Artificial intelligence (AI) poses obvious material threats to humankind, including the threat of environmental collapse and that of mass unemployment. However, alongside these material threats there exists a hidden existential threat too: in its promise to manufacture a self-conscious computer, artificial intelligence threatens to undermine the foundation of modern conceptions of selfhood. Our capacity for self-consciousness continues to be the locus around which theories of selfhood revolve, and in potentially reducing self-consciousness to a technological phenomenon, artificial intelligence similarly threatens to reduce selfhood to a manufactured quality. The struggle for selfhood has therefore taken on a new urgency. In responding to this threat, this article demonstrates that foremost in our mind should be Søren Kierkegaard, whose religious and existential work provides a compelling way to theorize the self. And by interpreting Kierkegaard’s work through the lens of several prescient works of science-fiction, it becomes possible to see the way that Kierkegaard’s account of the self is not only compelling in its own right, but also how it is uniquely suited to addressing the challenge to selfhood posed by artificial intelligence.
This article aims to show that social prejudices, along with, of course, allied phenomena such as deliberate ignorance and elite capture, have plausibly provoked the silencing of Mapuche demands in the recent Chilean constituent process (2020–2023). This allows us to appreciate that it is possible for there to be silencing even if there is representation. In fact, the Mapuche case presented is plausibly not only an example of this but also of the more alarming possibility that representation, given a certain cultural context, can promote silencing. In a non-ideal world, in which the citizenry is loaded with prejudices and the communicative ambiance is adverse for certain groups, representation can trigger certain prejudices that promote silencing. This possibility does not invite us to abandon political representation in the case of such marginalized social groups but rather to become aware that significant cultural change and adequate communicative strategies must also be fostered and put in place to resist this form of epistemic violence.
Moving beyond economic analyses of degrowth, growth and consumption are reframed through decomposition as a vital process through which life, value, and politics are continually re-composed. Against dominant imaginaries that cast decay as waste or ruination, this article turns to composting and carrion ecologies to articulate decomposition as a generative undoing and a mode of transformation that binds waste to worth. Drawing on multispecies examples from vultures in India to the Baltimore Compost Collective, the article situates decomposition as both material process and political metaphor to enact a revaluation of growth, decay, and consumption that unsettles capitalist logics of extraction and accumulation. It traces how practices of decay can cultivate livability and collective flourishing in the very sites marked by abandonment and disgust. In doing so, it challenges growth’s moral hegemony, recasts the ‘de-’ of decline, decay, and decomposition as a source of ecological vitality, and re-embeds growth within more-than-human cycles of breakdown and flourishing.
Theories of governmentality have shaped our understanding of power and rule in modern societies. A vast literature spans the humanities and social sciences, charting how ‘techniques of governance’ shape the choices and behaviours which are desirable and intelligible for free societies. But the majority of this literature is focused on liberal and neoliberal governance. How governmentality functions in the context of political projects which aspire to a radically more egalitarian and democratic society, economy, and politics, is a remarkable gap in the literature. However, in recent years, a handful of disparate interventions have begun to explore notions of ‘left governmentality’ and closely related ideas such as ‘positive biopolitics’. This article is intended to encourage the development of this nascent strand of governmentality research. It argues that previous inattention is the product of historical contingency and path dependency: governmentality is no less central to left governance than to any other form of modern governance. And, despite disciplinary, geographical, and empirical divergences, recent interventions repeat common themes: they should be understood as an emergent literature which has begun to sketch out the contours of a new research agenda. The article also suggests how emergent scholarship might be developed theoretically.
Intersectional theory has been criticised for neglecting religion and for being unable to account for religion’s social complexities. This contribution interrogates this critique by disaggregating different relationships of Muslim women to secular and religious varieties of patriarchy. We argue that what demarcates the challenges of intersectional analysis are the political contestations not around religion, but around women’s pro-patriarchal agency. We do so by discussing intersectional theory’s analytical usefulness and limitations in conceptualising the experiences of Muslim women. We focus on two interrelated dimensions: Muslim women in relation to secular patriarchy, and Muslim women in relation to religious patriarchy. We show that when analysed separately, the first dimension, the subjectivities of Muslim women in secular patriarchal spaces, do not pose a challenge to intersectional theory. We argue that intersectional theory’s limitations regarding the second dimension, Muslim women in relation to religious patriarchy, do not lie in its relation to Islam, but in its programmatic focus on problematising power inequalities. Lastly, in situating Muslim women at the intersection of these two dimensions, we demonstrate how intersectional analysis can reveal not only Muslim women’s marginalisation, but also the analytical marginalisations of Muslim feminisms.
The challenge of articulating the society-nature interface in the context of the ecological crisis has been at the center of recent debates in environmental philosophy. While some insist on the necessity to develop robust ways of talking about natural processes as distinct from society, others propose to abandon the nature-society distinction as outdated. In this article, I argue that a critical-realist assessment of nature is a necessary starting point for post-capitalist ecopolitics. To prove this, I focus on Cornelius Castoriadis’s reflections on nature and material imagination, which have been overlooked in existing literature on this topic. At first, I offer an overview of current debates on the nature-society divide and argue that abandoning this distinction generates theoretical and political impasses. I then argue that Castoriadis’s account of biophysical processes as dynamic and self-determining provides an original critical-naturalist framework, which presents geophysical and biological phenomena as connected yet irreducible to the normativity of the social. Finally, I explore how this approach can direct ecopolitical projects, moving beyond Castoriadis’s narrow definition of degrowth and toward practices of commoning. I contend that different ways of sharing resources, infrastructures, and space disclose alternative ways of integrating the creativity of social imagination with the creativity of nature and thus reshaping the society-nature interface in the Anthropocene.
