The Philosophical Salon

Welcome to The Philosophical Salon 19
enable us to return to social, economic, political, aesthetic, and other
forms of existence with the baggage of richer understanding. Typically,
such speculations inquire into the meaning of institutions, phenomena,
and expressions that, despite structuring our lives, risk turning into
empty buzzwords. They ask, among other things: What is the meaning of
politics? Of art? Of enmity? Of clean energy? Of the Anthropocene? Of
Europe? The list goes on…
Interventions are the inverse of Speculations, and yet, at their best, they
achieve a similar outcome, namely a more nuanced appreciation of the
complex realities we are a part of. For the articles gathered in this section,
a specific occurrence— for instance, hurricane Katrina, the Chernobyl
nuclear accident and their respective anniversaries —offers a springboard
for a theoretical discussion of the cultural, economic, or political
logics, within which it is ensconced. The singularity of the event is, of
course, never completely exhausted by these explanatory, semantic nets
and the work of mourning it calls for is similarly interminable. But it is
only thanks to discerning interventions that we can indeed work through
such occurrences, rather than act out, repeating the same tragic errors
that have claimed thousands of live (in these cases: the insufficiency of
government response to the plight of those who suffered from a severe
natural disaster, or our addiction to nuclear power). Zooming in on the
singular, the authors who contributed their analyses to this section of The
Philosophical Salon do not remain mired in infinite details but bring their
subject matter to bear on the predicament of being human today.
Reflections, in their turn, experiment with a difficult interplay between
the singular and the universal, alternating between those moments when
they zoom in on and those when they zoom out of the fine-grains of our
world. What does the vehement rejection of gun control in the US do
to the very notion of civilization? How, in making reproductive choices,
to assume individual responsibility for the environmentally damaging
effects of global overpopulation? Can universities still fulfill their critical
function in the epoch of their rampant bureaucratization? These are just
some of the guiding questions for thinking about the present from the
midpoint of what Hegel called “mediation,” the in-between of thought
that, neither entirely abstract nor wholly concrete, neither conjectural
nor empirical, holds a mirror wherein actuality-in-the-making can