and redesign of Krisis online. With a new website, Krisis will continue to publish articles that focus on contemporary issues as well as those that engage classic authors in a new light.

The articles of our current issue reflect both these aims. Femke Kaulingfreks opens the issue and analyses street protests, like the one in the Netherlands in reaction to the death of Mitch Hernandez in 2015, as cases of unruly politics. This opens the possibility of recognition for the politics of rioting and signals gaps in current structures of representation. Thomas Wells proposes in his article to ‘exile the rich’ by pointing to how democracy is undermined by unlimited accumulated wealth. The main problem for Wells is the way the rich gain independence from and command over others, instead of simply finding ways to curb wealth.

Sina Talachian dissects the shifting relationship between universalism and particularism in the work of Karl Marx. His article shows how a close reading of Marx’ work can still be relevant for contemporary debates on post-colonialism and intersectionality. In his essay, Merijn Oudenampsen considers the controversial but inescapable role of ‘utopia’ in the Dutch political and intellectual sphere. Through a critical reading of More’s classic text on utopia, Oudenampsen argues the need for utopian thinking in politics today.

In addition to articles, this issue Krisis presents a never before published interview with Richard Rorty by Mark Koster en Dennis Schulting. The American philosopher spoke about multicularism, right-wing and left-wing politics and intellectualism in the Spring of 1997, when he was Spinoza chair. The enduring pertinence of Rorty and this interview is introduced by Jappe Groenendijk.

Four reviews of new books of philosophy will close this issue. Beatrijs Haverkamp will review German philosopher Rahel Jaeggi’s Alienation. Eva Meijer read Animal Deliberation by Clemens Driessen. Sarah Ahmed’s latest monograph Wilful Subjects is reviewed by Eliza Steinbock. Finally Ilios Willemars will consider the newly published texts by Michel Foucault in Wrong-doing, truth-telling.