Our fourteenth year of publication begins with an exceptional expansion of our sense of philosophy’s powers and resources. In our special featured article, Brian Schroeder’s groundbreaking essay, “The Way of Becoming-Imperceptible: Daoism, Deleuze, and Inner Transformation,” brings the lesser-known tradition of Daoist “magic” and the cultivation of qi 氣 into dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari and their delineation of the practice of “becoming-imperceptible.” At stake is not a simple assessment of the convergence and divergence of concepts, but rather a radical reassessment of the transformative powers of thinking and practice. It is also the first of three essays that engage Deleuze.
In “The ‘Beautiful Soul’ and ‘Religious Consciousness’: Deleuze and Nishida,” Russell J. Duvernoy examines the meanings and usages of these two terms as articulated by Deleuze and Nishida. First, the author gives an account of the notion of the beautiful soul from its eighteenth-century origins to Hegel’s critique and Deleuze’s complication of it. In pointing out Deleuze’s somewhat vague phrase “religiosity,” Duvernoy looks deeper into the spiritual implications connected to Deleuze’s call for a more aggressive “selection.” The author then turns to a treatment of Nishida’s articulation of a religious consciousness that underscores the transformative nature of relationality and biconditionality. Duvernoy closes with a provocation that redirects the issue to contemporary problematics of the social sphere.
This issue’s discourse on Deleuze ends with Pablo Pachilla in the next piece, “The Eye is in Things: On Deleuze and Speculative Realism.” Pachilla presents a critique of the speculative realists’ argument against Deleuze’s “correlationism” through a detailed analysis of two representative thinkers of that tradition, Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier. In his defense of Deleuze, Pachilla goes beyond a mere critique by suggesting that Deleuze’s philosophy includes a dimension of correlationism and argues that we should embrace this aspect of his thinking. The author teases out this conclusion by looking at two of Deleuze’s works, Difference and Repetition and The Movement Image. It is a serious treatment of the speculative realists’ critique with a call to expand beyond current accounts of subjectivity.
Daniele Fulvi examines the concept of kenosis and kenotic sacrifice in Gianni Vattimo’s and Paolo Diego Bubbio’s works by focusing on three aspects from their philosophy: the hermeneutical, ethical, and the unnaturalness of sacrifice. The author extends the implications from Vattimo and Bubbio to include a rearticulation of the notion of nature that is positive by decentralizing the human person. Fulvi’s discussion is an expansion of kenotic sacrifice to address a more comprehensive understanding of Being that pushes beyond the anthropocentrism of philosophical thought.
The final article in this issue introduces readers to the woefully underappreciated but seminal work of the Afro-Caribbean philosopher, Sylvia Winter. Rafael Vizcaino in “Sylvia Wynter’s New Science of the Word and the Autopoetics of the Flesh” makes a compelling case that Wynter’s de-colonial philosophy, grounded in figures like the Martinican poet-politician-philosopher Aimé Césaire and his fellow Martinican, the psychoanalyst and philosopher Frantz Fanon, extends the powers and range of comparative philosophy in decisive ways.
The issue concludes with two substantive review essays. Christopher Yates examines Brian Treanor’s new work, Melancholic Joy: On Life Worth Living and John W.M. Krummel assesses Harumi Osaki’s Nothingness in the Heart of the Empire concerning the Kyoto School’s wartime political philosophy.